“The great political affliction of the 20th century,” notes Thomas Sowell in a recent colum, “was putting abstractions ahead of flesh-and-blood human beings, especially in ideological totalitarian states under Nazism and Communism.”

Yet even today, Sowell opines,

there are large and growing numbers of people — especially among the intelligentsia — whose starting point is some abstraction that they wish to apply to reality. For example, even in the face of a worldwide terrorist organization that has declared open warfare on every American man, woman and child, those whose starting point is abstraction focus on the ‘civil rights’ of terrorists.

[…]How can anyone have rights within a framework that he rejects and is trying to destroy? Rights are not just abstractions plucked out of thin air. Rights are part of a whole set of mutual obligations binding people together. If enemy soldiers have any rights, it is as a result of international agreements such as the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war. And they have those rights only after they have surrendered and become prisoners of war.

So long as they are still fighting, enemy soldiers do not even have the right to live, without which all other rights are meaningless. If these enemy soldiers have infiltrated wearing civilian clothes or disguised in the uniform of some other country, then they can be killed legally, even after surrendering. Spies have been shot or hanged for centuries.

[…]A sense of decency limits what we do to enemies […] but this is not a matter of rights, civil or otherwise. Nor is it a threat to the rights of American citizens when we fail to treat foreign terrorists as if they were American citizens. Citizens are people who have a legal obligation to play by certain rules, and who are therefore protected by that same national system of rules. But people who are trying to destroy both the citizens and the rules they live by have no such claim.

The irony to all this, of course, is that the self-same intelligensia that is (with regards to Gitmo, at least) closing ranks around abstract ideas such as “universal” civil rights (as distinct from those “rights” protected by contingent social contracts, such as treaties, constitutions, international accords, etc.) is the very group of “thinkers” who’ve spent the past thirty years developing an epistemology that undermines such metaphysical constructs in order to cultivate the philosophical ground for the kind of anti-universalism (or contingency-based “realism”) that they now — in this instance, and for their own political purposes — eschew…

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