Have things really gotten that bad? →
U.S. citizens aren’t rising to the challenge →
public acquiescence / approval / collaboration
You ever have one of those boyfriends or girlfriends with control issues? You
know the type — they’d decide where you were going out to dinner or what movie
you were going to see or whose friends you’d be visiting this weekend or when
it was time to have serious discussions and when it wasn’t.
Maybe it was kind of endearing at first (you called it “assertive” or
“confident;” maybe you melted a bit inside when they said “don’t you worry
your little head about this, sweetie; I’ll get the check”). But ultimately
this person annoyed the shit out of you because their attitude betrayed an
egotistical sense of superiority that degraded and disrespected you.
Politicians all seem to be cut from this cloth. It’s a prerequisite for
wanting to seek office. They all want the opportunity to spend your money for
you and make your decisions for you and decide on the limits of your behavior
because they’re smarter than you, better than you, and are confident that they
know what they’re doing.
They’re all assholes, in short.
And while you could spend the rest of the night in that singles bar picking
nits about which asshole is the least objectionable one, you’re still better
off yet choosing another bar where you can hang out with people who think of
you as an peer and an equal.
I really wish the liberals in the
U.S. would leave
the electoral meat market behind. Pinning your hopes on getting a Democrat or
a Green into office is a guaranteed loser. (And don’t get me started about the
Republicans who still believe that their party believes in “smaller
government.”)
A lot of time when I talk to people about their government I feel like I’m
talking to someone in an abusive relationship. “Yes, the government steals my
money and lies to me and threatens to throw me in jail and it’s always going
off on these destructive binges, but there’s an election coming up and I think
maybe it’ll change this time for real and I don’t want to just give up on it
after putting in all this time and emotional investment.”
Grow up! No, the government isn’t going to change — not in any meaningful way — so stop investing yourself in it. Stop leaning on it and counting on it and
looking up at it hopefully as if it were your friend. As much as you can get
away with, divest yourself from it. Do things for yourself that it offers to
do for you, hide your money from it when it comes home drunk from adventures
overseas, start seeing other forms of social organization.
There’s not much we as individuals can do about dumping the rule of
politicians. But we can do what we can, and that is to say “no” to government
whenever we’re asked, to resist it in whatever ways we feel are appropriate,
and to replace it with our own positive efforts where we can.
It is no secret that the WMD issue was more of a pretext than a reason for the war in Iraq.
After all, the crew surrounding Bush had been agitating for a U.S. invasion and overthrow ever since the premature conclusion to Desert Storm Ⅰ.
What is surprising is that no WMDs were used by Iraq during the war, and that none have since been found.
Even those of us who opposed the war and were unconvinced by Bush & Co.’s rationale still, by and large, thought that Saddam probably was hiding something in the attic.
In the months leading up to the war, as Seymour Hersh documented in a good series of New Yorker articles (see the list below), the Bush Administration reorganized its intelligence apparatus in such a way that its mission was not to try to determine the most accurate understanding of what was going on in Iraq, but instead to try to assemble the most convincing story of why the U.S. should invade.
There is also a lot of evidence suggesting that Iraqi exile (and wannabe Iraqi leader) Ahmad Chalabi and the INC were able to sell the invasion by fabricating the evidence that people in the administration (and elsewhere) most wanted to hear.
A lot of the pre-war scoops about Iraqi weapons were cooked up by Chalabi and his crew, and look now to have had no basis in fact.
The administration felt that they had enough wiggle-room in the U.S. military advantage that they could afford converting their intelligence machinery into a propaganda mill.
In this, they were right.
But they also discounted any political ramifications of this, probably in the expectation that some WMDs would surely be found and that in the aftermath of victory all would be forgiven.
Surprise, surprise.
The war drummers are keeping the beat, though, insisting that WMDs will be found eventually (and praying for the legendary short attention span of the public and press to kick in).
But the way they’ve been saying “see, told ya” every time something turns up that might plausibly be (but doesn’t turn out to be) WMD-related makes this seem unlikely.
And now they’re starting to be reminded how specific, how unhedged, and how menacing their original WMD propaganda was.
“There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” said Dick Cheney.
There is “no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised,” said Bush.
They can’t sweep these “no doubt” statements aside by finding an ambiguous trailer here or some residue there.
Or can they?
The key to their success so far has not been that they have commanded the strength of facts and arguments, but that the American people have wanted to believe themselves to be beneficient warriors fighting for truth, justice and the American way.
Why should the facts get in the way now, when they never have before?
After all, the lies that were told to justify the last Desert Storm never came back to haunt anyone.
And that tall tale about Air Force One being targeted on that was used to explain why Bush went hopping around the country like a spooked dog?
That’s not going to keep Bush from being portrayed as a hero-at-the-helm in the TV movie:
If the American people don’t want to believe that they were duped and don’t want to believe that maybe the evil Hans Blix and his henchmen and frenchmen in the UN were right, they never have to believe this no matter what the facts turn out to be.
