We read in our school books how the Christian crusades were established to take Jerusalem from the Muslims. And if we are fortunate enough we come to know only later that the crusaders, in the name of God, killed, stole and committed atrocities along their way to Jerusalem especially against Jews and Muslims.

Time have certainly changed for the better and now we have our democracies founded on the principle to make money in the name of God. And one metaphor to describe this founding principle is found in our tradition to have the motto IN GOD WE TRUST on our coins. But now as we have been developing a sophisticated social and economic system founded on the supremacy of corporations over people we have newer metaphors describing our democracies such as "ONE DOLLAR ONE VOTE" and the "COMMODIFICATION OF GOODS AND SERVICES." That is our aspiration to freedom is pursued by purchasing the commodified goods and services of the big corporations in the so called Free Market.

Our social life is dominated by this Free Market and everything has a price, including our lives. And in fact, our corporations have intellectual copyrights on our lives and we put a price on the civilian casualties caused by military interventions to defend our Free Market around the world.

 And this is what bothers me the most, the hypocrisy of our political leaders in commodifying the price of civilian casualties of our military interventions. So the Taliban have been saying that so far the bombing in Afghanistan has caused the death of some 1,500 innocent civilians while our military commanders are disputing this figure as too high for the collateral price of our war against terrorism.

I only hope that the price to protect our way of life is not going to be greater than the one experienced in Iraq when the US Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright stated that the deaths of half million children was worth it.

References

Pertinent articles published in Ensign

Commodification. Term used by New Historicism and Cultural Materialism http://omni.cc.purdue.edu/~felluga/commodification.html

US Intensifies Bombing, by William Branigin and Doug Struck, Washington Post, November 1, 2001 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21114-2001Oct31.html

60 Minutes segment, Punishing Saddam (airdate May 12, 1996) http://home.att.net/~drew.hamre/docAlb.htm