Abu Ghraib and "the greatest country in the world"

This Abu Ghraib torture story is a very important one.  And it's something of a test for Americans who piously judge other peoples and earlier generations of Americans for tolerating obvious wrongs - but often make those judgments superficially and with little seriousness.

If anyone thinks this is a lead-in to some white-guy whine about how Yankees shouldn't judge those pore Southern white folks who practiced slavery and segregation, I will refer you to some of my posts on the neo-Confederate drivel.

I'm sure I'll be returning to this issue.  But I want to make a couple of points about it.

How many times in the lifetime of any adult in America have we heard stories about the Holocaust, and wondered how the Germans could have cooperated with the Third Reich and its wars and persecutions?  How many times have we heard a speech or a sermon or seen a TV show or movie that dealt with segregation in the South and wondered how such an undemocratic system could have endured for nearly a century in the United States, with all its accompanying atrocities?

The Civil War is a very popular topic in "popular culture," a term I use with great hesitation.  But to the extent slavery is mentioned, it's usually passed off as an unimaginable evil, and the Southerners who practiced it and the Northerners who tolerated it to various degrees seem like pitiful moral pygmies, to the extent we engage the issue at all.  Remember the "ethnic cleansing" and rape camps in Bosnia and the outrage over the barbaric behavior of those exotic Balkan people?  Or the documentaries about how the US excluded Jewish immigration in the 1930s when Jews were menaced by Nazi policies?

Now Americans face the fact that our country has a systematic policy of torture in the countries that we are conquering - or in the case of Afghanistan, shooting up without actually conquering.  Yes, even based on what we know at this point, the policy is systematic and widespread.  Calling it the new gulag, as Sidney Blumenthal does, is an appropriate description.

Now we'll see how well we Americans, whose leaders constantly proclaim to the world and to voters happy to have our national narcissism stroked, deal with the knowledge that our military, directed by our civilian officials - are conducting sytematic torture in order to practice "terror" in the old-fashioned, French-Revolution sense.  To terrorize the populations we aim to subjugate.  We'll come up with no shortage of alibis, I'm sure.  Thanks to the Supreme Court's Scalia Five in 2000, we can at least truthfully say that we didn't elect this government.

I'm gong to quote a few paragraphs by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton from an essay called "Passivity and Abuse of Authority" from a 1971 collection, Thomas Merton on Peace.  It was actually written in 1962 or 1963, inspired by the diary of a Catholic priest written during the German occupation of France during the Second World War.  It is a Christian theological reflection on citizen responsibility:

One of the grave problems of religion in our time is posed by the almost total lack of protest on the part of religious people and clergy in the face of enormous social evils.  It is not that these people are wicked or perverse (as the Communists would have us believe) but simply that they are no longer fully capable of seeing and evaluating certain evils as they truly are: as crimes against God and as betrayals of the Christian ethic of love.  ...

It seems that a psychology of evasion and helplessness, glorified and encouraged by persons in authority who are able to take advantage of it, has gradually come to replace the true virtue of Christian obedience.  This is a psychology of subservient opportunism which in reality has nothing Christian about it, but on the contrary gives ample scope for the irresponsibility of the mass mind and in the end threatens to destroy both Christian and democratic liberty. ...

Note that a characteristic of this psychology is in fact a latent despair of freedom and of democratic government.  The either/or complex, which resigns itself fatalistically to the supposed "choice" between Nazism and Communism is, in fact, flight from the difficulties and responsibilities without which democratic life and freedom are impossible.

We could substitute Bush's rhetoric of Good and Evil for "Nazism and Communism" in that last sentence.

I was very glad to see today that there were a few protesters at the hearing who made the Congress who voted for this war against Iraq, and the generals and the Secretary of Defense who carried it out in violation of international law, hear for a few seconds a word of protest against their disgraceful gulag with it's Ku-Klux-Klan-fantasy S&M games (Rumsfeld Offers Apology at Hearing Los Angeles Times 05/07/04 :

Minutes into his testimony, Rumsfeld was heckled by several people in the audience, who shouted "Fire Rumsfeld!" and "War Criminal!" Security guards ushered the protesters out of the room.

Since the forces of respectability immediately hustled them out of the room, I thought the two-sentence summary at least deserved large type in this post.

If we are going to take collective pride in the mythical stories of American greatness, it's foolish to be surprised when the rest of the world sees us all under a collective shadow of Abu Ghraib.  Jim Lehrer on the PBS Newshour (05/07/04) touched on this point in a question he asked to columnist David Brooks who pathetically was trying to minimize the torture story:

Do we have a specific problem, David?  [Do] We Americans have a specific problem because we tell the world how wonderful we are all the time and that we are not barbarians like everyone else, that we don't acknowledge the dark side of our human psyche as everyone else does?

