The Gutless Pacifist: Appeal to Pity/Reality

The question is whether or not the sacrifice to get to that point is worth it?

And the problem with this question, which is much of what I try to get across when I bring up the human cost of war (including but not limited to the experience of my own family), is that it is too often asked on behalf of those who bear the suffering by the people who inflicted the suffering. It is the people who dropped the bombs and shot the bullets who ask “how many civilian lives are worth sacrificing?” The people being killed had no input into the decision. They were volunteered.

The people of our country do this and are “consenting” of it only out of ignorance of the real human costs. They “calculate it” based on the a combo of “just war theory” (to assuage the conscience by arguments about “long term saving of lives” and distance keeps them from factoring in any actual human consequences. They simpy do not see. They hand over these “dirty decisions” to folks who claim they are , like the Jack Nicholson “Colonel Jessup” character in A Few Good Men, “on that wall” and convincing themselves that “we need him on that wall, we WANT him on that wall”, and do next to no thinking about the conduct of those on that wall, and our complicity in that conduct (say for example, Abu Ghraib, bombings which take out thousands of “collateral damage” victims, etc.) Somehow, the powers that be keep on being apparently sufficiently successful at “manufacturing consent”, taking advantage of the desire of a people subject to the “security” provided by those powers to see those powers succeed “on their behalf”.