Rooting for the Home Team

When people judge the actions of the men who run their country’s government they use a different moral standard than they use for the rest of humanity. In America, the actions of men who work under the red, white, and blue banner are allowed to bypass the moral filter that each citizen developed in childhood.

This is very dangerous. There have been many horrible acts in human history that should never be repeated. However, if we fail to apply the moral lessons learned from history to our own government then we allow long dead horrors to resurface in the world- even as we scream with indignation at the smallest human rights abuses occurring in other countries.

This phenomenon does not occur entirely by chance. It is to the government’s benefit to operate outside of moral constraints. This allows them to use whatever means necessary to further their own ends.

Government exploits the senses of nationalism and patriotism to persuade an unwitting populace to blindly follow its direction. For example, there are few people that are capable of killing a fellow human being without remorse. However, there are many who are able to kill “the enemy” without losing sleep at night. A campaign of dehumanization, often accomplished through the careful use of euphemistic labels (such as “terrorist”), is a universal precursor to a government’s war. Otherwise it could never recruit hundreds of thousands of willing killers to its cause.

At the same time the government works to dehumanize its enemies it conducts a campaign of superhumanization for itself. The American government trumpets:

“I am the embodiment of Jefferson, Washington, and Madison! I am the spirit and essence of freedom incarnate! Whatever I do, I do for freedom. When I take your civil rights, I do it for greater freedom in the future. When I occupy third world countries and slaughter their defenseless citizens, I do it for freedom. When I enslave Americans’ descendants to mountains of debt, I do it for freedom.”

In America the sense of patriotism is particularly strong. Many Americans view their country’s history as a blameless, shining example of what a country should be. Each life sacrificed in America’s wars, willingly or otherwise, was a life sacrificed for lady liberty. After all, does not she herself stand on America’s shoreline, holding a torch aloft to illuminate this noble land of liberty as an example for others?

Never do most Americans think the truth: that the men who run their government have always been normal men: selfish, short-sighted, and flawed. The same actions decried as “despicable” when committed by foreigners are championed as “heroic” when done by US government agents.

I recently got into an argument because I condemned the actions of Harry Truman. As President of the United States, Harry Truman ordered the deployment of two atomic bombs on civilian targets. Thousands of men, women, and children were incinerated instantly, turned into organic ash where they stood. They were the lucky ones. Thousands more suffered slow deaths at the hands of radiation poisoning.

My view is the direct opposite of what they teach in government run schools. They teach that Truman’s action was a heroic choice that saved many American lives. With a similar line of reasoning, a friend of mine argued that the massacre of civilians during war may be justified if the reward is high enough. He hesitated to make a judgment in the particular case of Harry Truman’s wartime actions. According to him, the good of saving American troops at least partially offset the evil of incinerating Japanese homes and families, making it a morally nuanced situation.

Other men have used logic similar to Truman’s supporters to justify attacking civilian targets. However, I don’t think my American friends would hesitate to condemn their actions because they don’t bat for the home team.

For example, the name “Osama bin Laden” has taken its place among Hitler and Satan in the pantheon of evil. The reason? He thinks the freedom of the Arab world from Western imperial influences is important enough to sacrifice civilian lives. We might call him the Harry Truman of the Middle East.

As most Americans condemn bin Laden for putting civilians in harm’s way, so too do I condemn Truman. If bin Laden is a “terrorist”, then so is Truman. In fact, Truman’s actions are more indefensible because eventual victory was available through conventional military means. For bin Laden, direct military action, against the most feared armed force in all of history, is out of the question.

Some people might wonder why I harp on a long-gone episode in American history. It's because we still have yet to give that episode the proper moral judgement. Americans have not yet looked at Truman's holocaust and said "Never again!", the way we have at the massacres caused by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Saddam. Americans will not permit the suffering of the innocent except when it is caused by our own government.

We Americans have a perverse and dangerous view of our place in the world. Until we realize that our civilians are not worth more than other countries' civilians and that our leaders do not operate within a sacred halo that allows them to turn ugly sins into holy acts, America will continue to be a source of great global suffering.