The Black Pleasure Of Hatred And Cultural Provincialism
I give you my great friend and mentor Kenny Pierce:
"Usenet veterans are familiar with the common rule, "Whoever mentions Nazis or Hitler first, automatically loses the argument." My own feeling has always been that the only way that that rule could possibly be valid, would be if you had a bunch of people in your discussion who weren't worth talking to anyway -- which, I have to admit, does after all describe a great many Web "discussions."
See, there are two different ways in which I can introduce a comparison to Hitler. In the first, the guy I'm talking to has just embraced a position that seems to me to be more or less the same thing in principle as that of Hitler or Stalin. But I know perfectly well that the guy sitting across the cyberspace table from me is a nice guy who would be appalled at the thought of committing genocide. I therefore point out that his position is very similar to a Nazi position, precisely so that he can explain to me wherein lies the difference. In short, when I say, "It seems to me that you're taking a position that's not significantly different from that of the Nazis," the point is to give my friend the opportunity to say, "Oh, well, I see where you're coming from with that, but you're missing something: here's how my position is different from Hitler's." The analogy is directed at exploring his position, with which I strongly disagree but which I suspect I may not fully understand; and there is not the slightest question of any disrespect of his character.
But the other reason to introduce a comparison to Hitler, is precisely in order to attack my opponent's character as a human being -- to show not that he is intellectually wrong, but to prove that he is morally contemptible. In this form, when I say, "You're just like the Nazis," the point is not to give my opponent the opportunity to clear up a misunderstanding on my part. It is a vicious personal attack. The point is not to introduce understanding, but to inflame passions. The point is not to enhance the discussion, but to demolish all hope of the discussion's ever yielding fruit. And when somebody starts throwing Hitler around in that fashion, then the discussion is indeed over; and the question of which person is correct on the original issue pales in importance, compared to what you have just learned about the character of the Hitler-mongerer. For a vicious character is a far worse thing than a false belief.
I have been musing on this recently because of the monotony with which the most horrific accusations are hurled casually and incessantly at George W. Bush, including comparisons to Hitler -- and how widespread is this Bush-hatred on the Left. I don't know whether to believe this poll or not, but if you genuinely believe that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance and allowed it to happen, then there is something deeply, deeply wrong with you -- but just look at the statistics for what percentage of Democrats think Raving Rosie may actually have a point.
America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure.
Surely this can't be right? 61% of Democrats think there's a decent chance that Dubya was a 9/11 co-conspirator???? That's millions upon millions of people totally lost to reason, and I'd rather go with Occam's Razor and believe that one sociologist used some sort of flawed polling methodology than that a third of my countrymen have, on any subject involving Dubya, the approximate IQ of a paranoic-schizophrenic chihuahua who's had a few too many bad LSD trips. (I'd sure like to know how the pollers phrased the questions that elicited the results that they chose to present in this fashion. If you're a Democrat who thinks there's a 1-in-1000 chance, does that mean that these guys count you as "not sure"?)
But let's figure the methodology's flawed, and in order to be conservative let's only count the 35% of Democrats who think it's more likely that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance than that he didn't, and to be really conservative let's round that down to 30%. And we'll figure that, what, maybe 40% of Americans self-identify as Democrats? A little simple math, and...that's 36,000,000 people who have talked themselves into believing that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance. Not, mind you, 36,000,000 brainwashed Pakistani or Palestinian teenaged boys who all their lives have been carefully and manipulatively and deliberately shaped to be jihadists. That's 36,000,000 American voters.
I suppose my memory may be failing me, but I seem to remember that even during the height of the Right's hatred of Bill Clinton, the folks who were sure that Clinton had had Vince Foster and a string of other people murdered, were looked at by the majority of Republicans as being off the reservation. Does anybody know whether similar polls were run back then? (This is a serious question; I'd like to know, and I don't trust my memory.) The attitude of most of my Republican friends was rather similar to mine, which is that if you were forced to find the very best possible two-word description of Bill Clinton, those two words would be "white trash." (I admit that personal prejudice may be at work here, but if so, it's the prejudice of an Okie against the inbred Arkansas hillbillies, not the prejudice of a Libertarian against the Democrats.) The all too familiar lack of self-control, the all too familiar lack of basic honesty, the all too familiar lack of integrity or indeed of any genuine moral virtue, the all too familiar exploitative attitude toward women -- the man was intelligent and he was charming and (this is obviously me talking rather than my Republican friends) he even did some worthwhile things as President, but as a person he was pretty much worthless. White trash. Or, if we're allowed a few more words of description, white trash with an immense natural talent for politics unconstrained by inconvenient principles of ethics.
But that doesn't make him Hitler. And what's more, saying, "Man, how did we get a piece of white trash in the White House?" is a pretty far cry from saying, "Our President is a murderous S.O.B. who's out to destroy our country and turn it into a Nazi Fascist regime." And maybe my memory betrays me, or maybe it's just that every Democratic lunatic nowadays has access to the Internet while ten years ago Republicans were still trying to figure out how to use Al Gore's novel new invention or something, but I just don't seem to remember it being commonplace to hear Clinton described as "Hitler."
What strikes me the most is that (a) the people who are most fits-of-drooling deranged about Hitler, are disproportionately people who natter on incessantly about the importance of tolerance and about the fact that in morality and religion there is no universal and objective truth, and (b) I can't help but think that any person who would, like Democratic Senator (!!!! hard to write him off as lunatic fringe) Dick Durbin, compare the actions of the Bush Administration to the evils of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot all in one fell swoop, is somebody who is breathtakingly ignorant of what true evil looks like. And I don't think the two are unrelated. Mark Steyn has pointed out (don't have a link other than my memory, sorry) that the nineteenth-century British, who didn't pretend to believe that other cultures were just as good as theirs, all the same went to the trouble to understand other cultures in detail; but that in the mass modern multiculturalists, who claim to think other cultures are as worthwhile as their own, display a breathtakingly provincial ignorance not merely of non-American cultures, but even of sub-cultures in America itself, should those sub-cultures not happen to be their own. "All cultures are equally valid" becomes, not a reason to value and attempt to learn from other cultures, but instead an excuse to ignore them.
But there is only one real cure for cultural provincialism. Every human being starts out with an immense amount of preconceptions and cultural filters, some of which enhance his world view and some of which are debilitating and self-destructive. Until you learn a foreign language you do not really understand the unique tang and character of your own; if you have lived your whole life without ever walking out the front door of the house in which you were born, then you don't really know what it looks like; and if you have not put in the sweat and effort genuinely to understand and value another culture, you not only don't understand the other cultures -- you don't even understand your own. Thus the only cure for cultural provincialism is to fall in love with some culture other than your own and roll up your sleeves and put in the intellectual sweat necessary to become at least marginally at home in it. But multiculturalism, insofar as it inclines one to say, "My culture isn't any better than anybody else's, but then nobody else's is any better than mine; so rather than taking the trouble to learn a foreign language I think I'll play another round of World of Warcraft," undercuts the very motivation that makes genuine respect for other cultures, and genuinely healthy skepticism about one's own, a live possibility.
It seems to me that the same thing happens to people who try to convince themselves that there is no absolute truth in morality and religion. If you genuinely believe that there is such a thing as evil and good, then that gives you plenty of incentive to figure out what evil looks like, and what makes it tick, and how to defeat it. I, for example, who (as a Disciples of Christ redneck Okie kid) would have been promptly written off by the prejudices of most Manhattan liberal Democrats as a narrow-minded, ignorant hick, read Solzhenitsyn's GULAG Archipelago in eighth or ninth grade -- which made it instantly and forever impossible for me to entertain for the slightest instant the idea that the American treatment of our prisoners at Guantanamo was even remotely comparable to the evils of the Stalinist camps. I had read Corrie ten Boom's The Hiding Place even earlier than that, and from then on could not stomach the offensive banality of Hogan's Heroes, much less imagine for a moment that any even marginally sane person could compare Guantanamo to Ravensbruck. I had read In the Presence of My Enemies, and that had led me on to the haunting images of the fall of Saigon and the atrocities of Pol Pot; and not even when I was still a pre-teen would I have been ass enough to think that the American soldiers at Guantanamo had any business appearing in a simile involving the death squads of the Khmer Rouge.
But Dick Durbin was capable of drawing those comparisons in prepared remarks on the Senate floor, without noticing that there was anything dubious about his rhetorical tactics until the firestorm that promptly erupted drew his attention to it.
To refresh your memory, by the way, Durbin had read a report in which the following tactics of interrogation were described: * Prisoners had been chained up for stretches of "18-24 hours" or more without food or water or a bathroom break, and "most times" had befouled themselves. * On one of the occasions that I just mentioned, the air conditioning had been turned down so far that the prisoner was shivering; while on another, the air conditioner had been turned off entirely so that the room was "well over 100 degrees;" and on another occasion, the prisoner was being forced to listen to "extremely loud rap music." Durbin's reaction?
If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings.
Let me assure the Senator that only somebody who had no idea of what the Nazis and Soviets and Khmer Rouge were like, would hear that a prisoner was being forced to be in a room where the air conditioning and the music were both cranked up too high, and instantly think, "My God! It must have been the KGB or Gestapo that was interrogating them!" My point is not that the treatment being meted out to the Guantanamo prisoners was something I would have enjoyed experiencing my own self, or even that there was nothing wrong with such treatment (I happen to think there isn't, but I can see that a reasonable person might disagree with me on that point).
My point is that the Senator's words betray the fact that he has absolutely no idea of what it looks like when a regime genuinely has "no concern for human beings." (An oft-quoted motto of the Khmer Rouge, in regard to the 1.5 million and more people they killed: "To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss." Now that, Senator, is a lack of concern for human beings.)
Reading Senator Durbin's speech is like...well, it's as if you heard a man harangue you at length about the mighty, towering mountains of his childhood home as "veritable Himalayas" -- and then you were to find out he was born and raised in the Texas Hill Country and had never been any farther from Austin than the stultifyingly flat coastal plains near Houston. Nobody who knows what a real mountain looks like, would even call the hills of the Hill Country "mountains," much less "Himalayas." It wouldn't even cross your mind.
