I thought this was a stunning piece by Eve Garrard, Not just, and not tidy either posted on normblog
We can't assume for the sake of moral neatness that men whose lives were not disfigured by extraordinary suffering, who were in global terms rather affluent and well-protected, but who nonetheless vented their poisonous hatreds on the bodies of their innocent fellows, must have been reacting to prior evil-doing. People's choices are shaped by good forces as well as by bad ones, and sometimes what they choose brings evil out of that good, and the prior good is as much a part of the causal chain as any prior evil is. The world is not ultimately a tidy place, let alone a just one, and we shouldn't let our desire for a simple moral order blind us to the causal complexities which lie behind horrific actions. (Eve Garrard)
The host of normblog, Norm Geras, also a Professor of Government at the University of Manchester, U.K. , gives an important lesson in the difference between necessary causal agents and moral culpability for those who see none in the Guardian (full text here).
It needs to be seen and said clear: there are, amongst us, apologists for what the killers do, and they make more difficult the long fight that is needed to defeat them. (To forestall any possible misunderstanding on this point: I do not say these people are not entitled to the views they express or to their expression of them. They are. Just as I am entitled to criticize their views for the wretched apologia they amount to.)
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So, there are apologists among us. They have to be fought - fought intellectually and politically and without let-up. What is it that moves them to their disgraceful litany of excuses? This is doubtless a complex matter, but here are a few suggestions. One thing seems to be the treatment of those who practise terror as though they were part of some natural environment we have to take as given - not themselves free and responsible agents, but like a vicious dog or a hive of bees. If we do anything that provokes them, that must make us morally responsible, for they can be expected to react as they do. If this isn't a form of covert racism, then it's a kind of diminishing culturalism and is equally insulting to the people transformed by it into amoral beings incapable of choice or judgement.
Finally, via norm, a fine statement by Robert Mason, from one of the signatories to the declaration against terror.
Of course, I started out saying we deserved it. I rattled the shibboleths and evoked the totem of roosting chickens. I suddenly reversed my support of the Kurds and the Afghans and the Sudanese, all to blame George Bush. But I knew it was a lie.
See, like any progressive, I knew that true people's movements don't, as the terrorists do, boast of their love for death, or target the innocent, or espouse Jewish conspiracy theories, or reject democracy on principle, or enslave women... especially all at once. I'd seen this foe before, and it's name wasn't America. It was fascism, trading in jackboots for keffiyahs and merging Mein Kampf with Qur'an. In this fight as any other, I knew I had to stand where I'd always stood... with the heretics, the hebes, the homos and the harridans.
Be they the slaughtered mothers of the Sudan, the roasted innocents of Manhattan or the pulverized cosmopolitans of London or Bali or Tel Aviv, I therefore announce my solidarity with the victims against this rising fascist tide. We have met an enemy that is not us, who hates us for our good ideas, not our bad policies. Fighting it requires no apology.
Standing up for women, Jews, homosexuals, Christians, and ordinary people living ordinary lives, though all are really extraordinary, is what fighting terror is all about. Indeed, fighting it requires no apology.
Posted by Jill Fallon at July 21, 2005 4:13 AM | Permalink