Ethics in the Service of Evil

In the earlier example of the New York attacks, we understood that the moral stance of victimization was essential to enable the victimization of others.

Americans – and in particular the American government – had to propagate the mythology that the attacks were utterly unprovoked, stimulated only by the malevolent evil of the attackers, and were directed at America solely as a result of America’s “virtue.”

America’s capacity to sustain this mad fiction was a truly staggering “achievement.” The leader of the attackers clearly stated, in factual terms, the crimes that America had committed in terms of foreign policy. No sane human being could deny that American troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia, or that the Anglo-American sanctions against Iraq had resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, or that billions of dollars of aid were not flowing from Washington to Tel Aviv.

These were all facts, which were not even mentioned, let alone discussed or repudiated.

This does not mean that we must necessarily agree that the actions of the American government justified the attacks on New York. It does mean, however, that the mantra “we have no idea why they attacked us” is a complete falsehood. We may violently disagree with the moral justifications for the attacks, but the attackers were very clear as to why they attacked.

The reason that these simple explanations went instantly and irrevocably down the “memory hole” is that they threatened to bring the question of moral principles to bear on the interaction, in a simple one-two punch:

  1. If their attacks on us are unjustified, then our far more egregious attacks on them were also unjustified. (If they are evil, we are far more evil.)
  2. If our egregious attacks on them were justified, then their muted response against us is even more justified (If we are good, they are more good.)

The only way that the second premise could be justified is if excessive murder is considered “better” than a muted response – in other words, they are less moral than us only because they murdered fewer of us than we did of them. (This would be a difficult moral premise to argue for without openly bursting into sulphurous flames.)