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America has no collective moral standard. So what else can one expect than complete chaos?
To put things in perspective, the eugenic argument for killing violent criminals is simple and straightforward. The argument for reveling in their death is different. As someone who has always been vary of group pathologies, this event and the surrounding characters make it feel like we are skirting the line.
As an example, killing a child rapist is just. But making a spectacle of the event where the intent is to invoke some emotional gratification or celebration goes beyond chasing the mere utility of ending a bad life. Good people don't enjoy suffering. The true celebration of ending the lives of criminals comes in the form of safe and happy societies that are free from the terror of living with bad people who allow themselves to cause undue suffering.
This should be especially obvious to those of the 'Christian' persuasion. Of which, one has to conclude, most Red Tribe Americans are not. If you feel anger or hatred for someone, the 'Christian' thing to do is for you to forgive them, if only to save yourself and those around you. Wrath is a sin. And if your conception of these events differs greatly from this Christian framework, you're probably not 'western'. That does not mean letting criminals go free, you should still seek justice. But beyond that justice you have a life to live.
It might be the case that the modern western person is simply too sheltered and cowardly to face the reality of what the third world necessitates. And that the 'spectacle' of the act is necessary in some way. But until such arguments are made, this feels like another slip towards barbarity. If this guy was to be executed, walk into his jailcell in the middle of the night and end him. Everything else is degenerate. I mean, he is paralyzed from the waist down, no? Are you going to shoot a guy in a wheelchair?
And as has been overviewed, the third worlder is no stranger to public executions. And dying a martyr for your cause is not something you should fear. So the only people not understanding what is going on from any angle are the 'westerners'
Listening to this person made me sympathize with the soon to be martyr. It could only be deduced from this interview that some Americans are incapable of understanding the suffering of others.
An American saying this about a middle Eastern terrorist is beyond a joke. America has no moral currency in that part of the world. It was all spent on the graves of children. 'They should not shoot our soldiers when they are not prepared' is laughable, and further serves to highlight just how morally lost America is.
I mean the government of most modern Democratic countries is whatever the collective electorate has decided at the present time. It by definition cannot be a singular principle other then vox populi suprema lex esto “the will of the people is the supreme law”.
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This is true inasmuch as "wrath" is, when used technically, the sinful version of anger, but anger is not itself sinful in the Christian tradition.
Doing this is how the Soviets did it. Secret executions are the tool of repressive governments everywhere, and breed secrecy and fear. The Western tradition is one of public executions. The condemned also has, in the Western tradition, certain last rights that would be abrogated by executing him in his cell while he slept. As far as I know it is routine for other executions in the United States allow outside witnesses to attend.
You can argue that these are outdated ideas but understand that in the Western tradition you reference shooting someone in the back of the head in their cell block pattern-matches onto totalitarian regimes, whereas a public execution is pretty much the staple Anglo-American tradition.
Now you can also argue, I think, that livestreaming it is a bad idea. But it seems to me that we can address the question of if executions should be public and if they should be livestreamed separately.
Why? He killed a pregnant woman who was his comrade-in-arms.
Nidal Hasan is not a Middle Eastern terrorist, he is an American citizen and soldier, born in Virginia, who shot his fellow soldiers to death when they were unarmed in a place of trust.
Executions are generally attended to by a cleric of the condemned's faith, a journalist from the associated press, and a doctor as well as prison officials, right?
I don't know the details of each state, but I think that something like what you are describing is typical. I believe there may be other outside witnesses as well.
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I think the fact that this sentence exists demonstrates the weakness of the 'American citizen' bit in being the sole definition of who is (or should be) an American.
Clearly, calling this man is a terrorist, that's not a partisan statement. And clearly he is Middle Eastern (which is why his parents called him Nidal instead of James). His attack was motivated by his Middle Eastern religion and his attachment to his fellow Middle Easterners. He may have had American paperwork, and even an American accent, but he clearly did not consider himself American in a meaningful sense of the word.
