Email from my friend David Miller:

Well, Benazir Bhutto’s political comeback has been cut short by a fusillade of bullets and a suicide bomber. I don’t know enough about her political career to know how to interpret the loss to Pakistan. But when I saw the news this morning I thought that this was perhaps the beginning of more and greater suffering.

Bhutto’s situation was a difficult one. She wanted to be a politician, but some people who opposed her politically or religiously (it seems there’s little difference in fundamentalist religion) were willing to kill her and to sacrifice everyone around her in order to achieve that end. So BB must have known that each time she mounted the rostrum the eyes and hearts of her audience might be torn out by a homemade bomb.

I wonder how she rationalized putting so many people at risk.

Was it that she didn’t believe it would ever actually happen? That can’t be, since, on the day she returned to Pakistan, a bomb that detonated in the crowd demonstrated just how determined and homicidal some of her opponents were.

Or did she simply assume that the people around her understood the peril they placed themselves in by being near her? "If you support me then you’re liable to die with me." It doesn’t seem like a very winning platform for a campaign, but it was the truest statement of her political position.

I think perhaps the rationale for exposing her supporters to potential bomb blasts comes in the belief that if people didn’t stand with her today then they were likely to die at the hands of fundamentalists on a different day in the near future. I’d like to believe that that dire prediction is what propelled her back to Pakistan and into "public life."

It’s not a choice I’d ever want to have to make. Indeed, I don’t think I could make it. I don’t believe that an individual can become part of a centralized system of government coercion and argue persuasively that others should vote for, much less die for, the cause of one particular boss over another. I don’t believe the claim that my mode of coercion is so much less coercive than my political opponent’s mode coercion.

Coercion has by definition a binary bluntness to it: either you are forced or you are not. Rothbard makes some interesting comments about Hayek’s notion of coercion in The Ethics of Liberty that essentially say the same thing.

I ask myself if Bhutto as prime minister would use the police and the army against the fundamentalist opposition in coercive ways and I think it likely that she would, though admittedly I have no strong evidence for this evaluation, just a general impression about the type of prime minister she was.

So no, I could not, in good conscience, place a single person in jeopardy in order to further my political aspirations. I imagine that I could be convinced to mount the barricades in a revolution and I suppose if I could be convinced that that is what Bhutto was doing then I’d think very differently about the whole matter.

I’m tempted to post this as a blog entry, but not without the picture that came across the news feed this morning. It was from the blast site. I’d like to use it, but of course I don’t want to be guilty of leaking that photo to the world without paying the proper fees or giving the appropriate credit. If I did show the photo I’d have to own up to where I got it, which would probably lead to my getting fired in which case no more photos or blog posts with AP photos. And I couldn’t in good conscience post it without credits. Someone (B.K. Bangash) risked life and limb for that picture; the viewers ought to know whom to revere. Then again, perhaps they wouldn’t thank Bangash: it’s a horrible picture, the foreground is filled with the abject despair of a corpse, which only a moment before was a person with a name; a person who might make you laugh with a joke or a well-timed wink; a person who you might have shared a meal with; a person who might have laughed with you about how after only two glasses of wine the world looked one hundred times rosier; a person you might have confided in about some desire still not come to fruition — "still I love her" — "I’ve never said to him…"; a person, the person standing next to you on the subway train or in line at the grocery store. Now that person is just so much meat, raw material for nature’s composting and human grief. Yes, it’s a horrible picture, but in a way I want everyone to see it, so that they have a chance of feeling the precarious nature of being a human in society with other humans. It isn’t all ice cream and sitcoms. Some of human existence is so very desperate and beautiful because it thrives in the face of its desperate circumstances.

Alas, I’m an inveterate individualist. I start by writing about a political assassination — by definition a matter of state — but what affects me is the loss of a person. Ah well, sometimes I fear I have gone too far from my enthusiastically leftist upbringing. I don’t believe in sacrificing the one for the many. I believe that the one makes the many meaningful. A woman died today by gunshot wound or shrapnel (it doesn’t really matter which, but in the early news coverage there were gaps of air time that the networks filled with speculation on this point). She was a mother, a lover, a wife. She loved pretty things, especially scarves. She thought that her place was as a leader of the country she could not stay away from. She was willing to die rather than be denied the opportunity to live in her country on her terms. That is quite enough tragedy for a Thursday. Whether it is part of something larger is a separate and secondary matter, but I fear that it is. I fear it’s the beginning of real instability in a country with nuclear capability.