"...as an unmuddied lake, sir."
"...As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer."
This is from an interview with an immoral slanderer, who rationalized an inexplicable act of savagery:
AMY GOODMAN: How many people have interpreted this, "if as you said, true enough, they were civilians of a sort, but innocent, give me a break. They formed a technocratic core at the very heart of America's global financial empire, the mighty engine of profit, to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved, and they did so both willingly and knowingly." How many people have interpreted this as that they deserve what they got?
WARD CHURCHILL: Well, I'm not a judge. I don't make the assessment as to what it is they deserve. I'm simply pointing to the reality of it. I don't know that I even agreed with the execution of Eichmann, per se. I'm not repudiating it. I'm not taking exception to it and defending the man, but I don't make that decision. What I did was posit the reality with the intent of allowing the reader or compelling the reader even to draw their own conclusion. If their conclusion is that if you do these things, you deserve death, then that's the conclusion they've drawn.
AMY GOODMAN: What conclusion...
WARD CHURCHILL: Apparently...
AMY GOODMAN: What conclusion have you drawn about September 11th and the...
WARD CHURCHILL: Well, I posit my conclusions that if you want to avoid September 11s, if you want security in some actual form, then it's almost a biblical framing, you have to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. As long as you're doing what the U.S. is doing in the world, you can anticipate a natural and inevitable response of the sort that occurred on 9/11. If you don't get the message out of 9/11, you're going to have to change, first of all, your perception of the value of those others who are consigned to domains, semantic domains like collateral damage, then you've really got no complaint when the rules you've imposed come back on you. If you are going to alter that scenario, you first have to value those little brown bodies that are embodied in the Iraqi children, the half million that were mentioned first, or the Palestinians, or the Grenadans, or the Guatemalans, or the Nicaraguans, or tick off the list. You are going to have to treat them as having human faces, actually having human value and not something, some form of existence to be slaughtered with impunity. And the best signification of that, rhetorically at least, is the U.S. has always postured itself at the forefront of valuing others even as it treats them like toilet paper. Rhetoric alone is not going to do it. Ennobling rhetoric is absolutely irrelevant in this context. You're going to have to do something concrete. And I recommended that the most concrete thing that could be done was an overt and tangible manifestation of the U.S. at the highest policymaking levels as demanded by the general citizenry to begin to adhere to the rule of law. That is, announce that it accepts the idea that the U.S. is bound to conform to international legal requirements, the same as any other country, rather than announcing always and inevitably that it was entitled to a some sort of a self-defined exception from the rule and that when other people or other peoples objected to that, there's a unilateralist policy.
All clear?
Good, because this here is the sort of provocative, out-of-the-box reasoning that gets you on the opinion page of a major metropolitan daily:
The news is filled these days with reports of civilian casualties, comparative civilian body counts and criticism of Israel, along with Hezbollah, for causing the deaths, injuries and "collective punishment" of civilians. But just who is a "civilian" in the age of terrorism, when militants don't wear uniforms, don't belong to regular armies and easily blend into civilian populations?
We need a new vocabulary to reflect the realities of modern warfare. A new phrase should be introduced into the reporting and analysis of current events in the Middle East: "the continuum of civilianality." Though cumbersome, this concept aptly captures the reality and nuance of warfare today and provides a more fair way to describe those who are killed, wounded and punished.
[snip]
Turning specifically to the current fighting between Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas, the line between Israeli soldiers and civilians is relatively clear. Hezbollah missiles and Hamas rockets target and hit Israeli restaurants, apartment buildings and schools. They are loaded with anti-personnel ball-bearings designed specifically to maximize civilian casualties.
Hezbollah and Hamas militants, on the other hand, are difficult to distinguish from those "civilians" who recruit, finance, harbor and facilitate their terrorism. Nor can women and children always be counted as civilians, as some organizations do. Terrorists increasingly use women and teenagers to play important roles in their attacks.
The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit. Some — those who cannot leave on their own — should be counted among the innocent victims.
If the media were to adopt this "continuum," it would be informative to learn how many of the "civilian casualties" fall closer to the line of complicity and how many fall closer to the line of innocence.
Every civilian death is a tragedy, but some are more tragic than others.
All clear?
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