The definition of a "terrorist" is famously almost always a subject of contention. I don't particularly mind applying it to Hasan.
Oh, so you think that if he doesn't consider himself an American, then he's not? Interesting. Do people get to pick whatever citizenship they want, now? Does this mean that someone who does consider himself an American is? Maybe the whole world is American (except Nidal Hasan, who is a "Middle Easterner")? I think the answer to all of these questions is "no." So Hasan is an American.
I understand the idea of being (let's say) "spiritually American" or saying that Hasan is "not a true American" – very reasonable rhetorical statements – but this guy had the rights, privileges, and duties of an American, by virtue of being an American citizen. He is, legally, an American citizen. And in terms of his behavior, he deserves to be treated as one, because to do otherwise cheapens his crime.
If you think that citizenship is not something to be cheapened by importation and dilution but rather a sacred bond held between fellow-citizens with attendant rights and duties, then you believe in holding people to that.
Palestinians are special. They're internationally considered Palestinians even if they acquire another citizenship, and so are their descendants. Once a Palestinian, forever the line is so attainted.
They aren't that special, they're just using the same standard as Jews.
Not even in the slightest. If you convert away from Judaism, you are no longer a Jew and if you are a woman your future children aren't automatically Jewish either. Also Judaism is a religion and not a nationality; while Israel has the law of return, it only says Jews can become Israeli citizens, not that they ARE Israeli citizens.
Plenty of cultural-only Jews at this point who'd still be considered thoroughly Jewish by the outer world. Most of the Seinfeld cast are the platonic example of New York Jews and I believe they don't actually practice.
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If America truly is a 'proposition nation' with no ethnic requirements to be a member then pretty much. if America is simply a (very successful) economic zone where citizenship is just a piece of paper that grants you access, like a software key, then America isn't a nation at all.
I guess the point I was responding to was your sentence that Hasan was not a middle eastern terrorist, he was an American, as if those things are mutually exclusive. I would argue that Hasan is 100% a middle eastern terrorist, even if he is also 100% a US citizen, because all citizenship is just a piece of paper. If Britain was invaded by France tomorrow and we were all stripped of our citizenship to be made subjects of the French Empire, Britain as a nation would continue to exist. Because, to put it crudely, civic nationalism is fake.
I don't think these are the only ways to think about how citizenship and country work. There's an older understanding of citizenship that is more akin to being bound in a sacred pact – like adoption. As far as I can tell, ethnic groups all have some way of bringing non-co-ethics into the "in-group" ethnic circle. If you think Americanness should be an ethnicity, when is an idea that I am sympathetic to, then citizenship is that ritual.
This is precisely what I think we should all deny. "Citizenship is just a piece of paper" commodifies and cheapens citizenship, the opposite values you should be pushing if you want people to think in ways that are transcendent instead of being non-transactional.
Except Hasan was not a naturalised citizen. He never took an oath of loyalty or was willingly adopted into the country. There was no 'ritual' at all. The model of citizenship you describe is clearly incompatible with birthright citizenship, which involves handing out citizenship to babies of (both legal and illegal) immigrants.
I would say that giving out citizenship like candy is what cheapens and commodifies it. Describing it as just a piece of paper is simply being honest about the world.
Hasan's parents were, as far as I can tell, legal immigrants and became naturalized citizens (a bit unclear to me if that happened before or after he was born), so opposing birthright citizenship for illegal aliens doesn't really "solve" here. Giving birthright citizenship to the children of citizens is not much, if it all, different than the model you seem to think would be preferable, of being born into an ethnic group.
However, I don't disagree with the criticism. If I was King Of The World, citizenship (and adulthood, for that matter) would likely be earned by deed, not birth.
I don't want to live in such a world, nor do I agree that that is an honest description of what citizenship has long been understand to entail in the American tradition, so I decline to follow your lead here.