You see, when I hear people talking -- apparently in all seriousness -- as though Dubya were a new Hitler, attempting to overthrow American democracy and replace it with fascism, my first thought used to be, "Good God, there's a person who has lost all sense of proportion." But I am coming to think that's not really what's going on. It's not that Senator Durbin has no sense of proportion, I don't think. I think it's something rather simpler. Imagine that you know a person who has never actually seen the Rockies or the Alps or the Andes or the Himalayas, nor -- being a person of desultory and slipshod public education -- has ever actually learned anything about them beyond acquiring a vague idea that whenever people want to talk about really high mountains, they usually seem to mention these Himalaya thingies. To a person of such severely limited life experience and such inadequate education, the Texas Hill Country hills might seem like the tallest mountains in the world -- and he might, with no consciousness of the grotesque absurdity of his comparison, say something like, "If you didn't know you were just a few miles outside of Llano, Texas, you would most certainly believe that you must be in the Rockies or the Himalayas."
Americans are, after all, the most fortunate people in the history of the world, insulated from the batterings of disease and famine and despotism and tyranny to a degree that is really very difficult for most of us to appreciate, I think. We are notoriously sheltered and notoriously provincial and notoriously clueless about things that go on in the world outside of our American cocoon. So I think my explanation may be a true telling of at least part of the story.
Or maybe I'm wrong and it's just that lots of Democrats are addicted to the black pleasure of hatred, and that they lust for excuses to blacken Dubya's name the way the Marquis de Sade lusted after pain, and that Durbin was deliberately playing to his base but, due to a political miscalculation, overplayed his hand a bit. But I'd very much prefer not to find myself holding such a bleak opinion of so many of my countrymen."
Ymarsakar,
Thanks, I'm glad to hear it. I'm going to explore the topic some more, I think, but not as part of this comment thread.
Posted by: Kenny | Wednesday, May 23, 2007 at 06:07 PM
Can I ask whether anybody besides the Ghost and I is getting any good out of this conversation?
Yes, Kenny, but only on your side of the conversation for the last few set pieces.
You having 9 kids must explain your patience.
Posted by: Ymarsakar | Saturday, May 19, 2007 at 05:33 PM
Ghost, you didn't answer any of my questions, and I'm simply not going to bite on the absurd "barely hyperbole" bait.
Except that I can't resist, more for the fun of it than anything else, pointing out that at the time of Durbin's comment, the score stood, if memory serves:
Hitler: 11 million give or take a few million ("About six million European Jews...about 500,000 Gipsies, between 10,000 and 25,000 homosexuals, 2,000 Jehovah's Witnesses, up to 3.5 million non-Jewish Poles, between 3.5 million and six million other Slavic civilians, as many as four million Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 1.5 million political dissidents." -- moreorless.au.com.) This is assuming you don't just say, "The hell with it," and simply dump on him personally the blame for the 60 million or so who died in WWII overall.
Stalin: roughly twenty million (moreorless.au.com)
Pol Pot: one to three million (moreorless.au.com).
Chappaquiddick: 1
Guantanamo: 0
"Barely hyperbole" -- ah, yes, I see what you mean. Oh, I've been meaning to point out something: my own personal IQ is about 20,000,000 or so. Well, I mean, not literally, but I gather that in saying that I'm only barely indulging in hyperbole...or at any rate, it certainly falls below the Durbin threshold. ;-)
Other than the preceding affectionate teasing, I'm ignoring your absurd attempt at distraction and encouraging you to have a real conversation, in which you actually listen to what the other people are saying and genuinely open your mind to the possibility that they might have a point, which is to say, that you might actually be wrong. At the moment you're pretty much putting your hands over your ears and repeating your talking points loudly enough to hide from yourself the uncomfortable questions you're dodging. (In an odd way, you keep reminding me of Tate Donovan in the Love Potion Number Nine police station.)
Again, I very much want to hear a genuine, honest, not-changing-the-subject response to this:
Posted by: Kenny | Friday, May 18, 2007 at 01:05 AM
Kenny, I think this is a perfectly good rhetorical comment.... it is barely hyperbole and has a good bit of truth to it. I mean, everybody was outraged at what the FBI agent reported except for Republicans.
Now this, on the other hand is a ridiculous insult from Tom Delay!
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Thursday, May 17, 2007 at 06:14 PM
Ghost,
Okay, the most important reason to urge Democrats not to resort to demonization, is for the Democrats' own sake.
Of the Seven Deadly Sins (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, anger, envy and pride), only two are purely and directly destructive. Anger is the state in which one has (either intellectually or emotionally) mistaken another's harm for one's own good. Envy is the state in which one has mistaken another's good for one's own harm. Each of them causes the foolish person to attempt to harm the other person; but at the deepest level each is far more harmful to the sinner than to the object of his malice.
I'd like you to give yourself some time to dwell on that and let it sink in a bit, and then come back and respond to the following (which is just restating a previous question that you never got around to answering):
If I understand you correctly -- and by all means correct me if I don't -- then this is what Dick Durbin really meant by his remarks:
"I know the President means well and is trying to protect the country against terrorists, but his policies are foolish, because if we allow our interrogators to cause physical discomfort to their interrogees, this will set in motion a chain of events that ultimately will cause the United States to be engaging in deliberate genocide and operating slave labor camps and death camps that will result in the deaths of millions. Therefore the President should change his policies and cease causing physical discomfort to the prisoners at Guantanamo."
But, if I understand you, you think that Senator Durbin chose, deliberately and for purely rhetorical purposes, to say that if you were to show an observer a prisoner under interrogation at Guantanamo and another prisoner under interrogation in Stalin's Lubyanka Prison, the observer wouldn't be able to tell which interrogation was which. And you're fine with this rhetorical tactic. (Again, correct me if I'm misunderstanding you.)
Now, presumably Senator Durbin had a reason for using the rhetorical tactic of demonization -- for saying the second thing when he really meant the first. So my question for you is simply this: what was it that he was trying to accomplish? Why choose the second version? What was the end to which this demonization was intended as a means?
If you try to answer that question I think we may make some real progress toward your seeing one of the critical reasons that the use of demonization is a bad idea for reasons other than merely that persons who wield demonization thereby render themselves at least a little bit like Hitler. But, really, please don't just fire something off the cuff, and please don't try to argue, in your response, that Bush is an evil guy. We all know, already, that you believe that, and Bush is not the topic here.
I think this is really important, by the way, for reasons more pressing than politics. Not a time to be playing games.
Posted by: Kenny | Thursday, May 17, 2007 at 06:11 AM
Mac, I assure you that in my opinion it is universal human nature to respond to discomfort with rage if one has not carefully disciplined oneself to expect and control that response -- and often even then. Not at all a peculiarity of Americans.
[chuckling] Guest, I'm plenty arrogant enough to have felt sure I was holding my own -- I was just wondering if anybody felt like they were learning anything. (I decided to go politically, rather than grammatically, correct in that last phrase.)
If I wanted to get sidetracked into the torture thing I'd point out that there are several Geneva Conventions, not all of which have been ratified by the U.S....you know what, I'm getting sidetracked right now at this very moment and am hereby slapping myself back into line.
Posted by: Kenny | Thursday, May 17, 2007 at 05:58 AM
Oh, I think there are ample reasons, legal and otherwise, why Dubya and this Republican administration should have continued our historical adherence to the the Geneva Conventions and our Constitutional principles. Perhaps Gonzales should have ruled the "uniforms" requirement "quaint" and insisted on the moral high ground. It would be nice if this Republican administration acted in the higher order of American orthodoxy as opposed to slouching toward despotism.
The larger problem in Afghanistan was that we were scooping up large numbers of individuals with really no mechanism for triage and the problems from that are still manifest at Guantanamo.
Here’s what happens when this irresponsible Congress railroads a profoundly important bill to serve the mindless politics of a midterm election: The Bush administration uses Republicans’ fear of losing their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws — while actually doing nothing to protect the nation from terrorists. Democrats betray their principles to avoid last-minute attack ads. Our democracy is the big loser....
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Thursday, May 17, 2007 at 05:02 AM
Dear Kenny,
Yes, I am actually enjoying myself immensely, and think you are holding your own quite well. There is one factual error here, however, on the part of "Ghost Dansing", that needs to be addressed: Ghost, I hate to be the one to break the bad news to you, but the Geneva Conventions do not apply to irregular combatants, only to uniformed soldiers. This was deliberately done in order to prevent militias, terrorists, and other irregulars from cynically exploiting the surrounding civilian population and endangering the lives of non-combatant innocents. In other words, any group not making itself clearly identifiable by wearing a uniform is afforded *no* legal protection by the Geneva COnventions.
Worse (from your point of view): the Geneva Conventions specifically outlaw and prohibit any militia from dressing as civilians and using the civilian population as cover in order to deter the enemy from attack (a la HAMAS, for example), and state specifically that any person or group engaging in such depraved tactics is violating said Conventions, and has forfeited any kind of legal protection.
Also, even in the case of protected enemy combatants (i.e. the kind wearing uniforms), the COnventions permit detention without trial for the duration of the conflict.
Please do go read the Conventions before dragging them in erroneously; Irwin Kotler, the Canadian human rights commissioner and lawyer, has written several books about this subject, if you prefer not to deal with the dry legal language or wish to know how the legal precedents have been applied and interpreted.
Warm regards to all,
Guest
Posted by: Guest at the Feast | Thursday, May 17, 2007 at 01:56 AM
Don't worry, Kenny; I misspelled "overweaning." Take a look at any five novels the NYT Book Review praises to the skies each Sunday and, aside from the implausible characters, cleverer-than-thou snarky/hip tone, ridiculous plots and overworked and predictable themes, you'll find about 25 grammatical and/or spelling errors in each book within the first 10 pages, I kid you not, and these are books ostensibly edited by the cream of the editorial crop at the nation's most prestigious publishing houses. Anyway, if I were your dad I'd be proud of my son, even if he sometimes confuses the subject of a sentence with the object of a preposition.
I agree when you said that we Americans become outraged when we are made to be uncomfortable. But I thought about it for a minute and then thought, how does that make us different from the Europeans? They dress their inertia and self-regarding selfishness up in a phony "tolerance" of even the fascistic wing of Islamism; we do the same, dressing it up in our fight for "freedom."
As for the discussion between you and GD this week; I've followed it with interest as much as I can, but you two sometimes get too abstract and arcane for this poor old almost-52-year-old's brain. Shalom, Mac Brachman
Posted by: mac Brachman | Wednesday, May 16, 2007 at 10:48 PM
"besides the Ghost and I"...
We will now pause for a moment of silence while my father the English teacher bows his head in shame. To think that his son doesn't know the difference between the subject of a sentence and the object of a preposition...[sigh]
Posted by: Kenny | Wednesday, May 16, 2007 at 10:41 AM
Can I ask whether anybody besides the Ghost and I is getting any good out of this conversation?
