Thursday, in the wake of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, George W. Bush made a public statement condemning "this cowardly act."
I don't get it. It makes sense to call it an "evil act" or a "destructive act" or a "wanton act." But I don't understand how a man who, aside from carrying out an assassination, deliberately blows himself to pieces, can plausibly be deemed "cowardly."
So what is that about?
If it were just Bush, one might explain it as another of his Bushite projections. It is quite likely that Bush, like most bullies, is fundamentally cowardly. And I've already, in a previous essay ("Bush and Rove: Collaborators in the Theater of the Moral Lie,"), cited an example of Bush's hypocrisy, and apparent disconnection with his own reality, on the subject of cowardice:
the President stood before microphones on the White House lawn mocking bin Ladin for cowardice in sending other men off to face death while he remained protected in some hidden cave. This from the most protected man in the world, who’d just sent his countrymen’s sons and daughters to fight his war!
But it ISN'T just Bush. I've noticed, since well before this Bushite era, a number of American political leaders will stand up in instances like the present one (with this assassination in Pakistan) and condemn the "cowardly" perpetrators of one crime or another, when obviously the crime would actually require considerable boldness and fearlessness to pull off.
So I'm wondering: with so many other much more apt words of denunciation available, why do our leaders so often call upon this inappropriate condemnation of "cowardice" the falsity of the charge is so clear on the surface?
Andrew Bard Schmookler's website www.nonesoblind.org is devoted to understanding the roots of America's present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of such books as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (SUNY Press) and Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America's Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press). He also conducts regular talk-radio conversations in both red and blue states.
9-11 was a 'cowardly act', according to Bush. I agree with his description. His hiding with school children while his minions, handlers and various and sundry Mossad agents flew planes into buildings, or whatever happened, was VERY cowardly of Bush.
Bhutto probably was assassinated by more of Bush's people. Thus the instant declaration that 'Al-Qaida did it!' And what could be more cowardly than getting a pass on the Vietnam War and spending the whole time getting drunk and snorting coke?
For the record, I think anyone who would blow themselves up to effect political change is brave indeed. Deluded perhaps, but brave. Perhaps we should recommend to Bush that he get braver himself.
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Dawn Owens (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 7 comments)
on Saturday, December 29, 2007 at 11:45:22 PM
Don't you know? Black is white, up is down, right is wrong, freedom is slavery, torture is fun, bankruptcy is a healthy economy... and so on. Don't be stupid!
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Daniel Geery (26 articles, 58 quicklinks, 121 diaries, 690 comments)
on Sunday, December 30, 2007 at 9:13:00 AM
People are faced with choices when dealing with situations and people they do not like. Here are a few choices: They can ignore the problem and hope it goes away on its own in a given length of time. They can get others to help them within the system and try to get the system to resolve the problem. They can strap on a bomb and blow up some innocent people and hope that the result will be that somehow the problem is resolved.
Which choice requires courage? Which choice is an act demonstrating fear or timidity Which act can be labeled as self-centered at best and cowardly at worst? In my opinion those who chose to wantonly take innocent human lives are cowards. They take the easy way to solve their problems because they are too afraid and timid to do it the hard way. It takes courage to stand up and try to solve a problem from within a system.
What if all problems, in society are solved this way? Isn't that the definition of anarchy?
What if your family was blown up while shopping at the mall for shoes by someone who didn't like, say, the way the mall allocated parking to the handicapped? Would you consider that person bold and fearless? I bet you would.
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Mad Jayhawk (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 305 comments)
on Sunday, December 30, 2007 at 10:39:54 AM
A Form of Denial: Offering an Interpretation of My Own
I just did a google search on the phrase “cowardly act.” Some 121,000 sites came up. Indeed, this phrase has a long history.
It takes a while to get past the immediate news of the Bush comments on the Bhutto assassination.
But on the 19th page, I found, for example, a condemnation of the assassination of President Lincoln (from the 1860s) as a cowardly act.
And it is not only an American practice. The President of Sri Lanka earlier this year said the same of the assassination of her foreign minister:
She appointed a committee to co-ordinate the arrangements for a state funeral to be held on Monday. She has appealed for “calm and restraint in the face of this grave and cowardly attack on Sri Lanka.”
There are also instances of its being used with attacks on government ministers in India, and a suicide bombing of a mosque in Pakistan. And these I’ve gleaned from a very quick and sketchy search.
In most of these additional instances, the assassins did not kill themselves. But I still cannot really see “cowardice” in any such actions.
Don’t anyone get me wrong: I’m not condoning assassination, or terrorism. The issue I'm raising is not right vs. wrong, but simply the issue of cowardice. I just don’t see these actions as “cowardly.” On the contrary.
Let me cite here one instance where over the years I’ve imagined myself as an assassin–i.e. I’ve imagined myself in the position of the people who, for example, plotted to assassinate Hitler in 1944, with the bomb they’d placed inside an attache case. When I’ve put myself in that situation, I’ve always hoped I’d have the courage and the cool to bring it off.
In that instance, for example, while the bomb only served to injure der Fuehrer, the conspirators in the assassination met a fearsome end:
Hitler had ordered that those found guilty be “hung like cattle”.[6] The treatment that had been dealt out to those executed as a result of the Rote Kapelle was that of slow strangulation using suspension from a rope attached to a slaughterhouse meathook.[citation needed] For the July 20 plotters piano wire was used instead. [from Wikipedia]
I wonder if anyone would call those who took such risks “cowards.”