I was responding to your model of citizenship as an oath of loyalty. Citizenship can be inherited, but loyalty can't. Hasan is a perfect example of one way the 'pinky swear that you'll consider yourself as an American' doesn't work. The other is that there is nothing stopping a counterfactual immigrant Hasan saying he's a loyal American and then becoming a jihadi anyway. Words are wind. Even if America didn't grant birthright citizenship to the children of illegals, the problem would still exist, as it does everywhere.
I think it's pretty hard to argue that 'the American tradition' doesn't treat citizenship as a mere piece of paper when it literally gives it to the children of foreign criminals, allows its citizens to hold an unlimited number of other citizenships and doesn't have any substantial requirements to give it out other than 'you've lived here a while'. And that's without getting into the fact that for most of the country's history, it was illegal for citizens of one race to marry citizens (or chattel) of another race. That racialised understanding of the nation is the American tradition. And it is declining at the very same time that the number of Americans who even like America is also declining. I don't think that's unrelated. I think the term 'multi-ethnic nation' is a contradiction in terms.
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You have this backwards. Hasan not considering himself an American isn't a positive point of evidence, it's counter-evidence (and a damning finisher) against the Propositional Nation position.
And yes, that's the fundamental absurdity. He's legally an American, yet clearly holds no bonds of brotherhood and fellowship for the rest of us. Instead, his true tribe is co-ethnics and co-religionists from the other side of the world, to the point where he was willing to commit mass murder about it.
Let's set aside the degree to which is tribal affinity with co-ethics and co-religionists on the other side of the world is a deadly LARP and agree that this is true: claiming that he is Middle Eastern obscures this and the problem (which exists to some degree in America and from what I can tell to a much larger degree in Europe) of second-generation radicalization.
If you think it's bad that Hasan doesn't consider himself an American despite being one, you shouldn't confuse people into thinking he's not American by referring to him as Middle Eastern. You should explicitly highlight exactly what he was, and highlight how it came to be that he continued to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces despite expressing affinity with America's enemies openly.
As we've seen in this very thread, calling him a "Middle Easterner" seems to make it easier for people to believe that what he did was not mass murder but rather a surprise attack on enemy combatants. It casts him as someone who was true to his deepest self and therefore in some sense admirable rather than someone who betrayed his most sacred confidences.
When the news headline is "US kills American citizen by surprise attack without trial", the phrase 'Middle Easterner' doesn't typically get used by the media, even though such a headline is guaranteed to be about a Middle Easterner.
I would like to do better than news headlines!
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Excellent point. Real Americans have names like 'Running Bear' or 'Flying Eagle'.
People who call their children names like that tend to identify primarily as members of their (pre-American) tribe, and not primarily as Americans, which kind of proves my point.
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Wrong America. The one you're talking about got done in by unchecked immigration.
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So when I use the term wrath in this context we could conclude that I am talking about the sinful version of anger. To that extent I think it's very obvious that anyone seeking out glee or spectacle in another persons death is acting in a sinful way. In this context we presume it is out of anger or revenge, which would necessarily be sinful. A better Christian would recognize just law and capital punishment, along with the necessity to personally forgive the perpetrator to save their own soul.
There's nothing secret about publicly sentencing someone to death in a court of law, killing them in a manner not publicized and then announcing that they have been executed.
The western tradition of public executions, along with burning witches, is generally not what people think of when talking about 'the west' which more often refers to the post enlightenment period and the major upswing in technology and standards of living through the 18th and 19th century. Which coincides with decreases in public executions and capital punishments along with a host of other social revolutions.
The US army has killed plenty of pregnant women in Nidal's lifetime. Should one only sympathize with pregnant women getting killed when they are American? That's what many Americans earnestly believe. Expressing themselves as completely incapable of recognizing any hostile act taken against them from the viewpoint of its perpetrators.
Nidal Hasan is a middle Eastern terrorist. He has a stamp from the US government and a birthplace far from his actual homelands, but knows in his heart exactly who he is. A martyr for a cause he believes is just, who shot enemy combatants in a successful ambush.