Brooks' reply is not worth quoting.  But it's an excellent question.  And the answer is, "Well, duh!  It's pretty obvious and at times like this it comes back to bite us big time."  But I guess we can't expect a Big Pundit like David Brooks to come up with that response.

I've been amazed for a while at how it's become stock rhetoric for American politicians, including Presidents, to refer to the US as "the greatest country in the world" (Republican version) or "the greatest country in the history of the world" (Democratic version).  This is a fairly recent phenomenon; Jimmy Carter is the first President that Iknow of that useda phrase like that.  When Thomas Jefferson talked about American being a beacon of liberty, or Lincoln talked about the US being the last, best hope of mankind, they were speaking about a country that was still a minor player on the world stage and was struggling desperately to make democracy survive as a form of government.

This "greatest country in the world" nonsense today is just mindless jingoism.  My advice to politicians of both parties:  Shut up with that!  If America is "the greatest country in the world," lets leave that to people from other countries to say.  It's stupid and narcissistic at best for Americans to be saying that.  At worst, it contributes to the kind of self-righteousness and deadly arrogance that led Bush and Rummy to create a gulag outside of international and American law featuring the sadistic torture of prisoners - allegedly to "get information," in reality to terrorize the "enemy" populations and to satisfy the sick tendencies of those who do the deeds.

We're going to hear a lot more about the Abu Ghraib story.  It includes the sex and sensationalism that became the Holy Grail of the mainstream media in the 1990s.  And it relates to the Iraq War - though the Bush-and-Rummy Gulag extends well beyond Iraq - which is obviously going very badly.

It's also going to provide a real-time lesson in how Southern segregationists could learn to live with lynching (and participate in it), how Germans could tolerate Nazi anti-Semitism (and facilitate it), how Serbians and Croatians and Bosnians could tolerate "ethnic cleansing" (and be willing to benefit from it).  We're seeing it some already, with Rush Limbaugh's it's-just-like-frat-boy-pranks justification of torture.

People wonder why soldiers engaging in sadistic tortures would take picture of themselves doing it.  I'm not surprised at all.  Just read Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men (1992), about Germans who were called up in the Order Police to systematically murder Jews in Poland.  They snapped photos documenting much of their activity, long before the invention of digital cameras, and proudly mailed them back to their families in Germany.  Once these kind of demons are let loose, the normal sense of shame and morality that operate incivilian life dissolve.  It's telling that Rumsfeld in his Senate testimony showed particular emotional outrage about the photographs themselves (Capitol Hill Sees the Flip Side of a Powerful Warrior Washington Post 05/08/04 edition, accessed 05/07/04; my emphasis)

"I wish I knew how you reach down into a criminal investigation when . . . it turns out to be something that is radioactive, something that has strategic impact in the world," Rumsfeld said, with unfamiliar helplessness. "We don't have those procedures. They've never been designed. We're functioning in a -- with peacetime constraints, with legal requirements, in a wartime situation, in the Information Age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had -- they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."

Maybe someday we'll have a Secretary of Defense again who will be more outraged about torture being systematically practiced on his watch than about whoever give photos to the media "against the law."  It's unlikely to be while any member of the Bush Dynasty holds power.

These kinds of activities are not restricted to wartime.  But war gives them a special opportunity to flourish.  The Nazis extensively persecuted Jews long before the Second World War.  The systematic exterminations of Jews only began after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.  And the decision to undertake that systematic killing was taken earlier that year in connection with the planning of the invasion of the USSR.

Chris Hedges in War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002) draws on his experience in the Balkan Wars to describe how the process works:

Organized killing is done best by a disciplined, professional army.  But war also empowers those with a predilection for murder.  Petty gangsters, reviled in pre-war Sarajevo, were transformed overnight at the start of the conflict into war heroes.  What they did was no different.  They still pillaged, looted, tortured, raped, and killed; only then they did it to Serbs, and with an ideological veneer. Slobodan Miloševiæ went one further.  He opened up the country's prisons and armed his criminal class to fight in Bosnia.  Once we sign on for war's crusade, once we see ourselves on the side of the angels, once we embrace a theological or ideological belief system that defines itself as the embodiment of goodness and light, it is only a matter of how we will carry out murder.

Next time Bush talks about our fight of Good vs. Evil, we would all do well to remember that it leads to Abu Ghraib and the fight to justify the Good Torturers as being better than the Evil Torturers.