In
the first months after the Benghazi attack, the most urgent question,
and one only rarely asked, was "What were Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton doing during the seven and a half hours between the initial
emergency communications from Benghazi and the final American deaths?" A
negative answer was provided in February by Leon Panetta: they were not engaging with their subordinates; they were not contacting anyone to discuss options; they were giving no orders for action; they remained entirely uninvolved.
We
are left to speculate about the positive answer to that question. Were
they sleeping? Curled up by the fire with a good manifesto? Playing
poker with Huma and the gang? Practicing jokes for a fundraising
speech? Your guess is as good as mine.
And none of these guesses really matter in the end, compared to the looming horror that attends any of thepossibilities,
namely this: the president and secretary of state of the most powerful
nation on Earth are impervious to shame. They can do -- they have done
-- what you hope you could never do, what you pray your
children will never be able to do, what psychologists fill academic
journals attempting to explain. They were informed that their
countrymen -- their appointees -- were being attacked, were issuing
repeated cries for help, and, if nothing were done to intercede, were
likely to be killed. Knowing this, and knowing, further, that they had
at their disposal the most powerful military in the world, no risk of
personal harm, and many subordinates prepared to leap into action at
their word, they blithely walked away from the desperate men pleading
for their help, and carried on with whatever they happened to be doing
that night. They let other men suffer unto death without
lifting a finger to help, or even indicating a moment's regret for their
inaction after the fact.
They
demonstrated a cold lack of interest in the suffering of others -- not
the abstract, theoretical suffering of collective interest groups, such
as "the poor" or "gays" or "women," but the real physical pain and
mortal terror-style suffering of individual human beings in mortal
crisis.
Walking
home one evening, you hear men across the street shouting for help, as
they are in the process of being overwhelmed by a gang of thugs. You
walk away, unconcerned with their cries or the sounds of bats smacking
down on their flesh. You do not call the police or volunteer any
assistance. You go to bed and sleep well. The next day, and each
subsequent day, you carry on with your life of fun, friends, and
self-indulgence, never giving a second thought to the men who died
because you did not care to help. If a neighborhood reporter asks you
about the crime, you put on your gravest voice and say, "Gosh, that's so
sad; I hope they find the creeps who did it."
That
is what Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did on September 11 and 12,
2012, and what they have continued to do in the months since. God save a
nation in the hands of men and women with souls of this nature. For a
man without shame or the capacity for the most primal forms of
fellow-feeling is a man who has no internal, self-imposed limits on what
he might do to achieve his ends. If the suffering of others is
absolutely nothing to him; if literal cries for help do not stir in him
painful feelings that can only be alleviated by prompt action or,
failing that, by interminable days of shame and self-loathing, then
there is nothing -- apart from pragmatic calculations -- to prevent him
from doing anything that seems to serve his ends. For it is
the awareness of the rightful existence and potential suffering of other
men that serves as our internal limit.
And,
for that matter, how does a man impervious to the plight, the fear, the
anguish, and the simple will to live of other human beings choose
his own ends? What prevents him from choosing ends which entail or
require the suffering and sacrifice of other people, if he is incapable
of recognizing -- at the moral and emotional level -- the dignity, the
value, the slender thread of breath linking an individual human being to
the divine for its achingly short span of life? Such a brute is
limited only by external restraint, specifically by the law. Once he
himself becomes the maker of laws, either actually or in his
own mind, he is utterly without limits. For now his inability to
appreciate the individual existence of others is divorced from the fear
of punishment or personal pain that might have stopped him from acting
out the lusts and whims of his monstrous inner life.
Progressivism,
socialism, Marxism -- call it what you will -- is an authoritarian
strategy masked as a political theory. At its core is the premise that
the state has full authority, in the name of "the people," to do any
number of things which would have been almost universally recognized,
throughout human history, as shameful acts. In the name of "equality"
and "justice," progressives claim the authority to take one man's
rightfully earned possessions by force, and simply give them to other
men; to remove children forcibly from their parents, and raise them
according to precepts that may be antithetical to everything the parents
believe; to retard the intellectual and moral development of every
citizen through an aggressive, coercive program of indoctrination
through government schools, aimed at producing a submissive underclass
of competent but unambitious adults; to determine, by edict, who may or
may not be permitted to pursue life-preserving medical treatment, and
under what conditions that treatment may be provided; and so on through
the litany of moral violations recast as "services," and even "rights,"
by collectivist despots and their bureaucratic minions.
There
must have been a moment near the end for each of the men who lost their
lives in Benghazi, and perhaps particularly for Tyrone Woods and Glen
Doherty who died many hours after the violence began, when they realized
their situation was all but hopeless, that no help was coming, that
their urgent calls and messages were meeting with silence in
Washington. If there is a Hell, and it has the poetic perfection of
Dante's, it is reasonable to suppose that this feeling -- "I am alone,
vulnerable, and abandoned" -- will be the eternal fate of two people who
knew these men's predicament and had the power of the world at their
fingertips, but who did not care to try to help. The deaths of four
Americans -- their fear, courage, and pain -- will not have been in vain
if the most essential lesson of Benghazi is well-learned, and
long-remembered. For Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton revealed
themselves as today's "democratic" progressives rarely do. They
revealed, to be exact, that they are, at heart, what all leading
progressive authoritarians have been: conscienceless; without basic
human empathy; dismissive of, and unfeeling about, life itself (except
their own); constitutionally incapable of considering as significant or
meaningful any harm their actions or inaction may cause to other "mere
individuals" -- in short, monsters.
Homer,
composing his epic tales for a society dominated by war and its
frequent and sudden losses, coined a term for the essential life force
of an individual man, a term designed at once to dignify the individual
dying warrior, and to fill all hearers with wonder and a moral shiver at
the fleetingness of it all: psuch�" -- literally, "breath." There is the root, linguistically and philosophically, of our word psyche, i.e., soul.
Human life is breath, and thus death a mere exhalation. A biological
fact transformed through poetry into the essential glory and tragedy of
our existence. With what horrifying ease may a man be dispatched from
this world -- from the company of his comrades, the home of his family,
the embrace of his beloved, and the society of his fellow citizens. In
the end, a man's life is just an invisible wisp of air, barely felt and
quickly lost. We cling to and cherish life because, deep down, we know
this of ourselves. We begin our journey to full humanity, however, when
we recognize and respect this truth in others. To fail in
this initial stage of our moral journey is to become something other
than human, something lower, something degraded and ugly.
Creatures
of such failed moral development are currently, unthinkably, the most
powerful men and women on the planet. We are sometimes given to
wondering, in the face of one or another of the progressives' assaults
on individual freedom, natural rights, and human dignity, how they
cannot see what inhuman conditions they are imposing on their fellow
men. The problem is worse than that. As Benghazi teaches, these
monsters, unlike their hypnotized followers, do see what they are doing, but they are simply incapable of giving a damn.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/05/benghazi_reveals_the_heart_of_progressivism.html at May 15, 2013 - 07:48:30 AM CDT
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