Working out our salvation with fear and trembling
About two thousand innocents died on 9/11.
Tens of thousands of innocents have died in the wars we have commissioned to redress that greivance.
Is this acceptable? Does it matter that they're not Americans?
This bifurcates into other questions: is war an acceptable response to terrorism? Berry notes in Citizenship Papers that our definition of "terrorism" is quite elusive: in the end, it seems to be politically motivated violence against civilians not authorized by a government. When it is authorized by a government, it is simply war: and everyone knows that in modern war the death of innocents is inevitable.
The Catholic catechism distinguishes between the willful destruction of innocent life and its incidental and unintended destruction in the pursuit of a just cause. Should we rely on such a (fine) distinction to justify the indiscriminate loss of life that results from modern methods of warfare? Certainly, such a distinction will not protect us from the hatred we will receive by those whose families and friends we have "incidentally" destroyed.
But then there are questions of destiny, of self-defense against political Islam, "Islamofascism," an ideology more dangerous than fascism or Communism because it is an ideology that puts a low priority on staying alive. As Podhoretz says, mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent for Islamists--"it is an incentive." The prospect of their acquiring weapons of apocalyptic magnitude is staggeringly dangerous. It would mean the greatest threat the civilization of the West has yet had to endure.
Buckley: Those critics who insist that it is only a small war-party faction of the Islamists that we have to fear might have been asked a generation ago if it was not merely a small number of Germans and Russians we were properly exercised about. Sixty million people were dead after that misreckoning.
Do we dare join the ranks of the Neville Chamberlains of the world, the optimistic isolations and pacifists who wished to resign themselves to the existence of world-threatening and totalitarian political movements? The call echoes down through history: Not our fight. Not our problem. They have good reason to hate us. If we comprimise, they will leave us be.
But the Churchills of the world, atavistic and semi-barbarous to their contemporaries--the unsophisticated, the "cowboys"--answer with the bass voice of destiny: No. Our fight, whether we will have it or no. Our place upon the stage of history has come: and what an awful duty it is.
Tens of thousands of innocents have died in the wars we have commissioned to redress that greivance.
Is this acceptable? Does it matter that they're not Americans?
This bifurcates into other questions: is war an acceptable response to terrorism? Berry notes in Citizenship Papers that our definition of "terrorism" is quite elusive: in the end, it seems to be politically motivated violence against civilians not authorized by a government. When it is authorized by a government, it is simply war: and everyone knows that in modern war the death of innocents is inevitable.
The Catholic catechism distinguishes between the willful destruction of innocent life and its incidental and unintended destruction in the pursuit of a just cause. Should we rely on such a (fine) distinction to justify the indiscriminate loss of life that results from modern methods of warfare? Certainly, such a distinction will not protect us from the hatred we will receive by those whose families and friends we have "incidentally" destroyed.
But then there are questions of destiny, of self-defense against political Islam, "Islamofascism," an ideology more dangerous than fascism or Communism because it is an ideology that puts a low priority on staying alive. As Podhoretz says, mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent for Islamists--"it is an incentive." The prospect of their acquiring weapons of apocalyptic magnitude is staggeringly dangerous. It would mean the greatest threat the civilization of the West has yet had to endure.
Buckley: Those critics who insist that it is only a small war-party faction of the Islamists that we have to fear might have been asked a generation ago if it was not merely a small number of Germans and Russians we were properly exercised about. Sixty million people were dead after that misreckoning.
Do we dare join the ranks of the Neville Chamberlains of the world, the optimistic isolations and pacifists who wished to resign themselves to the existence of world-threatening and totalitarian political movements? The call echoes down through history: Not our fight. Not our problem. They have good reason to hate us. If we comprimise, they will leave us be.
But the Churchills of the world, atavistic and semi-barbarous to their contemporaries--the unsophisticated, the "cowboys"--answer with the bass voice of destiny: No. Our fight, whether we will have it or no. Our place upon the stage of history has come: and what an awful duty it is.