PREEMPTIVE TERROR AS THE OUNCE OF PREVENTION
Crime in the name of God, Justice, National Defense, and Public Safety: The New Administration seeks to restore assassination as Legitimate State Policy. Nations have always indulged in the covert neutralization of enemies. But only in America could a defender of capital punishment seek formal exemption from the international ban against assassination as government policy. The new administration would establish a novel public domain of government service. While Capital Punishment would still be reserved for private murderers, state-sponsored killers would be considered civil servants and pensioned after retirement.
All this would be done in the name of protecting Americans from foreign terrorists, by means of an ex-post-facto process of murder, eliminating them before they can harm us. As Benjamin Franklin had written, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
What is reassuring about this quest for legitimacy is the deference it pays to Law and Order. It required 200 years to develop the liberties and immunities we now enjoy. It may take much less time to lose them.
AN OFFENSE AGAINST HUMANITY
On December 7th, 1941, in a gross breach of traditional naval politesse, the nation of Japan, not yet at war with us, attacked and destroyed an American base with the resulting loss of many superannuated ships and aircraft, and many lives, most of them not obsolescent at all. The event ruffled the composure and ruined the afternoon of the American president, who commemorated the infamy with a declaration that will live as long as the nation endures. More than sixty years after, an American nuclear submarine returned the discourtesy by ramming and sinking a Japanese fishing vessel, near the same waters, with the loss of 9 Japanese lives, including schoolchildren and their teachers.
An American newspaper described the catastrophe with striking matter-of-factness in the best tradition of laconic journalism, that is to say, a total absence of outrage or fellow feeling. It is as if the sacrifice of children to a Moloch rising from the sea were an everyday affair. Though infinitesimally smaller in scale than the horror at Hiroshima, this equals it in ghastliness, setting the blood to boil.
What can or should be done about it? The American people, through our President, should apologize to the Japanese people. American schoolchildren should observe a day of contrition. The submarine should be scuttled for an offense against humanity, and its officers should render lifelong condolence to the parents and children of the world. War and its instruments, lethal whether triggered deliberately or by accident, should everywhere be condemned and neutralized. A new Peace of God should be declared, so that the serenity of the Creator ceases to be affronted.