Ghost,
Well, first of all, because what Durbin said WAS NOT TRUE. Jeez, sometimes you liberals have the hardest time grasping the fact that truth and factuality are related concepts.
[sigh] At any rate, your bewilderment seems genuine rather than rhetorical -- it seems to me that you really can't figure out what the problem with Durbin's remarks could be. You can't see how they could do any harm. Do I have that right?
'Cause, you see, I can think of five or six reasons that Durbin's remarks were way out of line and destructive, and that a culture that celebrates such remarks rather than rebuking them is a self-destructive culture marching blindly but enthusiastically toward the ash-heap of history. (You will note that I do not say that Democrats have already, and deliberately, destroyed America and left us on the ash-heap of history.)
Ghost, if you're really trying to figure it out, we can keep going; it's not like I don't find it useful to walk through my own beliefs in detail, even though I don't expect to change your mind about anything. But if you're just looking for an excuse to do more Bush-ranting, well, you're certainly capable of carrying that on at length without my help.
Posted by: Kenny | Wednesday, May 16, 2007 at 10:38 AM
As I said: I think Durbin finds this Republican administrations machinations and rationalizations sustaining unethical policy with respect to torture, constitutional and international law and habeas corpus abhorrent, and engaged in rhetoric that matched his level of revulsion. He probably did so deliberately.
The rhetoric, upon specific analysis does not offer a perfect parallel to extreme historical examples of despotism and murderous public policy. However, insofar as conscientious adherence to principles of human rights and dignity are considered foundational underpinnings to governmental policies espousing individual freedoms and liberty, and insofar as despots seek to undermine or otherwise deny these foundations, the rhetoric was not in fact capricious and in fact offers accurate parallels on a more abstract plane thus rendering the criticism that it was illegitimate "demonization" itself questionable. (Obviously there must be the possibility of legitimate "demonization" should the rhetoric be in fact pointing out a diabolical aspect of policy, even if the articulation is over simplified.
demonization: noun; to represent as diabolically evil; "the demonization of our enemies"
Note that Durbin's comments were far more nuanced than you suggest.... although rhetoric such as this is intended to make ideas politically understandable in a less-nuanced way.
So, what he said was, taken out of context this could be construed as the behavior of a despotic regime.
I'm not sure that is not accurate.
Even here, Kenny tacitly rules-out the evaluation of a rhetorical comment by examining the underlying truth of the reference. Durbin is pointing to the tip of an iceburg of un-American policy implemented by this Republican administration. Why must it be put nicely? Why is not this remark evaluated on the basis of the truth that underlies and causes the occasion?
Why, Kenny.... why, why, why? :)The real issue with modern Republicanism is, the underlying strategy is to suppress criticism of their actions. That strategy was articulated in Ronald Reagan's "first commandment" not to criticize other Republicans, and has been a consistent media strategy for Republicans ever since.... including tactics that demonize Democrats that critisize Republican foreign policy as unpatriotic or aiding and abetting the enemy. It is also reflected in Republican media strategy; sometimes specifically articulated as deliberate suppression of the media.... roots in both Rove and DeLay.
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 05:07 AM
Apparently the discussion of the tactic of demonization is over. You guys sleep tight.
Posted by: Kenny | Monday, May 14, 2007 at 10:43 PM
Durbin doesn't like what the Bushies are doing, and neither should you, Kenny....plain and simple. Their behavior is in some ways more insidious and diabolical because these so called "conservatives" actually have a great big problem with the American Constitution and International Law.
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Monday, May 14, 2007 at 09:18 PM
Okay, I know I said I'd shut up, but this is more about getting a laugh than about making a point. Since the previous example was about feminists who have lost all since of proportion, it reminded me of a classic Stupid Feminist moment from back in my college days, which moment comes from the fact that a sense of humor is really all about proportion, so that someone who has no sense of proportion can hardly help but be an unwilling straight man to their opponents' jokes.
There is a serious point to be made about being careful not to create, by one's actions, an environment in which bad things are more apt to happen to women. (This was the whole point of teaching boys how to be gentlemen, and it is interesting to see feminists, having done everything they could do to destroy the social constraints that protected women, trying to create a new set of social inhibitions to serve the same purpose -- but that's a different topic.) At any rate, there are lots of young men on college campuses who constantly speak of women in degraded and objectifying terms, and that absolutely contributes to a bad environment in which things like date rape are more likely to happen. But, Princeton feminists being Princeton feminists and therefore utterly without a sense of proportion, the Women's Center objected to "sexism" in general without really distinguishing between degrees thereof, and to the Women's Center telling a mother-in-law joke was "sexist."
So it was unfortunate that the Women's Center chose to run an ad in the Daily Princetonian that sternly warned all the young men on campus, "When you laugh at a sexist joke, you give every man present permission to commit rape."
The next issue of the Prince included the following rejoinder in the classifieds:
"When you laugh at jokes about nuclear devastation, you give every person present permission to annihilate mankind."
Well, okay, I thought it was funny.
And since we're here:
Q. How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. [In your snootiest, most offended tones] That's not funny!
Posted by: Kenny | Monday, May 14, 2007 at 04:45 PM
Since the Ghost is apt to excuse any tactics that go to support her theme that Dubya is the incarnation of evil on earth, I thought it would be worthwhile to include a link to this article, in Christina Hoff Summers complains about American feminism's refusal to recognize that women in many Islamic countries face unimaginably worse persecution and oppression than do many in the United States. Note that Summers points precisely to American feminists' complete inability to recognize that a sense of proportion matters, and that how bad something is is at least as important as whether something is bad in the first place.
You should read the whole article, but here is a passage that should certainly gain the attention of anybody who has understood the point of my original post:
Again, a person who can work themselves into feeling that James Dobson is as evil a person as is Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is a person whose sense of proportion has been utterly lost -- and with it, his ability to make sane moral judgments.
Now I'll shut up and let other people talk. Sorry to monopolize the conversation there.
Posted by: Kenny | Monday, May 14, 2007 at 03:58 PM
Ghost,
Not to overwhelm you with stuff here, but something else occurred to me in the car on the way to lunch.
If I understand you correctly -- and by all means correct me if I don't -- then this is what Dick Durbin really meant by his remarks:
"I know the President means well and is trying to protect the country against terrorists, but his policies are foolish, because if we allow our interrogators to cause physical discomfort to their interrogees, this will set in motion a chain of events that ultimately will cause the United States to be engaging in deliberate genocide and operating slave labor camps and death camps that will result in the deaths of millions. Therefore the President should change his policies and cease causing physical discomfort to the prisoners at Guantanamo."
But, if I understand you, you think that Senator Durbin chose, deliberately and for purely rhetorical purposes, to say that if you were to show an observer a prisoner under interrogation at Guantanamo and another prisoner under interrogation in Stalin's Lubyanka Prison, the observer wouldn't be able to tell which interrogation was which. And you're fine with this rhetorical tactic. (Again, correct me if I'm misunderstanding you.)
Now, presumably Senator Durbin had a reason for using the rhetorical tactic of demonization -- for saying the second thing when he really meant the first. So my question for you is simply this: what was it that he was trying to accomplish? Why choose the second version? What was the end to which this demonization was intended as a means?
Posted by: Kenny | Monday, May 14, 2007 at 03:21 PM
And, um, you don't see any resemblance between the rhetorical tactics you're defending and the rhetorical tactics Hitler used?
I mean, what with your not wanting to be even the least little bit like Hitler and all, I'm getting a little cognitive dissonance here...
Posted by: Kenny | Monday, May 14, 2007 at 01:32 PM
Oh, and not only are you allowed to talk as though the bottom of the slope had already been reached, but you are allowed to talk as though the bottom of the slope is what Bush has deliberately in mind all along? (As a historical analogy, this would seem to imply that when Churchill complained that Chamberlain's policies would lead to disaster, it would have been both charitable and honest for Churchill to accuse Chamberlain of being a co-conspirator of Hitler's -- that there would have been nothing wrong with Churchill's announcing on the floor of Parliament, "Neville Chamberlain is a Nazi.")
Posted by: Kenny | Monday, May 14, 2007 at 01:30 PM
Ghost,
If Durbin really is as revulsed by Guantanamo as he is by the concentration camps of the Third Reich, the labor camps of the gulag, and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, then he is a man who has lost all sense of proportion -- and since a sense of proportion is a prerequisite for all rational thought and all moral clarity, he would be a person whom one ought to be reluctant to entrust with the duties of a dogcatcher, must less a seat in the self-styled "world's greatest legislative body."
Now, it seems to me that you are essentially arguing that it is legitimate to take a slippery-slope argument and talk as though the very bottom of the slope had already been reached. Have I got that right? In other words, rather than saying, "If we adopt the policies Bush wants to use to fight terrorism, it will have the unintended side effect of setting off a train of events that could conceivably end in fascism," you can just say, "Bush is a Fascist"? And you consider that there are no problems of charity or honesty in such a leap?
(I am manfully resisting the urge to go whacking away at your checks-and-balances concerns because I don't want to go irretrievably off topic.)
Posted by: Kenny | Monday, May 14, 2007 at 01:23 PM
Clarification: "The rhetoric, upon specific analysis does not offer a perfect parallel to extreme historical examples of despotism and murderous public policy.
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Monday, May 14, 2007 at 05:06 AM
I think Durbin finds this Republican administrations machinations and rationalizations sustaining unethical policy with respect to torture, constitutional and international law and habeas corpus abhorrent, and engaged in rhetoric that matched his level of revulsion. He probably did so deliberately.
The rhetoric, upon specific analysis does offer a perfect parallel to extreme historical examples of despotism and murderous public policy. However, insofar as conscientious adherence to principles of human rights and dignity are considered foundational underpinnings to governmental policies espousing individual freedoms and liberty, and insofar as despots seek to undermine or otherwise deny these foundations, the rhetoric was not in fact capricious and in fact offers accurate parallels on a more abstract plane thus rendering the criticism that it was illegitimate "demonization" itself questionable. (Obviously there must be the possibility of legitimate "demonization" should the rhetoric be in fact pointing out a diabolical aspect of policy, even if the articulation is over simplified.
demonization: noun; to represent as diabolically evil; "the demonization of our enemies"
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Monday, May 14, 2007 at 05:02 AM
you assume government is the only possible limiter on human freedom
Oh, nonsense. I cannot possibly have made it more clear over the last few months that I think that government is an absolute necessity precisely because if there is no responsible government, then the forces of violence and fraud will overwhelm the innocent and peaceable.
