Progressives are rehashing the old debate, asking whether it is ever moral to use enhanced interrogation techniques to get our enemy detainees to divulge important information. Bernard Goldberg asks the question: "Why it is moral to allow the bomb to go off killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians?"
And then goes on to say...
"And exactly what American values are upheld by letting the bomb go off? I can’t think of any.
If liberals want to make the case that waterboarding is immoral no matter how many innocent lives are saved – no matter if the target is a yellow school bus filled with third graders on their way to the museum – then Man Up and make the case, with no apologies."
I don't know how anyone could actually think that it is moral to simply allow millions of innocents to die when there is an avenue we could use in extreme cases to prevent the tragedy from happening. How is it an American value to vie for our nation to yield in its duty to protect its citizens? I don't consider America abandoning its responsibility to do its all to protect American citizens from our enemies adhering to American values.
Progressives like to spout the human rights mantra, have compassion for and are fervent defenders of criminals, scumbags, and terrorists. For some reason liberals hearts empathize with the scum of the earth even though these people are responsible for the most heinous of crimes and thrive on victimizing ordinary people. For some reason progressives haven't deemed that the ordinary Joes and Joannes of this world to be worthy of the same compassion as the scumbags of the world. In addition liberals treat the innocent and most vulnerable of all with utter contempt, like they are non-existent in their alternate quasi-reality. According to liberals the innocent and most vulnerable of all who have not committed any crimes are undeserving of the same rights simply because these babies are unable to speak, are inconvenient, and thus to progressives they are to be brutally destroyed and thrown out like they were pieces of garbage all because progressives are irresponsible, morally bankrupt human beings who prey on the weak.
Progressives would have us revert back to a time when so-called civilized people committed barbaric actions. In First Century BC the Carthaginians were a civilized people who wanted to maintain their opulent lifestyle and would crush the skulls of infants in order to sacrifice them to the pagan Gods as a way of achieving that end and today we have liberals who want to maintain a relatively comfortable lifestyle and in order to do so they murder their offspring. And the progressives push this demonic agenda on the confused, desperate, and frightened.
My husband was reminded of and pointed me to this famous passage from The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton:
In a previous chapter I have hinted at something of the psychology that
lies behind a certain type of religion. There was a tendency in those
hungry for practical results, apart from poetical results, to call upon
spirits of terror and compulsion; to move Acheron in despair of bending
the Gods. There is always a sort of dim idea that these darker powers
will really do things, with no nonsense about it. In the interior
psychology of the Punic peoples this strange sort of pessimistic
practicality had grown to great proportions. In the New Town, which the
Romans called Carthage, as in the parent cities of Phoenicia, the god
who got things done bore the name of Moloch, who was perhaps identical
with the other deity whom we know as Baal, the Lord. The Romans did not
at first quite know what to call him or what to make of him; they had to
go back to the grossest myth of Greek or Roman origins and compare him
to Saturn devouring his children. But the worshippers of Moloch were not
gross or primitive. They were members of a mature and polished
civilisation, abounding in refinements and luxuries; they were probably
far more civilised than the Romans. And Moloch was not a myth; or at any
rate his meal was not a myth. These highly civilised people really met
together to invoke the blessing of heaven on their empire by throwing
hundreds of their infants into a large furnace. We can only realise the
combination by imagining a number of Manchester merchants with
chimney-pot hats and mutton-chop whiskers, going to church every Sunday
at eleven o'clock to see a baby roasted alive.
The first stages of the political or commercial quarrel can be followed
in far too much detail, precisely because it is merely political or
commercial. The Punic Wars looked at one time as if they would never
end; and it is not easy to say when they ever began. The Greeks and the
Sicilians had already been fighting vaguely on the European side against
the African city. Carthage had defeated Greece and conquered Sicily.
