Daft Old Duffer returns. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
Syria is a large – and despite the carnage we witness on our screens – a civilised and cultured country. There surely remain large parts wherein families still sit before their television sets each evening, or attend the local cinema, and see on the news what is happening all around them. Just as we do.
What then do you suppose they think when they see the chemical attack footage and its effect on the children?
And then watch the leaders of France, Britain and America making indignant speeches condemning the atrocity and threatening to do something or other about it?
Why distinguish between chemical attacks and bombings?
Do you think, as I do, that many of them may wonder why there is such a fuss over those particular victims?
Why those suffering kids are considered so much more important than their own, slaughtered by bombs, shells, bullets. Or buried alive under collapsed buildings?
For of course, to our Great Leaders they are.
Everybody’s at it
Hard to step up and defend civilisation from the effect of high explosive or machine gun bullets.
They are so ordinary. Everybody’s at that sort of murder. Including the very men who spout those stirring speeches about punishing evil.
Hard to use them as an excuse to stand tall and dream of being another Marlborough, Wellington, Churchill. Or even Thatcher.
Why is poison gas any different?
But poison gas – that’s different. Everybody says so.
And why is it different? Why is murder by poison beyond the pale when the same job performed by tank and plane is not?
Why, for no other reason than that everybody says so.
Especially those nations who produce the gas and so assiduously sell it to those they now condemn for using it.
Ideal then for posing as an International Statesman, a Leader of Men in the fight against the Forces of Evil.
Western Civilisation? You’re having a laugh, right?
Image: Freedom House under CC BY 2.0
