The phrase "We had to destroy the village to save it" has been attributed to many different people during the Vietnam War. It is used to express the utter senselessness and futility of the conflict: in pursuit of a desire to "save" Vietnam from communism, American troops were acting to destroy it piece by piece. A very similar observation can be made about the current War on Terror.

Western governments proclaim their desire to "save" the West and in particular to save Western liberties — our freedom is, after all, the reason why the "Islamofascists" hate us. The process of doing this, however, appears to require that those same governments destroy liberty at the same time.

Since 2001 many countries have pushed through repressive laws in the name of the war on terror—but few as eagerly as America and Britain. America first rushed through the Patriot Act. The authorities' powers to snoop on American citizens were vastly increased. Agents armed with a court warrant could now eavesdrop on private telephone calls, read e-mails, pry into library records, bank statements, medical records and suchlike without needing to show “reasonable suspicion”. At the same time, in an apparent breach of the law, George Bush secretly authorised his own warrantless domestic surveillance programme. He was, he said, acting in his constitutional capacity as wartime commander-in-chief. ...

By abandoning the very values they are seeking to protect, America and its allies are in danger of winning a pyrrhic victory, civil libertarians protest. “It is the response to terrorism, rather than terrorism itself, that does democracy most harm,” Michael Ignatieff, a former head of Harvard's centre for human rights, argues. Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law at Yale, castigates Britain in his new book, “Before the Next Attack”, for its “tragic slide to a police state”. He accuses America of moving “one step at a time toward a presidential tyranny”.

Source: The Economist

I have to wonder about the degree to which politicians are simply using terrorism as an excuse for grabs for greater authoritarian power and the degree to which they sincerely believe that their measures are a necessary and appropriate response to terrorism. I'm sure that there has to be a combination of both — I'm not so cynical as to believe that they are all using terrorism as an excuse. There have got to be politicians who really believe in what they are doing.

Who would be the most easy to reach and convince to change their minds: the true believers or the cynical manipulators?

But others, like John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, maintain the opposite. “What if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?” he asks.

Consider very carefully the implications of what John Podhoretz is saying: that rather than continue to pursue humanitarian values and morality, these principles are actually a hinderance to their future and that democracies must learn to set aside humanitarian concern for others and replace that with a "cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests." What's the difference between this and the policy pursued by Nazi Germany?

I don't believe that there is any significant difference between the two. Nazi Germany was an immoral monster and it's precisely because the modern liberal democracies promote humanitarian values that not only made them superior to the Nazis then, but continue to make them superior to anything even remotely like the Nazis today. Liberal democracies didn't have to abandon humanitarian morality in order to fight the Nazis and they don't have to do the same today. It's the siren call to set aside that which makes us better which we have to fear the most. That is what helped lead Germans down the path laid out by the Nazis and that's the path which people like John Podhoretz is trying to make look appealing now.

 

Read More:

• Guide to Ethics and Morality
• War and Morality
• War on Terrorism
• Godless Liberalism