Reply #48: Sorry, but that's a lot of hooey.

[Inland]

Something that is done by somebody else doesn't become my liability because a sufficiently vague and meaningless term like "countenanced", or "done for our ultimate benefit" is attached to it. It is not the doing of the busboy, dead in the world trade center, that something is "in effect, done in his name".

I could no more apply that attenuated dispersal of responsbility through societies to the WTC than I could apply it to a nuclear bomb on Saudi Arabia or a genocide of Arabs.

Even aggressor societies upon whom there is a declared war are treated better than that, and they should be. Even in Nazi Germany, not every man, woman and child was an Eichmann, or even a Nazi.

So I am wondering what it is that the WTC victims did that was so criminal that they deserved a horrible death and the terrorists were justified. It turns out that it was nothing THEY did. And nothing they could have prevented. And maybe nothing they even knew about.

While they can't escape a penalty, the people who did it are justified as working justice.

And Ward Churchill doesn't consider himself part of the problem. If he did, he would gleefully kill himself. His essay shows his disgust with the celphones, and the stock trading, and the working and the making money. He, as an academic who contributes nothing to society, is freed from any implication of guilt. But the busboy and the secretary are part of the economy. They are complicit in death squads, imperialism, as Churchill sits on land taken from the Indians and awarded his university and paid with taxes earned from the very economy he decries as a war engine. What a dick.

And please--it isn't the use of a metaphor. There isn't anything metaphorical about declaring the dead to have received a just punishment. It isn't about shock value. Justifying murder in order to make people aware of the pain their lifestyle causes isn't just bad polemic likely to make enemies out of people who don't feel they should be killed for working nine to five. It is profoundly evil.

Here's a moral guidline for you when figuring out who to punish for a nation's crimes. First of all, the people who did it, did it. Those who didn't do it, didn't do it.

It's a good rule.