No offense, Ghost, but I'm spending more time chasing rabbit trails than a man with nine children can responsibly allocate to on-line discussions, however fascinating; so I'm just not going to follow you off-topic for a while. In re demonization and its prevalence as an anti-Dubya tactic:
I understand you to be saying that in your opinion Durbin knew that he was indulging in gross exaggeration, which is to say, demonization, and did it deliberately; I think he was more likely just being a thoughtless moron; the matter is unlikely to be proved either way since only Durbin himself knows; thus that conversation has hit a dead-end.
I understand you to be saying that there's nothing wrong with Durbin's indulging in demonization because all politicians do it; I believe that rather than being an excuse for Durbin that's an indictment of all politicians; I don't see much prospect of either of us convincing the other; so that line of conversation looks done to me as well.
I understand you to be saying that demonization of Dubya is indeed more widespread and bitter than it was with his immediate predecessors, but that it's Dubya's own fault because he deserves it; since I don't think he deserves it and don't think an unethical rhetorical tactic becomes ethical if you dislike the target enough, I think we are stuck with agreeing on the phenomenon but differing about its significance.
So I'm not really seeing much ground left to cover in this discussion of demonization, unless I've wildly misunderstood you. Do you think I'm misunderstanding something major here?
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Sunday, May 13, 2007 at 11:20 PM
Certainly the condition of tyranny fait accompli is different than undermining the foundations of liberty in such a way that tyranny can emerge. The former is/was the condition in fascist and totalitarian states.
In America, the structure of checks and balances is such that Dubya and modern Republicanism is in the process of being flushed down the toilet. I pray that America never allows modern Republicanism to take root, or it will be America no more.
Also, Kenny.... you make the classic mistake made by most Libertarians.... You assume government is the the only possible limiter on human freedom.
Absolutely not so. Without government regulating the private sector, your governance defaults to corporate plutocracy.
That is the default that Dubya and this Republican administration brought into being..... with Republicans in government, it is not the government by and for the people, accountable to the people that is in charge. It is Enron, Big Pharm, and the like.... profit motive, unaccountable.
Those big multinational corporations don't give a darn if Kenny has to pack up and immigrate to India to get a job..... or whether Kenny's working conditions deteriorate to level in Chinese sweat shops.... or whether Kenny has health care..... Kenny is just a commodity.
All of the governmental social reforms you detest were brought about in reaction to abuses specifically during the industrial revolution.....
That's England.... In America:
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Sunday, May 13, 2007 at 09:09 PM
Ukrainian writer Oleg Atbashian grew up in the Soviet Union and lived through its death throes. Here is what he has to say about the Durbinesque tactics that the Ghost considers to be just playing the game the way "everybody" plays it:
Posted by: Kenny | Sunday, May 13, 2007 at 07:56 PM
Ghost,
Life puts you in lots of positions that aren't comfortable. The biggest problem with Americans is that they think that if they aren't comfortable, then that's an outrage, rather than its just being life in an imperfect world. As it happens, I am uncomfortable with giving government any power at all, and the more secrecy is involved the less comfortable I get -- indeed, I am far less comfortable with the granting of power to government than is anybody who could quote with approbation that screed about "redefining freedom" that showed up in the comments here a while back. But I am also uncomfortable with allowing innocent people to be destroyed by terrorists. And I know something that liberals just don't seem to grasp, which is that life is a long series of tradeoffs, and often none of your options are good, and the only way to find a position that makes you "comfortable" is wilfully to close your eyes to some significant aspect of the situation. The easiest way to resolve a bugger of an ethical dilemma is to put your hand over your eyes and pretend that one of the horns doesn't exist -- and then you can criticize anybody who doesn't run all the way to the extreme end of the horn you picked, as being morally inferior to yourself.
By the way, Ghost, about "moral relativism:" you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I am not going to get drawn into an argument about "torture" with you, Ghost, because I spent quite a bit of time last year in such a discussion only to have the guy on the other side make it clear that no evidence on earth would ever convince him that innocent lives could be saved by waterboarding known terrorists. Here I was doing my honest best to wrestle with the dilemma created by terrorism, and it turned out my friend was not interested in dealing honestly with the tradeoffs -- he just decreed that the tradeoff was not allowed to exist and then claimed the moral high ground. But the first rule of moral thinking is, "Get your facts straight." Hell, if I were willing to wish the dilemma away, then I'd be right where he is and probably way past him on the tie-the-government's-hands spectrum, being someone who intrinsically distrusts government, while he is somebody who thinks the answer to practically any problem is to have the government solve it -- unless the Republicans are in control, in which case Government Is Evil. But reality is that which doesn't go away even when you refuse to believe it, and the reality is that the government's responsibility to protect those whom it believes to be innocent, and its responsibility not to abuse its power in dealing with those whom it thinks may be guilty, are in conflict most of the time. It is easy to declare that we ought to be a nation that never violates the dictates of conscience; and it is easy to tell yourself that that means that we should not let our government do anything that even hints at the possibility that innocent persons could be harmed by our inaction -- as long as you pretend that only half of the dictates of conscience exist. That is, it's easy to take what you proclaim to be the moral high ground if you pretend that it's a terrible moral failure for our government unintentionally to cause pain to the innocent through its actions, but that it's no moral failure -- no dereliction of duty -- for our government unintentionally to allow the deaths of thousands of innocents whom it was sworn to protect, through a refusal to act.
But having been through one fruitless conversation on this topic, I'm just not particularly interested in going through it again. I mean, if I were confident that I were dealing with people who were genuinely open-minded on the topic, that would be different; I think it's an issue (like the issue of abortion) that forces you to think through very profound issues at the heart of right and wrong, and certainly it's one on which I think my current views may be in need of correction. Not happening today, though. In fact I'll give you the last word on the torture thing, or the last fifty words, or however many you want to take, because I'm not taking that on again in this thread. I repeat my congratulations to Mac for his observing that the question of torture was not the point of my post, and that in that post I actually granted the anti-torture postulate for the sake of argument.
Returning to the actual point of the original post: Perhaps I am misunderstanding you, but I gather that you are pretty much conceding that the level of demonization of Bush is higher than the levels of demonization directed at his immediate predecessors. It seems to me that you're just saying that (a) there's nothing wrong with the tactic of demonization in politics, and (b) the reason that the levels have risen is that Bush deserves to be demonized. (Unless you're trying to say that Bush really is, quite literally, the moral equivalent of Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot; but I don't think you mean to go that far.) Well, okay, then, we disagree and it seems to me the useful part of the conversation pretty much ends there. I don't think your response is the response of somebody who really means it when they say they don't want to be even the least little bit like Hitler, but that bit of inconsistency is your problem, not mine. I myself think demonization is, in all but the most bizarrely special circumstances, a fundamental violation of the laws of charity and integrity from the religious perspective, and a divisive and destructive tactic from the political spectrum. I don't think it's a tactic that you can use (at least in ordinary circumstances) without being both a bad Christian and a bad citizen, and the fact that the use of nasty and destructive rhetorical tactics is widespread among politicians...well, is anybody here very much invested in defending the proposition that politicians are the salt of the earth?
On the other topic, though, you seem to be disagreeing with my theory that Durbin said what he said through fatuous ignorance, and maintaining that in fact he knew perfectly well that he was indulging in demonization. You consider this an exculpation of the Senator, it seems, because you think you have shown that demonization is not evil, and thus you are trying to clear him from the charge of being a moron. Since I do not buy your rationalization of the tactic, if I were to accept your correction, this would force me to stop thinking of him as a well-meaning moron and instead drop him in the vicious-lying-bastard-politician slot. Therefore I think it's more charitable for me to continue thinking of Durbin as I have been so far, which -- ironically enough -- is pretty much the way I think about Dubya.
It's a very odd thing -- you have far more faith in government than I could ever imagine having, and yet the better I get to know you the more I realize that when it comes to individual politicians you're far more ready to think badly of them than I am. It doesn't surprise me that you are willing to demonize the hated Republicans. But to find that you also have a lower opinion even of Democrats than I do...that's something I didn't expect. According to you, it seems, politicians are so universally dishonest, demagogic, unscrupulous and malicious, that the moral bar has to be dropped down to Dead Sea levels in order to make it possible for them to get over it -- Dick Durbin can resort, in your opinion deliberately, to absolutely shameless demonization of the President, and as far as you're concerned one has to condone that behavior because he's a politician and that's just what politicians do.
Yet you want to hand over all kinds of power to politicians, at least just as soon as you can be confident that it will be Democratic, not Republican, politicans -- Democratic politicians like the estimable Dick Durbin -- who will be able to wield government force against the uncooperative. Can you not see that in attempting to rebut what you perceived as a personal attack on a Democrat (which you didn't want to tolerate because anybody demonizing Republicans is on the side of the Good Guys and is off-limits for criticism), you have yourself provided a vastly more sweepingly damnatory accusation against the entire Democratic Party as well as the Republican Party? You are talking to someone whom you know perfectly well is a Libertarian and who believes that the common man is far more decent and far more to be trusted than are most politicians. And you have just admitted to me that all politicians resort to uncharitable, dishonest, manipulative tactics in order to win the power necessary to impose their will, by violence, upon their fellow citizens. Keep it up and you'll convince more people to become Libertarians than I ever could... ;-)
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Sunday, May 13, 2007 at 07:20 PM
I don't typically cite other blogs, but this one has done its homework on the issue of torture and habeas corpus:
Link
In the end, this Republican adminstration's policy on these issues is simply another example of incompetence. Torture is not an effective intelligence tool (only on TV folks) and circumventing our normal policies on prisoners simply complicates our internal processes for their disposition, and undermines our standing in the world on the issues of human rights.
Once again, Republicans displaying poor judgement with deliterious effects on their own objectives. Pathetic, but predictable.
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Sunday, May 13, 2007 at 01:58 PM
1. There is a basic principle of simple charity, which is that one tries to think the best of other people, and certainly one does not exaggerate the human failings of another being into monstrosity of evil, either to oneself or to others.
Kenny, I understand what you are saying better than you think. I have to point out that your standards for discourse are your standards for discourse.
Rhetoric has been around as long as there have be human beings, and for some people unless you raise an exaggerated juxtaposition, they just "don't get it". Do you really think that in a sit-down discussion comparing the virtues of Dubya and Pol Pot that Durbin would really think Dubya is Pol Pot incarnate? That is nonsense.
