Timothy Burke has a comparison of the US today to late-Weimar German that's actually thoughtful, not just careless polemics: TIMOTHY BURKE: Twizzle Twazzle Twozzle Twome (scroll down to May 14 posts).
Explaining why he makes the comparison, he says:
Not because of the prison abuses, not exactly. More because of two related developments in the wake of those abuses: first, the degree to which one important faction of the American right has unabashedly revealed its total contempt for anything approaching universal liberal democratic values, or any sense that the United States must actually earn its status as moral exemplar rather than have that status conferred on it as a cultural and racial inevitability, a national destiny. In the aftermath of Abu Gharaib, the intellectual and ethical collapse of one segment of the right has been total. It's been a litmus test to see who jumps which way. Andrew Sullivan, to his credit, has jumped back from madness and begun to ask the questions that need asking and say the things that need saying. But much of the populist right like Rush Limbaugh, as well as commentators like Victor Davis Hanson and politicians like James Inhofe, have dived in and happily wallowed in pure and unrestrained moral excrement.
The far more disturbing thing for me is that this isn't just the chattering classes, that there is a segment of the American public for whom there appear to be no conditions or events that would falsify their belief that the war in Iraq is necessary, just and winnable. More, judging not just from press reports but things I've overheard myself in conversations, there are people who believe that the conduct in Abu Gharaib was justified and if anything not extreme enough, and that the war has to be prosecuted with more intensity and force in every respect. There is the ordinary American man in today's New York Times who says, "Wipe them all out". There are those who many of us have overheard saying, "Well, if it comes to that, we have nukes". ...
The reason this raises the specter of 1930 and the question of what Germans ought to have done against Nazism for me is that I now have a new appreciation for how hard it might have been to know what to do then, because I don't really know what to do now. What does one do when one becomes aware that a significant plurality of one's fellow citizens seems to believe that it's right to torture people and pursue an exterminationist or brutalist strategy of conquest? I honestly have no idea.
I would point out that there's always been a certain number of people who reacted like that: defending William Calley's mass murder at My Lai, idolizing Ollie North, spewing jingo rhetoric. And this is not the first time the junkie bigot Rush Limbaugh has demonstrated the level of his commitment to the principles of democracy and civilization.
1 comment:
"What does one do when one becomes aware that a significant plurality of one's fellow citizens seems to believe that it's right to torture people and pursue an exterminationist or brutalist strategy of conquest?"
Interesting post. and for once i can see where your coming from here. The kuwaiti's in the above situation asked for help from the rest of the world. the iraqi's in the above situation are doing everything in their power to become a free and democratic society. That is the situation you were talking about isn't it?
Post a Comment