As is usual these days, one horrible thing tends to drive out another. We’ve had a pretty long string of disasters lately, natural and man-made, so it is easy to forget this hideous things which were going on just before the latest bout. George Clooney and John Prendergast over at the Washington Post remind us of what has been happening in Sudan:
…the list of dishonored agreements and massive human rights crimes in Sudan is shocking in scope. In Darfur, the Khartoum regime has cleared millions from their lands, allowing ethnic groups allied with the government to move into the deserted areas. In the oilfield areas of southern Sudan in the 1990s, the regime strategically killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of indigenous residents to facilitate Chinese oil exploitation. In the Nuba mountains during the late 1980s and 1990s, the vast majority of locals were forcibly displaced by Sudanese government attacks, and hundreds of thousands died.
The international community threatened real consequences during and after these incidents and after other targeted crimes against civilian populations. But the consequences never came…
Clooney and Prendergast are, of course, good liberals and thus don’t advocate – at least right now – any military action against the Sudan regime. To that I ask, why not? Both men clearly know what a bestial regime it is, both know that no peace agreement will be honored by the regime. So, why not demand a punitive expedition against the regime? Because we’re afraid – plain and simple, we’re just afraid to do it.
This is not, by the way, a liberal or conservative thing – we’re all afraid. Right down to the ground, we’re cowards – we got a yellow streak a mile wide running down our backs. People have been, are and will be butchered by the Sudanese and other such regimes and we’ll do nothing, or next to nothing, about it (Libya being a demonstration of “next to nothing”). But it isn’t physical cowardice that holds us back – after all, even if any one of us does suffer from that, we’ve clearly got the men and women who can do the job. No, our cowardice is moral – as we have become a less and less moral people we have become progressively less willing to do the right thing.
Oh, sure – here come the objections. From some conservatives we’ll get the “we can’t nation-build” nonsense, while from some liberals will come the “we can’t be an arrogant power” silliness. From others there will be the objection that we’ll have another Iraq or Afghanistan on our hands. Yadda, yadda, yadda…all designed to ensure that we don’t do what we know is right. Remember, people are being mass murdered – women and children as well as men (and the women often raped in to the bargain). Suppose some group settled itself upon your community and started butchering all the people and burning the town? What would you do? What, moreover, would you demand that your fellow citizens do to help you? You know darn well you’d want it stopped…and you’d fully expect your fellow Americans to rush to your aid. But it changes because the people being killed are far away and foreign?
We know darn well it doesn’t. “They are foreign” is just a different way of saying “I’m too craven to help, so I’ll just look away and pretend it isn’t happening”. Right is right – we are supposed to do what we can, when we can. God doesn’t expect us to solve all problems in the world…but any problem we can solve, we should solve. And, yes, we should always see first if there is a peaceful way out. But once we’ve tried and tried and tried and the evil people keep being evil, then it becomes not a matter of “should” we go to war, but only a matter of “can we?”. If we have sufficient forces then we should do it – invade and conquer, and then kill all those responsible for the butchery…and without being too particular about rules of evidence. In such an action we are teaching a lesson – we would be instructing barbarians on the rules of civilization and that there comes a time when we’ll have enough of their beastly business, and we’ll start killing them all.
This is what moral men and women do – or, at least, used to do. More than a century of moral erosion and now its not something which is done. And, after all, they’ll soon be starting up the preliminaries for next year’s American Idol and Celebrity Apprentice…we’ve got things to do and places to go. So, who cares if some poor girl in Sudan is going to be raped and murdered today as a part of official government policy?
Blogs For Victory 