However, if you have a sitting government that uses 9/11 as justification to abandon the application human rights, undermine Constitutional principles and abrogate international agreements such as the Geneva Conventions (which we honor for the sake of our own soldier's treatment as much as the enemies) a rhetorical shot between the eyes on the political stage is more than appropriate.
On January 18, 2002, President George Bush (the decision is referenced1 in the Gonzales Memo of 25 January, 2002) made a presidential decision that captured members of Al Quaeda and the Taliban were unprotected by the Geneva POW Convention. That decision was preceded by a Memorandum dated January 9, 2002, submitted to William J Haynes II, General Counsel to the Department of Defense, by the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (which provides legal counsel to the White House and other executive branch agencies) and written by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and Special Counsel Robert J. Delahunty.
The Yoo/Delahunty Memorandum provided the analytical basis for all which followed regarding blanket rejection of applicability of the Third Geneva Convention to captured members of al Qaeda and the Taliban. Its validity is, accordingly, analyzed in some detail at the end of this discussion.
In a Memorandum dated 19 January, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to inform combat commanders that "Al Quaeda and Taliban individuals...are not entitled to prisoner of war status for purposes of the Geneva Conventions of 1949." He ordered that "commanders should "...treat them humanely, and to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, consistent with the Geneva Conventions of 1949." That order thus gives commanders permission to depart, where they deem it appropriate and a military necessity, from the provisions of the Geneva Conventions.
Of interest, this line of argument presents a startling analogy to the arguments raised by defendants at the post World War II Nuremburg trials, and elsewhere, that, because they were required by national law to obey superior orders, they had an absolute defense against war crimes committed in carrying out those orders. That so called Nuremburg defense was, and has been since, roundly rejected. The point is, of course, that whatever their validity under U.S. national law, they present no defense to an otherwise valid charge of a war crime under international law.On January 25, 2002, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales sent a Memorandum to President Bush regarding a presidential decision on January 18, 2002, (the White House has issued an Order to that effect, dated February 7, 2002, see below) that captured members of the Taliban were not protected under the Geneva POW Convention ("GPW"), to which the legal advisor to the Secretary of State had objected. He advised that "there are reasonable grounds for you to conclude that GPW [the ] does not apply ...to the conflict with the Taliban." Mr. Gonzales argued that grounds for the determination might include:
1) a determination that Afghanistan was a failed state "...because the Taliban did not exercise full control over the territory and people, was not recognized by the international community, and was not capable of fulfilling its international obligations" (see definition of statehood in Cpt. 1.3 and discussion in Kadic v. Karadzic, 70 F.3d 232, 244 to 245 (2nd Cir, 1995) ) and/or
2) a "determination that the Taliban and its forces were, in fact, not a government but a militant, terrorist-like group."
Mr. Gonzales then identified what he believed were the ramifications of Mr. Bush's determination. On a positive note he felt they preserved flexibility stating that:
"The nature of [a "war" against terrorism] places a high premium on ...factors such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors ... and the need to try terrorists for war crimes... [t]his new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners..." He also believed the determination "...eliminates any argument regarding the need for case-by-case determinations of POW status." The determination, Mr. Gonzales said, also reduced the threat of domestic prosecution under the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441). His expressed concern was that certain GPW language such as "outrages upon personal dignity" and "inhuman treatment" are "undefined' and that it is difficult to predict with confidence what action might constitute violations, and that it would be "...difficult to predict the needs and circumstances that could arise in the course of the war on terrorism." He believed that a determination of inapplicability of the GPW would insulate against prosecution by future "prosecutors and independent counsels."
Mr. Gonzales then identified the counter arguments from the Secretary of State (See, Colin Powell Memo of January 26, 2002 pages 1,2,3,4,5) which included:
Past adherence by the United States to the GPW;
Possible limitations on invocation by the U.S. of the GPW in Afghanistan;
Likely widespread condemnation by allied nations;
Encouragement of potential enemies to find "loopholes" to not apply the GPW;
Discouraging turn-over of terrorists by other nations;
Undermining of U.S. military culture "which emphasizes maintaining the highest standards of conduct in combat..."
In response, Mr. Gonzales says, inter alia, "...even if the GPW is not applicable, we can still bring war crimes charges against anyone who mistreats U.S. personnel." He adds that, "...the argument based on military culture fails to recognize that our military remains bound to apply the principles of GPW because that is what you have directed them to do." (Emphasis added).
On February 7, 2002, President Bush signed an Order, (pdf copy) accepting the reasoning of the Yoo and Gonzales memos, and validating the order issued by Secretary Rumsfeld on January, 19, 2002.
From the sequence of events, and discussion by White House Counsel, it appears fairly clear that the decision by Mr. Bush, and the subsequent orders from Mssr.s Bush and Rumsfeld, were based on the Yoo/Delahunty Memorandum of 9 January, 2002.
That Memorandum was written in four parts. The first examines the 18 U.S.C. Section 2441, the War Crimes Act, and some of the treaties it implicates. The second part examines whether members al Qaeda can claim protection of the Geneva Conventions and concludes they can not. The third portion examines application of those treaties to members of the Taliban. It concludes nonapplicability because 1) it says "the Taliban was not a government and Afghanistan was not...a functioning State", 2) "the President has the constitutional authority to suspend our treaties with Afghanistan pending restoration of a legitimate government", and 3) "it appears...that the Taliban militia may have been ...intertwined with Al Qaeda" and thus on the same legal footing. Finally, the fourth part concludes that customary international law does not bind the President or restrict the actions of the United States military [under a constitutional analysis].
The Memorandum is questionable on many grounds, both factual and legal.... and represents a radical departure from conservative historical American positions.
From this perspective, the idea that the legal findings of this Republican administration in this regard are more reminiscent of despotic regimes attempting to reconcile themselves in anticipation of violating international laws of conduct in war.... these arguments at base were preparatory for the applications of torture to prisoners, and for the general convenience of suspending habeus corpus.
In recent days, human rights violations perpetrated by the USA throughout the "war on terror" have in effect been given the congressional stamp of approval. With the passing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 by the US House of Representatives on 27 September and the Senate on 28 September, Congress has turned bad executive policy into bad law. This document looks back on the evolution of the executive’s "war on terror" detention policies, in order to illustrate the sort of violations in which Congress, through inaction and now legislation, has become complicit. Amnesty International will continue to campaign for the USA’s "war on terror" detention policies and practices to be brought into full compliance with international law, and for repeal of any law that fails to meet this test.
On 21 September 2001, Amnesty International faxed a letter to President George W. Bush. The organization urged the President to put respect for human rights and the rule of law at the heart of his country’s response to the crime against humanity that was perpetrated on 11 September 2001. "In the wake of a crime of such magnitude", the letter said, "principled leadership becomes crucial… We urge you to lead your government to take every necessary human rights precaution in the pursuit of justice."
Amnesty International deeply regrets that its appeal fell on deaf ears. The past five years have seen the USA engage in systematic violations of international law, with a distressing impact on thousands of detainees and their families. Human rights violations have included:
Secret detention
Enforced disappearance
Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
Outrages upon personal dignity, including humiliating treatment
Denial and restriction of habeas corpus
Indefinite detention without charge or trial
Prolonged incommunicado detention
Arbitrary detention
Unfair trial procedures
Most Americans, and some Republicans, find themselves unconfortable being put in this position.
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Sunday, May 13, 2007 at 08:25 AM
Ghost,
You were entirely missing the point at first, but I think you've figured it out a little better as the discussion has gone along. You'll have to forgive me if what follows, tries to explain stuff you already figured out -- I wasn't on line when I wrote it, and when I came back to post it lots of conversation had gone on in my absence. I'll go ahead and post it because I think you're still not really grasping what I'm trying to say and because at 2:00 a.m. I'm too tired to throw it all out and start over; but I hereby note that I can tell you're closer to the mark than I originally thought you were.
At any rate:
Nobody is saying, "It's not a sin to hate Jews as long as you don't actually kill any of them, because that's not as bad as Hitler," or, "It's not a sin to kill Jews as long as you only kill four or five million of them, because that's not as bad as Hitler," or, "It's not a sin to kill six million Jews as long as you don't make lampshades out of their skin, because that's not as bad as Hitler." Being a devout (though not particularly good) Christian, I am obviously well aware of the Sermon on the Mount; indeed, I used to be able to recite the whole thing from memory. But that doesn't mean I think that if a man has ever looked at Halle Berry and thought, "Man, I'd like t' get a litter outa THAT," his wife should be able to divorce him on grounds of adultery. Redneckery, sure, but adultery, no.
The point of Jesus' words (and of James's and Paul's on a similar theme) is not that there are no such things as relatively good or relatively bad people. It's that nobody is good enough; all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, Whose command is, "Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." Those sayings apply to two issues: (a) is it okay for me to indulge myself in little sins as long as I avoid the big ones? and (b) are there some people who are good enough to make into heaven without depending utterly on God's grace and Christ's atonement? If Senator Durbin had in fact been operating from the motives you ascribe to him, and if he had been applying correctly those Scriptural principles by which you attempt to justify his folly, then the burden of his speech would not have been, "If you heard what our government is doing to suspected terrorists, you would think Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot was in charge." It would have been, "I, Senator Dick Durbin, am just as much in need of the grace of God as were Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and even Republican neocons, for I like them have sinned knowingly in thought, word and deed, through my own fault, through my most grievous fault; may God be merciful to me, a sinner." Somehow that's not the vibe I got from the speech.
If you decide to abuse those particular teachings by applying them as a lever to condemn other people rather than as a spur to reform yourself, so that no matter how absurd the comparison is you can rationalize to yourself saying to those who disagree with you, "Anybody listening to you would think he was listening to Hitler or Stalin," then not only are you using those teachings in completely the opposite way from that in which they were intended to be used, but you are throwing away any hope you might have had to influence the behavior of those whom you thus attack. For a person who passes judgment with such utter abandonment of proportion, is a person whom others come very early to hold in contempt.
Besides, if you're going to appeal to the Sermon on the Mount, and you're going to say that all political discourse should be predicated on the constant literal and extreme observation of each of the principles found therein (with no attention paid to context, intended application, or Jesus' penchant for hyperbole as a paedogogical tool), how exactly do you reconcile your incessant condemnation of Dubya, your insistence on making every single topic that anybody here at ATB brings up just one more excuse to take a whack at Dubya (I think if I posted a recipe for chocolate chip cookies you'd claim that proved that Dubya is a terrible President), and your refusal ever under any circumstances to give the man even the most minimal and begruding of praise...how do you reconcile all that with, "Judge not, lest ye be judged"?