Maybe one day American soldiers will stop killing unarmed people in 'places of trust' the world over, but until they do, there's little rational to mourn them beyond anyone else when the shoe is on the other foot.
Not everyone is aware of the distinction, though.
This gives rise to speculations that the condemned was tortured the death, or not killed at all. Both are bad.
Actually, at least in England, the post-enlightenment period lead to the "Bloody Code" and a rise in executions, which were often public and treated as a spectacle.
This is a false equivalency and you know it, or should know it.
Please quantify this statement and back it up with polling numbers or another citation.
It's curious how one could get such a perspective. Certainly not from reading American novelists (such as Tom Clancy), or American scholars (such as Lawrence Wright) or American journalists (such as John Hersey) or American combatants (like Ian Fritz) or interacting with American Mottizens (we have GWOT vets on here, and I've never gotten that impression from them at all; rather the opposite.)
Repeating something doesn't make it true.
It is rational to punish traitors because the harm of their actions erodes trust, and as I think you know, a lower-trust society is a worse one.
I'm not getting this. Aside from being tortured by other inmates, which is routine in American prisons, I see no reason to assume that a prison intended for general population inmates or a military prison would begin torturing inmates because they changed the way they execute them. You could just as well torture them and execute them via firing squad.
The code was not supported by the people. Which is why executions went down, despite more capital punishment law being passed. And it was then ultimately abolished. In either case, people don't associate 'the west' with public executions. But rather the modern justice system that came after.
It's not. But people who are emotionally unable to sympathize with people born too far away do believe that it is.
I'm referring to the person in the Fox interview, people who share his sentiment, you and other pro-America guys on here. Who ultimately draw the distinction between good and bad, with America on the good side of every conflict. And they don't see that as unreasonable or questionable.
I get it from interacting with Americans. What is most peoples reaction to Timothy McVeigh when he called the children killed in the bombing 'Collateral Damage'? Yet so many Americans fail to imagine why some people refer to America as the great Satan.
We agree on that. What we disagree on, it appears, is what makes someone a national of a nation. With two Palestinian parents, I think you are a Palestinian.
Sure?
Generally speaking, when people are tortured it leaves marks that witnesses to executions will notice.
Who's "people"? I'm a Westerner, and I do. I have been in favor of public executions since I was in high school or before, in part because it is part of the Western, Anglo-American tradition.
I do understand the push-back against live-streaming it and the concerns about making it a spectacle, or that it might be a bad idea in this specific case. Those arguments track with me. But the idea that "here in the West we don't execute people publicly" doesn't, because it's not true.
Do you really think this is an accurate description of me based on my posting history?
Even if you are confusing me with Shakes, Trump's Own Strongest Soldier, I doubt this would be an accurate description.
Well, I think I am beginning to understand why. It should not surprise you if even the most reasonable and open-minded of people will become a raging nationalist when you paint people of their nationalities with a broad and unflattering brush.
You should read the authors I mentioned. They are emblematic of what Americans read: Clancy was a tremendously popular novelist during the Cold War with the American right; Wright wrote a popular and interesting account of the path to 9/11; Hersey's writing about Hiroshima is, I believe, commonly taught to American students in grade school; and Fritz wrote in the Atlantic, one of America's most prestigious publications.
His parents were Americans also.
America specifically has popularized many ways by which you can torture people and not leave a mark. So if a prison institution were committed to torturing their death row inmates and believed they could hide those acts, and I don't know why that would become the case if you were to not execute those inmates in public, they could presumably do just that.
Most modern western nations don't execute people, full stop. The ones who did public executions dropped the practice before the turn of the 20th century. Did they do so in the past? Yes, but 12 year olds working in factories for 14 hours a day was also a thing in the past, but is not associated with 'western values'.
I don't know. I based it on your reply to me here, where you acted with incredulity towards the assumed legitimacy of the targets of Nidal Hasan. Who were all but one, as far as I can tell, directly involved with the US military in one way or another. Alongside that I think the Fox News interview was very emblematic of exactly the kind of viewpoint blindness that I see afflicting many Americans.
