March 20, 1997
Since the pundits are already gearing up for the pleasantly narcissistic and nauseatingly self-congratulatory task of greeting the new millennium, it seems only appropriate that FRATRICIDE should offer a few observations along these lines. Here is one that is hard to ignore: ours is the first century within which there has been a practical, wide-spread use for the word, "genocide."
Without a serious change of direction in society, values, and personal morality, and the broad acceptance of a firm ethical baseline, the twenty-first century has every likelihood of being the second such.
People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have -- for example, the freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.
... Søren Kierkegaard
Ever since our conquest of natural forces began... and material wealth increased by leaps and bounds, our conduct has deteriorated. Up to that time we had done the Gospel of Christ mouth honour at least; and had to some slight extent shown consideration if not love to our fellow men. We did not give tithes to charity, but we did give petty doles, till suddenly science appeared to reinforce our selfishness with a new message: progress comes through the blotting out of the unfit, we were told, and self-assertion was preached as a duty: the idea of the Superman came into life, and the Will to Power, and thereby Christ's teaching of love and pity and gentleness was thrust into the background.
... Frank Harris, My Life and Loves
To oppose the death penalty is to impose it upon the capital criminal's future victims. The twisted "morality" that withholds the time-honored penalty for murder on humanitarian grounds does so in the wishful, but unrealistic, belief that a life is being thus saved. It has, instead, brought more suffering, more injury, and more death.
This century has brought into currency a coinage that has only one application now: recidivism, the tendency to relapse into criminal behavior. This is the lesson of recidivism:
Unexecuted felons Executed felons
Recidivism > 80 % 0 %
If the U.S. cannot muster the determination and fortitude to satisfy its moral obligation to execute capital criminals, it will not long remain free in any meaningful sense.
There are times when democracy produces results so vile, wicked, or idiotic that serious thought should be given to abandoning it. Such a moment occurred as recently as last month, when a news-reader intoned, with a voice that would do justice to King Lear, that relations with [the People's Republic of] China were declining. Such was the depression and despair conveyed by that sepulchral voice that it seemed all might be lost [whatever it was] should we not retrieve our position in China's good graces. The airwaves had hardly stilled from that announcement when the President came on with his defense of most-favored-nation status for China again this year. We cannot let milk or medicine go into Iraq, but we can trade high technology with a regime that has butchered many times more of its own people than Saddam ever dreamt of.
We should not have good relations with the current Chinese regime. It is an international outlaw and pariah. Its treatment of its own people is despicable, What it aspires to do to other people, presently free in places like Hong Kong and Taiwan, is unspeakable. Good relations with such a nation conveys to the world, correctly, I think, an endorsement of its policies. The failure of the U.S. to regard the Chinese junta as the same kind of criminal gang that inhabited the Kremlin during the heydays of the Soviet Union bespeaks a naivete that the U.S. cannot afford. Worse, it confirms the world's suspicions that the U.S. is a hypocrite: it talks about freedom, liberty, and human rights, but it lacks the courage of its convictions.
So far from bemoaning the present poor relations between the U.S. and China, I think that they should be worse yet. As an American with some concept of morality, I do not want relations with China to improve until its government becomes a legitimate one, recognizes and guarantees human rights, and conforms completely to the fundamental standards for civilized nations. Why does the U.S. not insist on this?
Money; the U.S. does it for money.
Suppose you were introduced to a man who had, to your certain knowledge, personally ordered the gassing of 10,000 Jews during the Holocaust, and that man reached out his hand to shake yours. Could you do it? Could you keep from striking him? Could you keep your lunch down? Would any amount of money as a compensation help? Would the belief that the handshake would inaugurate a new world order in which the world would be much safer and perhaps happier make any difference to your feelings?
Now, suppose that instead of Jews, it was 10,000 Chinese that the man had ordered killed. Would that make any difference to the dilemma? It had better not. Yet we rightly condemn every aspect of the Holocaust, while pretending that the slaughter of millions of Chinese at the hands of Beijing's butchers is merely an internal affair upon which we are not competent to comment.
This attitude is so wicked, the moral slackness so evil, it makes me physically ill to think of it. If you knew personally of the stories of each precious human life snuffed out by these callous monsters, you would weep bitter tears. Even if only a tiny fraction of the stories that are told are true, the hideous Red Chinese regime is steeped in innocent blood.
But, for money, the U.S. is apparently willing to say, in effect, that none of these things ever happened, or if they did, that they were somehow justified. The current U.S. excuse is called "constructive engagement," a bureaucrat's weasel words if ever I have heard them. Under "constructive engagement," one has permission to touch filth. But can one touch filth and stay clean?
