The recent demented rantings of certain US Democratic politicians who compare Gitmo to the Gulag and the Shoah have made me wonder about something.
When one hears "left"ists accuse "right"ists (or hawkish centrists like ourselves) of "lacking nuance", or "seeing the world only in black and white", one wonders to what extent they are projecting.
The lowest grayscale resolution one can have is zero bits: everything mid-grey. The moral equivalent would be kneejerk moral equivalence: sounds familiar?
The next level up in resolution would be one-bit: black and white. Where Paleostinian terror becomes morally equivalent to national liberation movements against British, French, and (yes) Belgian colonial regimes of old; where some frat hazing rituals applied to suspected terrorists become equivalent to the gulag or the Shoah; and where a US president's unwillingness to veto a law prohibiting a particularly revolting type of third-trimester abortion becomes the equivalent of the Taliban or Wahhabist theocracy. Sounds familiar?
Children are indeed very much used to seeing the world in black and white. Part of growing up indeed means adding a few bits of resolution: going to 16 grays, or 256, or whatever one achieves. But what all the "nuance" touters forget is that even a 32-bit grayscale (with over 4 billion different shades of gray) still has deepest black and brightest white.
The reason people like myself support the War on Terror is not that we "love" war: it is that we have come to realize that, ugly as war may be, there are things uglier ever still. Like no sane human being (except possibly one in excruciating continuous physical pain) would love to die, but some fates are worse still than death.
And that, as much as one would like, it is impossible to keep wholly clean hands in dirty "asymmetric warfare" against an opponent that neither practices nor recognizes accepted laws and customs of armed conflict. But that the inability to be all white does not mean that one either becomes all black, or should simply resign from the game rather than "sully one's hands". "Purity of arms" is not a suicide pact. And, like objectivity in journalism, is a beautiful Platonic ideal that must be strived for, but is seldom fully attainable.
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