Post-Mortem Child Abuse

I'm going to be charitable here.

I have a son. I think if he died, a big part of my soul would die - and a chunk of my mind, too. If he were murdered, bigger parts of both would be in jeopardy. If he were murdered in a horrendous, grisly fashion on the world stage, I'm sure I'd be mentally and emotionally much the worse for wear, at the very best.

Michael Berg is no relation, but I think we have that much in common. Again, I'm trying to be charitable.

But his article in the WaPo today makes charity difficult. It counts, I think, as ex post facto child abuse. I try to go sparingly on the hyperbole - but it may be the single most sickening thing I've ever read in my whole life.

Berg, a lefty and alleged member of International ANSWER, the neostalinist group that demonstrated in favor of Saddam Hussein before and during the war, has a long history of, to say the least, bizarre activity, with hatred of the Bush Administration beiing the unifying factor.

Read his WaPo piece. If you're feeling awash in Judeochristian charity, you might chalk it up to the insanity of losing his son amplifying his pre-established barking-moonbat tendencies. If not, you might think he's a horribly-morally-disfigured person, defective in ways that can't even be analyzed.

Whatever you chalk it up to, he writes:

My son, Nick, was my teacher and my hero. He was the kindest, gentlest man I know; no, the kindest, gentlest human being I have ever known. He quit the Boy Scouts of America because they wanted to teach him to fire a handgun. Nick, too, poured into me the strength I needed, and still need, to tell the world about him.

This I don't doubt.

People ask me why I focus on putting the blame for my son's tragic and atrocious end on the Bush administration. They ask: "Don't you blame the five men who killed him?" I have answered that I blame them no more or less than the Bush administration, but I am wrong: I am sure, knowing my son, that somewhere during their association with him these men became aware of what an extraordinary man my son was. I take comfort that when they did the awful thing they did, they weren't quite as in to it as they might have been. I am sure that they came to admire him.

I read this, and sat for a moment exaclty as I'm sitting now, on reading it for the fourth time; agog, mute with the realization that we are dealing with a man who has departed controlled moral flight, and is living in a fantasy world where he believes the terrorist butchers were capable of seeing their victim as anything other than Yudeh, pronounced about the same as Jude. and with all the attendent metaphorical implications.

That other Berg goes on:

I am sure that the one who wielded the knife felt Nick's breath on his hand and knew that he had a real human being there. I am sure that the others looked into my son's eyes and got at least a glimmer of what the rest of the world sees. And I am sure that these murderers, for just a brief moment, did not like what they were doing.

Michael Berg - why do you "feel" that?

For as part of this fantasy, it's also certainly possible to believe that a suicide bomber looks into the eyes of a toddler in a stroller, and the toddler's father, and feels a shred of their humanity - the joys and cares and love that animates them - before she pulls the toggle and eviscerats them all with flying shrapnel.

Right?

Because it's all really Sharon's fault?

We proceed:

George Bush never looked into my son's eyes. George Bush doesn't know my son, and he is the worse for it. George Bush, though a father himself, cannot feel my pain, or that of my family, or of the world that grieves for Nick, because he is a policymaker, and he doesn't have to bear the consequences of his acts. George Bush can see neither the heart of Nick nor that of the American people, let alone that of the Iraqi people his policies are killing daily.

Donald Rumsfeld said that he took responsibility for the sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners. How could he take that responsibility when there was no consequence? Nick took the consequences.

Again I sit. Too dumbfounded to even scratch my head in wonder.

How to react to this...thing? This myopic subordination of the memory of your son, this cynical, amoral exploitation of the horror of his death, to bolster the morale of a bunch of apologists for tyrannical genocidalists?

A stringent Den-Bestian/JoeCarterian analysis of his fallacies? Like spraying Lysol on a turd.

A piqued, Rachel-Lucas-like "What an asshat?" Lets him off too easy.

I'll sit for a moment. Maybe it'll come to me as you read:

Even more than those murderers who took my son's life, I can't stand those who sit and make policies to end lives and break the lives of the still living. ...

...So what were we to do when we in America were attacked on September 11, that infamous day? I say we should have done then what we never did before: stop speaking to the people we labelled our enemies and start listening to them. Stop giving preconditions to our peaceful coexistence on this small planet, and start honouring and respecting every human's need to live free and autonomously, to truly respect the sovereignty of every state. To stop making up rules by which others must live and then separate rules for ourselves.

Right. Because the Arab World lives freely and autonomously. And the butchers who KILLED YOUR SON, YOU WORTHLESS TUB OF...you deluded little man, are fighting for that free, autonomous society that celebrates the dignity of every father's son.

Just like they celebrated the freedom and autonomy of Dan Pearl, and Nick Berg, and the toddlers ripped apart in Tel Aviv, and the Haitian immigrant pulverized in the World Trade Center.

Again, I can't think of a cogent response.

We, the people of this world, now need to act on our beliefs. We need to let the evildoers on both sides of the Atlantic know that we are fed up with war. We are fed up with the killing and bombing and maiming of innocent people. We are fed up with the lies. Yes, we are fed up with the suicide bombers, and with the failure of the Israelis and Palestinians to find a way to stop killing each other. We are fed up with negotiations and peace conferences that are entered into on both sides with preset conditions that preclude the outcome of peace. We want world peace now.

I need a minute here. I'm still too pissed to type.

OK. I'm back.

One of the great casualities of war is the humanity of ones' enemies; when the guy in the foxhole across the clearing ceases to be human, and becomes just another Kraut, Yanqui Peegdog, Jap, Boche, Hun, Gaijin, Towelhead, Infidel, My or Gook. It's an inevitable end result of prolonged warfare.

And what we see here is the same phenomenon - in reverse. Michael Berg credits his enemies - animated by an eliminationist anti-Semitism that recognized his son's humanity no more than a Klansman would have recognized that of a Freedman - with more humanity than he does his countrymen, who it would seem he regards as the real enemy.

The lowest form of evil, some say, is the denial of truth - no, the abnegation of the truth. Michael Berg, Stalinist apologist from International ANSWER, abnegates moral truth as well as reality when he credits his son's butchers, straight from the world of fantasy, with a sense of charity that is inimical to their sick view of their faith, to try to influence the equally weak-minded and deluded.

Is Michael Berg evil?

Or should we be charitable, and stick with sick, deluded, and irrational with grief?

I don't know yet.

Posted by Mitch at May 21, 2004 05:36 PM