Even President Bush is saying that the U.S. relationship with China is the "most important one on earth." He goes on to say that the Chinese people have much more freedom now than they did when relations with Red China began under Nixon. I suppose that one must be grateful if a thief returns even a portion of what he has stolen, but it does not change one's opinion about the thief. President Bush is thus himself contaminated with the vileness that is the Chinese tyranny, by offering this defense of the U.S. policy, by justifying such corruption.
It now appears that the President himself has taken part in this travesty, by meeting, hiring, taking money from, and later, protecting a man who is at best a willing dupe and front man for the Red Chinese, and, very possibly, a Chinese intelligence officer. John Huang is still at large, not under arrest. How this is possible, in view of the man's access and the contacts he is known to have had with the PRC, is beyond me. Where are the FBI, the Defense Investigative Service, and all the other arms of the government whose job it is to track down and arrest spies? The only explanation is that he is free because of the political influence of his mentor, President Clinton. There needs to be made an accounting for all this malfeasance, and if it needs to start with the President, so be it.
The U.S. needs to think carefully about what it represents, morally, ethically, and spiritually. U.S. diplomatic relations with the wicked, twisted leaders of China should be in an unsatisfactory state most of the time, constantly causing trouble. It should be noted that this says nothing about the suffering people of China, with whom it would delight me to have diplomatic relations, should they ever be represented by a government that rules by consent. But as long as the present junta rules that billion-man prison, a diplomatic relationship will and should be a troubled one (I hope).
Quite apart from the absurd position the U.S. State Department takes on China, which injures the interests of the only truly free government in the Chinese world, on Taiwan, the U.S. makes a practice of using the uninvolved, sometimes wholly innocent bystanders, as leverage in its foreign policy. Essentially all boycotts and embargoes work in this way.
In Iraq, the Coalition embargo is currently causing untold suffering among the ordinary people of Iraq, while it leaves Saddam Hussein untouched.
In Cuba, the ordinary people live in abject poverty, unable to obtain the simplest western goods, while the Castro regime continues its thirty-seven year usurpation unhindered.
Throughout the world, and throughout this century, embargoes have been used as weapons against disliked regimes, justified, in democracies at least, on the grounds that they will eventually bring about the fall of said regime. Has this ever actually happened, even once?
The use of innocent victims trapped between two powers in this way is immoral. The case of Saddam and Iraq is an excellent example. By preventing imports into Iraq, the coalition is daily condemning to death, or lives of misery, hundreds of thousands of children and other uninvolved people. Meanwhile, Saddam and his henchmen eat full meals in the safety of their fortresses. The defenders of the embargo point out that Saddam merely has to give in and the embargo will be lifted. But there is no reason for Saddam to give in, from his point of view. And so the situation continues, with both sides entrenched in their respective positions, while the innocent and uninvolved suffer.
One cannot have it both ways: either Saddam is a dangerous enemy of the U.S. and should be dealt with in an appropriate way, or he is not. The way that dangerous enemies should be dealt with is to destroy them. If the U.S. is unwilling to do this, it should withdraw.
The same thing can be said of Castro in Cuba. If he is so awful, he should be deposed, by whatever means are necessary. The U.S. did not hesitate in the case of Noriega. Castro's Russian sponsors are no threat any more. If he needs to be deposed, it could be done. If not, then the U.S. should forget him. Instead, the citizens of Cuba, together with U.S. citizens who would be doing business with Cuba, have been forced to bear the main burden of the U.S. policy. Cuba's aggression and other forms of international bad behavior should be met by force, the military might of the United States, or they should be ignored.
The policy of embargo is, in the long run, indistinguishable from the taking of hostages. Much the same could be said for all forms of public coercion -- boycotts, strikes, etc. -- in that innocent and uninvolved people are injured by it. What individual persons do, in their freedom, by striking or boycotting, is nobody's business; a conspiracy among thousands to do the same thing is, under some circumstances, a crime, a violation of RICO or the restraint of trade statutes (unless it is done by a union, in which case it is protected). But in the case of the State Department, it is government policy to do these crimes and coercions. In this, the United States government is acting, not like the government of a free people, but the government of a sovereign and competing warlord, a junta no better than those it opposes.
If this is the New World Order, we need to give the deck another shuffle.
To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.
... J. A. Froude
The wicked tyrants who still rule one third of humanity choose the evil that they do, irrespective of the ideology they espouse to cover their guilt; they know what they do. So far from wishing to nourishing the Tree of Liberty with the blood of patriots, I would vastly prefer to test the strength of its limbs by hanging some more tyrants.
All contents © Copyright 1995, 1996 by Redmon Barbry ¶ 5:57 PM
