Collateral Damage
I love this term. It sounds so clinical. No moral responsiblity there. In fact it sounds justified, with the use of the word “collateral: ” a security pledged for the repayment of a loan . In other words, it’s a mechanism of repayment.
Damage, too, is fairly benign. Damage is certainly less extreme than annihilation, murder, or ruin. One definition is: any reduction in the intended use or value of a biological or physical resource. Reduction but not dissolution, for example, is operative here.
But collateral damage is certainly not the sum of its parts: Inadvertent casualties and destruction inflicted on civilians in the course of military operations. A euphemism for our hand in the death of innocent civilians.
As our soliders battled in Samarra and prepare for a bloody battle in Fallujah, the irony and meaninglessness of these battles struck me. American soldiers, who have no emotional investment in the land they are fighting for, will be shooting at, blowing up, destroying, and murdering people to take over some land because we disagree with the people who claim to be the leaders there. We will advocate for a democratic election, so long as the Iraqi people choose someone that we agree would be a worthy leader. And thousands of Iraqi civilians will die in order for us to make them free. But what kind of freedom is this? How can you be “free” if your friends and family are killed? How can you be free if you live in fear that at any time, it all could start up again and you will have to dodge bombs and bullets in going about your everyday life? I would have more sympathy for this military maneuver if US incompetence and arrogance were not the reasons for the strong insurgency in Iraq.
A part of humanity dies when a democracy defies the principles of freedom and democracy and murders innocent people in order to free them.
First, I’m THRILLED to see another AECT member blogging about “educational technology for empowerment and social justice!†I teach as an adjunct in a Ph.D. program at a Catholic university that is devoted, in essence, to that precise issue, and feel it’s possibly the greatest issue of our time in our profession.
That said, I can’t help but wonder how many German Jews in 1944 would have found it ironic and meaningless that “American soldiers, who have no emotional investment in the land they are fighting for, will be shooting at, blowing up, destroying, and murdering people to take over some land because we disagree with the people who claim to be the leaders there.â€
I would encourage you to question the assumptions that (1) “the principles of freedom and democracy†require good men (and women) to do nothing while a tyrant gasses his own people and machine-guns them into mass graves, or (2) it is worse to engage in a war that kills a few innocent people despite our best efforts, than NOT to engage in it and allow the tyrant to keep killing multitudes.
Because everything in the last paragraph could just as easily be talking about the war to end the Holocaust, and the war to topple Saddam.
Jim Ellsworth
3 May 05 at 5:07 pm
[...] Jim by responding to comments from one blog on another. But it’s my blog-life So Jim Ellsworth posted a comment on my other blog, which due to my branching in two directions I feel is better to [...]
Midquel… » Waxing political - Nazis v. Saddam
6 May 05 at 8:12 pm