So here’s something I came across yesterday (and forgive me if it takes a while to get to my point): the Atlantic had a piece observing that female presidents on TV tend to be Republican (whether that’s true or not, I don’t know; I don’t watch enough TV, and when the TV is on, it tends to be the Science Channel or the Food Network). In the comments section, out of nowhere, a commenter quoted Hilary Clinton as having said, “Women have always been the primary victims of war,” with the comment that this disqualifies her from the presidency.
I looked this up: this was from a speech at the First Ladies’ Conference on Domestic Violence, in El Salvador, in 1988, and she tied in domestic violence to the civil war in that country. Here’s the whole paragraph:
The experience that you have gone through is in many ways comparable to what happens with domestic violence. Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today’s warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children. Women are again the victims in crime and domestic violence as well. Throughout our hemisphere we have an epidemic of violence against women, even though there is no longer any organized warfare that puts women in the direct line of combat. But domestic violence is now recognized as being the most pervasive human rights violation in the world. Here in El Salvador, according to the statistics gathered by your government, 1 in 6 women have been sexually assaulted and the number of domestic abuse complaints at just one agency topped 10,000 last year. Between 25 and 50 percent of women throughout Latin America have reportedly been victims of domestic violence.
I pushed back on this, and another commenter replied by linking a report, “UN Says Women, Children Are Biggest Victims of War,” from Voice of America, but this report doesn’t really do much more than cite the UN and the Red Cross, and focus primarily on such issues as the lack of access to healthcare for pregnant women, as well as the frequency with which women are raped by the occupying army.
Now, I imagine that a part of how the UN judges women to suffer more than men is by differentiating between civilians and military, and asserting that anyone in the military is just a part of the fight, and not a “victim” per se, though I think the Soviets, who lost more than a third of their young, and even middle-aged, men (36% of men ages 20 – 34 and 33% of those 35 – 49, per Wikipedia), would beg to differ. Such a mindset assumes that each army was equally spoiling for a fight, rather than one army invading a country and another army defending. And in either case, it certainly has happened plenty often that an invading army, yes, may have enslaved the women, but only after killing the men — or conscripting them for forced labor.
But that’s not the direction this comments-discussion took. Instead, here’s the response:
I’m not saying men only die in combat. What I’m saying is that when you’re dead, you are dead and can’t suffer anymore. However, women will go on to endure many more horrors that are worse than death as will many men.
Now, I don’t want to make too much of this — it’s just one person.
But: consider two people detraining at Auschwitz. One goes left, the other goes right. Left was instant death. Right might have been a slow death, with nothing but unremitting suffering beforehand, or might have meant survival — not that the living conditions in the camps were meant to ensure anything other than a slow death, and it’s my understanding that Auschwitz survivors were, in general, either recent arrivals, or were shunted to a camp with better conditions after a time, or were the fortunate few who managed to acquire better treatment — a more desirable job, a chance to sell smuggled valuables, even just befriending the right person, to get their serving of the soup from the bottom, with vegetables. But, in any case, of anyone who suffered the misery of the camps only to die before liberation, you could say, “fate worse than death.” But for a survivor, who after release, restarts life, perhaps immigrates to Israel or the United States, who marries and has children and grandchildren — no, of course not. The women of Soviet-occupied Germany and Poland may have wished to be dead in the weeks and months after the Soviets came, but, eventually, the authorities decided to establish law and order.
And I suspect this attitude, that there can be some things, indeed a great many things that are a “fate worse then death” — whether it’s a long-term disability or a short term horror — is not unique to this commenter, but part and parcel of a general approach, in which death is not a bright line any longer. Abortion? Euthanasia? It seems that, to many, it’s not as important whether someone lives or dies, but just one part of a bigger equation — and I’m not speaking of morality so much as an overall perception in society about how the world works.
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