{"id":20923,"date":"2011-05-02T16:27:07","date_gmt":"2011-05-02T22:27:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/?p=20923"},"modified":"2014-06-13T17:24:28","modified_gmt":"2014-06-13T23:24:28","slug":"thoughts-for-today-vengeance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2011\/05\/02\/thoughts-for-today-vengeance.html","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts for Today: Vengeance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vengeance is counterproductive, always. Not to mention the fact it gets your soul all sticky.<\/p>\n

— Spider Robinson<\/strong> (b. 1948) American-Canadian author
\nCallahan\u2019s Con<\/em>, ch. 2 [Lady Sally] (2003)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I cannot find it in myself to mourn the passing of Osama Bin Ladin. He was a vile zealot who self-righteously delighted in sowing fear and death among innocents, and I am quite satisfied that he will not longer be able to do so.<\/p>\n

But I worry a bit over all the jovial, gleeful, jingoistic celebration going on about his fittingly violent passing. It just feels … sticky, to use Lady Sally’s terms. OBL’s passing isn’t the end of a war.\u00a0 It may or may not be a strategic victory in the War on Terror, depending on how much you think OBL was still calling the shots.\u00a0 Certainly there’s a visceral feeling of justice and closure …<\/p>\n

When the Egyptians were drowning in the Red Sea, the angels in heaven began to break forth in songs of jubilation, but the Holy One, blessed be He, silenced them: \u201cMy creatures are perishing \u2014 and ye are ready to sing!\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

— The Talmud<\/strong> (AD 200-500)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

… but I worry a bit when it all turns into spontaneous jubilation and shouts of “USA! USA!”\u00a0 It’s not the angels of our better natures talking (or chanting) there, nor is it a celebration of any special virtue that distinguishes our nation from others.\u00a0 Anyone can shoot a bullet through an enemy’s head.<\/p>\n

What it is is tribalism, plain and simple. It’s vengeance<\/em>.\u00a0 He hit us, we hit him back.\u00a0 He killed our people, we killed him.\u00a0 It’s seductive, because it feels so good, so certain, so hot and bloody and plain and simple and we won<\/em> and he’s dead<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.<\/strong><\/p>\n

— J.R.R. Tolkien<\/strong> (1892-1973) English writer, fabulist, philologist, academic [John Ronald Reuel Tolkien]
\nThe Fellowship of the Ring<\/em>, Book 1, ch. 2 \u201cThe Shadow of the Past\u201d [Gandalf] (1954)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t expect that OBL would ever have taken up knitting and philanthropy, but I don’t know that, nor do I know what else he might have done with his life, or what good might possibly have come of it.\u00a0 On the other hand, he reaped as he sowed, and there’s a satisfaction there, too.<\/p>\n

But let’s not go overboard.\u00a0 This guy wasn’t Hitler, or Stalin, or even Mussolini.\u00a0 He was responsible for the deaths of thousands, but killing him doesn’t kill his cause, or mean that no more will die at the hands of al Qa’eda’s butchers.\u00a0 This isn’t V-E Day.\u00a0 It isn’t an occasion for a huge sigh of giddy national relief that the conflict is done.<\/p>\n

Bottom line, while I’m not unhappy he’s been killed\u00a0 (heck, even Gandalf was known to slay enemies in battle, right?), it just doesn’t feel right to be celebrating by waving a flag and chanting about how it proves that “We’re Number One! We’re Number One!”<\/p>\n

That Talmud passage keeps coming back to me.<\/p>\n

Or, as David Sirota<\/a> put it today (h\/t Stan):<\/p>\n

For decades, we have held in contempt those who actively celebrate death. When we\u2019ve seen video footage<\/a> of foreigners cheering terrorist attacks against America, we have ignored their insistence that they are celebrating merely because we have occupied their nations and killed their people. Instead, we have been rightly disgusted — not only because they are lauding the death of our innocents, but because, more fundamentally, they are celebrating death itself. That latter part had been anathema to a nation built on the presumption that life is an “unalienable right.”<\/p>\n

But in the years since 9\/11, we have begun vaguely mimicking those we say we despise, sometimes celebrating bloodshed against those we see as Bad Guys just as vigorously as our enemies celebrate bloodshed against innocent Americans they (wrongly) deem as Bad Guys. Indeed, an America that once carefully refrained from flaunting gruesome pictures of our victims for fear of engaging in ugly death euphoria now ogles pictures of Uday and Qusay\u2019s corpses, rejoices over images of Saddam Hussein\u2019s hanging and throws a party at news that bin Laden was shot in the head.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To paraphrase Nietzsche, when you party it up in the abyss, the abyss parties it up in you<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That’s not what we’re fighting for, is it?<\/p>\n

(Quotations: 1<\/a>, 2<\/a>, 3<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vengeance is counterproductive, always. Not to mention the fact it gets your soul all sticky. — Spider Robinson (b. 1948) American-Canadian author Callahan\u2019s Con, ch. 2 [Lady Sally] (2003) I cannot find it in myself to mourn the passing of Osama Bin Ladin. He was a vile zealot who self-righteously delighted in sowing fear and … Continue reading “Thoughts for Today: Vengeance”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[29,10,382,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-9-11","category-geopolitical-brouhaha","category-lord-of-the-rings","category-wist"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":44054,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2014\/08\/01\/war-and-remembrance.html","url_meta":{"origin":20923,"position":0},"title":"War and Remembrance","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 1-Aug-14 2:15pm","format":false,"excerpt":"A very thoughtful essay by +Yonatan Zunger. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it -- but sometimes those who remember it to well never leave it behind.Reshared post from +Yonatan ZungerThe flow of time is inexorable, and in some lands, it flows faster than others. America is,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6438,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/09\/02\/almost_certainl.html","url_meta":{"origin":20923,"position":1},"title":"Almost certainly misquoted","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 2-Sep-04 6:46am","format":false,"excerpt":"As Neil Gaiman points out, this news story almost certainly misquotes the perp: A 6-foot-tall, 275-pound bearded man crashed a children's birthday party in Oak Forest, identified himself as \"vengeance,\"...","rel":"","context":"In "Comics & Comic Books"","block_context":{"text":"Comics & Comic Books","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/media\/media-comics"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":19892,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2011\/01\/18\/bryan-fischer-is-a-dolt-american-justice-system-edition.html","url_meta":{"origin":20923,"position":2},"title":"Bryan Fischer is a Dolt (American Justice System edition)","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 18-Jan-11 10:51pm","format":false,"excerpt":"It's been a while since I pointed out how Bryan Fischer is a dolt. \u00a0I think I need to correct that. 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