Reply To: Political Statements
My concern with the association arguments is that I don’t understand how you guys are reasoning your category boundaries. Who is guilty based on the actions of one person or a handful of persons among a given group? How long does the guilt last? Does it spread to all members of their families? Does it spread to anyone who knew them at the time of the violence? Does it spread to anyone who’s known them since, whether they were aware of the violence or not?
If I’m reading your arguments correctly, you’re saying that merely associating with someone who’s ever been in a group that advocated or resorted to violence against innocent people is enough to condemn a person for life to being identified as a supporter of violence. This seems wrong to me. Ted Kaczynski was a Harvard student before he was the Unabomber — does this mean that everyone who knew him at college is suspect? He bought supplies while he lived in his cabin in Montana, including presumably some of the lumber and batteries that went into his bombs. Was the hardware store owner complicit? His brother eventually turned him in — did that expiate the original error of being related to the Unabomber?
I think I agree with your underlying principle that violence against the innocent, even for some kind of presumably positive end goal, is pretty close to unforgiveable. The 9/11 airplane teams, the 9/11 planners, the people who strap bombs onto retarded girls and send them into produce markets to blow themselves up — these are terrible, merciless committers of cold-blooded crimes that can’t be allowed to succeed or prosper in any civilized society. Same thing with the intifada proponents who lob grenades into farming villages across the Gaza border, or the kidnappers & murderers of journalists, in any country. If I read you correctly, you don’t make a distinction between the intifada bomb masterminds and the 12-year-olds tossing rocks in the streets — they’re all part of the same violent terrorist movement.
But the world is full of people who come close to those bad guys, or who hold some values and ideals in common with the bad guys, or who belong to some of the same groups the bad guys had once belonged to, but who are NOT as bad as those bad guys, and for the life of me I don’t see what good unplacable condemnation does when it gets spread around to all those people.
Look at people who kill, or are involved somehow with the death of other people, through carelessness or accident. Both Teddy Kennedy and Laura Bush were involved in auto accidents that resulted in somebody else’s death when they were fairly young & reckless. Should that bar them both from public office, forever? Is the difference between them and Ted Kaczynski an absolute difference because there was intent in the one case, but accident in the other? Or is it a difference of degree? Are their children somehow implicated in those deaths, or is it limited to them as individuals?
As for Wright saying that the chickens were coming home to roost on 9/11, I personally can’t see the difference between that statement and Jerry Falwell’s allegations that various weather disasters could be blamed on gay people. To me, both were just examples of scapegoating behavior — in Wright’s case, fairly logical, because the al Qaeda groups were indeed responding in some ways to actions of the American government (and hence in some sense the American public) that they disliked. In Falwell’s case, he claimed to be reading the mind of the creator of the universe, which I consider way more deluded and evil.
But I just can’t understand how you can use these guilt-by-association arguments to rule in or out politicians and their lesser connections with donors and supporters. At least not without understanding better what your reasoning is.