Carthage had also planted herself firmly in Spain; and between Spain and
Sicily the Latin city was contained and would have been crushed; if the
Romans had been of the sort to be easily crushed. Yet the interest of
the story really consists in the fact that Rome was crushed. If there
had not been certain moral elements as well as the material elements,
the story would have ended where Carthage certainly thought it had
ended. It is common enough to blame Rome for not making peace. But it
was a true popular instinct that there could be no peace with that sort
of people It is common enough to blame the Roman for his Delenda est
Carthago; Carthage must be destroyed. It is commoner to forget that, to
all appearance, Rome itself was destroyed. The sacred savour that hung
round Rome for ever, it is too often forgotten, clung to her partly
because she had risen suddenly from the dead. Carthage was an
aristocracy, as are most of such mercantile states. The pressure of the
rich on the poor was impersonal as well as irresistible. For such
aristocracies never permit personal government, which is perhaps why
this one was jealous of personal talent. But genius can turn up
anywhere, even in a governing class. As if to make the world's supreme
test as terrible as possible, it was ordained that one of the great
houses of Carthage should produce a man who came out of those gilded
palaces with all the energy and originality of Napoleon coming from
nowhere. At the worst crisis of the war Rome learned that Italy itself,
by a military miracle, was invaded from the north. Hannibal, the Grace
of Baal as his name ran in his own tongue, had dragged a ponderous chain
of armaments over the starry solitudes of the Alps; and pointed
southward to the city which he had been pledged by all his dreadful gods
to destroy.
Hannibal marched down the road to Rome, and the Romans who rushed to war
with him felt as if they were fighting with a magician. Two great armies
sank to right and left of him into the swamps of the Trebia; more and
more were sucked into the horrible whirlpool of Cannae; more and more
went forth only to fall in ruin at his touch. The supreme sign of all
disasters, which is treason, turned tribe after tribe against the
falling cause of Rome, and still the unconquerable enemy rolled nearer
and nearer to the city; and following their great leader the swelling
cosmopolitan army of Carthage passed like a pageant of the whole world;
the elephants shaking the earth like marching mountains and the gigantic
Gauls with their barbaric panoply and the dark Spaniards girt in gold
and the brown Numidians on their unbridled desert horses wheeling and
darting like hawks, and whole mobs of deserters and mercenaries and
miscellaneous peoples; and the grace of Baal went before them.
The Roman augurs and scribes who said in that hour that it brought forth
unearthly prodigies, that a child was born with the head of an elephant
or that stars fell down like hailstones, had a far more philosophical
grasp of what had really happened than the modern historian who can see
nothing in it but a success of strategy concluding a rivalry in
commerce. Something far different was felt at the time and on the spot,
as it is always felt by those who experience a foreign atmosphere
entering their own like a fog or a foul savour. It was no mere military
defeat, it was certainly no mere mercantile rivalry, that filled the
Roman imagination with such hideous omens of nature herself becoming
unnatural. It was Moloch upon the mountain of the Latins, looking with
his appalling face across the plain; it was Baal who trampled the
vineyards with his feet of stone; it was the voice of Tanit the
invisible, behind her trailing veils, whispering of the love that is
more horrible than hate. The burning of the Italian cornfields, the ruin
of the Italian vines, were some thing more than actual; they were
allegorical. They were the destruction of domestic and fruitful things,
the withering of what was human before that inhumanity that is far
beyond the human thing called cruelty. The household gods bowed low in
darkness under their lowly roofs; and above them went the demons upon a
wind from beyond all walls, blowing the trumpet of the Tramontane. The
door of the Alps was broken down; and in no vulgar but a very solemn
sense, it was Hell let loose. The war of the gods and demons seemed
already to have ended; and the gods were dead. The eagles were lost, the
legions were broken; and in Rome nothing remained but honour and the
cold courage of despair.