My inbox is seeing a lot of a release from the anti-Bush group Move On that starts like this:
The President took the nation to war based on his assertion that Iraq posed an imminent threat to our country.
Now the evidence that backed that assertion is falling apart.
If the Bush administration distorted intelligence or knowingly used false data to support the call to war, it would be an unprecedented deception…
There’s nothing unprecedented about it.
This sort of deception happens in every war, as I document elsewhere on sniggle.net:
How many times has a country gone to war in the midst of a frenzy whipped up by disinformation planted in the media?
You might as well just ask how many times a country has gone to war.
The answer’s the same.
Despite having been lied to time and time again, few of us care to apply extra scrutiny to the urgings of the hawks in power — rather, most of us are willing to go along with the idea that the assertions of the president should be given the benefit of the doubt.
Which makes me suspect that people want to be fooled — or not that they want to be fooled exactly, but that they want to go to war and they’re willing to participate in being fooled in order to get one.
A sort of national wink.
“Saddam is aiming terrible weapons of mass destruction at our cities?
Okay, I can go along with that.
Go get ’im!”
You give me a good excuse and I’ll give you my support.
One of my areas of study is the various ways people come to believe things that are not true.
The rest of sniggle.net is largely a catalog of these ways.
One thing that stands out is that deception isn’t something that one person does to another person, but is usually a mutual effort.
Professional con artists are fond of the phrase “you can’t cheat an honest man” — it captures the fact that many of the best cons rely on the mark thinking that s/he is getting away with something:
For instance the famous Nigerian Scam that’s been doing the rounds in email.
In that one, the victim is so busy counting the money to be made by cheating on the deal that s/he doesn’t notice that all of the money is really going in the wrong direction.
In most good deceptions, the deceiver relies on the fact that the mark isn’t all that interested in the truth — there are other, stronger motivations for belief than whether or not what is believed matches reality.
By discovering these and playing to them, you can get people to behave as though up were down, losing were winning, or the World Trade Center were toppled by a bunch of Iraqis.
Which means that an official investigation into the deception (as promoted by the Move On crew) is going to be mostly of interest to historians and propagandists and isn’t likely to have much of an effect on politics.
Please don’t buy in to the fantasy that “once the American People realize that they’ve been had they’ll be furious.”
It just isn’t so.
I gave in to temptation and brought up the U.S. presidential election campaign here at The Picket Line.
My position, in a nutshell: If you think Kerry’s the answer, you’re asking the wrong question.
A friend emailed me, saying he’d probably be voting for Kerry even though he isn’t too excited about it, and asking who I’d be voting for.
So I tried to give it a little more thought.
My working theory is that paying attention to political campaigns helps the pests to thrive and lowers the general quality of discussion and debate as well as having a bad influence on public intelligence and behavior.
But I suppose that I have no evidence that occasional indulgence is terribly harmful, so long as I take care not to make a habit of it.
I think I understand people who will be voting for Kerry and I can sympathize with them.
Bush is a dangerous lunatic and people will have good reason to sleep better at night with him and his crew out of (as much) power.
But I’m hoping to discourage people from thinking of this crisis we’re in as being something that might be over come , or that voting for or working for Kerry is the solution.
Only part of this is because Kerry is campaigning so hawkishly.
He’s backing away from his most courageous stands during the Vietnam Era, running to Bush’s right on Israel, promising to send more troops to Iraq, and hoping to strengthen the Patriot Act.
So be it.
Still, there’s little I can imagine Kerry doing that I can’t imagine Bush doing worse.
Bush is a dangerous lunatic, but it’s not like this is a hidden secret that’s being suppressed or censored — it’s right out in the open.
The liberal blog world keeps hoping that they’ll finally get The Big Scoop: the evidence on the scandal that proves for once and for all what they already know is going on.
The big problem is that a majority of Americans don’t seem to mind the awful truth, or in fact to be willing to entertain its possibility — even if they had the evidence in black-and-white, they’d figure out some way to work around it (like the majority of Americans who continue to believe that the WMD-in-Iraq or Saddam-helping-bomb-the-WTC stories are either true or about as likely as not).
A case in point is the frequent assertion that “we do everything we can to avoid civilian casualties.” It’s a Fact with a capital F. Hawks can assert it confidently as the lead-in to something else, with the same tone they’d use to recite one of the laws of thermodynamics or a cliche about life (“there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” “nothing is certain but death and taxes,” “Rome wasn’t built in a day”).
Nobody ever says of this assertion “are we really?” or “how exactly have we changed our policies to enforce this new standard?” or “how do we know how well we’re doing?”
The facts don’t agree well with this Official Motto, but the facts aren’t at issue!
“We do everything we can to avoid civilian casualties” sounds like an assertion of fact but it doesn’t seem to ever be interpreted that way — it’s more like a creed or an assertion of pride or something.
I sometimes imagine that when these people are talking about America they’re really referring to a mythical place like Camelot that by definition does what is good and right.
