(Photo by Aidan Bartos on Unsplash)
(See Part 2: The Voice of Evil on Flight 93)
There is yet a further reason why the release of the Flight 93 recording is worthy of mention and I draw attention to it. As I mentioned in Part 1, this recording is exceptional in that it offers us the opportunity to listen to a particularly well documented…lie. And we are not just talking about a minor stretch of the truth:
Ziad Jarrah: “Hi, this is the captain. We’d like you all to remain seated. There is a bomb aboard. And we are going to turn back to the airport. And they have our demands so please remain quiet.”
There is murder behind this lie. Despite its seeming innocuous appearance we already know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the speaker fully intends to murder every single passenger on that plane, and in fact did so.
We also know that passengers aboard Flight 93 ultimately decided to confront that lie, though too late to save their own lives.
Moral Paralysis is born from the lie that so many pacifists desperately want to be true; the lie that you can successfully negotiate with anyone. However, that lie is based on the assumption that everyone is like you, and wants more or less the same kinds of things that you want.
No matter how willing you are to negotiate as a passenger, when your pilot is hell-bent on crashing the plane into something, “negotiation” will be limited to where the plane crashes, not whether it will land.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a dedicated pacifist until confronted with the incontrovertible evil that was Adolph Hitler and his followers. Among Hitler’s followers were Joseph and Magda Goebbels. who were so dedicated to the success of national socialism that they chose to fatally poison each of their six children, and kill themselves, rather than live in a world without it. Negotiation can easily become nothing more than appeasement when you are negotiating with those who would rather experience death, and the death of those dearest to them, than let go of their utopian dreams.
