The Innocence that Kills

[Rootsie]

by rootsie

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
                                                      U.S. Declaration of Independence

“No one can condone acts of violence aimed at working people going about their daily lives. They have not been a party to, nor are they responsible for, the decisions of their government. They are entirely innocent and we condemn those who have killed or injured them.
 The loss of innocent lives, whether in this country or Iraq, is precisely the result of a world that has become a less safe and peaceful place in recent years.”
                                                      George Galloway, MP, July 7, 2005

The Declaration clearly states that the one and only purpose of any government is to safeguard the unalienable rights of its people, and that the only powers a government should have are the ones these people give it. This is the definition of democracy. In return, it is the people’s responsibility to keep a vigilant eye out to ensure that their government does not veer from this purpose.

What variety of ‘innocence’ is acceptable in a democracy? If its people are not ultimately responsible for the decisions of their government, then how can it be said that that government is democratic?

One of the most monstrous aspects of governments careening out of control is that they murder any possibility of innocence. If these governments are engaged in various heinous crimes across the globe, every citizen is fair game when retribution time comes. You can’t have it all ways, trumpeting the virtues of your democracy, enjoying the privileges bought off ‘the other’s’ back, and then protesting your innocence when the rubber hits the road. This is true even if it is deranged elements of your own government that have hideously attacked you.

“But we didn’t know!” That’s what the townspeople said at Auschwitz as the human ashes rained down on their heads.

On 9-11 I was sickened by that question, “Why do ‘they’ hate us?” I felt in that moment the gravity of this sin of ‘innocence.’ People in a democracy are supposed to know what their government is doing. A million Iraqi children dead and we ‘didn’t know.’ I realized in that moment that we’d lost it, lost any semblance of control over our government. The President smugly replied, “They hate us because we love freedom.” All I can say is tell it to Fallujah, where a captive population shuffles through checkpoints with optical scans. Tell it in the face of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and all the other gulags.

Of course, it can reasonably be argued that we in the West do not live in democracies and never have, that ‘democracy’ from the first has actually been about plutocracy, ‘democracy’ merely a rhetoric-laden vehicle used by vested interests to put the lockdown on the planet and its wealth. They bestowed relative privilege on some (largely white) as a great pacifier, while they raped the rest. The thing is, they gave us the words for humane governance, and not only the words but the ideas behind them. Young people have been manipulated by those words into thinking it’s an ok idea to sacrifice their lives in service to a beast. Talk about suicide bombers.

I saw an article today about a conference being held in Washington to train teachers to teach about the Holocaust. Where are the conferences about the Holocaust of imperialism, about the Palestinian Holocaust, about the Congo Holocaust?

The Israeli government was ‘informed’ about the impending bombings in London; the police on the ground were not. The safety of Benjamin Netanyahu was deemed more important than the lives of thousands of Londoners.

Who benefits most from these bombings? That’s a question that could lead to something productive.

50 people blown to smears and pieces anywhere is a terrible thing. But innocence does not live here. I am a mother and a grandmother, and the pain it gives me to say this is great.

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

…The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
                              from “The Second Coming”  by W.B.Yeats,1921