If U.S. troops recklessly bombed a civilian area and took out some children, that wasn’t really America but some faulty mortal incarnation of the Platonic ideal of America — of course we regret the loss of life but, let’s be reasonable, we’re America and America does everything possible to avoid civilian casualties, even if actual American troops don’t and actual American policy doesn’t bother to enforce or even monitor this.
Some people agree with what Dubya does (or they like his bad boy pose), some are more skeptical (or think his bad boy pose is too much like the bully who beat ’em up in school), but almost none have the appropriate sense of panic that our government with all of its power and its brutality (both potential and actual, since in Iraq we’re just cracking our knuckles compared to the real beating we could give out if we’re in the mood) is in the hands of a bunch of psychopaths.
The Dubya Squad seem to be particularly nutty in this regard, but Clinton and Gore and Kerry are just quantitatively less severely messed up, not qualitatively different.
The problem is that we don’t choose honest and honorable people to run our state (which would be dangerous enough) but instead we choose them through these election spectacles which as far as I can see have evolved to select some of the worst examples of humanity we’ve got.
Madness.
I’m convinced that if we selected our congress like we select our juries we’d be better off than with the way we do it now.
The fact that people put up with this, and even celebrate it, means that the problem is bigger than who’s in the oval office.
I don’t see any sense in wishing for a coup d’êtat by some handful of enlightened people who think like I do (fat chance anyway).
My instincts are more democratic than that.
I want to see the U.S. government dissolved or fundamentally reformed because we the people demand it — and not so much because of the change in government this would bring about, but because of the change in we the people this would signal.
The only happy ending I can see will be if suddenly, like a crack spreading across the ice, people snap and say to themselves “this is a buch of crap — why are we putting up with this?” No more mufflers in the form of ironic detachment, penetrating media analyses, above-the-fray commentary, or political expediency blinders.
No illusions about term limits or campaign finance reform solving anything.
Just a big “no more.”
Some people think real revolutionaries should vote for Bush because under the Dubya Squad things are most likely to get so dreadfully awful that folks will revolt.
Myself, I’m less prepared to grit my teeth and hope things finally get so intolerable that people snap, and more eager to see people raise their standards so they realize that it’s already intolerable.
After all, what are we likely to end up with after a revolution made by people with such low standards?
But this is also a reason why I’m not likely to get enthusiastic about Kerry, since he’s clearly an Anyone-But-Bush, a compromise, allegedly “electable,” a “moderate.” In other words this is more practice in lowering our standards and putting up with things we should practice not putting up with any more.
One perennially-tempting metaphor that’s been tempting me more than usual lately is the one that compares a nation to a person.
In some ways the United States today is behaving like a person faced with an accusation of wrongdoing.
The United States has a public image to protect, as well as a self-image to defend (Dubya’s “the America I know”), an eagerness to sweep its misbehavior under the rug, and a proliferation of storylines it tries out when conflicts between these images and reality come to the surface.
This suggests at first that, to the extent that this anthropomorphization metaphor is worthwhile, the United States is not psychopathic or infantile — it has a conscience and a far-from-well-developed ethical instinct, which is one step up from having no conscience at all.
On the other hand, even the psychopath will start coming up with a bouquet of justifications if he is caught, sounding for all the world as if he really cared.
So it’s worth noticing that the corresponding bouquet of shocked and disgusted Senators only went on display because photos of the abuse in Abu Ghraib made denial of the obviousimpossible.
For the purpose of argument, though, let’s let hope rule: There is a respectable public murmur of consternation even over those of our misdeeds that we could plausibly deny, and if our metaphor holds, we can call this evidence of a collective conscience.
So if this metaphor is going to be a helpful one, we next need to figure out how a person goes from being a psychopath, to being concerned with justifying her behavior by lying to herself and others, to being someone who fully owns her behavior and whose self-image matches her actual motivations and actions.
(Or maybe it makes more sense to look at how ethical development takes place in children.)
Then we can see if there is anything from this we can apply to the nation, using the metaphor as guidance, that seems like it would do any good.
I haven’t gotten much further along this path.
My instincts tell me that instead of getting useful it will just get more and more speculative and science-fictionish.
I can’t imagine that there’s a good “cell’s-eye” view story of how to reform the ethics of a body — and that’s what you and I are, right: cells in the body politic?
Are we just individually to try to become stronger voices of conscience, shouting louder than the justifications and the denial?
I don’t know that this would be helpful.
After all, Joe Lieberman and Christopher Hitchens see themselves in this lonely moral prophet mode too.
It seems that such people are as likely to come up with more cleverly-worded justifications as they are to cut through them.
The metaphor does suggest a reason why reasoned arguments have been unable to stop the war, and why the collapse of the premises of the reasoned arguments that we rode to war on didn’t stop or discredit it.
If you want to litter, or cheat on your spouse, or pad your résumé or whatever, but you don’t want to own up to having these sinful desires, you try out justifications and redefinitions and denials and such until you find the best of the bunch.
