thinking the unthinkable

I find myself stiffening against the reports of Palestinian children killed by Israelis. This is unlike me, I'm a big "kid" person. But really -- these people hide behind their children, send their children out as suicide bombers and teach them preposterous made-up history insuring their stubborn resistance to anything that might help them or "their people." Are they really such a loss? See, it's a horrible thought. They are innocent children. But was the child innocent who walks up the helicopter with a basket of flowers and tosses the basket of bombs into the copter? Shouldn't that child be eliminated with minimal sorrow? Sure the child is "innocent" but her parents and her culture is not. They are stupid and savage and bloodthirsty.

Here's the seque.

I have spent my whole life being outraged at our white cavalry ancestors who could be so cruel to the Native Americans, slaughtering women and children. How many movies and books have featured soldiers ("The Last Samurai", "Dances with wolves") destroyed the the inhumanity of their superiors ordering the wholesale elimination of the enemy, not leaving the "breeding stock" if you will. Our (white) ancestors were fully outraged by the real (and fictional) slaughters of their own people (including women and children of course). You could argue that their revenge made them less human, but that is assuming human is reaching beyond what we are. Human, historically, including plenty of wholesale slaughter of the innocents. It's only in modern times when we hope to rise above such things with rules of warfare (Geneva Convention) and so forth.

But now we have an enemy that laughs at our "civilized" restraint. They have no compunctions, whether they be Palestinians shooting random rockets at cities or suicide bombers in Iraq, or Al Qaeda targeting innocents in our own cities. They have found a way to "rise above" (for the glory of Allah) such simplistic, self-defeating notions that harming children (in a war) is somehow lower than low and we would never stoop to it, even if at the expense of defeating ourselves.

So let's go further. Why is "genocide" a higher crime than mere warfare? Surely the evil of the holocaust is somehow behind this. And I wouldn't argue how evil that was. But it's like hate crimes. If a man kills a man, how much worse can it be that he killed the man with hate in his heart or because he wanted his wallet. Killing is killing. Sure, we'd like to eliminate the philosophies and psychological dispositions that create unreasonable hate in a person or society, but it's this a reach beyond what we can do?

Thus the hand-wringing over Hiroshima many years over. Can we see ourselves making this decision again? Could we nuke Teheran as punishment for eliminating Israel. What about the children?

We are overcivilized, over-feminized and doomed.

Drink on, fellas.