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davywavyIn the wake of the recent bombings in London, various 'radical' (read: 'bonkers') clerics have been claiming that the bombings were the fault of the British people, and it is we who must accept responsibility for them. Somewhat more worryingly, this opinion has been echoed, and tacitly agreed with in some quarters. Not least some of the more left-wing press, but also it's been popping up on LJ here and there too.
Now, I don't know about you, but this attitude really irritates me. The first thing I don't like about it is the implicit racism of the assumption that it's our fault. It is our actions, the attitude says, that brought the attacks onto us. This abrogates the bombers of moral responsibility and effectively makes them less than human. They didn't have free will. They didn't make an active decision to step outside of civilised society. We made that decision for them, through our actions.
When Tim McVeigh bombed Oklahoma city and claimed he was doing God's work, nobody sat back and asked if it meant we weren't taking enough notice of the desires of the 'Christian community'. We sat back and looked at him for what he was - an extremist nutter and criminal who deserved to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Why is it, then, when other groups of nutters and criminals decide to take the law into their own hands, it is suddenly our fault? Is it because the bombers killed themselves in the attacks? There is an honourable history of suicide as a means of protest which does not involve the death or injury of others. Certainly, if the London suicide bombers has gone to an out-of the way placed and publically detonated themselves in protest against - well, whatever it was they thought they were protesting against - and alerted the press beforehand, then public sympathy would have been firmly on their side as nobody else would have been hurt.
The fact of the matter is they wanted to kill and harm other people and, irrespective of the woolly bleatings of the Guardian, Ken Livingstone and some of the more hard-of-thinking members of the Livejournal world, premeditated murder is not a legitimate form of protest; and more to the point the victims and the society of those victims have no moral responsibilty for those murders.
After all, if we start accepting external moral repsonsibility for the deaths of the commuters on the tube, how long will it be before 'She was asking for it' is an acceptable moral excuse for rape? In many ways, they are the same argument.
The bombers weren't religious, they weren't martyrs, and their actions were entirely their fault.
And anyone who says different is just asking for a punch in the gob. It'll be their fault, too.
In the light of this thought, I'd like to ask you a few questions:
[Poll #536667]
Now, I don't know about you, but this attitude really irritates me. The first thing I don't like about it is the implicit racism of the assumption that it's our fault. It is our actions, the attitude says, that brought the attacks onto us. This abrogates the bombers of moral responsibility and effectively makes them less than human. They didn't have free will. They didn't make an active decision to step outside of civilised society. We made that decision for them, through our actions.
When Tim McVeigh bombed Oklahoma city and claimed he was doing God's work, nobody sat back and asked if it meant we weren't taking enough notice of the desires of the 'Christian community'. We sat back and looked at him for what he was - an extremist nutter and criminal who deserved to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Why is it, then, when other groups of nutters and criminals decide to take the law into their own hands, it is suddenly our fault? Is it because the bombers killed themselves in the attacks? There is an honourable history of suicide as a means of protest which does not involve the death or injury of others. Certainly, if the London suicide bombers has gone to an out-of the way placed and publically detonated themselves in protest against - well, whatever it was they thought they were protesting against - and alerted the press beforehand, then public sympathy would have been firmly on their side as nobody else would have been hurt.
The fact of the matter is they wanted to kill and harm other people and, irrespective of the woolly bleatings of the Guardian, Ken Livingstone and some of the more hard-of-thinking members of the Livejournal world, premeditated murder is not a legitimate form of protest; and more to the point the victims and the society of those victims have no moral responsibilty for those murders.
After all, if we start accepting external moral repsonsibility for the deaths of the commuters on the tube, how long will it be before 'She was asking for it' is an acceptable moral excuse for rape? In many ways, they are the same argument.
The bombers weren't religious, they weren't martyrs, and their actions were entirely their fault.
And anyone who says different is just asking for a punch in the gob. It'll be their fault, too.
In the light of this thought, I'd like to ask you a few questions:
[Poll #536667]
Re: Hmm ...
Date: 2005-07-24 10:02 am (UTC)What I'm trying to establish is: do you consider the suicide bombers to have had sufficient autonomy over their actions (despite societal pressures and so on) for us to regard them as ultimately responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians: what the law would call murderers?
And if not, then under what circumstances would you hold someone to be 100% responsible for murder?
H
Re: Hmm ...
Date: 2005-07-24 10:07 am (UTC)I'm wary of using judged and judgement in regard to dead people as it has (in our culture) a heavily implicit tang of afterlife and judeo-christian mythologising.
Re: Hmm ...
Date: 2005-07-25 08:38 am (UTC)So, basically, what you are saying is that, within your own belief system, you regard the concept of “Murder” stripped of all external influences, as being a sort of Platonic ideal, the ethical equivalent of the Frictionless Ladder in applied maths, a mental construct that doesn’t really exist, except as a tool to enable us to solve problems in real life.
And the people in our own imperfect, quotidian reality whom we regard as “murderers” are those people who by their actions have approached sufficiently close to your ideal of Murder to merit that description. Is this a fair summary? I think so.
Well, honestly, Grim, if this is your very oblique, roundabout way of saying that the suicide bombers were murderers (but not Murderers) then I don’t think I would disagree with you. Stripped of all the special factors you plead on their behalf – poor nutrition, lack of counselling, suicide-bombing memes and so on, and reduced to that one nodal point of “either/or” (in this case, “should I or should I not detonate these explosives on this crowded Tube train”) at which free will comes into play, they obviously chose to set the explosives off. But I must say I do think you take a jolly long time to say something which might be compressed into a couple of sentences of ordinary commonsense.
H
Re: Hmm ...
Date: 2005-07-25 08:47 am (UTC)Everyone has free will to act, or not, as they choose. While everyone, ultimately, has entirely free reign of choice their percieved choices are shaped and 'limited' by other factors.
The root objection I have to comments like Dave's ones is that they mistake understanding for excusing and are often fantastically simplistic, characterising actions as 'simply' right or wrong, good or evil, without any thought for any context rather than their own.
I don't think this is a one-two sentence argument or concept, especially not in the frame of reference here.
Re: Hmm ...
Date: 2005-07-25 08:59 am (UTC)Have to say I don't think it 'fantastically simplistic' to oberserve that detonating a bomb in a confined space full of civilians is 'wrong'.
Re: Hmm ...
Date: 2005-07-25 09:01 am (UTC)Re: Hmm ...
Date: 2005-07-25 09:12 am (UTC)H