You hold onto one, but if it gives way that doesn’t really matter since there are more to choose from, and you weren’t really attached to the justification so much as to the behavior.
So if the metaphor holds here, it suggests that America didn’t so much want to protect itself from weapons of mass destruction, it didn’t so much want to prevent Saddam from conspiring with Al Qaeda to attack us or sending nukes to North Korea, it didn’t so much want to save the oppressed prisoners in the rape rooms of Abu Ghraib.
What it really did want was to invade Iraq — either for reasons it didn’t want to acknowledge, or just because — and those were the best excuses it could come up with.
(So the story would go like this: Why did America go to war in Iraq?
It wasn’t for reasons but because America was angry.
It had just gotten sucker-punched by Al Qaeda in New York and it tried to hit back but just ended up kind of flailing away at Afghanistan which wasn’t very satisfying.
And it still kind of bore a grudge against Iraq since a decade before.
Why? did America attack Iraq — do you ask why a spouse abuser beats a spouse?
No.
You just try to stop the abuse and encourage other ways of coping with anger and frustration.)
I’m bringing all this up not because I think this metaphor can support all of the weight I’m putting on it, but just because speculations like this have been suggesting themselves to me lately.
It’s as silly to blame a handful of sadistic prison guards as it is to blame the Secretary of Defense.
No — the problem goes all the way to the top.
It doesn’t stop at Dubya, but at the country that permits him to be the Commander-in-Chief and Hider of Things We’d Rather Not Know.
More and more, the part of my brain that interprets the behavior of individual people is lighting up when it tries to integrate and synthesize what it learns about the behavior of the U.S. as a nation.
Sometimes these intuitions are false alarms that mislead, other times they’re helpful, and in this case it’s probably a mixed bag.
I’m noticing that people who used to support the war and now don’t are going through this middle-stage of stepping from plausible reason to new plausible reason as each old one burns behind them.
Each reason is a little worse than the last one, and so at each stage a handful of people bail out — “I was for the war until…” until I found out there were no weapons of mass destruction, until I realized that Dubya was as inept as he sounded, until all of Colin Powell’s fairy tales dissolved into pixie dust, etc.
The saddest of these have been the people who were for the war, but only the good parts, and now that the war has actually come to pass, with all of its bad parts, they’re against it (or are starting to lean that way).
They were all for deposing the dictator, bringing democracy, removing a threat, ushering in a new era of representative government in the region and all that.
And that’s why they supported the war.
But they never wanted the “transfer tubes,” mass civilian casualties, photographs of American sadists in action, chaotic clashing warlords, regional instability, deficit spending, military overreach, red-white-and-blue gulags and all that.
Who knew that war is a package deal?
The last great plank on this burning bridge of reasons to keep our troops fighting in Iraq (or, as Kerry would dissent, to send even more troops in) is that we can’t leave now — we’ve got to fix what we’ve broken.
If we just cut-and-run, bad things will happen — chaos, civil war, bloodshed.
In the foreground, a reporter just doing his job, frowning over some little technical glitch, maybe something he forgot to do…
Bang, boom. No warning.
Just an incoming U.S. aerial attack.
“To prevent looters from stripping the vehicle,” the Pentagon later says, classifying everyone within thirty feet as “looters” and sentencing them to summary execution.
Blood splashes on the lens. The camera spins. Tiny glimpses of terrible carnage.
Without a beat, without reflection, without even a moment of minimal thought, Wolf Blitzer moves on.
As do we, collectively.
And that’s that. America kills innocent civilians. Lots of them.
And it’s no big deal now. Not controversial.
No reason to ask questions or rationalize or even pretend to soul-search like the national media once did.
America kills civilians. Lots of them. Just part of the fabric of things now.…
We are killing in large numbers. And we are numb to what we are doing.
Something deeply shameful has us in its grip.
We carefully nurture a spirit of detachment toward the wars we pay for.
But that means we cloak ourselves in cold indifference to the unnecessary suffering of others — even when we cause it.
We don’t look at any of this directly because the consequent guilt would violate our sense of ourselves as nice people.
Meaning no harm, how could we inflict such harm?
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who was responsible for the bill, said that the controversial provision was the White House Department of Homeland Security’s idea.
He speculates as to the Dubya Squad’s change of heart:
“For whatever reason, the White House has decided they don’t want to take this on because they’re afraid of the political implications.”
I’d almost given up hope that being pro-torture might be a political liability in the United States.
I’m heartened to discover that the Dubya Squad, at least, fears that this is the case.
A British diplomat has accused Britain’s intelligence service of using information obtained by foreign governments through the use of torture, according to a leaked document published today.
Craig Murray, the ambassador to Uzbekistan, said that information extracted from prisoners tortured in the central Asian republic’s jails was being passed on via the American CIA to MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service.
As well as denouncing the use of such material as morally and legally wrong, Mr Murray warned that information gathered in this way was unlikely to be reliable, as victims would say whatever they thought their tormentors wanted to hear.