As an example, from the Fox interview which another person thought would make people less sympathetic to Nidal, acting like a military base is a 'place of trust' and that the military personnel therein where defenseless, and therefor the attack was cowardly. And that if Nidal had honor, he would have challenged the American servicemen to hand to hand combat. I mean, it takes me a while to get past the absurdity of hearing such things said, but to examine it further, did the US military conduct itself with such honor? Or did they kill close to half a million civilians through war campaigns across the middle east? Where none of those men, women and children in a place of trust?
I'm not surprised when Americans who consider themselves reasonable and open minded rise on their hindlegs whenever the legitimacy of their tremendously stupid and murderous zionist foreign policy is questioned. Because despite their beliefs about themselves as being reasonable and open minded, they're often actually not all that. They just egotistically believe that about themselves, whilst acting with complete disregard for anyone and anything but themselves and their preconceived notions of 'America's interest'.
And to follow your point about open minded American literary figures, as dramatic as all the media Americans make about the atrocities they commit can be, whilst cathartic for the American, doesn't actually absolve Americans of the reality of those atrocities that they committed. It's actually quite perverted to murder hundreds of thousands of people and then write a book about how horrifying that was. And then make a big deal about how bad you feel about that. But then just repeat the process as soon as some foreign policy idiot theorists conception of America's hegemony gets threatened.
As I said, we have a different definition of what a national is. You think it's the stamp from the government or similar. Which is a historically absurd definition that contradicts the etymology of the word 'nation'. I think it's your ancestry. If you don't want to engage with the topic, fine, but these assertions are inane. A person born of two Palestinian parents is Palestinian. He proved that with his actions as well.
The point I am trying to get at as regards executions is that appearances are important, and executing people in secret is a bad appearance. Even if you don't think people's executions should be public, you shouldn't want witnesses removed. Even if you can secretly torture people without leaving marks (which yes, we can) you should not act in such a way as to needlessly arouse suspicion that you are doing so.
The problem with Nidal Hasan's target wasn't that he targeted soldiers. Iran has killed somewhere between a dozen and two dozen soldiers in our war with them and none of the American commentators on here have acted like that was illegitimate in the same way that Hasan's was (or as far as I can remember, at all) because Hasan is an American who turned his gun on his countrymen.
I don't think you can point me to a single star-spangled flag waver on the Motte that has argued that Artesh soldiers, acting in the normal course of their duties, should be executed for the deaths of US soldiers. I think you are mistaking your own ideas about what Americans think with what they actually say they believe. Perhaps you have had other experiences off of the Motte that I can't speak to, but what you are describing of your experiences here does not comport with what I recognize.
If you are a soldier and particularly an officer, then yes, a military base is a place of trust, and generally stateside on a military base US soldiers are disarmed, and will go to jail if they carry a weapon on base. (This is a sorry and facile state of affairs, and I think the current admin may be working to change it, which is good).
I am not sure I would say Hasan is a coward but shooting unarmed people is not generally what is associated with courage. I don't think Hasan acted much differently in terms of personal courage than any mass shooter, in the sense that he was brave enough to accept being shot by cops but not brave enough or willing enough to accept defeat to engage armed people from the start. I think that his target set could in some sense be seen as more "legitimate" than bin Laden's in the sense that they were primarily military, but also that his infamy should be greater because he betrayed a position of trust and violated the oath he took.
Did American troops kill close to half a million civilians during the Global War on Terror? No, they did not. The majority of civilian casualties throughout the Global War on Terror were not caused by US troops. I suspect you know this, which is why you used the phrase "through war campaigns" thus absolving the people who actually literally did kill civilians of their actions and rhetorically placing it on people who were innocent of their deaths, while at the same time providing a defense (a motte, if you will) if someone pointed out the inaccuracy.
