Bloody Civilian Quotes

According to one scholar, the “ideal victim” in the Troubles was someone who was not a combatant, but a passive civilian. To many, Jean McConville was the perfect victim: a widow, a mother of ten. To others, she was not a victim at all, but a combatant by proxy, who courted her own fate. Of course, even if one were to concede, for the sake of argument, that McConville was an informer, there is no moral universe in which her murder and disappearance should be justified. Must it be the case that how one perceives a tragedy will forever depend on where one sits? The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once observed that, “for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic group, sometimes even at the edge of a village.” When it came to the Troubles, a phenomenon known as “whataboutery” took hold. Utter the name Jean McConville and someone would say, What about Bloody Sunday? To which you could say, What about Bloody Friday? To which they could say, What about Pat Finucane? What about the La Mon bombing? What about the Ballymurphy massacre? What about Enniskillen? What about McGurk’s bar? What about. What about. What about.

But nothing has ever expressed the general, gut-felt moral revulsion against city-bombing better than a virtually unknown article, from firsthand experience, by America’s most famous writer at the time, Ernest Hemingway, in July 1938. It’s still little known because he wrote it, by request, for the Soviet newspaper Pravda, which published it in Russian; his manuscript in English didn’t surface143 for forty-four years. It conveys in words the same surreal images that Picasso had rendered on canvas the year before. His lead sentence: “During the last fifteen months I saw murder done in Spain by the Fascist invaders. Murder is different from war.” Hemingway was describing what he had seen of fascist bombing of workers’ housing in Barcelona and shelling of civilian cinemagoers in Madrid. You see the murdered children with their twisted legs, their arms that bend in wrong directions, and their plaster powdered faces. You see the women, sometimes unmarked when they die from concussion, their faces grey, green matter running out of their mouths from bursted gall bladders. You see them sometimes looking like bloodied bundles of rags. You see them sometimes blown capriciously into fragments as an insane butcher might sever a carcass. And you hate the Italian and German murderers who do this as you hate no other people. … When they shell the cinema crowds, concentrating on the squares where the people will be coming out at six o’clock, it is murder. … You see a shell hit a queue of women standing in line to buy soap. There are only four women killed but a part of one woman’s torso is driven against a stone wall so that blood is driven into the stone with such force that sandblasting later fails to clean it. The other dead lie like scattered black bundles and the wounded are moaning or screaming.

Firstly, Inspector,” Miss Trent interrupted. “The safety of the Society’s members is paramount to me. Secondly, I have the utmost trust in Lady Owston and Mr Locke. They would’ve intervened had Miss Webster not returned when expected. Therefore, your accusations are without foundation. They are also symptomatic of your categorical hatred of the Bow Street Society, and of what we are trying to do.” “Which is what, exactly?” “Ensuring justice is served for those who ask for it.” “And putting your members’ lives at risk in the process!” “Enough, Inspector!” Miss Trent stood and glared down at him. In a heartbeat, he, too, was on his feet. Towering over her five feet seven inches with his six feet four, he bellowed, “You will listen to me, Miss Trent, and you will listen carefully!” Miss Trent put her hand on her hip but remained silent. “If you and your Society insist on facing danger unnecessarily, you will do so under my terms. You will give me a full list of your members so I, and the Metropolitan Police, can stop them from being murdered, attacked, and robbed. Try to justify what you do as much as you like, Miss Trent, but, at the end of the day, you are all just bloody civilians playing at a copper’s game!” “And yet, we are the ones people look to when the police refuse to help them,” Miss Trent retorted as she stepped closer to the desk. Leaning forward, so their faces were mere inches apart, she went on, “Not every case we investigate is a crime, Inspector, and our clients expect discretion with the confidences they grant us.

The scale of the cruelty and suffering and loss was beyond my comprehension. The most famous number, of course, was six million: the number of Jews killed by the Nazis as they implemented the madness of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” But tens of millions more had died, too—another forty million civilians, by some reckonings, and twenty-five million soldiers. Although some four hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were killed in three and a half years of fighting—a dreadful toll, to be sure—American losses represented only a tiny fraction of the war’s total. In China, the war dead totaled nearly four million soldiers and sixteen million civilians as Japan’s armies cut a deadly swath through China. The Soviet Union lost twenty million people as well, almost equally divided between soldiers and civilians, as the German army ground itself down in a prolonged and bloody eastern campaign. Seventy-two million deaths, by bombings, firestorms, massacres, diseases, starvation. How was it possible, I wondered, for so many people to die in such a short time without the very fabric of civilization collapsing? And

Israel’s response to these demonstrations was deadly. Each week, Israeli snipers opened fire on the protesters, ultimately killing hundreds and wounding thousands over the course of the year-long protests. The scenes of bloodied protesters, journalists, and medics were shocking and heart-wrenching. In our classes, we had learned that, according to the Fourth Geneva Convention, it was illegal for Israel to target unarmed civilians like this, and that, in so doing, it may have been committing a war crime.

The morality of the situation becomes more complicated when compared to the massive US bombing campaign that intentionally killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Germany and Japan during World War II. Whereas this campaign was much more brutal than the Madrid bombings, it is generally considered acceptable. The discrepancy that we may entertain between condemning the Madrid bombers (easy) and condemning the even more bloody-handed American pilots (not so easy, perhaps because among them we may find our own relatives — my grandfather, for example) should make us question whether our condemnation of terrorism really has anything to do with a respect for life.

The obliteration of two cities of civilians avoided what would surely have been a bloody invasion against a radicalized nation that was using suicide bombers, but it also exposed the dark side of the power that science could unleash, and the horrific consequences that can arise when ethics lag behind knowledge.