Evil Pacifists?

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note

The casualties mount. B-52s are back in the carpet-bombing business, and the United States is littering Afghanistan with unexploded cluster bombs that await the lethal curiosity of Afghan children. Hospitals, nursing homes, villages, and the Red Cross (twice) fall victim to the U.S. aerial assault. The Taliban say the bombing has killed 1,500 civilians. The Pentagon says that number is exaggerated. But no matter the exact figures, war is taking its customary toll.

CNN believes it's unpatriotic to report these details without reminding viewers of the horrific casualties of September 11. "We must redouble our efforts to make sure we do not seem to be simply reporting from their vantage or perspective," CNN chairman Walter Isaacson said in a memo to his staff. Sure enough, one night when I went to CNN.com, I read a dispatch by Nic Robertson in Kandahar, who was writing about civilian casualties, and there was an editor's note at the end that tried to make those casualties seem justified.

Here at The Progressive, we do not believe it is our job to minimize the deaths of any innocent people, whether they are in the World Trade Center towers or in a home in Kandahar. But these days, that view is considered downright unpatriotic.

Commentators have declared open season on pacifists and other peace activists. Michael Kelly, a columnist for The Washington Post, was the most vituperative. "Pacifists are not serious people," he wrote on September 26. "In a situation where one's nation has been attacked--a situation such as we are now in--pacifism is, inescapably and profoundly, immoral. Indeed, in the case of this specific situation, pacifism is on the side of the murderers, and it's on the side of letting them murder again." (In case you missed his point, he also, in his last line, called the pacifist position "evil." Then he returned a week later to heap more scorn, calling pacifists "Liars...