Thursday, December 11, 2008

Pro Libertate: Leviathan Devours a Family

Excellent and thought-provoking commentary from William Norman Grigg on the tragic loss of four civilian lives in the crash of a crippled military aircraft.


The pilot’s value is a product of his humanity, not a function of the job he has chosen or the clothing he wears to work. The same can be said of Yoon’s wife, Yong Mi; his daughters, 15-month-old Grace and 2-month-old Rachel; and his mother-in-law, Suk Im Kim. Each of them was a treasure of incalculable worth...

None of these individual human lives should have ended on that morning. But if one couldn’t be spared, it was the moral duty of the pilot to sacrifice his own – assuming, of course, that there is a coherent moral code underlying the institutions of American militarism...

This lieutenant thus confronted that rarest of things, an opportunity for a member of the US Armed Forces actually to defend the lives of American civilians. In this case, he could have done so by turning around and attempting to make it back to the Abraham Lincoln, rather than flying over a heavily populated area aboard a stricken fighter jet...

Had he done so, he may have had to ditch his plane in the ocean and dying at sea. But he would have protected the civilian population, which is supposedly the reason our government has a military in the first place...

I do not mean to suggest that I wish this young man had died... I am underscoring the fact that it would be ethically perverse to suggest that the proper course of action was to sacrifice the lives of four civilians in order to save the life of a Marine...

I am very concerned, however, that Yoon’s generous gesture will help fortify an already widespread, and thoroughly pernicious, assumption – namely, that those wearing government-issued uniforms are more valuable than the population at large, and should be protected at the cost of civilian lives...

The only morally sound answer to this predicament is that the military officer must sacrifice himself on behalf of the civilian. That, after all, is what he was trained to do, what he had promised when he enlisted. To do otherwise would be to nullify the entire stated purpose of having a military establishment in the first place. Any other conclusion would be based on the assumption that the civilian population exists to defend the military, rather than the reverse...

Rather than forcing civilians to sacrifice their lives for the military, conscription forces civilians to surrender their lives to protect the State and those who control it...

Although we’re rarely told that our rulers assume we exist to protect them and serve their needs, that assumption is infused into the warp and weave of the Regime...

The unadorned truth, however, is that Yoon's family was taken from him needlessly, killed as collateral damage in the routine operations of the Leviathan State.


Pro Libertate: Leviathan Devours a Family

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