Let me try again to make my points, this time rather more clearly and in somewhat more detail.
1. There is a basic principle of simple charity, which is that one tries to think the best of other people, and certainly one does not exaggerate the human failings of another being into monstrosity of evil, either to oneself or to others.
2. There is a principle of honest and useful discussion and persuasion, which is that discussion is about which ideas best capture and express reality, that persuasion is about affecting what another person chooses to do of his own choice, that debate is about which of two people is smarter, and that arguments are about which of two (or more) people is more of a jerk. If somebody brings in Hitler as an analogy, it is usually obvious whether they are engaging in a discussion or an argument; and a wise man simply does not waste time with people who want to argue. I mean, it doesn't do you any particular harm when a person who can't even read expresses a preference that your eternal destiny be one that notoriously lacks air-conditioning, but time is precious, and besides, Jesus was pretty emphatic about the whole pearls-before-swine thing. Thus even though I adore the wintertime and I admire patriotism, "Winter Patriot" has just gone straight onto my list of persons whose posts I will henceforth pretend do not exist -- not because (s)he has hurt my feelings, but because if I pay any attention, (s)he will just waste my time.
3. There is the logical principle of proportionality. Adultery, patronisation of prostitutes, participation in orgies, and bestiality may all be "the same thing" as looking lustfully at a woman, in the extremely limited sense that they are all forms of the fundamental deadly sin of Lust rather than of, say, Sloth. But there are, quite clearly, dramatic differences as well. Unless a person is speaking in an explicitly devotional context in which the question is root classification of sin or else the private quest to "be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect," it is simply false to say -- or rhetorically to imply -- that all of those are "the same thing."
4. There are the consequences of the abuse of language, the debasement of language, and the damage that does both to people who are encouraged grossly to exaggerate their own victimhood, and to those whose genuinely horrific suffering is thereby patronisingly minimized. In effect, the compassion and empathy that genuine victims need from others for their healing, is stolen from them to feed the narcissistic self-pity of the sheltered and privileged; for once you have taken all the words that we can use to describe evil and dumbed them down to where half the population qualifies as "evil," then when the real thing arises you no longer have language adequate to deal with that reality. If the foulest insults that humankind can dream up are to be routinely applied to Bush, then what happens when someone who is far more evil than Bush arises? What terms will you apply to that person, having failed to keep any rhetorical powder dry, as it were?
5. A person of sheltered life and incurious temperament may be very naive indeed about just what depths of evil people can descend to (and I think the typical liberal American is sheltered by his good fortune in being American, and is apt to be rendered incurious and indolent on matters moral by the liberal shibboleths of "tolerance" and "multiculturalism"). In that case, he is apt to define "ultimate evil" as "the worst thing I personally know about." Since "the worst thing I personally know about" means for most people "the behavior of the people I dislike the most," it's a natural thing for such silly persons to decide that the people they really dislike, are the ultimate in evil -- and since everybody knows that if you want to say "ultimately evil" you say "Nazi," then the guy who really annoys you becomes, in your rhetoric, the moral equivalent of the person who oversaw the Holocaust. The conclusion of my post argues that this sort of fatuously sincere (though stupid) Hitler-talk is something that you'd like the fatuous person to learn to be ashamed of, but that it is not as bad as wielding the rhetoric of demonization in the full awareness that one is doing nothing more nor less than lying about and slandering your enemies; and Durbin made his appearance there because I think his speech is probably a perfect example of the particular type of folly I was trying to describe.
If I stick to your point rather than mine, Ghost, you are arguing that a "real" American would never want to be even the least bit like Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot, and therefore there's nothing wrong with heaping exaggerated and disproportionate abuse on persons in whose behavior or beliefs we can find analogues to the behaviors and beliefs of Hitler or Pol Pot. Now let me show you the consequences of that for yourself, should the rest of us adopt the rule that any similarity to tyranny gives us licence to abuse others as if they were tyrants.
The point I was making in my original post was that the tactic of demonizing one's opponent and exaggerating the degree of evil to which he has abandoned himself, is precisely a matter of claiming that his faults are far more grievous, both in degree and in kind, than they really are; and that demonization of Dubya is more endemic than I remember demonization of Clinton or Reagan or Carter to have been -- i.e., it seems to me to be a worsening problem in American political discourse. Now, it is hard to demonize someone convincingly by making specific accusations, especially because specific accusations, when unjustified, tend to be readily refutable. Therefore throughout history liars, demagogues, and the privately malicious have resorted to the tactic of demonization by association. With this tactic, you take a label that everyone associates with evil, and you find some excuse, however tenuous, to slap that label on your target. Generally speaking, your label should meet the following criteria:
1. The label should connote not just effects, but motive as well -- saying that someone has influence and has been financially successful doesn't pack nearly the punch as does saying that he is part of a conspiracy of a wealthy and powerful cabal that means to dominate the world with its behind-the-scenes pulling of strings. But note that you want the label to connote the image of malicious motivation you're trying to sneak in, rather than to denote it, because the former is vastly more difficult to refute.
2. Some detail of the behavior of persons who deserve the label should be similar enough to your target's behavior -- even if the similarity is merely verbal and even if there is a farcical difference in degree -- to let you say that your target is doing "the same kind of thing" as are persons whom everyone would agree fit the label.
3. You should be able to pretend that persons who fit the label, are a threat to the ordinary decent people in whom you are trying to inflame hatred; if people wearing the label have in fact caused great harm to others in the past, so much the better for your purposes.
4. If you can personify the label (that is, refer to a person whom everybody knows about and already has highly negative associations with), that makes the label far more effective. You could call somebody a backstabber, but it's very much more effective to call him a Judas. You could call somebody a fascist (especially if your audience has the sort of desultory American public education that practically ensures that they won't know any better than their pet hamsters what "fascism" actually is), but it packs more punch to call him Hitler (or perhaps a "little Eichmann").
If you can find a label that meets these characteristics, then you can call your target "Hitler" or whatever, and you'll suggest to your listeners that your target deserves the label in all respects, especially in motives and intent, and you encourage your audience to direct toward your target the same fear and anger and hatred that they have for the exceptionally evil people who genuinely deserve the label. If your audience is composed mostly of people who, like you, want to think badly of your target, this will give them the excuse they need to do it. But if somebody challenges you on it by attempting to refute the specifics that you have merely implied, then you appeal to the similarity that's actually there and huffily pretend that that's all you meant to begin with.
In private life, you resort to demonization in order to excuse yourself for hating the person who disagrees with or otherwise annoys you. Most of us know that it is wrong to hate, and persons handicapped by having grown up in the liberal subculture have the added burden of feeling that it is wrong even to "be judgmental," i.e., to pass judgment on the moral quality of others' actions (this is a burden because it is impossible not to pass such judgments when someone is violating one of the moral principles you genuinely believe in). The easiest way to deal with the guilt one feels (a guilt which appears to be more exaggerated in people who have been raised to be "tolerant" rather than charitable), is to convince yourself that your target is so vile that he deserves to be hated because he's practically forfeited his humanity, and therefore it's okay for you to hate him. This doesn't work very well if you have been carefully raised by genuinely godly Christian parents, because you will have been taught that even if somebody does deserve to be hated, God requires you to love him anyway; so to rationalize your hatred you have to find a way to "forget" that inconvenient point. But the person who has been raised with the faux virtue of "tolerance" doesn't suffer from this particular constraint.
In public life, you use demonization to whip up the passions of the mob and to create a situation where it does your enemy no good to appeal to reason or to the mob's human decency, because you have moved the mob out of the arena of reason and into the arena of passion, and out of the mode of compassion and decency and into the mode of hatred and malice and revenge and fear. But the approach is the same, with one difference: in order to wield demonization in the public sphere you don't have to bother to convince yourself, at least not if you are unscrupulous. In fact it works better if you are perfectly well aware of what you are doing, because you can more cold-bloodedly foresee and prepare for your targets' attempts to defend themselves in the court of public opinion, thus (ideally) ensuring that they have lost before they even start.
You detect demonization by running through a quick checklist:
1. Is there a difference in degree between the target's behavior and the behavior that is popularly associated with the label? For example, a person who gets angry may have "committed murder in his heart," but if you use that as an excuse to call him "Jack the Ripper" then you're trying to direct against him emotions that are not appropriate for someone who has merely gotten angry. To put it in very simple terms for people who have trouble grasping this: Everybody gets angry, but very few people engage in serial killing. The emotions we feel toward serial killers are what they are because serial killers' behavior is so uncommon that we feel they have all but abandoned their humanity -- and therefore it would be deeply and contemptibly dishonest to try to get somebody to feel about me the way he feels about serial killers, by pointing out that because I have been known to get angry, I have ipso facto "committed murder in my heart."
2. Does the label imply a depravity of motive that I don't have good reason to believe is actually present? If it is possible that a person is engaging in the behavior you detest out of good but foolish intentions, then it might be appropriate to call him a "little Chamberlain," but to call him a "little Stalin" would be demonization.
Now, that Durbin was engaging in demonization (though I think in this particular case he was fooling himself as much as anybody else) is not really open to dispute. He was, quite clearly, engaging in demonization. But demonization was probably Hitler's single most effective propaganda weapon. So if you're going to defend Durbin, my dear Ghost, then you can't very well avoid saying that it's okay to be quite a bit like Hitler in some ways. Indeed you tiptoe up to the very threshold of making that sentiment explicit when you try to excuse Durbin's use of a dishonest and destructive rhetorical technique that happens to have been Hitler's favorite technique as well, by saying, "Politicians use rhetoric." Well, yes, but there's a difference between using rhetoric responsibly and using it irresponsibly. For example:
Responsible:
Irresponsible:
Both Dr. King and Mr. Douglas used rhetoric. Would you say that the former's use legitimized the latter's?
At any rate, for my part, having more sense and integrity than Durbin, I'm not about to say that he is a Nazi just because I caught him engaging in demonization; I think his motives were not very Nazi-esque, even if his rhetorical methods were, and therefore it would be slanderous for me to say that Durbin is a Nazi, or to pretend that if I hadn't known in advance that the person who gave Durbin's speech was a Democrat, I would have assumed from the speech that he was a Nazi propagandist with no respect whatsoever for truth or justice. But by your rule, since he is unquestionably "a little bit" like Hitler, I could feel free to label him a Nazi with a clear conscience. May I respectfully submit that my rule is more likely to promote charity and compassion and compromise and civility in discourse, than is yours?
