For that matter, why do they confuse evil and cowardice?
When a hostage gets executed by terrorists, that hostage is a victim, not a hero.
When a terrorist executes a hostage, that makes them evil, not cowards.
The worst thing is that I can’t correct people about this irritating tendency without looking like a bit of a dick, like I’m trying to take something away from a dead guy or extend some sort of respect to a terrorist.
I first noticed this idiotic tendency on 9/11 and it has bothered me ever since. Its one thing to refer to the passengers of flight 93 or the emergency responders as heroes but up until very recently people were referring to all the victims of 9/11 as heroes. And I still hear people refer to the guys that flew the planes into the twin towers as cowards. Ever since then I’ve noticed that we do this sort of thing all the time.
Conflating cowardice with evil is bad for us. It makes it to easy to conflate physical bravery with morality.
I don’t know that conflating victim and hero is also bad for us but it seems wrong.
Um. I consider some evils to be moral cowards. Unrelated to 9/11 (and predating it for a decade or so) a person who was technically a neighbor bought a small farm and built fences and turned pigs loose. In a neighboring county he was a garbageman. There were many rumors about what happened to his enemies (of which there were many, on both sides of the law). I think the man, who started his antisocial tendencies early by pissing out the schoolbus window on kids waiting for the bus, found the easy and amoral way (feeding dead opposers to his hogs) preferable to being what New England would consider a good neighbor- (quiet, unassuming, doesn’t come over). The urinating on schoolkids as a gradeschooler is documented. The enemy disposal never was. He was jailed for racketeering. Evil person.
The OP has a point- since 9/11 we do confuse/conflate the hero/victim. Flight 93 had heroes… to my knowledge the others were victims.
I can see what you (and Bill Maher before you) are getting at, but there’s a passage from the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. that I think is relevant. He was arrested during a protest, and while incarcerated wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail.
Terrorist like those on 9/11 are, ostensibly, acting for (what they believe to be) moral and/or political reasons. They want the U.S. out of the Middle East, or whatever. That’s fine, but if they believe they are suffering an injustice then let them address it and accept the consequences (as King did) in full view of the world. If we see you suffering and oppressed, we will help. But they don’t. Those who do the plotting and recruitment stay hidden and keep themselves safe. Those who act suffer only the consequences they inflict on themselves, and take innocent people with them.
Or, to put it another way (and I may have read these words on this board), cowards don’t sign their names.
That’s my take on it, at least. Whether the popular usage of “cowards” to describe terrorists is quite so nuanced I really couldn’t say.
The loose use of the word “hero” really bothers me. Not every fireman, policeman or soldier is a hero. Implying so, as people do every day cheapens both the word and the actual acts of heroism. The truth is, most people will never even be in a position to act heroically. You need something extraordinary happening, with someone’s life on the line, and then heroism might occur. This drives me nuts, and they all do it. Even, maybe even especially, the people on Fox News who are over eager to show respect and appreciation for service people. It’s really disgusting. Something akin to stolen valor.
You know, the old, “potato, potato” reference just doesn’t work on a message board :eek:
It’s simply a subjective question. I would call ANYONE who attacks an unsuspecting or defenseless person a “coward” whether they’re a terrorist or a common street thug. I would also call anyone who raises awareness of an evil person or organization (anyone like, for instance, a VICTIM, of some crime of that organization) a “hero”.
That’s just my particular view. You don’t have to share it.
People are just trying to be nice about the victim so compliment them by attributing to them a particularly esteemed status, regardless of merit. I’m not defending the practice, it annoys the hell out of me, but it’s inevitable.
Again, I’m not defending this, but there is an I think inevitable “regression to the mean” that occurs with all words that have a strong emotional impact. There are and always will be those that seek to overstate reality, and the result is that language continually cheapens, and new terms have to be invented or come into fashion to replace the terms that have lost their impact.
I will perhaps cop some criticism for saying so, but I think it is even more of a problem in US culture than elsewhere because of the US penchant for overblown emotional rhetoric in salesmanship and journalism.
I would not - a definition of “hero” which does not require some degree of intent isn’t worth much. Even a bollard can stop a bag snatcher if the guy runs into it as he tries to escape, but that doesn’t make the bollard a hero.
And I know what you mean, but I don’t think anything will change. Also when people refer to a suicide as cowardly. Have these people never had any experience with depression?
