Collateral
Damage Is Murder
By Michael Boldin
08 August, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Collateral
damage is nothing more than a euphemism for state-sponsored mass murder.
It is the term given to people killed in military actions who were "not
intentionally targeted." In reality, this is pure propaganda. It
has always been morally just to protect innocent people against aggressors.
But, on the other hand, it has never been moral, nor has it ever been
necessary, to bomb cities filled with innocent people.
We rarely see the faces or
know the identities of those reduced to the status of collateral damage.
It is a gray area where the victim becomes less than a person. Interestingly
enough, during the Vietnam War, both Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara
used the term "integers" to describe those civilian deaths
that they preferred not to have publicized as human beings. Such is
the amazing power of doublespeak.
Civilians killed incidental
to what the dominant power refers to as "progress" are called
collateral damage, while those killed intentionally are victims of "terrorism."
But all too often, unfortunately, it's quite difficult to tell the difference
between the two. Governments regularly do one and call it the other,
but the end result is still the same; dead civilians. So, no matter
name you give it (War on Terrorism, Spreading Democracy, Regime Change,
Defending our Freedoms), when war is taken to a civilian population,
isn't it nothing more than terrorism and murder, even if you later call
the victims collateral damage?
Come to think of it, there
is probably no term that is more repugnant and immoral than the one
that discards the importance of other people's lives are mere collateral
damage; especially when their deaths become incidental to the conquest
of some military or political objective. As collateral damage, these
people suffer the same outcome as fat discarded by a butcher.
It is important to note,
however, that those who use the term "collateral damage" strategically
always seem to apply it to foreigners; such as Iraqis and Afghanis.
Even when a two-ton, laser-guided bomb is dropped on a small village,
it's claimed that the mass deaths were "inadvertent" and "tragic,"
and that they could have been prevented if the "terrorists"
would just stop fighting back, or as some of us call it, resisting.
So, rather than treating these people as human beings victimized by
evil actions, they are simply written off as collateral damage, i.e.,
rubble.
No moral person would ever
dream of referring to a policeman killed while trying to save people
from the World Trade Center as collateral damage, even though that policeman
was also an "inadvertent" victim, and not the direct target
of the attack. We can all acknowledge the fact that the policeman was
a real person, and not just an unfortunate statistic. That person was
the victim of a heinous act of violence which caused his death. Likewise,
the innocent victims of our government's actions in the "war on
terror" are more than a statistic. They are also victims of heinous
acts of violence.
Apologists for American soldiers
killing people in Iraq would like us to believe that their killings
are justifiable because they're done in "self-defense." The
awful truth is that most killing in the course of this or any war is
simply murder disguised as self defense. Otherwise, we'd have to accept
as morally valid, a thought process similar to this:
Those Iraqis were trying
to kill ME so I just had to kill THEM. Like my leaders said, they were
supposed to welcome me as a liberator, and let me secure their country
for them. I'm here to help these poor people, and all they do is shoot
at me!
Let's try to simplify this
self-defense argument. U.S. soldiers participate in the invasion of
Iraq, which is a country thousands of miles away from home that has
never attacked America. The soldiers have their weapons loaded, with
fingers on the trigger. Meanwhile, there are Iraqi citizens who object
to their country being invaded by a foreign army. They proceed to load
their own weapons, and point them at invading U.S. soldiers. American
soldiers then shoot and kill the "foreigners" in their home
country. According to American politicians and military leaders, such
killings are not murder; they're self-defense. These "insurgents"
should have just given up and surrendered peacefully.
With this type of thinking,
I suppose that if a person were to stand on your driveway and aim a
loaded weapon at you, they would be justified in killing you if you
were to point a gun at them. They, and not you, under this code of collateral
damage, would be the ones using self-defense! Oh, you might say that
the robber was trespassing, right? U.S. troops are doing the same, are
they not? We've heard it called regime change, spreading democracy,
fighting terrorism and more. But, what else can it be called other than
trespassing? It is nothing more than an invasion, which is trespassing
at the barrel of a gun.
When a State drops bombs
on another country and brings about the inevitable deaths of innocents,
it cannot be exempted from liability just because it didn't want to
kill them. It can never be innocent itself, whatever the justification.
It can never be anything but fully responsible for each and every death
it causes. Reducing men, women and children to statistics will never
eliminate the overall culpability of the aggressor State.
The obvious assumption that
the murderers make is that our goals and our lives have more importance
than that of any foreigners, and therefore, in order to achieve these
goals, we have the right to murder them without repercussion. Because
there is never a penalty for the "winners," it must be a right...right?
But what kind of right could this be? Is it an inherent right, a legal
right, a moral right? In fact, it's none of these; it is simply a right
of superior power. This is the same kind of right that has been exercised
by tyrants throughout history; giving them justification to murder millions
to achieve a "greater good."
So, these unfortunate people,
the collateral damage of war, have been forced to become martyrs for
the unchecked power that caused their deaths. They have been discarded
for the sake of the higher cause; not based on their own beliefs, but
ours. It should be quite self-evident by this point in history, that
anyone who claims to believe in freedom and equality could never use
the phrase "collateral damage" without being an utter hypocrite.
Such hubris must not continue forever. The murder of innocent people
is murder, period.
Yes, it is true that innocents
die when war is waged. Yes, innocent people will always die when their
cities are bombed and their homes are invaded. This is all the reason
that should be needed to vehemently oppose every aggressive war that
our government engages in!
In the end it doesn't matter
what you call it. A half-million Iraqi children who died as a result
of "sanctions" don't care what you call it. They, and their
brethren who are dying today, don't care about the doublespeak used
by so-called scholars, party loyalists, military apologists, or any
other supporters of our brutal wars - they're dead.
Written by Michael
Boldin [send
him email], who is an outspoken critic of the American
political system, and a senior editor and contributing writer for www.populistamerica.com