215. Is gassing people essentially distinct from other ways of killing them?

Back to Plato's "Slice nature at her joints" (that is, "choose words that make essential distinctions"), the problem raised by same-sex marriage (Post #199).  Isn't President Obama missing the joint when he draws a "red line" for Bashar al-Assad between gassing "his own people" (to speak as everybody from the General Secretary of the UN to John McCain speaks) and killing them in any of the dozen or so other ways he has been killing them?  "Shoot, burn, knife, bomb, strangle, torture, drown, club, gut and starve as you will but by God you gas and we're coming after you. "

I suppose any manner of killing that is distinctly more painful than another can justifiably be singled out.  We do that regularly with "torture," which makes a great difference in our willingness to use other words, like "civilized" and "enlightened," and, through our laws and administrative rules, determines whether or not officials are punished and the government embarrassed.  The first experience of poison gas in World War I put gassing in this category, I think.  "You're torturing people to death."

So maybe that's it.  The line President Obama is drawing is a line between civilization and barbarism, and Assad's crossing it will be a movement into barbarism that civilized nations cannot tolerate.  Obama, president of the nation with enough force to influence Assad, will be justified in using it.  He is defending civilization.

Suppose Assad, facing that kind of motivation, wanted to stay on the right side of the civilized-barbaric line but couldn't understand the big difference gassing makes.  Could we deliver our belief that it's distinctly more painful than other ways of killing?  A form of torture?  Not if Assad knows some history.  "More painful than the lingering agony of radiation sickness?" he will ask.  Indeed, nobody who knows the killing history of the civilized nations is going to believe that "gassing" makes an essential distinction.  Too many of those who died by other means have suffered as much, and all are just as dead.

Still, I think, "gassing" slices at a joint. But it's not a joint in nature.  It's a joint in us, formed by our psychological (and in a democracy therefore political) needs.  We need to be good, and we need signs of our goodness, especially after doubtful behavior.  Nothing is so trivial — buttons instead of zippers, worsted instead of lace, beef instead of pork, fish instead of beef — that it can't be a sign.  "I may have lied, cheated, and stolen but at least I didn't cross the line into forbidden food."  The slide into the tribal need is easy.  "We may have bombed and burned and machine-gunned and fragged and napalmed and land-mined but at least we didn't gas."

That not only gives us an easy way of calling ourselves good, it gives us an easy way to call others bad.  "You're bad — or evil, or, as John Kerry said yesterday of Assad, 'morally obscene.' You gas."  All we need is one sign.  The moral world is divided in two.  One line, and we draw it.