My guess is that the charge of “cowardice” is employed, like so many insults in the school-yard and elsewhere, as a means of trying to recapture a sense of power at a moment of fear and of inescapable acknowledgement of injury.
Calling the foe a coward is an attempt to belittle the foe, to deny those who have struck home the dignity of being effective warriors. We live in a world in which strength is more respected than goodness, unfortunately. And so when nations/societies/individuals are stung by a blow from an enemy, the temptation is to try to deny the reality that the enemy has displayed the strength implied by the capacity to hurt us. We deny the warrior virtue of courage, and –like school-boys taunting their adversaries with accusations of being sissies, or homosexuals, or the offspring of immoral women– we put down the warriors on the other side as cowards.
The language we use matters, because the language we use can either help us confront our reality, or to evade it.
If I am correct in my interpretation, above, then this use of language --calling these injurious acts "cowardly"-- is one of the means by which we seek to escape the reality of our experience at those times. And it is one of the premises of my book OUT OF WEAKNESS: HEALING THE WOUNDS THAT DRIVE US TO WAR that the psychological/spiritual roots of our war-making lie in our attempts to escape the reality of our experience.
It is because we are at war with our own experience, that book says, that we are driven to make war against other people and nations.
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Andrew Bard Schmookler (301 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 141 comments)
on Sunday, December 30, 2007 at 11:55:33 AM
In my view this completely inappropriate appellation is used because it displaces blame from the cause(s) of the act to the murderer, i.e., 9/11 had nothing to do with any blow back from our actions in the middle east over the past 50-100 years, it is just some despicable act by some people who hate our freedom. Government is totally innocent of the slightest wrongful act. (Please don't lose faith in your government--everything it does is perfect in every way.)
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Donald Carl Isenman (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 3 comments)
on Sunday, December 30, 2007 at 12:51:34 PM
and he should not be used as any reference. As for courage and cowardice the only courage that matters is the one other people can be taught to follow in an act of free will. Desperation can be an act of one but it cannot be taught to exercise as a free will. Desperate acts are and will be the acts of individuals and those are not cowards- they are just people who think they have nothing to lose. Courage though has many forms but only those which can be followed by others as acts of free will mater. Thus only the courage of the free matters as a contribution. By free I mean not 'free American' but free mind- a person makes a decision on his/her own without pressure and not under desperation. I am not counting battlefield here although even there there could be differences. But when it comes to the estimaate whether the act done was an act of courage we need to discount desperation as a driving force.
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Mark Sashine (50 articles, 19 quicklinks, 242 diaries, 3434 comments)
on Sunday, December 30, 2007 at 3:52:40 PM
I think the "cowardly acts" description is meant solely as a way to dissuade others from doing the same thing. It's psychological warfare. I assume psychologists have determined that tagging an assassination and/or suicide bombing as a "cowardly act" must be the most effective way to curtail such future acts by people inclined to perform such acts of courage and conviction.
Most of can't begin to know (or want to know) what it must feel like to be Lee Harvey Oswald just before pulling the trigger of the rifle or the Benazir Bhutto assassin just before detonating the explosive device, but I'll bet a dollar that they're resisting feelings of cowardice associated with changing their minds and backing out.
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victorberry (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 6 comments)
on Sunday, December 30, 2007 at 4:21:20 PM
CONFUSION BETWEEN FACTUAL SENSE OF COURAGE AND PRAISE
Perhaps its origin is in the Medieval code of chilvary and fair fighting. Governments, with modern armies, can hardly expect individuals without such resources to take them on in single combat. They denounce guerrilla fighters as cowards for "sneak attacks" when they know the guerrilla fighters would have no alternative unless they were willing to be crushed.
Because of the positive conotations of the word courage, people often can not distinguish between praising someone and an objective, factual description of their behavior. Factually, courage means only that a person was willing to take risks in pursuing some end, up to risking years in prison, or death, or even prolonged torture and death. Thus, when someone shows they have courage in the factual sense by pursuing some end of which the speaker disapproves, they say "I don't think x really showed courage."
Saying that someone displayed courage in the factual sense does not mean your are praising them. The inability to understand this distinction was shown in the mass outcry that forced the networks to fire a reporter when he said he did not think the 9/11 hijackers could be called cowardly when they were willing to kill themselves by crashing planes into buildings. This confusion was also shown by a previous poster who told the author of this article that he would not call someone who killed his family with a bomb while they were shopping because he objected to the way the mall allocated handicapped parking spaces courageous. This confusion was also shown by the poster who found it necessary to come up with a convulated definition of courage. You can say that someone showed courage in the factual sense without praising them or agreeing with their ends.
Thank you for your good contribution, Mr. Halfhill
I particularly like this factual addition to the discussion: "The inability to understand this distinction was shown in the mass outcry that forced the networks to fire a reporter when he said he did not think the 9/11 hijackers could be called cowardly when they were willing to kill themselves by crashing planes into buildings."
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Andrew Bard Schmookler (301 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 141 comments)
on Sunday, December 30, 2007 at 11:42:05 PM
The IDF in high flying airplanes with proper uniforms and using precision guided cluster bombs which kill women and children or the Palestine Freedom Fighters who can not afford a uniform, but who sacrifice their lives trying to get the land, homes, and livelihood of their people back?
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Anton Grambihler (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 283 comments)
on Thursday, January 3, 2008 at 12:17:59 PM
11 comments
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