The Gutless Pacifist: Appeal to Pity/Reality

I am not sure how those people who would want to prevent that or prevent it from happening to other people could be accused of viewing things in abstract, detached manner.

I think the abstraction is indicated when, in the same breath as they cite the heroic actions of the military, they excuse or deny the reality of what the military did. Raping, killing and oppressing is exactly what the Allies did do, but the apologetics flourish amongst the people who did not have to bear that suffering. And that’s even only when the actual experience of civilians during the war is admitted to the discussion, while usually it is dismissed as an emotional appeal.

So I would maintain that this unwillingness to face the human reality of the situation in favour of ideological bantering does make an abstraction of it. Not only does it reduce the war to an abstraction and deny the gravity of it, but it also reduces moral concepts to abstractions. Heroism, freedom, peace, sacrifice… Those all become ideological tools of debate, rather than human behavioral realities. That is why it is so easy to defend war as something that “saves” a people while at the same time dismissing what happened to those actual people that one claims to have “saved”. If our concern truly is for the civilians of Europe or the civilians of Iraq, then we must be honest and concerned about the suffering Europeans endured at the hands of both the Axis and the Allies, and the suffering Iraqis endured at the hands of both Saddam Hussein and the USA. If we aren’t, then we’re merely partisan idealogues using civilians as rhetorical pawns.

Similarly, I was once told that my “concern for the Iraqi people” was “phony”. The nerve. The arrogance. Because the REAL concern here was opposition to a president who’s somehow become something of a cult hero, and criticism sets of some kind of rage. So much so that there is no such thing as compassion anymore. What ultimate cynicism. What we’ve come to in our public debate (and then trickling down to personal conversations; which really aren’t connversations most of the time. It’s screeching. Expressions of concern for the destruction of life unneccearily are seen as partisan “bickering”. They’ve lost touch with any semblance of a what is real. It is now just what the screechers say we shold say, and we see what they tell us to see.