torture as a macho American virtue

[fpb]

If the Republicans wanted to win at the coming elections - and, perhaps even more important, not to confirm every commonplace of anti-American propaganda throughout the world - they should have sent Cheney (and perhaps Rumsfeld) on a diplomatic mission to Antarctica for the last couple of months. His outburst about pretend drowning being a legitimate kind of interrogation has been manna to al-Jazeera, MoveOn.org, the Daily Kos, and the Brutish Broadcasting Creeperation. But what was worse was the number of would-be reasonable Republican columnists, people who claim to be the real mainstream of American society - and, increasingly, are - who, instead of suggesting that he should suffer from a few weeks of laringytis or that he should retire to the Rockies to fish and shoot deer, have lined up to support him, even claiming that pretend drowning is not torture. All of it, mind you, said with the earnest, moralizing tone with which they (rightly) denounce the New Jerk Dimes' assaults on American security and the crass exploitation of Mark Foley's flirts with young adults by the party of gay rights. Be serious: do you imagine that if such... call them procedures... were used by any American cop, against the worst, most murderous, and most provenly guilty, of gang members - the case against the gang member would not collapse in court, and the cop and his accomplices would not go to jail, among the execrations and disgust of all decent Americans? Have you morons learned nothing from the Abu Ghraib calamity? The West is held to a higher standard of behaviour than the stateless gangs of murderous thugs who hate it; and rightly so, for these are the standards we chose for ourselves. To imagine that American citizens are protected from treatment that is acceptable even for criminals of other countries is to make a nonsense of the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence. This should not even need saying; it should be as obvious as the sun in the sky. But evidently Cheney and a number of Republicans are blind to self-evidence.

A curse on the party spirit, and a plague on both your houses. The Foley affair showed the Democrats eager to throw overboard every bit of principle they had ever claimed with respect to gay rights, merely in order to show a little-known Republican in a bad light; and the water-torture affair now shows hordes of Republicans willing to throw overboard the very historical principles they claim to live by, the principles upon which the Republic was founded, just in order to support a morally tone-deaf old man. I can see the need of things like Guantanamo, special courts, and even limitations on published evidence, because this security crisis - it is hard to call it a war, though it has some of the features of one - is something completely new in the last few centuries of history: militarized banditry with a politico-religious justification, yet leaderless and stateless, with no state to hold responsible (though many are accomplices) for its soldiers' behaviour, no common uniform, organization, or aims, supported by an anarchic network of mosques, self-proclaimed leaders, Islamic financiers, and deviant secret services. In these circumstances, to hold the enemy to every word of the Geneva Conventions, which none of them ever signed, which none of them regard except with derision, and which never envisaged worldwide banditry of their kind is, whatever the US Supreme Court may happen to think, total insanity. But there is something much more important than the Geneva Conventions, which, after all, only codify the transient and ever-changing laws of war; and that is our own collective conscience, the values in whose name we have built our societies, the values in whose name our fathers fought and died against kings and tyrants. And if Dick Cheney thinks that these grey old rules may carelessly be broken for the delusion of advantage against a fanatical enemy, then he is almost as revolutionary and as destructive as that enemy; and to that extent, he has to be rejected by the sane majority of both parties.

Comments

[patchworkmind.livejournal.com]

Yes. My sentiments exactly. Exactly. I say so, and that's why it's getting a little harder for me to live hereabouts, on this continent. It's the seige mentality, the party jerseys, the Us v. Them thing that makes me cringe. It's the power-at-any-price crowd. It's all so transparent if people ever bother to think. The problem is... most don't, and they don't because they don't want to.

The state of things in the U.S., particularly its so-called government, saddens and sickens me no end.

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

I wonder if this is how it felt during the Cold War, or how the Germans felt in the bad old days?

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I'm reading Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem to try to get some sense of that... what makes people behave the way they do... how do people live with the horrible acts they permit/condone/participate in...

[patchworkmind.livejournal.com]

It might be, but the real test is in how one reacts, what one does with one's impulses. Does one choose violence or aggression, or does one choose to do something else? Does on sink to a lower level in hopes of "getting even"?