“We are selling our souls for dross,” he wrote in the confidential Foreign Office report seen by the Financial Times.…
Mr Murray caused a stir by speaking out publicly in about “brutality” in Uzbek jails, highlighting the case of two men who were boiled to death.…
“This is morally, legally and practically wrong.”
Intelligence officers had argued that, as they did not know the precise source of the information they received, they could not establish whether the individual involved had been tortured or not, Mr Murray wrote.
“I will not attempt to hide my utter contempt for such casuistry, nor my shame that I work for an organisation where colleagues would resort to it to justify torture,” he said.
Of the hundreds of cases of political and religious prisoners he had looked into in Uzbekistan, very few had not involved the use of torture, he said.…
What a wonderful day it will be when a straight-shooting report like this gets leaked out of the U.S. government.
Some days it seems like “such casuistry” is all that’s left over on this side of the pond.
It amazes me how much we’re willing to tolerate and excuse.
Should the United States be held to the same standards as other countries?
Not if that means we can’t invade anyone we’d like any time we’d like for any reasons we can invent after-the-fact.
Can the most powerful military on Earth pummel civilian homes with guided missiles in total disregard for civilian casualties?
If that’s what it takes.
Is a “zero tolerance” attitude toward torture justified?
It’s not even worth discussing.
How is it that in America, after the shame of Abu Ghraib and the many legal memos that set the stage for it, the person challenging the Dungeonmaster-in-Chief doesn’t feel like it’s worthwhile to say “I don’t need a team of lawyers to tell me whether or not torture is wrong — in my administration, America will have a zero tolerance policy toward torture, no ifs, ands or buts”?
Kerry’d say it even if he didn’t mean it, if he thought it was a position he could use to distinguish himself from Bush and that would get him votes.
Clearly, his team has determined that as an issue, it’s a loser.
To distinguish himself from Bush as the one less likely to countenance torture just isn’t going to help him at the polls.
Which tells me that there’s a frighteningly large chunk of the electorate that’s told themselves “so, the United States is having people tortured, eh? I guess I can live with that.”
In a world where a hundred thousand lives can be swept away in a tsunami, do I lack a sense of proportion when I blog about a small pack of tortured detainees?
Why am I so concerned about American abuses when the world is full of torturing despots and even Nature is cruel?
I mentioned my disillusionment about the failure of the American public to oppose the policy of the U.S. government and its military and intelligence operations of torturing some of the people they have captured.
It is more than national pride that makes me especially frantic over America’s moral retreat about torture — and about other things, such as putting people in concentration camps because of their race or national origin (I half expect to wake up some morning to find the talk shows debating whether the United States was justified in enslaving Africans or denying women the right to vote).
The U.S. possesses a vast arsenal of nuclear weapons, each one of which can inflict a disaster every bit as cruel and awful as ’s tsunami.
There are enough nuclear weapons in the world that we could, if we chose, unleash an equivalent nuclear tsunami every day for the next fifty years.
All the world’s nations and scientists and engineers can’t pin down the earth’s crust, but it is only human judgment and willpower that prevents nuclear holocausts.
What prevented the U.S. from nuking Hanoi or Moscow or Baghdad or Havana?
What prevents India from dropping the big one on Pakistan, or Israel from taking out Tehran?
A number of things, most of them coldly strategic perhaps, but among these are the opinion of the civilized world and of the citizens of the nuclear powers.
To the extent that there is an international consensus and a national consensus within the nuclear powers that nuclear weapons should not be used or that their use should be strictly limited, we are less likely to experience such a preventable disaster.
To the extent that any of these opinions is discredited or eroded, disaster becomes more likely.
I don’t know if I have the data to defend this, but it seems to me that moral retreats, like the post- U.S. retreat on torture, are related to each other.
Retreating in one area makes other retreats easier.
I’ve heard people p’shaw the torture of prisoners in U.S. custody by saying that those prisoners were a lot more fortunate than people outside the prison that Americans had bombed or shot, and I remember how the Abu Ghraib photos were dismissed by some as being nothing worse than what happens in American prisons or fraternity hazings.
Certainly each abuse at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo made the next one easier to commit.
All sorts of awful things have been justified simply by saying that this is a “post-9/11 world” in which one act of terrorism excuses another act of thoughtless barbarism which then makes anything standing in the way of the next atrocity seem “obsolete and quaint” as a result.
I’ve heard people p’shaw Hiroshima by pointing to the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden.
I can imagine the nuking of Falluja being explained away as being no worse than the recent conventional weapons assault on the city.
And why shouldn’t we enslave the people we conquer?
After all, a slave ought to be thankful he isn’t a torture victim or a napalmed civilian!
Moral retreats seem to happen along a continuum.
At one end of the continuum is something like cannibalism — there is a near-universal consensus that people should not be slaughtered to be eaten, and people practice what they preach with almost no exceptions.
Next to this on the continuum is something like slavery, for which there is a similar near-universal consensus but which exists in some places or in some watered-down forms that probably ought to trigger the same ethical revulsion but do not.
