I am usually at first bemused but then aghast by the lack of moral courage or logic displayed by pundits regarding whether the world's leading military powers should choose to strike Syria for its recent use of chemical weapons. I know I sound callous, but are people any more or less dead when they are murdered with a chemical agent than with a bullet or machete?
I understand that the world justly views Nazis as the paradigm of evil, but were the Jews and other non-Aryan enough people killed by the Nazis any less dead at the begining of WWII when the Nazis weapons of mass murder happened to be carbon monoxide being piped back into trucks (really a chemical agent) and bullets? Were they more dead after the Nazis began to use Zyklon B gas?
Perhaps the West is against mass murder when it can be carried out in a relatively quick and impersonal manner? Is this why people have such an aversion to chemical (and nuclear) weapons?
Is the West against any type of mass murder, or is the West only concerned with mass murder by chemical agent. Or is the West only against quick modes of mass murder, but slow death from torture and starvation (think Nazi Ghettos, Soviet Gulags, or North Korean Prison Camps) are somehow more palatable?
Or is the West only against mass murder when it judges that it is in its own strategic self interest to be against mass murder?
Or maybe the West is only against mass murder when in their own view the side being murdered cannot defend itself?
Regarding Syria, mass murder has been going on for an extended period of time. Suddenly the use of chemical weapons to carry out the mass murder has aroused the consciousness and consciences of the West.
Personally, I am just against mass murder.
Of course, military calculations need to be made to ascertain if and how mass murder can be stopped completely or at least minimized. But to act morally indignant when chemical weapons are used while ignoring mass murder seems to be morally obscene.
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