Again, from my Libertarian perspective liberal Democrats are doing "the same thing" as Nazis or Communists -- that is, they are (or would be if they could get complete control of the goverment) using the government's monopoly on violent coercion, and people's fear of what the government can do to them if they break the laws, in order to promote a political agenda that lots of reasonable people would disagree with and object to if your government were to fail to intimidate them into silence. Insofar as you want to pursue your agenda by expanding the government's power and directing it to the service of your agenda, Ghost, you yourself are more than just a little bit like Hitler and don't mind being so -- but you would object pretty strongly if I were to announce that from now on I would always refer to you as "ATB's resident Hitler." I certainly would object if anybody here were to start calling you "Eva Braun" -- but then I also object when people refer to Dubya as "Hitler."
Finally: you've pulled in the Sermon on the Mount, my dear Ghost, so I'm going to take the liberty of challenging you as a fellow Christian to examine your conscience. Are you dealing charitably with Dubya, when you defend and excuse those who would demonize him? In aiding and abetting that demonization, are you doing unto him as you would have him do unto you?
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Sunday, May 13, 2007 at 03:55 AM
Gabriel Honoré Marcel (December 7, 1889 Paris – October 8, 1973 Paris) was a French philosopher, a leading Christian existentialist, and the author of about 30 plays.
Marcel obtained the agregation in philosophy in 1910, at the unusually early age of 21. He taught in secondary schools, was a drama critic for various literary journals, and worked as an editor for Plon, the major French Catholic publisher.
Marcel was the son of an atheist, and was himself an atheist until his conversion to Catholicism in 1929. Gentle, flexible, and good natured, Marcel was opposed to anti-Semitism and supported reaching out to non-Catholics.
Marcel is believed to have coined the word existentialism some time after the First World War, while he was still an atheist. He is often classified as one of the earliest existentialists, although he dreaded being put in the same category as Jean-Paul Sartre; Marcel came to prefer the label "neo-Socratic" (possibly because of Sören Kierkegaard, the father of Christian existentialism, who was a neo-Socratic thinker himself).
Sartre emphasized people's inability to treat the other as subject, which Marcel viewed as mistaken. While Marcel recognized that human interaction often involved objective characterization of "the other", he still asserted the possibility of "communion" - a state where both individuals can perceive each other's subjectivity.
For many years, Marcel hosted a weekly philosophy discussion group through which he met and influenced important younger French philosophers like Jean Wahl, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Marcel was puzzled and disappointed that his reputation was almost entirely based on his philosophical treatises and not on his plays, which he wrote in the hope of appealing to a wider lay audience. Camus and Sartre were far more successful in translating their philosophical concerns into appealing literature.
Marcel's philosophical methodology was unique, although it bears some resemblance to both existentialism and phenomenology broadly construed. He insisted that philosophy begin with concrete experience rather than abstractions. To this end he makes constant use of examples in order to ground the philosophical ideas he is investigating. The method itself consists in “working…up from life to thought and then down from thought to life again, so that [one] may try to throw more light upon life” (Marcel 1951a, p. 41). Thus, this philosophy is a sort of “description bearing upon the structures which reflection elucidates starting from experience” (Marcel 1962a, p. 180). In addition, Marcel expressed a refreshing preference for philosophizing in ordinary language. He maintained that “we should employ current forms of ordinary language which distort our experiences far less than the elaborate expressions in which philosophical language is crystallized” (Marcel 1965, p. 158).
"All then prepares us to recognize that despair is in a certain sense the consciousness of time as closed or, more exactly still, of time as a prison- whilst hope appears as piercing through time; everything happens as though time, instead of hedging consciousness around, allowed something to pass through it. It was from this point of view that I previously drew attention to the prophetic character of hope. Of course one cannot say that hope sees what is going to happen: but it affirms as if it saw. One might say that it draws its authority from a hidden vision of which it is allowed to take account without enjoying it.
We might say again that if time is in its essence a separation and as it were a perpetual splitting up of the self in relation to itself, hope on the contrary aims at reunion, at recollection, at reconciliation: in that way, and in that way alone, it might be called a memory of the future."
Homo Viator
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Saturday, May 12, 2007 at 09:22 PM
So uh Winter Patriot.... listen.... nobody here is responsible for Guantanamo or Iraq.... we'd all kinda like to see Dubya and his whole Republican administration unceremoniously flushed down the crapper, but we really can't do that right now.
So, like Kenny is really talking about extreme comparisons and some rhetorical things, and well mac is really a fine fellow once you get to know him.
Gringoman is, well, gringoman and none of us were really justifying Guantanamo or torture for that matter...
So like let's just chill on the rotting in hell stuff and.... well, I'll tell you what.... why don't you just call me....
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Saturday, May 12, 2007 at 08:30 PM
Now I'm wondering how I can redeem myself so as not to rot in hell forever.
People, get ready!
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Saturday, May 12, 2007 at 07:27 PM
Mac.... I wasn't criticizing you. I was demonstrating an irony with respect to the concept of "absolute" morality.
Of course Durbin is begging exaggeration (sp) with his comparison.... however the rhetorical point was about the "wrongness" of torture and how this Republican administration had proceeded with prisoners. That is a rhetorical technique.... exaggerated comparisons..... politicians use rhetoric.... most Republicans think EVERYTHING is about rhetoric, being "on message" and loyal to ideology regardless the facts.... and Republicans depend on rhetoric of a much more primative nature all the time. They simply employ strident assertions of "their truth" hoping to out run the real truth at every turn. It's spin spin spin.
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Saturday, May 12, 2007 at 03:15 PM
When the US started bombing Afghanistan in October 2001, it was simultaneously offering huge cash bounties for "terror suspects". People fleeing from the bombing of their homeland were captured in the lawless border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan and sold into captivity.
Some of those people are still in Guantanamo.
The International Red Cross has tolds us that 70% to 90% of the people being held there -- without any charges, without any hearings, let alone any trials -- are innocent not only of terrorism but of any wrongdoing whatsoever.
Yet they've been there for more than five years. And there is no indication that they will ever be released.
Whether the official story of 9/11 is true or false, nobody in his or her right mind could possibly contend that all the people of Afghanistan are to blame. And yet our government bombed their country, bought fleeing refugees, and continues to hold them against their will.
Whether or not this is better or worse than Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot is irrelevant. It's still a despicable, unjustifiable, and thoroughly evil policy.
It is the way of tyrants, and madmen. And I am disgusted but not surprised to see a post on this so-called "beautiful" blog defending it.
May you rot in hell forever.
Posted by: Winter Patriot | Saturday, May 12, 2007 at 01:33 PM
Gentlemen,
If you'll pardon a tad of heresy or contrairianism, I seem to be feeling very non-partisan these days. In fact, I really have to rein myself in to keep from hurling in a less-than-genteel way, as in "A plague on both your bordellos!"
This distemper is elaborated a little more in a recent gringommentary at gringoman.com, THE BC ERA. It begins....
All right, we're in the 19th year of what gringoVision dubs 'The Bush-Clinton Era'. A misnomer, you say? Glib over-reach? Unfairly offensive both to Dems and Pubs? Is it just a groundless insinuation that both parties have become equal purveyors of good and evil ('bad' for seculars) or at least evil(bad) as they look more and more like pimples on the face of Lady America? Is sober reflection even possible inside the belly of the times, without the historian's arm chair perspective?
This BC Era is noted for breeding millionaires like flies or workhorses (choose your simile), cocky stock markets, low unemployment, a BC down-sized pc military unable to properly man the Iraq project, very intensive globalizing and out-sourcing (encouraged by Ivy League globalistas like Bush and Clinton), BC multi-culturalism, emboldened Islamic fanatics, BC confusion on how to confront Islam, border anarchy, unprecedented tidal waves of illegal aliens, anchor baby boom, astronomical entitlements, professional victimologists, history's fattest poor people, the telecom and New Media revolution, mainstreaming homosexuality, Soros workers, the care and feeding of White Guilt Syndrome, the emergence of slut n' thug culture once confined to the ebony ghetto, a kind of politically correct Police State feared by broadcasters and even by office-holders, and race racketeering (mainly by white liberals and their media-hatched black "leaders", replacing the old defeated conservative racism with the new triumphant liberal racism and its notorious double standards.)
About this BC Era, volumes could be, should be and no doubt will be written, possibly even before the Era is finally over. Not a story day goes by that's not illustrative in some way, whether appearing online, heard on air, seen on plasma or read in one of the environmentalists' losing-ad-revenue tree killers. ...
[Continued at gringoman.com's gringommentary with examples from (1) The Fort Dix Six (2) Paris Hilton and (3) the female Naval officer who reportedly (via military corruption.com) moonlighted for the DC Madam while attached to the Naval Academy}
Posted by: gringoman | Saturday, May 12, 2007 at 01:09 PM
Finally, Mac, I have not addressed your bitter complaint about the way in which America is waging a "war on terror" in such a way that it has absolutely no effect whatsoever on our standard of living -- and even then we whine that we have to get out of Iraq, over the objections of the majority of the soldiers who are actually doing the fighting, because "the price is too high." But that is not because I didn't notice it. It's because, even though that is the single thing that most infuriates me about this war and most causes me to be pessimistic about the future of the American character, you said it so well that I couldn't think of anything to add. Amen, and amen, and amen is what I say.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Saturday, May 12, 2007 at 12:43 PM
Mac,
Should have reread that last before I posted it, because I didn't state my criticism of Obama quite accurately. It's not actually that Obama never has anything to say. What I should say is that, as a matter of campaigning style, he usually tries to avoid specifics that he could be nailed down on and forced to defend rigorously. (See, for example, his absurd attempt to avoid the al-Qaeda question in the South Carolina debate by changing the subject -- within the first sentence -- to, "Well, Bush has done it all wrong, especially Katrina.")
But it was an exaggeration to say that he never says anything.
Unfortunately, so far, when he has come down out of the dreamland of vague feel-good generalities and has said something that lets you get a handle on something he would like to implement as an actual policy, I've thought, "Um, that's a pretty stupid idea." But having stupid ideas is not the same thing as having no ideas at all; so my criticism in my previous comment was not really fair.
[chuckling] Though I have to say, I'm not the only person whom Barack affects that way. My opinion seems to coincide very much with this gentleman's:
That would be the verdict of the notorious right-wingers over at The Nation. (The Ghost may note here that by her standards anyone who wishes to abuse me as a far-left-winger is now free to do so, since out of my own mouth I have just admitted to being, albeit admittedly to a small degree, like Bob Moser.)