Next comes something like torture or the bombardment of innocent civilians, which public opinion and government statements mostly condemn in the abstract but permit in reality.
After this comes the abandonment of hypocrisy and the matter-of-fact adoption of something brutal and immoral, for instance the U.S. holding the threat to obliterate entire cities with nuclear weapons as part of its explicit offensive military posture.
Each stage of this retreat along the continuum represents territory that will take hard effort to reclaim.
If slavery is overlooked, it becomes more likely to be hypocritically practiced, and then more likely to be brazenly adopted.
To make a nuclear first strike policy unthinkable, you must first make it dishonestly and hypocritically denied, then almost unheard of, and only then will it be possible it make it nearly inconceivable.
After , the American public debate on torture started — which is to say that torture went from being undebatably, obviously wrong except in certain artificial philosophical thought experiments to being something that might possibly be appropriate in titillating real-world hypothetical scenarios of vicarious sadism.
From there it was a short step for the Dubya Squad to condemn torture in public and authorize it in private.
From here it can go in two directions — either the Dubya Squad will become more brazen about torture as the public adopts a “what’s the big deal” attitude and the nominal opposition decides it’s not an issue that polls well (and torture will become more widespread, and other atrocities will find their slippery slopes greased), or the Dubya Squad will be forced to tighten up its secrecy and hypocrisy in the face of public revulsion and opposition protest (and torture will become less common, and those who are tempted to push the bounds of wrongdoing in other areas may be more hesitant).
The “slippery slope” fallacy is a fallacy because rhetorical or analogous momentum does not by itself provide an argument for real-world momentum.
It can nonetheless be a persuasive argument because sometimes that real-world momentum does exist.
Ordinary, well-educated people, without malice, sent children to be starved, gassed, and cremated because given the momentum of the time, such things seemed appropriate to people who had replaced their moral compasses with weathervanes.
The only thing worse than seeing endless news stories about the torture of “detainees” at U.S. prison camps like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay is seeing the word “shocking” in relation to something that we all, in our heart of hearts, knew was happening from the start.… ¶ However much we may express shock at the particulars, we knew.
We all knew.
A profound sense of disappointment with the American people greeted me here in Istanbul where the final session of the World Tribunal on Iraq, investigating and documenting war crimes in Iraq, modeled on the Bertrand Russell Vietnam War Tribunal of , is convening.
The mood is the opposite of what I encountered here and elsewhere after the anti-war demonstrations of .
Back then, enormous sympathy for victims of , and respect for a people who took to the streets to try to stop their government from committing acts of aggression before the invasion had even begun, had generated admiration and warmth toward Americans, if not their government.
After all, people said, Bush stole the election.
And, look, they would point out, Americans are trying to stop him.
Americans are good people with a bad government — just like everywhere else — they would declare, and curse Bin Laden and Bush in one swift, contemptuous breath.
Now, however, I get confused looks, pained questions, and heads shaking quietly in disbelief and disappointment.
Don’t the American people know, I am asked, again and again.
Explain please, they persist, how, after the publication of pictures from Abu Ghraib, Bush got re-elected?
Don’t the American people watch the news from Iraq?
Where did the protests, the outrage, the uproar go?
This is not just a sad turn of events; it is a profoundly dangerous situation for the American people.
Mass murder of civilians is rarely the work of lonesome nuts operating totally outside of societal norms and beliefs.
On the contrary, scratch the surface of most of the horrors of , and you will find a cold, cruel belief that the victims brought it upon themselves.
Everyone shakes their head and loudly condemns the atrocity once the bodies are cold and deep under the earth; however, a close examination of the events as they occurred often reveals that there was an implicit and explicit turning of hearts and faces away from the people who ended up slaughtered.
The perception of indifference and complicity of the American people to the crimes committed by their government is obviously not a good development.…
At first I tried explain my questioners about the corporate control of media and the lack of grassroots organizations, but, honestly, it all rings a bit hollow.
In the shops, on the buses and the ferries, and among the participants of the Tribunal, everywhere, people persist: don’t they have Internet; don’t they have alternative media; is nothing reported about Iraq at all?
What on earth is up?
I also tried to tell people about the stubborn remains of the anti-war movement, of the many people who oppose the war and find it hard to find a way to register their opposition, of the disregard for public opinion this administration has shown, the attempts at alternative media, organizing, congressional hearings…
It was clear from the way my comments were received that it all sounded like I was making excuses for a people who indeed, at least for the moment, seem to have shut out the systematic torture and the brutal occupation out of their minds and hearts.
I realized I needed to do something else.
I needed to talk about things apart from the general positive things you can say about most any country — that there are people who remain committed to justice and peace, even during the hardest of times.
I needed to explain that are almost-singularly and deeply American challenges to the shameful acts of this administration.
That what we are witnessing is also a struggle between different American values, and the results are far from certain.…
Some years ago I gave my expression to my own feeling — anti-patriotic feeling, it will doubtless be called — in a somewhat startling way.
