When the Enemy Is ‘Them,’ Watch Out

The relatives of victims of the Oklahoma City bombing who were in attendance at Timothy McVeigh’s trial in Denver on Monday were especially appalled when the defendant’s friend Michael Fortier testified about the twisted justification that McVeigh had offered him for the slaughter of their loved ones. It is safe to assume that most decent Americans were aghast at McVeigh’s alleged reasoning. According to Fortier, McVeigh intentionally planned the bombing to take place at a peak work hour, when it was certain that a large number of federal employees (and many of their children, who were in an on-site day-care facility) would be killed. Fortier said that McVeigh rationalized these murders by comparing the federal employees to “storm troopers” from the movie “Star Wars.” “They may be individually innocent, but because they were part of the evil empire, they were guilty by association,” Fortier said McVeigh had argued.

Who among us does not recoil at such repulsive reasoning?

Yet the sad fact is that large numbers of human beings, Americans included, are adept at using the same type of twisted logic to find and punish guilt by affiliation.

In McVeigh’s hysterical imagination (as expressed in his writings) he and like-minded “patriots” are at war with the United States government. His apparent contention, then (according to Fortier) is that all who associate with the enemy deserve to be judged collectively, not individually; therefore, taking lives collectively is justifiable. Even children who could not possibly have done harm can be executed because they are part of “them.”

Most of us have no trouble seeing the evil, the injustice and the illogic in this argument when it is applied to people “like us.” But what about when the proverbial shoe is on the other foot?

During the last few years, the controversy over the American use of nuclear weapons against Japan in 1945 once again reached a fevered pitch, particularly when the National Air and Space Museum tried to examine the implications of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of its exhibit of the Enola Gay, the plane that carried the bomb to Hiroshima.

Among the aspects of the proposed exhibit that angered many Americans, especially veterans of the Pacific war, was a sympathetic portrayal of the effects of the bomb on the civilian population of Hiroshima. How many times have we all heard the litany? How many times have many of us said it? “They deserved what they got. They started the war, didn’t they? They attacked Pearl Harbor, didn’t they? They had it coming to them. If you dish it out, you’d better be ready to take it.”

But it should be clear that many of “them” in fact had nothing to do with making war against the United States. Some of those killed in Hiroshima had not even been born at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, much as infants in the Oklahoma City federal building’s day-care center had not been born at the time of the assault on the Branch Davidian compound, which McVeigh and like-mindless people see as the Pearl Harbor of their movement.

Fortier said on Monday that an FBI agent who had aggressively interviewed him “actually called me a baby killer.” That is precisely what those responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing are. We might recall that many babies died at Hiroshima, too.

The atomic bombs were just the most conspicuous examples among thousands of cases during World War II of attacks on civilian targets. The Nazis horrified the world with their bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War and their subsequent bombardment of Polish civilians at the beginning of World War II. Yet the Allies quickly adopted similar practices, using the handy justification, “They started it, so they deserve it.” Once again, this was the convenient resort to the doctrine of collective guilt: The children of Germany would pay for the sins of their fathers, just as the children in the Murrah Federal Building would pay with their lives for the imagined guilt of some workers in offices above them.

If this sounds like an argument of moral equivalence between the actions of governments in wartime and the actions of terrorists who fancy themselves engaged in war with their own government, it is not. Not quite. Extraordinary measures may be necessary to win a war, and this may, on rare occasions, provide some moral cover for otherwise reprehensible actions. What should be clear is that, however one may compare the actions themselves, there is moral equivalence--or, rather, immoral equivalence--between the justification offered to rationalize such actions as the Hiroshima bombing on the basis of collective guilt and that reportedly advanced by McVeigh for the mass murder of people he knew to be individually innocent.

As we cringe at McVeigh’s coldblooded rationale, we might take a moment to look in the mirror and rededicate ourselves to one of our most cherished American principles, individual responsibility. In this way, we might better guard against the impulse, the argument and ultimately the action of mass indictment and indiscriminate punishment, whether by government or fanatic.