I completely disagree with your arguments. First, I generally speaking don’t buy into the concept of civil disobedience. If a a governement is oppressive, I have exactly zero moral issues with people secretely breaking its laws.
Second, there might be time and place where civil disobedience can have results. The USA in the 60s, about the specific issue of black people’s rights, might have been such an instance. But do you think that getting arrested in support of gay people’s rights, for instance, would have had any result during the same era and would you have advised homosexuals to openly break the law back then? I know that some people will invoke Godwin, but I don’t care : do you think the best course of action in Nazi Germany would have been to openly break the law and get arrested? And in the specific example you gave, do you think there was the most remote chance that a peaceful action by a middle-easterner would impress the American public so much that they would demand and obtain that their governement would, say, close its military bases in Saudi Arabia? Only the most hardcore pacifists would argue that peaceful action is always the best choice, and not even them would argue that this action should always be conducted openly.
Finally, it has nothing to do with cowardice or courage anyway. It’s quite obvious to me that flying a plane into a tower requires more bravery than letting the police arrest you after a protest. And those guys certainly “accepted the consequences”.
Frequent argument, but when was the last time an US president went to fight along with his men instead of “plotting and recruiting” from the White House? Leaders and generals stay safely long away from the front lines, that’s not something peculiar to terrorist organizations. If anything, probably the other way around. Leaders might not be blowing themselves up, but they’re not exactly left alone (see drones) and they put themselves much more at risk than western leaders do.
Are you saying the 9/11 terrorists did not accept the consequence of their actions? They died fer chrissake! They knew they were going to die in a fiery inferno and they made sure it happened, because they thought it served a higher cause. If that isn’t courage then the word has no meaning, and there has never been any military hero who died in battle, ever. In the light of their ideology, they were indeed heroes of the first order. The problem was that it was an evil ideology, leading them to employ very evil (not to mention stupid and, probably, ultimately counterproductive) means toward evil (or at least very dubious) ends. None of that detracts one whit from their very real courage, however.
King was courageous in his way, too, and for good rather than evil ends, but he did not put his life on the line anything like as directly as they did. He might well not have been assassinated, and would have lived out his days as an admired and respected figure. For goodness, he had them beat in every conceivable respect, and, no doubt, he pursued his ends in a much smarter and more effective way than they pursued theirs, but for sheer courage he doesn’t come close.
Conventional valor in warfare. Sure. OK, now, tell me what term would apply to someone who, say, launch a missile against people armed with AK-47 500 kms away? Is he displaying “conventional valor in warfare”? Especially when you know pretty well that [del] innocent people can be murdered [/del] there might be collateral damage. Isn’t it policy to risk such collateral damages rather that putting boots on the ground and risking the life of an US soldier? Shouldn’t we call that “cowardice”?
I don’t think “conventional valor” has been considered of any importance in warfare for some centuries. If you can kill the other guy without taking any risk yourself, it’s all the better. See Patton’s famous quote.
Again, I disagree with the use of the word “coward”. You might say misguided, evil, criminal, cruel, whatever, but coward doesn’t apply even in this case. You specifically excluded the executioner carrying out a legal order, but I’m not convinced it’s very different.
Because it makes for better propaganda to call people doing something you don’t like or otherwise wish to portray in a bad light “cowards”. If your guys blindside an enemy it’s a “clever ambush”; if the other guys do it then it’s a “cowardly sneak attack”.
The problem of course is that while calling enemies cowards makes for good propaganda it makes for bad strategy once people buy into the propaganda and assume that the “cowards” in question will in fact act cowardly.
Mohammed Atta conceived of, and did most of the plotting (and probably much of the recruitment) for the 9/11 attacks, and he died when the plane hit the tower, as he planned.
If you are talking about Osama bin Laden, his role was not instigator but bankroller of the operation. He did not dupe Atta, or anybody else, into doing it (they duped themselves). Sure, he did not do anything particularly courageous as part of the 9/11 operation itself, but he was not the prime mover of it anyway, and his considerable courage as a fighter, during the Afghan fight against the Soviets, is well attested.
Neither Atta nor bin Laden were bad people because they were cowards (which they decidedly were not). They were bad people because they did some very bad things for some very bad reasons.
This drives me crazy, too. I’ve been known to yell “Are you telling me there isn’t one guy in the entire military who hides behind a table whenever shots are fired???” at the TV.
