Shoot to Still

Now this is funny, but when Thoreau says that indiscriminate slaughter is what al Qaeda does, I am a little too closely reminded of the terrorism is civilians line trotted out when reluctant radicals seek to avail themselves of the chauvinism that insists our killing of so-called non-combatants is unintentional and therefore less morally egregious than their killing of so-called non-combatants, because dead babes in the marketplace are precisely their point, not merely a regrettable side effect. Now I just want to point out how morally dubious is this claim, not only because it takes the claims of an immense aggressive military empire at face value, but also because it is a claim made by those who both admit and understand that civilian death on a large scale is a completely and wholly foreseeable outcome of your bombing campaign in Tripoli or wherever. Oh, uh, well, we know with certainty that we will kill civilians but we do not intend to kill civilians. Yuh. Um. I will take moral casuistry for two hundred, Alex. You are basically making distinctions based on your own susceptibility to a PR campaign; you are choosing Crest and insisting that Colgate is not even toothpaste.

In any case, what you must do is escape the teleology of "combatants" and "non-combatants" and "civilians" and all that altogether. As a matter of general principle, it is necessary to adopt a fundamentally pacifistic position; to view violence as violence, killing as killing, and to simply reject it, uniformly, as the wages of evil. Now perhaps you will be called upon one day to violate those principles; Space Nazis have invaded your town; a bear in a lobster suit is raping your wife in a hot air balloon and you have just one shot with the breech-loaded muzzle that happens to be lying powdered and ready at your feet. As my friend Adam says, Hypothetical Is The New Real! It is an infinitely entertaining game, the invention of new and Byzantine circumstances in which the only solution is violence and death, but it serves no end but to justify via unreality those things which reality obliges you to condemn.