It was at , when, in pursuance of what were thought to be “our interests,” we were invading Afghanistan.
News had come that some of our troops were in danger.
At the Athenæum Club a well-known military man — then a captain but now a general — drew my attention to a telegram containing this news, and read it to me in a manner implying the belief that I should share his anxiety.
I astounded him by replying — “When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.”
I foresee the exclamation which will be called forth.
Such a principle, it will be said, would make an army impossible and a government powerless.
It would never do to have each soldier use his judgment about the purpose for which a battle is waged.
Military organization would be paralyzed and our country would be a prey to the first invader.
Not so fast, is the reply.
For one war an army would remain just as available as now — a war of national defence.
In such a war every soldier would be conscious of the justice of his cause.
He would not be engaged in dealing death among men about whose doings, good or ill, he knew nothing, but among men who were manifest transgressors against himself and his compatriots.
Only aggressive war would be negatived, not defensive war.
Of course it may be said, and said truly, that if there is no aggressive war there can be no defensive war.
It is clear, however, that one nation may limit itself to defensive war when other nations do not.
So that the principle remains operative.
But those whose cry is — “Our country, right or wrong!” and who would add to our eighty-odd possessions others to be similarly obtained, will contemplate with disgust such a restriction upon military action.
To them no folly seems greater than that of practising on Monday the principles they profess on Sunday.
Under the influence of politicians, masses of people tend to ascribe the responsibility for wars to those who wield power at any given time.
In World War Ⅰ it was the munitions industrialists; in World War Ⅱ it was the psychopathic generals who were said to be guilty.
This is passing the buck.
The responsibility for wars falls solely upon the shoulders of these same masses of people, for they have all the necessary means to avert war in their own hands.
In part by their apathy, in part by their passivity, and in part actively, these same masses of people make possible the catastrophes under which they themselves suffer more than anyone else.
To stress this guilt on the part of the masses of people, to hold them solely responsible, means to take them seriously.
On the other hand, to commiserate masses of people as victims means to treat them as small, helpless children.
The former is the attitude held by genuine freedom fighters; the latter that attitude held by power-thirsty politicians.
— Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (hat tip: Today in Iraq.)
Reporter Stephen Ohlemacher of the Associated Press reports that in the wake of the various reforms that were designed to “end Welfare as we know it” — sure enough, “[t]he number of families receiving cash benefits from welfare has plummeted” — but other government programs, like Medicaid, food stamps, and disability benefits have expanded, so that:
And that doesn’t even count the millions of Americans who are directly on the federal government payroll as employees, nor does it include the various recipients of federal subsidies or the owners and employees of companies that depend on government contracts.
And although I couldn’t find the raw data the report is based on (and the report is not particularly precise in describing this data), I don’t think it includes the families who get more back in EITC than was taken from them in taxes, either.
Receiving Social Security retirement benefits also doesn’t put you in that one-in-six.
But if you add all these things up, it seems we’ve become a nation of addicts — ignoring the damage the government is doing to us and those around us because we’ve become dependent on it and afraid of what will happen to us if it goes away.
I can’t tell you how often this happens:
I meet someone who’s sympathetic to war tax resistance and wants to learn more about it, but who tells me “actually, I’m not against taxes — in fact I think we should have higher taxes.
The government just needs to spend the money better, on socially valuable things.”
And so many people in the war tax resistance movement, too, have this fantasy that the “good” government spending can be separated from the bad — for instance, those resisters who pay 49% of their tax bill to protest the 51% of their income taxes that would go to war (admittedly, most of them know that this is a symbolic gesture, but it’s mostly symbolic of their belief in a Jekyll-and-Hyde government).
Even weirder are the ones who think that they can legislate a firewall between military spending and other government spending with a Peace Tax Fund Act or some such mechanism.
I’m afraid it’s a package deal: You pay for government, you get it all.
What amazes me most are the pacifist liberals.
I’ll hear someone tell me that they don’t believe it’s ever appropriate to use violent force — not to repel invasion, to stop a genocide, to battle injustice, nothing — which can be a respectable though difficult-to-defend position.
But then they go on to say that they think the government ought to spend more money on public education, social welfare, the arts, medical research, and so forth, and it’s clear that they haven’t thought things through.
Do they really mean to say that they believe government agents ought to be able to use force, for nothing so desperate as to prevent genocide or repel invasion or overthrow a tyrant, but merely so that they can enforce something akin to charity?
Would they themselves be willing to hold up people at gunpoint or threaten them with prison for such a cause?
I don’t feel safe turning my back on a “pacifist” like that.
I’ve been trying to ignore the political soap opera going on. I don’t much
care for it, or American Idol or any of ’em. But
this morning my inbox was full of friends gushing about Obama’s performance
last night. One asked, “Am I the only big baby who cried through all of
Obama’s acceptance speech?” Others assured her she was not. One added: “Does
anyone else find Biden completely adorable?”
Makes me feel like I’m hooked up to the Stepford
Wives chat room by mistake.
