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Connecting Terrorism and Civil Rights - a Dubious Link |
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Wednesday, 02 June 2004 |
A few weeks ago I attended a speech given by Condoleezza Rice. The speech largely centered around a discussion of her experience growing up in Alabama during the civil rights movement. Among other things, she drew a comparison between the acts of violence against African Americans and modern day terrorism.
At first the comparison struck me as insightful - church bombings and lynching are similar tactics to suicide bombings and assassination. But something bothered me about the comparison and I couldn't put my finger on it. After mulling it around I think I've narrowed it down to two things. First, violent acts of American racism grew from an established majority trying to keep a minority subjugated, modern terrorism grows from minority groups attempting to overthrow (or at least unsettle) the majority. Second, if there is any positive story to tell about racism in America it is the non-violent nature of the civil rights movement. Even the bloodshed of the civil war left a hundred years of legal racism.
Dr. Rice suggested current American involvement in Iraq was a continuation of the fight against terrorism that began with the civil rights movement, stating, "When the Founding Fathers said ‘We the people,’ they didn’t mean me; my ancestors were only three-fifths of a person. That view was wrong in Birmingham in 1963, and it is wrong in Baghdad in 2004."
Dr. Rice is exactly right - human rights should apply equally to all people, both people of African descent in America and Shiite Muslims in Baghdad. Unfortunately, Dr. Rice is willing to trade off relative freedoms - Iraqis are no longer oppressed by Saddam Hussein, but now face occupation by an American army; Israelis feel less threatened by terrorism, but Palestinians worry about their neighborhoods being bulldozed. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood the value of absolute freedoms and was unwilling to trade off the freedoms of the oppressors for those of the oppressed. He understood that a society of two groups who are 4/5ths free is no better than one with a group 5/5ths free and one 3/5ths free. Civil rights as a zero sum game makes nobody better off.
Imagine the now famous problem of segregation on a bus. The solution is not to put African Americans in the front and move the whites to the back, or to divide the bus longitudinally so half the front seats are for whites and half the front for blacks. The solution is for everyone to be free to sit where they please while respecting the freedom of others to choose their place.
There is an important distinction between taking up a seat on the bus then refusing to move and forcing someone to move to the back of the bus at gunpoint. Invading another country because you feel threatened by weapons of mass destruction or links to terrorism amounts to the latter solution. Comparing the current "war on terrorism" to the civil rights movement does a great disservice to one of the brightest moments of a violent century.
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