Where does the Blame Lay?

I picked this up from Michael Totten. Who in turn got it from Powerline.

It’s always struck me that casualties resulting from natural disasters inspire less horror than those caused by violence. More people have been killed today by tidal waves in Asia than have been killed in the last year and a half of violence in Iraq. Yet it is unlikely that today’s earthquake will stay in the news for more than a day or two. I’m not sure why this is, but, frankly, I share the tendency to pay much greater attention to political violence than to natural disasters. But that shouldn’t make us indifferent to the tragedy suffered by so many today in South Asia.

This is a little different than my usual posts. Sometimes different is good — this is one of those times.

He (Michael Totten) posted on why the Asian earthquake will be out of the headlines in a couple days, which will more than likely be replaced with a suicide bomber killing 4 to 5 people.

Political violence is human violence; the other is a natural disaster. The difference is control. We have control over the political violence. The natural disasters just happen. We can’t stop it. We are helpless in the face of them.

This is not true with political violence. It doesn’t just happen. We can control it (if not directly then indirectly). Political violence has intent, it’s calculating. With this intent it’s reasonable to think that that intent can be changed.

A distinction between the two is blame. Shifting blame or responsibility to someone else when someone is killed/murdered it’s easy. You know the cause and it can be rectified by killing the killer. When a tidal wave kills someone, we really can’t blame the tidal wave. Even if we did what could be done about it? Nothing.