By Dennis Loo, 8/24/07
We do it, first of all, because it’s the right thing to do.
We do it irrespective of whether we expect to win. You don’t decide on what’s
right to do on the basis of whether or not you are guaranteed to win or if you
think you have a chance to win and you do a calculation about whether it’s
worthwhile or not – as if people’s lives and the planet’s future and all of its
creatures should be subjected to odds” calculations the way you”d do if you
were making a bet. We aren’t going to bet on people’s lives and we”re not going
to gamble with the planet’s fate. That’s for the other side to do.
Our adversaries say that torturing people and killing
innocent people – men, women and children – in the hundreds of thousands, is
worth it because it advances their goddamn empire and enriches them and their
friends” pockets. And their enablers, those complicit Democrats, those sorry
excuses for human beings, who say that “it’s off the table,” who say that “it’s
not worth it,” who say, lying through their teeth, that they “haven’t seen any
impeachable offenses,” who think to themselves that it’s in the best interests
of their party to keep the war and killing going longer and to keep Bush and
Cheney in office, these are the
people making these horrid calculations.
They want to convince us that, oh, yes, you”re right, we
don’t have the votes, it’s not going to succeed. They want us to believe that
you make decisions about whether you”re doing to fight against mass murder,
torture, dictatorial assertions of power, violations of the law and the
Constitution, massive illegal spying and so on by figuring out whether you
“have the votes.” You decide whether you”re going to fight injustice and
immorality and murderers and torturers on the basis of whether or not you think
you can win? What kind of immoral logic is that?! We say fuck that.
We don’t have to lie and we don’t have to suppress science
and we don’t have to oppress people. They do. They have to do all of these
things because if they don’t, they can’t possibly get their way. In order to
get their way, they have to do deeply immoral, barbaric, monstrous things – daily,
hourly, minute by minute.
So when we talk to people about why they should Declare It
Now and Wear Orange, we have a lot of reasons we can and should give them,
including that our strategy can work and we can win, but the most important argument we have is this: fighting tyrants, war criminals and
torturers is the right thing to do. It’s the only right thing to do. You cannot go along and remain silent
because to do so is to be a colluder and a Good German. You cannot wiggle out
of this if you have a conscience. What’s the counter-argument to our moral
stance? THERE IS NO COUNTER-ARGUMENT. There is no moral counter-argument.