Exploiting Misery. posted by Richard Seymour

The Wall Street Journal is known, among other things, for its cartoonish outrage at practically everything the Left gets up to. For instance, in one comment, a slack-jawed hack in their fold complains about Michael Berg's anti-war article in The Guardian:

Here's what the elder Berg says America should have done in response to the Sept. 11 attacks: "I say we should have done then what we never did before: stop speaking to the people we labelled our enemies and start listening to them."

This is sick stuff, though perhaps partly understandable as an irrational reaction of a man who's lost his son. Shame on the Guardian for exploiting Michael Berg's grief to further its own anti-American agenda. (Via Oliver Kamm

Kamm, incidentally, has his own spin on that issue, which involves a lot of drivel about the Socialist Workers' Party whom he seems to have developed a monomaniacal fixation on - even to the extent of repeating untrue assertions even following correction. Still, I said I wouldn't waste any more time on him and I won't. If you really are interested in the views of the American Tendency (long to reign over us), go ahead and pursue the link.

What I am more interested in is the flavour of this splenetic outrage - it was the same that moved Bill O'Reilly to denounce Jeremy Glick for having appended his name, as a 9/11 relative, to an antiwar advertisement which allegedly accused the United States government of terrorism. O'Reilly notoriously described Glick as having "a warped view of this world and a warped view of this country". He didn't manage to announce that Glick was "sick", but he might have gotten round to it eventually.

It's "sick" to want to listen to North Korea, Iran and Syria, according to the WSJ, but what of the remainder of Berg's recommendations? He continues:

Stop giving preconditions to our peaceful coexistence on this small planet, and start honouring and respecting every human's need to live free and autonomously, to truly respect the sovereignty of every state. To stop making up rules by which others must live and then separate rules for ourselves.

Does this seem eminently reasonable only to me? Well, obviously not, otherwise there wouldn't have seen record global anti-war demonstrations last year. Yet, Michael Berg's view is reduced to an "irrational reaction", thus depriving him of responsibility for and ownership of his opinion. That is absolutely disgusting.

The charge that The Guardian was merely "exploiting" Berg's grief to further an "anti-American" agenda is perfectly absurd. Still, there are egregious cases of blatant exploitation of the suffering of victims which apparently evoke no outrage, no vexation among the supporters of the war. Here, for instance, is one well-known political figure following the atrocities in New York and Washington:

I recently received a letter from a 4th-grade girl that seemed to say
it all: "I don't know how to feel," she said, "sad, mad, angry. It has
been different lately. I know the people in New York are scared
because of the World Trade Center and all, but if we're scared, we are
giving the terrorists all the power." In the face of this great
tragedy, Americans are refusing to give terrorists the power.

That may seem innocent enough. Bush, after all, is merely evoking the basic goodness of Americans, especially America's young. But he likes to cite the eloquence of others, (doubtless to atone for his own paucity of it). When Staff Sgt. Daniel Bader, 28, died in Iraq recently, Bush was quick to avail himself of the comments of the dead soldier's wife:

The White House has said in the past the president cannot pick and choose which funerals to attend and to whom to pay tribute without potentially offending other families who do not receive presidential attention.

But Bush used the Bader death to make a political point, quoting the words of the dead soldier's wife from a newspaper account.

"I'm going to wait until she is old enough to realize what has happened, and I will tell her exactly what her daddy did for her," Bush quoted the widow as saying of her daughter. "He died serving his country, so my little girl could grow up free."

Imagine Saddam Hussein invoking the moist-eyed comments of a loyal Iraqi woman whose husband had died for his filthy regime: "Her father died serving her country, to make her people free. Allahu Akhbar!" The stomach would fairly churn.

And remember that as the smoke was clearing in the Pentagon, and the bodies were still being dragged from the rubble, Donald Rumsfeld was making delighted political calculations :

"best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. at same time. Not only UBL."

Suffice to recall, the hysteria following 9/11 included, entirely predictably, injunctions against reflection on the role of the American government in the world, (pace O'Reilly's cheap-shots at Glick). In the name of the 'victims' the pro-War commentators of Left and Right have resorted to all manner of baseness and emotional blackmail. No sale.