But I remembered that last time this circus was in town I took a little time
to see whether the
U.S. torture policy
was considered remarkable by the participants. It was not. You wouldn’t find
the word “torture” by searching John
Kerry’s campaign site, and you wouldn’t find any mention of it in
the prime-time convention speeches, and
Kerry didn’t think to bring up the subject
when he had a chance to debate
Dubya. This, though the Abu Ghraib photos were still fresh in the news.
What I concluded at the time:
How is it that in America, after the shame of Abu Ghraib and the many legal
memos that set the stage for it, the person challenging the
Dungeonmaster-in-Chief doesn’t feel like it’s worthwhile to say “I don’t need
a team of lawyers to tell me whether or not torture is wrong — in my
administration, America will have a zero tolerance policy toward torture, no
ifs, ands or buts”?
Kerry’d say it even if he didn’t mean it, if he thought it was a position he
could use to distinguish himself from Bush and that would get him votes.
Clearly, his team has determined that as an issue, it’s a loser. To
distinguish himself from Bush as the one less likely to countenance torture
just isn’t going to help him at the polls. Which tells me that there’s a
frighteningly large chunk of the electorate that’s told themselves “so, the
United States is having people tortured, eh? I guess I can live with that.”
I’m happy to report that things are a little different this time around.
Yesterday I searched some of the transcripts of the convention speeches to see
if anything had changed. Torture now has at least a bit part in the play,
though no role in the star’s own performance:
And I’m very proud to say that we reject torture.
Patricia Madrid (co-chair of the platform committee)
Barack Obama knows… that torture is not only morally repugnant, it’s
militarily ineffective. It doesn’t work. It puts our troops at risk. It
endangers our national security.
Claudia Kennedy (former Army general)
…What about the assault on science and the defense of torture?… My fellow
Democrats, America can do better than that. And Barack Obama will do
better than that.
Bill Clinton
In less than a decade we have gone from being perceived as the beacon for
democracy and justice all over the globe, to a country whose government
has little respect for even the most basic tenets of human rights. We know
that’s not us. We’re better than that.
Tom Daschle
After they abandoned the principle first laid down by
Gen. George Washington,
when he prohibited the torture of captives because it would bring, in his
words, ‘shame, disgrace and ruin’ to our nation, it’s time for a
change.
Al Gore
President Obama and Vice President Biden will shut down Guantánamo,
respect the Constitution, and make clear once and for all, the United
States of America does not torture, not now, not ever.
even John Kerry
It would be a mistake to look at this campaign rhetoric and to decide that the
Democratic Party or these individual politicians in it had a change of heart
and decided to oppose torture. This is all just carefully-crafted campaign
rhetoric and there’s no reason to expect honest revelations of any sort to
come directly out of it. But, going back to my analysis of torture’s complete
absence from the last campaign — that it went to show that Democratic
strategists didn’t think the voters they were trying to reach gave a good
goddamn whether America was torturing people or not — I think this time around
the strategists have changed their minds about that, and that’s encouraging.
A shout-out to my buddy “Mayhem,” whose whimsical yet pointed art project at the Burning Man festival this year noted the connection between tax dollars and torture.
(Photos by “Mayhem”)
The festival’s theme this year was “the American dream” and this naturally invited some political commentary at a festival where “message” art is typically rare.
In “Mayhem”’s installation, passers-by could give electric shocks to a mannequin representing the iconic Abu Ghraib prisoner by pedaling a stationary bike nearby.
It’s participatory!
And just as participatory (a placard explained) is the real-life torture policy, thanks to the tax dollars that support it.
But we are revolting!
Oh.
I didn’t see any of ’s coronation hoopla, but many of my friends were overcome by emotion and emitted yelps of excitement in various on-line fora, so I couldn’t just let the event pass without notice as I would have wished.
I am embarrassed for my friends and my country that we still enthusiastically install royalty at such great expense at this late date after the success of our revolution.
And unlike the former monarchies which have devolved into republics and divested their crowns of significant power, we seem largely determined to attach all of our hopes and most of our sovereignty onto our king (or even, as showed, some court jester).
The people have spoken.
If the people had any sense of shame or any self-awareness, they’d shut the fuck up.
They’ve been speaking for a long time now and casting terrible, hateful imprecations that have called forth demons that they refuse to accept responsibility for or attempt to control.
And that button has just gotten better-insulated and more satisfying to fondle, hasn’t it?
For all of Obama’s talk of “responsibility” yesterday, you can be damn sure nobody is going to be asked to accept any.
For instance, I noticed — crestfallen in spite of myself — that Bush escaped Washington without having issued a much-expected midnight blanket pardon to the people who designed and implemented the U.S. policy of torturing its prisoners — so confident was he that no prosecutions (at least of anyone important) would be forthcoming.
Is there any hope that in my lifetime Americans will grow up and begin to take on the responsibilities of adults, instead of superstitiously appointing royal messiah-scapegoats to absorb our agency and take the blame for our sins?
