September 11, 2002: A Pacifist's Reflections on the Past Year
Larry Rosenwald
I wish we'd been able to take more time to grieve over the destruction, and over the dead -- before, that is, we began to construct interpretations of what the destruction and the deaths might mean. It's part of a pacifist sensibility to want to say, simply and repeatedly: these innocent people died by violence; let's mourn them, and let's keep mourning them until we're ready to be done with mourning.
Over the course of the last year, I've been uneasy with leftists who, in opposing violent retaliation for the attacks of September 11th, have seemed to condemn the emotions of people who've supported such retaliation: the love of country, the pain of being wounded, the desire to be safe, the desire to hit back and be avenged. I've felt all those emotions. Being a pacifist means not acting on such emotions, but it doesn't mean not feeling them. And it absolutely doesn't mean looking down on people who feel such emotions strongly, and seek to express those emotions through violence.
If pacifism means not being willing to regard the other as an enemy, then that notion has to apply to the others who are one's own angry and unpacifist compatriots.
Being a pacifist, of my sort at any rate, means being against reducing any individuals to numbers or categories, especially to the category of "collateral damage"; everyone who dies by violence is an individual, with a name and a face and parents and a history. In that sense, the New York Times was acting in a pacifist spirit when it published brief sketches of the people who were killed on September 11th. Those people needed to be mourned as individuals, not as numbers.
But the Times didn't go far enough. A report I trust says that the US war in Afghanistan killed over 3,000 civilians between October 7, 2001 and March 30, 2002. Each of those civilians was also an individual, with a name and a face and parents and a history. In the sort of world I'd like to live in, the Times would have found out who those civilians were, who their parents were, what they looked like, what lives they'd been leading when the US attacks ended them.
We would be less likely to go to war, I think, if we didn't dehumanize the people we kill.
I would not be misunderstood here. I recognize that there is a difference between trying to maximize civilian deaths, which is what the 9/11 terrorists did, and taking at least some steps to minimize them, which is what US forces did. But the difference, though significant, is, for me, nowhere near enough to make the killing of civilians acceptable. And saying that Afghan civilians died "by accident" would be false; their deaths were foreseeable, and as such are the moral responsibility of those who planned and executed the operations that caused them.
I'm a pretty extreme pacifist. So it wouldn't be altogether legitimate for me to criticize the Afghan War on the basis of how it turned out; I opposed it last fall simply on the ground that it was a war, and that war, as the War Resisters League says, is a crime against humanity.
I'll put this reflection in the form of a question, then, directed to people who sometimes find the use of violence acceptable and sometimes don't, and who supported the war. What justified the war, in public discourse, was that it would enable the US to retaliate against Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. People who supported the war argued in conversation with me that the war would do better at accomplishing these goals than would the measures pacifists supported, e.g., having the US sign on to the International Criminal Court, and then seek to have Mr. Bin Laden and other members of Al Qaeda tried there.
It doesn't seem to me that the war accomplished its objectives. It didn't apprehend, and so far as we know didn't kill, Mr. Bin Laden; it didn't dismantle Al Qaeda. So: might people who supported the war, and who agree with me that it didn't accomplish its objectives, be readier the next time we're faced with a crisis to consider the apparently unrealistic pacifist alternatives? Perhaps they wouldn't work either; but perhaps they would. And who can imagine what would happen if the world's great military power publicly held back from the use of violence, and submitted itself to the rule of law?
Sometime soon, I believe, the US will launch a war against Iraq. Its stated goal will be to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and to destroy the weapons of mass destruction some people assert that Iraq possesses. Maybe the upcoming war will accomplish these goals. I have nothing against these goals as abstract ideas. I hold no brief for President Hussein, and I'm wholeheartedly for getting rid of weapons of mass destruction -- though I'd prefer to get rid of all of them, not just the ones Iraq may or may not possess but also those certainly possessed by the US and several other nations.
But it's important, again, to keep our ideas concrete. In such a war, if the US attacks what seems to be a stronger army than it encountered in Afghanistan, many civilians will be killed. It will take a long time to find out how many, because the US government will be obstructing the investigation and minimizing the numbers. In the end, though, the facts will come out. We know this even now, before the war starts. And we know that each of those civilians will be an individual, with a name and a face and parents and a history.
Knowing that that's the case, shouldn't we seek by any means imaginable to refrain from causing their deaths?
Created by: Jiayang Chien '05
Maintained by: Lawrence Rosenwald
Date Created: August 6, 2003
Last Modified:
August 7, 2003