“Black lives matter!” is a cry that has reverberated across the country recently, mainly amidst “progressive” marches. The answer springs readily to mind: All lives matter. Don’t they?
Do the lives of policemen matter? The question comes to the fore after two New York police officers were shot to death by a killer who may have been trying to avenge the shooting death of an unarmed teenager by a white policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, and the non-indictment of New York policeman Daniel Pantaleo for the crime of choking to death a black detainee. Or maybe the gunman who killed the New York cops was simply a madman.
There is an immediate problem that arises with attempting to respond to the “Black lives matter” slogan with the broader claim that “All lives matter.” For one thing, the latter slogan might make, or should make, defenders of “abortion rights” squirm. Secondly, organizing a pro-life movement around a particular class of people, as defined by race or caste, suggests that human lives matter if, and only if, there is a popular uprising and a political constituency behind them. The transcendent value, the unalienable right to life, is imputed not to individual human beings, but to politically approved mass movements.
Thus the mammoth welfare-warfare state chooses what lives are worthy of respect, i.e., what lives “matter.” The lives of people who are, through our tax system, conscripted to support the lives of those who qualify for government-approved benefits do not matter. The lives of the beneficiaries do. The lives of non-combatants we kill in other countries with our “smart bombs” and drone strikes do not matter. The lives of foreigners we torture with waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” do not matter. American lives do. If you don’t believe me, just consider the response of former Vice President Dick Cheney, when asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd what his definition of torture might be. Cheney’s answer was not a definition, but an illustration of what Cheney considers torture — someone making a final call to loved ones on his cellphone before perishing in the flames of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
In the post-World War II years alone, it can hardly be disputed that no nation has killed more people outside its own borders than the United States has. The anonymous dead total in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even the millions. Yet once — and only once — has an alien force penetrated American security to the point of killing thousands of people in a single day of terrorism in our homeland. That presumably entitles the U.S. government to do whatever it wishes to whomever it wishes among the peoples of other lands, guilty or not of terrorist acts.
It is sometimes recalled that before 9/11, candidate-for-president George W. Bush spoke of creating a “more humble” role for the United States in its relationship with the rest of the world. Humble? What could be more arrogant that the world’s superpower having within and among its military commands all of the earth, seas, and sky. All the earth has been divided into U.S.”command zones” — a Southern Command, a Central Command, etc. And within each zone, American lives “matter.”
Or do they? We know that with each immoral and illegal war, American lives will be sacrificed, along with a far greater number of dead among the indigenous people. Observe, please, the hypocrisy of the Republican reaction to the release of the Senate committee’s torture report. Leading “conservatives” have expressed concern not over the fact of the torture — indeed, many have been given generous amounts of air time on our supposedly liberal media to defend the practice. It is not the practice of torture, but its public exposure that troubles them. Their criminal liability is not at issue. The Obama administration has made it clear it will not prosecute the torturers and their enablers.
The defenders of the “harsh interrogation techniques” claim the release of the report will inspire more acts of terror against America by our nation’s enemies. It is likely, however, that the “collateral damage” to their own reputations, their prestige, and their standing in the court of public opinion is what troubles them. It is that, and not anyone else’s lives, that matters. And to protect that, they have engaged a propaganda campaign that would do credit to Pravda, Izvestia, or any of the stratagems employed by the notorious Goebbels. In war, said U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson during World War I, the first casualty is truth.
And all lies matter.
