AS CITIZENS of a democracy we have a moral responsibility for the actions of a government over whose actions we have indirect control. Not only does the soldier who tortures have responsibility for her actions; we as citizens do as well. The unregistered voter has as much responsibility as the administration that rejects the Geneva Conventions. That is the logical conclusion of what we have absorbed as students. Yet the citizen in an oligarchic, theatrical democracy has no more immediate responsibility for the crimes of her terrorist state than the residents of Afghanistan under the Taliban. Equally importantly, the soldier torturers of Iraqi individuals have no immediate control over the fate of their humiliated peers.
For those of us brought up in the political historical tradition, George Washington freed the nation from her colonial yoke, Hitler gassed the Jews and George W. Bush invaded Iraq. Yet some colonists assisted the British, some the American insurgents and others assisted either depending on expediency. Likewise, some Germans marched with the Nazis from the party's earliest origins and others died in the struggle against fascism. We have established popularly the righteousness and sin of leaders in the Second World War. What of the other participants?
What of the employees of Blackwater and other private enterprises profiting from the invasion, what of the soldiers? Today, while Cindy Sheehan calls attention to our illegitimate and self-destructive occupation of Iraq, my cousins are killing Iraqis under the auspices of the Army and the Marines.
I don't blame our soldiers, our torturers, any more than I blame the Jews who dropped the gas cylinder every day in Auschwitz. They are players in a drama over which they have no daily control, a drama with laws so aged they appear natural, inevitable, inviolable. Today, working-class youth can choose Wal-Mart or the Army. They have no more choice than the individual who could work the gas or face summary execution. Our responsibilities in the function of the war machine are causally related to the deterministic, choice-devoid economic system that we have created.
Living in an age of terror necessitates recognition of the complexities of moral responsibility and means we must transcend the assignation of villainy and heroism that distract us from the systemic causes of our brutal mutilation of one another.
As difficult as it is to direct our moral outrage at systems, at philosophies that undergird geopolitical organization, that is precisely what we must do, because our nonfunctional democracy ultimately does not excuse us for the attack on Iraq or the continuing torture. While the soldier's decision to follow an order or not is immediately irrelevant, the fact of international personhood demands commitment to transformation of the capitalistic world system that only provides one choice: mutual, ceaseless attacks upon one another.
My cousins in the military have no choices. If they refuse to murder more Iraqis tomorrow, they will be thrown out of the military or into jail, eventually to return to southern poverty -- a poverty created by a persistent colonial economic organization that strategically avoids investment in the human capital of workers in favor of a disempowered, cheap international labor force. If we are to construct a society in which humane treatment of one another is a daily possibility, we must destroy the capitalism that predicates the terrorism.
Let us then abandon our absurd attacks on the person of Bush or bin Laden or our soldiers who continue to follow orders to torture Iraqis or other "enemy combatants," and direct our attention and efforts at subverting the system that functions only on a terrorist basis. Sustainable solutions to our unacceptable world system can only be found in radical transformation of that economic world system which, of course, is also by its nature a political world system, as those with the power of capital also control the politics.
Radical transformation demands a vision of a world that honors our human selves and our human collective self. With valorization of human rights as our foundation we can construct a responsible society in which the players are left with choices between virtue and virtue rather than murder or poverty.
Zack Fields' column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at zfields@cavalierdaily.com.
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