Mac, you know Obama better than I do, it seems to me; if you were going to lay out what you believe to be his intentions as to specific policy, what would make the list?
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Saturday, May 12, 2007 at 12:38 PM
Mac,
Don't worry, I'm not exactly a huge fan of Dubya, which I don't think is a big surprise to anybody here.
Unfortunately, I also don't think much of Obama, but then again, it's pretty hard to come up with a very long list of politicians of whom I have a high opinion. Your reaction to him interests me. To me, he seems to be all tone with no substance, and he seems to me to use the undeniable complexity of many issues to keep from having to address them with specifics, or to get away with reintroducing very silly ideas without having to address the withering logical criticism of those ideas that caused their retreat from the political marketplace in the first place. In other words, Obama strikes me very much as does F. Scott Fitzgerald: one likes the way he talks, but that can't hide the fact that he has very little to say. Govorit' mnogo, skazat' nichevo, as the Russian tag has it (very roughly translated, "To talk a lot while saying nothing").
But clearly, that's not at all how you perceive him. Very interesting.
And thank you, by the way, for recognizing that my point was very much a point about "rhetorical excesses" and the damage such excesses do to the person who commits them and the society that responds favorably to them, rather than whether the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo is unethical.
Posted by: Kenny | Saturday, May 12, 2007 at 12:09 PM
Weird. I expect to be criticized from the Right on this blog, after my last post, for affirming mostly pro-Dem and pro-Obama and anti-Bush sentiments, and what happens? GD pops up with criticism from the Left. Life never ceases to present one with surprises. GD, I love Durbin, I voted for him, I agree with you about torture, but...Kenny's remarks about Durbin's rhetorical excesses were spot on. Shalom, Mac Brachman
Posted by: mac Brachman | Saturday, May 12, 2007 at 09:45 AM
I wouldn't criticize Durbin too much Mac.... he was simply being absolutist in his moral rhetoric. Very simply torture is evil, even if practiced a little bit, and if embraced undermines the high-moral stance of America because such behavior approximates the policies of despotic governments of the present and past.
In a moral system where "lusting in my mind" is the moral equivalent of adultery, or where the use of birth control is the moral equivalent of abortion, or an abortion to save the life of a mother is the moral equivalent of abortion for convenience, the idea that torture and deprivation of human rights by America is the moral equivalent to torture and deprivation of human rights by Pol Pot or the Nazis shouldn't be that difficult to grasp.
Real Americans don't want to be even a little bit like Pol Pot or Hitler.
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Saturday, May 12, 2007 at 08:29 AM
Kenny: Thank you for your comments. I do not believe George W. Bush had prior knowledge of 9/11, nor did Dick Cheney et al. I do not believe they do what they do out of a deliberate sense of malice. However (I've outed myself as a moderate-to-liberal Dem. and an Obama supporter on this blog, so what the hell), I do believe they have misgoverned in the name of the "war on terror," that the Iraq war was a disaster from the get-go and has undermined our specific fight against the malignant Al Qaeda/Taliban/Pakistani jihadist/ISI (Pakistani intelligence service) combine and our larger battle against radical Islamism. I believe they have slanted most issues with the goal of sensationalizing them and casting those who disagree as witting or unwitting comforters of terrorists. I'll leave aside the wide range of "domestic" issues (I put the term in quotes because many "domestic" issues are increasingly international, from job security (which relates to international trade) to energy consumption (international relevance is obvious) to environment (ditto)).
But most of all I hate the whole tone of America in this age, the tenor and the sense of priorities the average citizen has or has been encouraged to have by the Bush Administration. Bush's approach has combined the worst aspects of Coolidge (presidential personal do-nothingism; complex policy issues, even life-and-death ones like an international "war on terror" are too boring and tedious to attend to details or to work hard, even if you're the most powerful man on earth), Hoover (stubborn sticking to current strategy and tactics even in the face of repeated failure, disaster, and scandal), Nixon (paranoid and hostile approach to all political "enemies," name-calling, sensationalistic/hyperbolic rhetoric), and Carter (overweening self-righteousness and certainty of one's own goodness and of the evil of any who disagree). Bush and Co.'s message to America post-9/11 has been, "go shop. We know what's best; don't worry your pretty little head about international affairs or Islam or any of that stuff; we've got it under control." And boy have we shopped. Even as our nation faces a crisis of survival, we are obsessed with the trivial: buying another I-pod or SUV, attending to the latest infantile doings of incorrigible attention-seekers like Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears. In other times, when there was a war on, people were not only aware of it, they were called upon to sacrifice, to notice that there were Americans fighting and dying for our safety and freedom. Not Bush and Co.: the message is, the overworked "all volunteer" force, stretched to the limit and beyond by the incompetent war tactics of this Administration, will take care of everything, never you mind.
So this is what I hate most about our age: the triviality and childishness and selfishness of the American consciousness, promoted by the Administration. Not only is it aggravating; it's sad! After 9/11, Bush could have called us to a common purpose. He chose not to; indeed, he did the opposite. When my parents were children in the 1930s and 1940s, the prominent actresses were the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Hattie McDaniel, and Carole Lombard. All women of substance; none would ever ignore the fact that the nation was in a Depression and then a world war (indeed, Lombard died in a plane crash while on a domestic tour to promote War Bonds, leaving her husband, Clark Gable, who co-starred with McDaniel in "Gone With The Wind," a widower). Who do we have? Lohan, Spears, and Eva Longoria. In both their entertainment lives and personal lives, you'd hardly know anything serious was happening in the world.
Not that everyone thinks that way. The 10-15% of the population that pays serious attention to current affairs is still there; they're just polarized, using simplistic arguments, easy scapegoats, and invective-filled rhetoric to make their points. So you get the rants of Maureen Dowd and "der Professor," as I call him, Paul Krugman (prof. of economics at Princeton) on the one side and the editorial pages of the Weekly Standard and the WSJ on the other. God help us all.
That's the main reason I like Obama; he (mostly) eschews easy rhetoric, slogans, and arguments; he understands our problems are complex, people are going to be asked to make difficult sacrifices, and scapegoat-hunting is a self-destructive game in the long run. What Kenny said about the other senator from my state (Mr. Durbin, Mr. Obama's senior counterpart), is, unfortunately, mostly true.
Sorry if I rambled too long; Shabbat Shalom. Shalom, Mac Brachman
Posted by: mac Brachman | Friday, May 11, 2007 at 09:17 PM
Let's Dance Little Stranger
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Friday, May 11, 2007 at 09:06 PM
A thlippry thlope indeed Kenneth.... the idea that there can be more or leth evil.....that maybe evil can be good in some cirucmstanthes..... thumarrily dithmithing the atholuteneth of evil is nothing leth then moral relativism!
In philosophy, moral relativism is the position that moral or ethical propositions do not reflect objective and/or universal moral truths, but instead make claims relative to social, cultural, historical or personal circumstances. Moral relativists hold that no universal standard exists by which to assess an ethical proposition's truth. Relativistic positions often see moral values as applicable only within certain cultural boundaries or in the context of individual preferences. An extreme relativist position might suggest that judging the moral or ethical judgments or acts of another person or group has no meaning, though most relativists propound a more limited version of the theory.
Some moral relativists — for example, the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre — hold that a personal and subjective moral core lies or ought to lie at the foundation of individuals' moral acts. In this view public morality reflects social convention, and only personal, subjective morality expresses true authenticity.
Moral relativism differs from moral pluralism — which acknowledges the co-existence of opposing ideas and practices, but accepts limits to differences, such as when vital human needs get violated. Moral relativism, in contrast, grants the possibility of moral judgments that do not accept such limits.
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Friday, May 11, 2007 at 05:37 PM
Amen, Kenny, Amen.
read Solzhenitsyn's GULAG Archipelago ...which made it instantly and forever impossible for me to entertain for the slightest instant the idea that the American treatment of our prisoners at Guantanamo was even remotely comparable to the evils of the Stalinist camps. I had read Corrie ten Boom's The Hiding Place...could not stomach...much less imagine for a moment that any even marginally sane person could compare Guantanamo to Ravensbruck...
My own introduction to the Kmer Rouge was a book I can't remember the title of that described the horrors of their "recruitment" programs, too, in which children in the eight to eleven year old range were forced to watch the murder of their families and learn to fight to the death others in their "military" groups, in order to harden their hearts to the pain and suffering of innocents. Then used as human wave assaults in battle. Gulag Archepelago also made an indelible impression on my mind- I was at the time, a pot-smoking, long-haired, maggot-infested...etc. Did some fact checking and found that it was really true, NY Times and radical left love of communism to the contrary.
...Let me assure the Senator (Durbin) that only somebody who had no idea of what the Nazis and Soviets and Khmer Rouge were like, would hear that a prisoner was being forced to be in a room where the air conditioning and the music were both cranked up too high, and instantly think, "My God! It must have been the KGB or Gestapo that was interrogating them!"...My point is that the Senator's words betray the fact that he has absolutely no idea of what it looks like when a regime genuinely has "no concern for human beings." (An oft-quoted motto of the Khmer Rouge, in regard to the 1.5 million and more people they killed: "To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss." Now that, Senator, is a lack of concern for human beings.)
My mother in law, after hearing me state that I thought Bush was an honest, honorabel man trying to do the best he could for America and protect this country from threats from the outside, told me "I just lost all respect for you!". What can you say to that? My mom, who is more reserved, has made it clear in her own way that she is praying for me to return to the Rooseveltian democrat world from the lost world I now inhabit.
Americans are, after all, the most fortunate people in the history of the world, insulated from the batterings of disease and famine and despotism and tyranny to a degree that is really very difficult for most of us to appreciate
Posted by: nofate | Friday, May 11, 2007 at 05:24 PM
"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings."
But Kenny.... most Americans, even some Republicans, don't want to be even a little bit like Pol Pot! Evil is Evil.... I cannot countenance this bit of moral relativism!
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Friday, May 11, 2007 at 04:46 PM
My parents knew a guy who had been a prisoner of war in those hyperefficient German camps, and had had most of the small bones in his body broken under torture. He couldn't even stand to be in the same house as a TV playing Hogan's Heroes.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Friday, May 11, 2007 at 04:15 PM
glad to read you back online again. been missing you.
Posted by: skewline | Friday, May 11, 2007 at 11:36 AM
I ... could not stomach the offensive banality of Hogan's Heroes...
Wow, and I thought I was the only weird kid back then. It wasn't funny, either.
Posted by: Mike Anderson | Friday, May 11, 2007 at 11:04 AM