Pliny wrote:
With Veidt, however, he wasn't at war with anyone, no shots had been fired, no lives had been lost. He just struck out with no provocation.
I'm thinking that one's a non-starter, though.
First off, Rorschach doesn't seem at all interested in that issue; Dan says the world is damned if they don't keep quiet, and Rorschach makes perfectly clear that -- even in the face of armageddon -- he's not going to compromise. He doesn't *care* what the consequences of blowing the whistle are, and will even stipulate for the sake of argument that all-out destruction will result; even so, Rorschach doesn't give a crap.
Second, of course, Veidt *can't* wait until the missiles are in the air; WWII could drag on for years and years before Truman decided to bomb Hiroshima, but WWIII is over as soon as the nukes start flying like maybugs.
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Veidt has no real way of knowing this, even if he is the smartest man alive.
Yes, and Blake has no way of knowing it (but reaches the same conclusion) just like Glass has no way of knowing it (but reaches the same conclusion). And it's not just how Veidt *says* that
"as stockpiles grew, as computers reduced human involvement, the spectre of accidental apocalypse stalked ever closer ... given the mathematics of the situation, sooner or later conflict would be inevitable" -- it's that, on a multiple-crisis graph charting the nuclear escalation index, lines converge in the mid-'90s as per Blake's aforementioned prediction about just when the nukes will be aforementionedly flying like maybugs.
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Oh, Veidt would probably say it was his job because he lived on planet earth and was a member of the human race, yadda yadda...but no one asked him to be our protector.
Heck, can't he at least act in his own self-defense?
I mean, yes, he's also out to save the lives of billions -- but even if you deny him that justification, can't he ask himself to step up?
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"Someone has to save the world." Really? And that someone is you, Veidt?
Well, there *is* no one else. Blake, for example, (a) saw the problem, (b) came up with zero solutions, and then (c) decided to keep Veidt's plan secret upon discovering it; everybody else on the planet was like Blake in that none of 'em came up with a solution.
Now, if Rorschach (or Dan, or Laurie, or Jon, or Eddie, et cetera) had either proposed some alternative solution *or* denied the existence of a problem, I'd agree that there's room for Rorschach to object on such grounds. But since Rorschach doesn't deny the problem and doesn't propose an alternate solution, I can only figure he bases his objection on figuring that people must be told so that evil can be punished.
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No one asked him to, in fact, the Keene riots prove no one wanted him to.
Rorschach ignored those. So did Veidt. I fail to see that *either* gets a clear moral win based on *both* of 'em ignoring the statement made by the Keene riots.