January 07, 2006
costs of appeasement...
Jonah Goldberg, on the movie Munich:
It didn't make my column, but one thing that bugged me was the constant emphasis on money. The Israeli hit squad was told to keep their receipts. They kept a running tally of how expensive everything was, etc etc.
I got the sense that what Spielberg and Kushner were trying to communicate was that "vengeance" is expensive not just morally, but financially as well. We could be spending the money on better things, in other words. But one has to wonder whether in the rest of the world that message (as intellectually and morally bankrupt as it is) will rise above the more superficial message that Jews are always concerned with money...
People who portray Jews as obsessing over money are NOT trying to convey any lofty message. My guess is that it's simply anti-Semitism. Or perhaps just the typical position of a millionaire Hollywood Lefty, expressing disdain for ordinary people who have to worry about money. Which the Israelis probably did; Israel was a poor country with a crushing defense burden. And despite support from terror-supporting dictators and European Eloi-states, the terrorists probably had their own money worries, and their own budgets---but nobody ever portrays them as money-grubbers.
"Expensive morally and financially." I disagree totally. It was morally correct to hunt down and kill those murderers. It was the only way justice could be done, and the only way to prevent them from murdering others, and a necessary step to discourage future terrorism. Appeasing terrorists is equivalent to murder, and we are fighting a war now partly because the world did not give Israel its full support in the fight against Palestinian terrorists. And Spielberg is now helping to cause future wars by his moral equivalence about terrorists. Spielberg is a murderer.
The financial point is just laughable. Slaughtering terrorists is about the best financial investment the world can make. They are now costing the world's economies trillions of dollars a year, if you combine direct costs plus opportunity costs plus the costs of uncertainty.
Posted by John Weidner at January 7, 2006 06:36 AM"Eloi-states". I like that. I wish more people would read H. G. Wells, both to open their minds, and to see just how badly wrong a socialist can get things. ("Things to Come" comes to mind.)
Posted by: Hale Adams at January 7, 2006 03:00 PMYou haven't seen the movie, have you?
Yes, its morally correct to hunt down and kill the murderers. But the point Spielberg makes in the movie is that the Israeli "hit" squad have an imcomplete list, so after getting those involved in Munich they begin going after those who might have been involved, and then those who might be able to give information on those involved, and eventually begin taking revenge killings on the family members of those who may or may not have been involved. And eventually the protagonist of the story begins to conclude in the name of vengence he has become what he set out to kill...a terrorist.
FYI - its the warning many (including several GOPers) have been trying to get across to the Bushites. When you condemn certain behavior (torture and murder, for example), but then start using it yourself and justify it by saying the other guy does it, then you become the other guy and you've lost all moral superiority. You are then no better or worse than those you fight, if you behave as they do.
Posted by: Zoomie at January 9, 2006 12:06 AMHave I seen "Munich"? No. Except to watch the first three "Harry Potter" movies, I haven't been to a movie theater since "Back to the Future III" came out in, what, 1988...?
As for your interpretation of what Spielberg is trying to say in "Munich", I have to wonder what bearing it has on reality. Please notice that Israel hasn't lost any Olympic athletes to terrorism since then. So, maybe the terrorists got a message, hmmm?
Posted by: Hale Adams at January 9, 2006 02:36 PMYup, so bombing civilians made the Allies no better than the Germans or the Japanese.
Unrestricted submarine warfare cost us the moral high ground against the Axis, whatever the benefits in strangling the Japanese economy.
The fact that we might have put the Japanese in Manzanar means that we're no better than the prison guards who mounted the Bataan Death March.
Kill a civilian by accident, and you're really Osama bin Laden in miniature.
It's not moral equivalence, it's that we're no better than those we fight.
Posted by: Lurking Observer at January 9, 2006 02:37 PM