I think it is completely fine to criticize the outcome of the Global War on Terror (indeed, I have done it myself) and to say that the GWOT led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. I think it is wrong to completely ignore consequentialist reasoning. But saying that the United States killed half a million citizens across the Middle East is no more sensible than saying Al Qaeda killed hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners through war campaigns across the globe – arguably less sensible, since after all Al Qaeda attacked the States.
Off of the top of my head, there are only two Americans who could reasonably qualify, and I don't think either of them felt bad about what they did, or ever pretended to.
Very well. I shall expect you, then, in the spirit of self-consistency, to refer to Trump as a European leader going forward :)
We agree that appearances are important. What we don't agree on is whether or not killing someone in private is 'secret' or not. How you could maintain that it would be, despite the American legal system is beyond me still. You keep asserting these caveats and scenarios that just aren't necessitated by anything. You can execute someone with witnesses and not have the event be public and without any risk of that person being tortured. There is no elevated arousal of suspicion regarding torture. You just keep asserting that there is and it's completely baseless beyond the average torture conditions in US prisons.
No, this is you looking at things from your American perspective. From the perspective of a Palestinian who is of a different ideological persuasion, America is still factually engaged in active warfare against people in the middle East. The soldiers in Fort Hood were not his countrymen or comrades but enemy combatants who play an active role in a military organization that has killed countless civilians in pursuit of an evil zionist ideology.
Regardless of him being a 'traitor', is a US army base a valid target? Does the US army kill innocent civilians? If the answer to these questions is yes, then what is this even about? The sympathy argument made in the Fox News interview is now even more inane than it was prior. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Inshallah.
I don't understand the point here. Iranian solders don't get to decide on when the war begins. The US just bombs them at an opportune time to the celebration of plenty of Americans. To the US that's a legitimate act of war. Why would Nidal have to operate by different rules?
If you are a combatant and see an enemy military base, it's a target. Do you see how you're just not engaging with a perspective that's not American? How the only way many Americans parse events is through American eyes? And how you repeatedly assert this frame again and again and never engage with anything beyond it?
Some might even say that killing the innocent makes you a valid target for just retribution. But many Americans seem incapable of understanding that other people also feel that way when they conceptualize of all the innocents killed by Americans.
Maybe this is a point of confusion but the exact number doesn't matter. Pick any number of thousand that you want. Are you pretending you don't understand the moral culpability of soldiers in service of an evil regime? How does America justify killing Iranian soldiers? The same way Nidal does when justifying the killing of American soldiers.
We were talking about public opinion. Maybe I can rephrase it so you better understand:
It's actually quite perverted to support the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and then read a book about how horrifying that was for the victims. And then make a big deal about how bad you feel about that. But then just repeat the process as soon as some foreign policy idiot theorists conception of America's hegemony gets threatened.
If you were serious about that conversation I would consider it, considering how ethnically split America is. It was basically complex colony of a wide range of Europeans. Held together by a common capacity to cooperate. Now it's unraveling through a host of ethnic contradictions as the share of non-Europeans who can't cooperate weigh the entire project down. I'd still prefer to refer to people of European ancestry who have lived in America for some time as Americans, for the same reason I don't refer to Germans as Europeans. But there's nuance there.
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The guy is a Palestinian Muslim who just so happened to be born in the US. His actions are reflective of someone who is a Palestinian Muslim jihadist, not of an American schizo. Why didn't he just go shoot up a school or something? It's because he's a Middle Eastern terrorist.
He's not a Middle Eastern terrorist. We can say that he behaved like a Middle Eastern terrorist, or that he shared their sympathies. We can argue that this is true in some spiritual sense, if we want.
But ultimately he was born as an American citizen to American immigrants who naturalized, and despite this he found that his sympathies lay elsewhere, to the degree that he was willing to kill his fellow soldiers out of misplaced affinity towards a group of people who were never really his own.
To claim that he is Middle Eastern is to deflect scrutiny from how he came to be radicalized.
This is just ethnicity denialism.
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