[super-pan.livejournal.com]

"The West is held to a higher standard of behaviour than the stateless gangs of murderous thugs who hate it; and rightly so, for these are the standards we chose for ourselves. "

You're right; we are supposed to be better than this.

We have the most amazing capacity for double think. We simultaneously decide it's ok for us to torture our "enemies", but still think we are the most moral and righteous country on this earth. It drives me crazy. And we can also boil it down to the simple premise that we should treat other humans the way we want our precious soldiers to be treated. I hate the idea of an American being treated the way we treated prisoners.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Let us not delude ourselves. Our enemies are monsters and will not treat any prisoners in any way but monstrously. In the days of the Empire, there was a commonplace that a British soldier left wounded and alone in Afghanistan should use his last bullet for himself - it would be better than what awaited him at the hands of the natives. The point is simply the same old, old, old one: what kind of victory do we achieve over our enemies, if, in fighting them, we become like them?

It is a practical point, too. Deskbound politicians in the capital and bloodthirsty newspaper warriors away from the front may think it more useful and efficient - and more pleasing to their anger and their frustration - to violate the rules of law in order to strike at the enemy; but it degrades the troops at the front. It teaches them to behave like bandits rather than like the soldiers of a state built on law and order; and the effects on discipline are inevitably disastrous. The German Army found that out in WWII: told by their political leaders to rob, murder and rape, their discipline collapsed. The number of court martials, executions and penal battalions was proportionately higher in the Wehrmacht than in the Red Army - an army built on terror. And there is no greater weapon than discipline. The Israeli Army repeatedly crushed stronger enemies, armed to the teeth by the world's greatest powers, quite simply because they had military discipline in their bones. Anything that endangers the fighting man's discipline at the front is a criminal threat to his morale and his very life. Period.

[bufo-viridis.livejournal.com]

The number of court martials, executions and penal battalions was proportionately higher in the Wehrmacht than in the Red Army - an army built on terror.

I'd rather think it was because Red Army usually did not bother with tedious paperwork of court martials etc., nor it registered all the instances of officers shooting beligerent subordinates ;)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Maybe, but the proportion was huge - something like two to one per number of men enlisted, if I remember Richard Overy's data correctly. I think that the correspondence between the criminalization of warfare and the collapse of troop morale is something that can be found in many places - it is, for instance, the only thing that explains the triumph in 1994 of the smaller, disciplined Tutsi force in Rwanda against the larger Hutu army, backed by the government and by France, but made drunk and disorderly by repeated massacres of civilians.

[bufo-viridis.livejournal.com]

I'd think that yes, criminalization of warfare doesn't work well for morale, so it makes harsher methods to keep up the discipline. However, there's no direct link between criminalization and ineffectiveness, of which Wehrmacht would be the best example. As much as "criminalised" the German army was it maintained v. high fighting ability basically to the very end. Possibly thanks to the strict disciplinary methods you mentioned. Similarly, if the Hutu's were disorderly by drinking alone, cue the massacres, they would be defeated anyway, I reckon.

V. high ratio indeed - what kind of penalties did the statistics include? Because such high ratio suggest large number of relatively minor charges (say, same guy serving monthly stints in penal battalion five times during the war). V. interesting.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

http://www.geocities.com/vortigernstudies/fabio/app9.htm

This is a curious place for this kind of data, but you will find the numbers and the reference for the sources.

[bufo-viridis.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'll have a look.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

fpb, I am so glad to read this from you. It has made me truly despair to see reasonable people trying to justify torture. As you say in your comment to halfguk, if, to defeat your enemy, you become your enemy, what kind of victory have you achieved?

And I agree with you that it's ridiculous the way the Democrats have exploited the Foley affair. It really is "a plague upon both your houses"--it makes a person wonder how to be principled in the political arena. Does one have to turn one's back on it altogether? I've always voted, but it does get so depressing sometimes.

[becomethesea.livejournal.com]

*applauds*

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

Well said.

... as always.