Each Human Life is Precious; Wanna buy a Rolex? posted by Richard Seymour

When George Bush Snr was asked by reporters about the deaths of innocent people that may have been caused by bombing this or that country, he was fond of replying that "each human life is precious", while adopting a pained, constipated expression as if the whole moral conundrum was eating at his heart day and night.

Each human life, of course, is not precious. Under capitalism, a human life is worth only what it costs to buy the bullet. It goes without saying that a society which makes it easy and cheap for people to kill values human life less than those which do not. American society does not value human lives, even if Americans do. Two years after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon and the accomplished facts of Bush Jnr's warmongering make it impossible to believe that this is an administration that values human lives very much, if at all.

Those Americans who have shown demonstrable regard for life by protesting death-dealing policies have been vilified up and down the press, tarred with every brush, associated with every guilt and every crime, slandered in the most perniciously creative ways. This is normal practise. Millions of Americans tune in to watch Bill O'Reilly hypocritically and quite obscenely abusing the son of a 9/11 victim; well-heeled readers of the Atlantic Monthly and the Observer get to read Christopher Hitchens lavishing scorn on his former comrades, implying that they are either Stalinist apparatchiks, bin Laden sympathisers, or childlike simpletons; pasty white cops with Balloo-the-Bear physiques lay into protesters in New York.

Most sickeningly of all, the Bush administration is all silken smirks as it exploits the dead to wage war. They indulge Russia using 9/11 as an excuse for their oppression of the Chechens and it isn't even a question whether Israel is going to find a way to pin this on the Palestinians. It is now known that Rumsfeld's first reaction to this event was to demand intelligence information to link the attacks to Iraq. Even as the bodies were being torn from the rubble, and heroic New Yorkers were ferrying millions across the river, away from danger, in a quite spontaneous moment of mass rationality, the Bush administration was looking for ways to exploit their political capital.

It is usually the case that when terrorist attacks occur, political capital accrues to the right. The instinct is to preserve the status quo against this irruption, not to see the irruption as constitutive of the status quo. The only situations where terrorist attacks impart moderation are those where the terrorist attackers are stronger than the nation attacked - for example, Libya has been subject to a long and relentless campaign of terrorist attacks coordinated by the American secret services, and yet today it is so desperate for an end to economic blockade and diplomatic solitude that it is handing out compensation money to victims of a crime for which it does not even take responsibility. Cuba cannot be far behind.

In this sense, the only authentic act of memory that took place in New York on September 11th 2003 was when hundreds of those attending raised their hands into the air and made the "peace" sign. Their action, while perfectly visible in the news video reel, was never referred to or explained. But it needs no explanation. Their moral integrity is untouchable even by disgusting mediocre hacks like Bill O'Reilly. Christopher Hitchens would shudder and down a malt whisky or two before dispensing some of his elevating invective on the relatives of the dead on whose behalf he claims to be battling. Dignity demands that we put a stop to idiots exploiting the dead for their own tacky merchandise - be that little glass jars with steel twin towers in them, Mount Rushmore-style carved heads on a couple of pewter twin towers, polemical works of near-fiction by fat ex-lefties or dreary wall-to-wall bullshit from the televisual wing of Murdoch International.

There is a time and a place for sanctimony, and this is it. The record of the political right since New York's tragedy has been disgusting, hypocritical and, worst of all, unbearably smug. For these and other reasons, what was initially a political triumph for neoconservatives deserves to become their political ground zero.