Bastion of Free Speech

In his latest interview (with Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist), Osama Bin Laden is reported to have made the following point: Civilians in the US are as responsible for American actions as the US Government. Since they elect their government, and the government acts in their name, therefore, they should be held liable for its actions. In the same interview, Bin Laden also fulminated against the US for killing innocent civiians in Afghanistan.

It is not reported whether Hamid Mir asked the logical follow-up question, "If so, Mr. Bin Laden, if this is what renders a people innocent or guilty, then does it mean that the Taliban, whose actions have resulted in the punishment of the entire Afghan nation, or Saddam Hussein's regime, under whose watch half-a-million Iraqis have died, or Yasser Arafat, whose unelected government has brought untold Israeli oppression on its people, are not truly representative of their citizens, and therefore, have no business speaking in their name?

The theater of the absurd has blossomed to grotesque proportions in our times, but rarely does the script get more gothic than when both sides talk freely about the blood of innocents. George Bush reviles the evil ones, and then accuses them of killing civilians. The Hamid Mirs in the US press never ask him, "Are you saying, then, Mr. President, that it would have been ok if the hijackers had hit a US military base (or, to put it another way, do you imply that hitting the Pentagon was within the rules of engagement but the World Trade Center was a no-no)?" If we concede they are the embodiment of evil, why are we surprised that they do bad things?

Lest we spend too much time chasing these mirages, let us see this shadow play for what it is, and note the following axioms:

1. No one really cares about lives, civilian or otherwise - so long as they belong to the other side
   When they last captured Mazar-i-Sharif from the Northern Alliance, the Taliban massacred hundreds of Shias - civilians, if you must - for their alleged support of the Northern Alliance. When the Northern Alliance captured the city back, they (according to news reports) threw captured Taliban soldiers into wells and lobbed grenades into the wells to finish them off.
   
   An auspicious start to a more humane regime! And the savagery continues with animal sacrifice - hundreds of sheep (political affiliation unknown, but clearly non-combatants) were sacrificed to celebrate the Northern Alliance's triumph.
   
   The US has not lagged behind in killing civilians - what else were they doing with death squads in Nicaragua and El Salvador - and even today in Columbia - remember the nuns and priests murdered by graduates from the US school for terrorists (whose graduates reportedly included Manuel Noriega and Robert D'Aubisson? The entire Cambodian war, from which that hapless nation is yet to recover, started with the US bombing of this non-combatant country.
   
   
2. The difference between developed and less developed countries is that the latter don't even care about killing their own populations
   
   One sign of development is some recognition of nationhood - although this is still pretty primive and racial even in developed countries. The development of democracy is an indication of progress in this regard.
   
   Killing of the local population routinely happens in the third world - what else was the shelling of Kabul by Gulbedin Hekmetyar, Afghani mujahid and Pakistani stooge, in which 50000 people died? The US-backed Jonas Savimbi continues his killing spree to this day in Angola. Idi Amin's murder of thousands of Ugandans, Pakistan's brutal suppression of Baluch and Pakhtoon movements, Indian human rights atrocities in the Northeast, Kashmir and Punjab - the list can be extended to cover most developing countries. Conversely, insurrection too, where people are willing to turn against their own fellow-countrymen, represents the same phenomenon.
   
   And oh yes, this has happened in the US too - so long as you remember that not all killing happens in wars. Placing toxic industries or waste dumps among poor people is a common way of dealing with the downside of industrial development. And yes, the syphilis experiments on black men in the US army, leading to several deaths and other illnesses - a secret study officially carried out by the military, which came to light in the 1990's and for which the government finally apologized.
   
   And when the US was indeed less developed, it had a civil war, which took the maximum number of lives America has ever lost in a war.
   
   
3. This is not a new reality, it has always been the case


I recall reading some time ago that more than 50% of the tonnage of allied bombs dropped over Germany was after 1944, when the German army was in retreat. Much of this bombing was on civilian sites. The purpose of war is to terrorize the other side into surrendering. When at all, after perhaps the days of Chivalry (and maybe, not even then), have wars respected non-combatants? Did Napoleon? Did Peter the Great? If they let the farmers survive and crops stand, it was only so that they may feed the troops.


4. Not all lives are worth the same
   
   The columnist R. Siddharth once observed that during the Great Bengal Famine in 1943, Winston Churchill refused to divert a couple of ships with foodstuffs to Calcutta, saying they were more urgently needed for the War Effort. Some six million people died in that famine - as an interesting aside, about the same number that died in the Holocaust.
   
   If AIDS had been a white epidemic instead of black, it would have received top billing in research and treatment. So some say. I don't know if this is true. But there are certainly other measures which tell us that not all lives are worth the same. And let us not blame our governments for this - we are all participants in this truth. Let alone a child dying in Africa. How many people forgo their vacation worrying about the abused children or battered women in their own locality?
   
   To this general apathy the spur of war provides a relief, for it allows one not merely to ignore others but to freely hate them too.

The apocryphal story is told of a meeting between Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, when Thoreau was in prison (for exactly one night). "What are you doing in prison?", Emerson is reported to have asked Thoreau. "What are you doing out of it?" came the reported reply. Gandhi said that in the rule of a dishonest government, the only place for an honest man was jail. George W. Bush's infantile If you are not with us, you are against us may yet have some meaning if turned around in this context, "If you don't oppose killing, you are for killing".

All well and good, but why do governments kill? Why do people kill - not individual murders, but mass murders? How does an Atta justify killing thousands of people? Quite possibly, exactly as an Israeli justifies killing a couple of Palestinians. The numbers make no great difference to the principle. All of us are able to justify killing in the name of some great principle - preservation of unity (The American Civil War), self-defense (Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, Pearl Harbor, September 11), freedom (the US Civil War from the Confederate point of view) the lesser evil (Truman dropping the Atom Bomb), even democracy (the US in Korea, Vietnam) - not to forget Holy War (the Crusades, the Afghan War against the Russians). The beauty of this trance is that even sane people (civilians) are able to justify all kinds of actions which they might never have approved of in normal times.

So what is the justification of one killing over another? This brings us to our final axiom: My lie (Lai?) is better than your lie.

One of the most memorable lessons from my grade school Hindi text was the story of the dacoit Ratnakar. In ancient times, he used to waylay travelers and loot them.
One day, a holy man, whom he was in the process of divesting of his meager possessions, asked Ratnakar, "Why do you do this?".
To which Ratnakar replied, "To feed my family."
"You are willing to commit this sin in their name?", asked the holy man.
"Yes", replied Ratnakar. "This is my sacrifice for them".
"Since they are ready to partake of your loot, have you asked them if they are also willing to share in your sin?", suggested the holy man.
The story goes that Ratnakar went back and consulted with his family while the holy man waited. When he returned, he told the holy man that the answer had been a resounding NO. Ratnakar gave up his life as a dacoit and later wrote the epic, Ramayana. He is better known by his pen-name, Valmiki.

The real civilians, then, are those on the street protesting the killing on either side. Those who take no stand, silently rejoicing and agonizing in front of their TV sets and computers, can paraphrase Jefferson - we are all civilians, we are all combatants.

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