In the whole world one thing still threatened Carthage, and that was
Carthage. There still remained the inner working of an element strong in
all successful commercial states, and the presence of a spirit that we
know. There was still the solid sense and shrewdness of the men who
manage big enterprises; there was still the advice of the best financial
experts; there was still business government; there was still the broad
and sane outlook of practical men of affairs, and in these things could
the Romans hope. As the war trailed on to what seemed its tragic end,
there grew gradually a faint and strange possibility that even now they
might not hope in vain. The plain business men of Carthage, thinking as
such men do in terms of living and dying races, saw clearly that Rome
was not only dying but dead The war was over; it was obviously hopeless
for the Italian city to resist any longer, and inconceivable that
anybody should resist when it was hopeless. Under these circumstances,
another set of broad, sound business principles remained to be
considered. Wars were waged with money, and consequently cost money;
perhaps they felt in their hearts, as do so many of their kind, that
after all war must be a little wicked because it costs money. The time
had now come for peace; and still more for economy. The messages sent by
Hannibal from time to time asking for reinforcements were a ridiculous
anachronism; there were much more important things to attend to now. It
might be true that some consul or other had made a last dash to the
Metaurus, had killed Hannibal's brother and flung his head, with Latin
fury, into Hannibal's camp; and mad actions of that sort showed how
utterly hopeless the Latins felt about their cause. But even excitable
Latins could not be so mad as to cling to a lost cause for ever. So
argued the best financial experts; and tossed aside more and more
letters, full of rather queer alarmist reports. So argued and acted the
great Carthaginian Empire. That meaningless prejudice, the curse of
commercial states, that stupidity is in some way practical and that
genius is in some way futile, led them to starve and abandon that great
artist in the school of arms, whom the gods had given them in vain.
Why do men entertain this queer idea that what is sordid must always
overthrow what is magnanimous; that there is some dim connection between
brains and brutality, or that it does not matter if a man is dull so
long as he is also mean? Why do they vaguely think of all chivalry as
sentiment and all sentiment as weakness? They do it because they are,
like all men, primarily inspired by religion. For them, as for all men,
the first fact is their notion of the nature of things; their idea about
what world they are living in. And it is their faith that the only
ultimate thing is fear and therefore that the very heart of the world is
evil. They believe that death is stronger than life, and therefore dead
things must be stronger than living things; whether those dead things
are gold and iron and machinery or rocks and rivers and forces of
nature. It may sound fanciful to say that men we meet at tea-tables or
talk to at garden-parties are secretly worshippers of Baal or Moloch.
But this sort of commercial mind has its own cosmic vision and it is the
vision of Carthage. It has in it the brutal blunder that was the ruin of
Carthage. The Punic power fell because there is in this materialism a
mad indifference to real thought. By disbelieving in the soul, it comes
to disbelieving in the mind. Being too practical to be moral, it denies
what every practical soldier calls the moral of an army. It fancies that
money will fight when men will no longer fight. So it was with the Punic
merchant princes. Their religion was a religion of despair, even when
their practical fortunes were hopeful. How could they understand that
the Romans could hope even when their fortunes were hopeless? Their
religion was a religion of force and fear; how could they understand
that men can still despise fear even when they submit to force? Their
philosophy of the world had weariness in its very heart; above all they
were weary of warfare; how should they understand those who still wage
war even when they are weary of it? In a word, how should they
understand the mind of Man, who had so long bowed down before mindless
things, money and brute force and gods who had the hearts of beasts?
They awoke suddenly to the news that the embers they had disdained too
much even to tread out were again breaking everywhere into flames; that
Hasdrubal was defeated, that Hannibal was outnumbered, that Scipio had
carried the war into Spain; that he had carried it into Africa. Before
the very gates of the golden city Hannibal fought his last fight for it
and lost; and Carthage fell as nothing has fallen since Satan. The name
of the New City remains only as a name. There is no stone of it left
upon the sand. Another war was indeed waged before the final
destruction: but the destruction was final. Only men digging in its deep
foundation centuries after found a heap of hundreds of little skeletons,
the holy relics of that religion. For Carthage fell because she was
faithful to her own philosophy and had followed out to its logical
conclusion her own vision of the universe. Moloch had eaten his
children.
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