“There is no moral difference between a suicide bomber and a Stealth bomber.”
Tony “free Tariq Aziz” Benn on BBC Radio 2 five minutes ago
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Well, at least he’s consistent…what was it they said about France? every moral compass has to have a butt-end to the needle.
I dunno, I think this is a promising sign — it shows he’s getting over his ridiculously-expensive-aeroplane obsession.
But what if you were to send a stealth bomber crashing into a suicide bomber, or if you placed a man on the stealth bomber and got him to crash into, or…?
Or would it make a difference what it was thy bombed? Or whether it was a stealth bomber or an ordinary bomber? Or if it was a grenade thrown by a soldier (do they still throw them?) or …?
Actually I suspect the only moral equivalence he is interested in is between ‘the West’ and whatever opposes it, and the blown up people are just a detail in the way of a grand gesture.
Since a suicide bomber expects to die and a stealth bomber expects to return home for tea I would have thought there was an enormous difference.
I have to agree with SCUDS. To boot, the Stealth Bomber is maintained in a state of good repair due to military diligence and tax dollars received via a valid national government. On the other hand, a suicide bomber’s health is entirely beside the point since s/he is “voluntary collateral damage” and any investment in weaponry to arm the qwee arsehole comes via a terrorist organization.
I think there are SEVERAL very distinct differences between the two. But then, I don’t work for the BBC, a broadcast organization that benefits from enormous state subsidies and specializes in inciting nationwide bouts of self-flagellation, and destined, in the end, to be identified as advocates of slow national suicide through exposure to boring, biased broadcasters so full of their own bullshit that they speak the same “merde” one would traditionally expect to originate from other sources.
Some of us HAVE lives; some of us WISH we did, are ashamed we don’t, and so pretend we do by making broad prounouncements about issues we know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about.
Plus ca change…
And you believe there is a moral difference? Why?
Unless you believe that suicide is itself immoral, then Benn is right. There is no moral difference between a B-2 and a suicide bomber. Or perhaps you could explain the moral distinction between these:
A B-2 drops a bomb at a checkpoint; a suicide bomber detonates himself at a checkpoint. What’s the difference? Either way you have four dead enemy troops.
Now, it may be that B-2s have historically been used for more moral ends than suicide bombers. But that does not affect whether B-2s themselves are more moral; any more than, say, an MP-40 machine pistol is a less moral weapon than a Lee-Enfield Mk IV rifle, simply because historically one was used to conquer Europe and the other to liberate it.
A ‘less moral’ weapon would be one that causes unnecessary suffering; so I would argue that mustard gas is less moral than high explosive. It might be one whose use always involves the deaths of innocents; so a hijacked airliner is less moral than a cruise missile.
Or it might be one which is more likely to cause the deaths of innocents. In which case, perhaps, a 2,000lb bomb would be less moral than a 15lb explosive jacket.
But to say that Benn is morally bankrupt is sloppy thinking. Badly done. Try harder.
My mistake here was to do Mr Benn the favour of taking him out of context. He offered this soundbite as he was being questioned, on the occasion of the 100th British military death, about the worth of our sending troops to Iraq. He argued that Allied military attacks against the regime of Saddam Hussein were morally equivalent to attacks in Iraq by so-called insurgents.
You cannot, it is true, make a moral judgment about inanimate objects, but you can make moral judgments about men. Suicide bombers are people. In Iraq the overwhelming majority of victims of suicide bombers have been civilians. Unlike agents of the Allied forces, suicide bombers have specifically targeted gatherings of civilians.
The aim of suicide bombers in Iraq has been to kill non-combatants in the largest numbers possible. Such attacks are a crime against humanity. Such attacks are a breach of the Geneva conventions. Such attacks, regardless of their motivations (in this case a combination of fanatical racist hatred, fundamentalist religious hysteria, and simple resentment by the deposed jailers of a prison state), are evil.
Anyone who chooses for political reasons not to recognise any distinction between civilians killed (in far smaller numbers) as an indirect result of bombing raids accurately aimed at specific military targets and civilians killed as a matter of deliberate policy, intended to terrorize the general population, is indeed morally bankrupt.
Tune in next week when I’ll be explaining the moral difference between a Challenger tank and a concentration camp torturer.