A dinner-party debate on martial snobbery
Between glasses of wine, a host defends his aversion to blowing up tourists
When it comes to bloodthirsty opinions, nothing beats dinner parties. This includes dinner parties for vegetarians, especially if they’re also bookworms. ( Vegetarians are indoor or outdoor types, like cats.) You might think they’re all pacifists, but you’d be wrong.
At a recent gathering of mixed vegans and omnivores the conversation turned to the suicide bombing of a bus carrying Israeli youngsters in Bulgaria. Most diners were outraged, but one vegetarian intellectual was puzzled by his fellow Canadians’ aversion to blowing up tourists. He wanted to know their reasons. Their impatience with what looked like the latest martyrdom operation — Israel blamed Hezbollah, and its sponsor, Iran, but neither has laid claim to it yet — struck the indoor vegan as mere bias.
“You’re just being reflexive,” he advised his host with the smug expression of discovery. He didn’t actually say “Gotcha!” but it was on his lips. “It’s a moral tic,” he explained.
“Yes, I hope so,” the host replied, somewhat taken aback. “I mean, yes, rather. Five Israelis dead, 33 wounded, a Bulgarian driver killed … One has this moral tic about this sort of thing, doesn’t one? Don’t you?”
“I have a moral tic against all forms of warfare, including this, but why call it terrorism?” his guest replied. “Everybody knows that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
“Well, no,” someone else said, “everybody doesn’ t know that. Sorry, that’s a load of bull. Confused people have been parroting it so long that some fools believe it’s an aphorism, but it’s nonsense. A terrorist is nobody’s freedom fighter. A terrorist is a loathsome creep who deliberately targets defenceless civilians, innocent women and children, whatever his cause.
“Causes never grace terrorists; it’s terrorists who disgrace causes.”
This may have got applause in a theatre, but at the dinner party it just got the vegetarian’s dander up (yes, vegetarians have one, too). Some, when their dander is up, begin to dig themselves in, and our vegetarian belonged in this group.
“First, why are women and children always described as ‘innocent’,” he demanded. “What if they’re the enemy? How can the enemy ever be innocent of being the enemy?
“And what else need anyone be guilty of but being the enemy to be a legitimate target?”
“A combatant, maybe?” somebody asked, rather plaintively. “A potential combatant?”
“Well, I’m sorr y,” said the hostess. “But if potential combatant is the test, women qualify. Why couldn’t a woman be a potential combatant? Sure, she may shopping when they bomb her, or picking up her children at school, but she could still be an officer in the reserves or occupy some post in a defence department …
“It would be sexist to exclude women.”
“And everybody can be a child-soldier,” an older man offered wryly. “Look at all the children with their sling shots in the intifada. Look at little Omar, the Kadhr-kid, Canada’s own contribution to child-warfare. Why shouldn’t children qualify as targets?”
It was hard to say whether either meant it or was speaking tongue-in-cheek, but the vegetarian took no chances.
“You can be sarcastic all you like,” he said, “but putting terrorists into a separate category of ‘irregular’ warfare, a kind of banditry beyond the pale, is hypocritical. It’s martial snobbery with no historical basis. Until the crusading kings and popes came up with some rules about knightly conduct in the Middle Ages, all wars were total. There wasn’t any nonsense about combatants and non-combatants; there was no ‘innocent’ enemy. The only categories were friend or foe, the only rule woe to the vanquished, and conflicts would end with cities razed to the ground and the captives enslaved or slaughtered.”
The host interrupted, offering more wine. “And what was the name of that idyllic period,” he asked, using the lull he created while pouring the dark red liquid. “Was it the age of savagery? Barbarism?”
“Ah, civilization,” his guest
‘Civilization,’ said the vegetarian guest, ‘is just an attempt to fix the rules of war to give the West an advantage’
said, after sampling the wine. “I think it’s mainly an attempt to fix the rules of war to give the West an advantage. It legitimizes forms of armed conflict at which Europeans and North Americans excel, and outlaws and criminalizes warfare at which the poor, the underdeveloped, the powerless can meet their enemies on equal terms.
“Civilization is an attempt to outlaw asymmetric warfare. It’s to interpret the rules of war so as to outlaw any form of armed conflict a Third World nation could win.
“Civilization is an attempt to prevent the third world from coming into its own.”
The bookish vegetarian finished his wine, said his farewells and called a civilized taxi. “Do you think he really believes this?” another guest asked the host after he left.
“I don’t know,” the host replied, “but if this newly released Pew poll is right, we have a much bigger problem than what our friend believes. Our problem is that Iran, the country Israel thinks sponsored the terror action in Bulgaria this week, is approved of by 76% of Pakistanis, supposedly the West’s closest ally in the war on terror, as Clifford May points out in a recent column.” “You can’t believe polls.” “If it’s bad news, trust me,” said the host. “You can.”