Nationalism Over Humanism

by poputonian

In a comment thread below, Sharkbabe noted the American apathy toward death and destruction in Iraq, and asked the key question why:

Sadly the mass of Americans are no more moved by Iraqi deaths than they were by Vietnamese deaths.
…
How hard is it to imagine your own neighborhood in ruins, your husband and children dead, your job gone, basics of life gone (clean water, electricity), future gone – why does nobody seem to grasp this or care? I still don’t get it. It’s more than racism, it’s something worse.

Her comment reminded me somewhat of a letter Benjamin Franklin wrote to his friend Anthony Todd, the postmaster in England. Granted, the American Revolution was a war between Anglo-cousins, so it obviously wasn’t a race war. But I think it illustrates how people with power do things without thinking about the consequences, just because they can. Here’s what Franklin wrote:

How long will the insanity on your side the water continue? Every day’s plundering of our property and burning our habitations, serves but to exasperate and unite us the more. The breach between you and us grows daily wider and more difficult to heal. Britain without us can grow no stronger. Without her we shall become a tenfold greater and mightier people. Do you choose to have so increasing a nation of enemies? Do you think it prudent by your barbarities to fix us in a rooted hatred of your nation, and make all our innumerable posterity detest you? Yet this is the way in which you are now proceeding. Our primers begin to be printed with cuts of the burnings of Charlestown, of Falmouth, of James Town, of Norfolk with the flight of women and children from those defenseless places, some falling by shot in their flight.

Allen and his people, with Lovell, an amiable character and a man of letters, all in chains on board your ships. Is anybody among you weak enough to imagine that these mischiefs are neither to be paid for nor be revenged, while we treat your people that are our prisoners with the utmost kindness and humanity? Your ministers may imagine that we shall soon be tired of this, and submit. But they are mistaken, as you may recollect they have been hitherto in every instance in which I told you at the time that they were mistaken. And I now venture to tell you, that though this war may be a long one (and I think it will probably last beyond my time) we shall with God’s help finally get the better of you; the consequences I leave to your imagination.

This is what happens when people who are incapable of empathy find their way into the world’s top power cell. They start wars because they can; because to them it feels good. It’s country versus country first, a competition to force others to submit to your will, even if you have to torture them, or kill them. Apparently, these war-makers do not understand that when you attempt to conquer a culture, that culture’s “innumerable posterity” will “detest you.” They might even merge into a new and different adversary, in the case of the Middle East, perhaps a more powerful Shia crescent.

Sharkbabe closed with this:

If Pelosi had an empathetic populace to work with, this atrocity would never have happened in the first place. As it is, I think she’s being very astute in her rhetoric (and I hope tactics) toward achieving the goal at hand – to stop this soul-sickening holocaust as soon as possible.

Yes, as soon as possible.