Morality and the September 10th Mentality

MICHAEL TOTTEN'S The (Im)moral Case Against the War casts a cold eye on an article in the utterly predictable Nation.

One of the problems with the September 10th mentality is known to some as the Genovese Syndrome, named after Kitty Genovese who was very slowly knifed to death in full view of her neighbors in New York City. Not one of her neighbors, witnesses all, lifted a finger to stop it or even to call the police. Better not to get involved, or so they thought before their morally repugnant passivism (or should I say pacifism?) shocked and appalled the rest of the country.

We denounce terrorists because when the freedom of self-determination they seek is weighed in the balance against the right to life of innocent people, it is the right to life that our collective conscience has decided should prevail. [Emphasis added.]

Good God. What "freedom" or "self-determination" are the terrorists supposedly seeking? The freedom to slash the faces of unveiled women? To stone adulterers to death? To throw gay people off buildings? To wipe Jews from the face of the Earth? If this is freedom, I'll take slavery.

Mr. Savoy has stripped that lovely word of all its meaning, reducing it to just another post-modern relativistic construct. Freedom for me is a tyrant for thee. No wonder he doesn't think it's something worth fighting for.

This, apparently, is what happens to people who live a rarefied existence in a spoiled complacent country. Maybe he needs to take a holiday in Sudan (or even Cambodia) to see how the other half lives. You know, walk a mile in another's shoes, get a little sympathy for the downtrodden. It's amazing I have to say this to a liberal. It was the liberals, after all, who taught it to me.

Agreed, with the note that it is important to remember that teaching even as those who taught it forget.

The comments to this item, involving one of the editors of The Nation, are also worth following.

Posted by Vanderleun at May 18, 2004 9:13 AM