The New Road

Not good for my health

Even though KQED is still on a fund-raising drive I think I will stop listening to right wing radio. I've learned what I need to know and I found the experience very disquieting.

Thursday and Friday were perhaps the most disturbing days. On Thursday our local Brian Sussman DJ talked at length about his plan to daisy cutter bomb the insurgent cities in Iraq. I spent the rest of my drive home thinking about asking him whether he would personally like to drop the bombs. I often wonder if the people who advocate bombing and killing thousands would feel the same way if the killing had to be done hand to hand.

The capper was on Friday when Sean Hannity and his two guests decided that the best term for the terrorists that murdered beheaded Christopher Berg was sub-human. The actions of the terrorists were truly inhuman and an atrocity, but to call someone sub-human is to invite association with that terms long history.

I have a fondness for how the term sub-human sounds in German, Untermenschen. Heinrich Himmler used Untermenschen to describe the millions of Juden lives he helped extinguish.

More recently there are associations with the use of the radio in conjunction with the term sub-human as Tutsi radio personalities described Hutus as sub-human vermin. When the machetes came out the Tutsi radio jocks would tell the death squads what houses to go visit. The year, 1994. The body count, 800,000.

We have a tradition of using the term in America, where we have used similar terms to describe Native Americans in the 1800s, and Japanese in the 1900s. The red man. The yellow scourge. Slaughtering people without mercy, firebombing their cities and interning them in camps is so much easier when you can think of people as less than human.

Can we say we haven't committed genocide? When the B-29 crews flying at 35,000 feet over Tokyo dropping incendiary bombs created nightly firestorms that would kill up to 100,000 people in a single night? When we firebombed Dresden the same way and killed another hundred thousand in one night? In the Fog Of War McNamara tells us that he and Lemay, who orchestrated the fire bombings, were convinced that they would have been tried as war criminals had we lost the war.

I'm a proud American. Proud of who we are. What we have accomplished and what we have done for the world. But one has to understand history clearly and the nature of people, and moreover, what moral certitude taken to it's logical extreme can produce. And from it I have learned one true constant:

There is not one human on this Earth who is sub-human. What people do can be inhuman.

When we start talking about people as sub-humans and speak of daisy cutting their cities we invite the cyclone of genocide which leaves no answers, only victims and bodies.

There are many paths to successfully exiting Iraq. None of them start with genocide.

So I think I will stop listening to Sean Hannity. I understand the the long history of the evil he invokes (in ignorance) a little too well to enjoy it's reference as radio infotainment.

There are many places to find medical info online so make sure you reference many of them before you trust the first medical info you find.