May 27, 2005
Civic Passivity
More than one hundred detainees have died in U.S. custody in the "GWOT." The United States has "rendered" suspects to other countries for "special treatment," torture, and execution. This might make it seem as if the United States wants to avoid the rough stuff, but that would be wrong. The DCI, Porter Goss claims that "waterboarding" is a "professional interrogation" technique. Unfortunately, the term waterboarding does not adequately capture the horror of what is done to the prisoner.
A failure to see beyond the abstractions and the euphemisms has led to a dangerous civic passivity in this country. We must strive to see beyond the words and to see our actions for what they really are. After all, the world thinks that America is doing this. And is the world not right; aren't American citizens ultimately responsible for the actions of their government? Therefore, let us shine a bright light on what many choose not to see.
Start by imagining waterboarding, examine it unflinchingly, without turning away. (If you are think that your imagination is not up to it, the film, Four Days in September, shows the Brazilian police using this technique.) This is what my government sanctions. I am horrified.
Fritz Stern has an interesting piece "Lessons From German History" where he speaks about the dangers of civic passivity. I have included a few interesting excerpts below (click on the continue reading button). He worries about our future now and I worry he may be right.
I know that I have underestimated the power and consequences of the policies current government in Washington. I know that I have not done enough. I challenge all of my colleagues, those of you reading this blog, to turn your personal and professional energies to shining a bright light on what many do not want to see.
Full text can be found at; http://www.nytimes.com/cfr/international/20050501facomment_v84n3_stern.html?pagewanted=print
or in the current issue of Foreign Affairs
Excerpt:
From "Lessons from German History"
To have witnessed even as a child the descent in Germany from decency to Nazi barbarism gave the question, how was it possible? an existential immediacy. Along with others of my generation, I wrestled with that question, trying to reconstruct some parts of the past and perhaps intuit some lessons.
Today, I worry about the immediate future of the United States, the country that gave haven to German-speaking refugees in the 1930s. (In 1938, at the age of 12, I came with my family to New York.) We refugees are grateful to the United States for saving us and for giving us a chance for a new start, if often under harsh circumstances. We loved and admired this country that, when we arrived, was still digging itself out from an unprecedented depression, under a leader whose motto was "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," while his German contemporary preached fear in order to exploit it.
The United States was the best functioning democracy of the 1930s -- that "low, dishonest decade" -- and under President Franklin Roosevelt it was committed to pragmatic reform and maintained inimitable high spirits. I have not forgotten the unpleasant elements of those days -- the injustices, the right-wing radicals, the anti-Semites -- but the dominant note of Roosevelt's era was ebullient affirmation.
Twenty years ago, I wrote an essay called "National Socialism as Temptation," about what it was that induced so many Germans to embrace the terrifying specter. There were many reasons, but at the top ranked Adolf Hitler himself, a brilliant populist manipulator who insisted and probably believed that Providence had chosen him as Germany's savior, a leader charged with executing a divine mission. God had been drafted into national politics before, but Hitler's success in fusing racial dogma with Germanic Christianity was an immensely powerful element in his electoral campaigns. Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics, but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudoreligious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas.
German moderates and German elites underestimated Hitler, assuming that most people would not succumb to his Manichean unreason; they did not think that his hatred and mendacity could be taken seriously. They were proved wrong. People were enthralled by the Nazis' cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into a flag-waving martial Mass. At solemn moments, the National Socialists would shift from the pseudoreligious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German people, 24 hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, "The national government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life." German elites proved susceptible to this mystical brew of pseudoreligion and disguised interest. Churchmen, especially Protestant clergy, shared his hostility toward the liberal-secular state and its defenders; they were also filled with anti-Semitic beliefs, although with some heroic exceptions.
Let me cite one example of the acknowledged appeal of unreason. Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, a Nobel laureate in physics and a philosopher, wrote to me in the mid-1980s saying that he had never believed in Nazi ideology but that he had been tempted by the movement, which seemed to him then like "the outpouring of the Holy Spirit." On reflection, he thought that National Socialism had been part of a process that the National Socialists themselves had not understood. He may well have been right. The Nazis did not realize that they were part of a historic process in which resentment against a disenchanted secular world found deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason.
Although modern German history offers lessons in both disaster and recovery, German has remained the language of politics in crisis. And the principal lesson speaks of the fragility of democracy and the fatality of civic passivity or indifference; German history teaches us that malice and simplicity have their own appeal, that force impresses, and that nothing in the public realm is inevitable.
Posted by Andy Blackadar at 09:24 AM
May 17, 2005
Should journalists be held to a higher standard than the government?
The credibility of the media continues to wither as it is simultaneously exploited and attacked by the savvy political party that is calling the tune. Lax journalists may have brought much upon themselves, but there is more going on here.
Most recently, the White House self-righteously brayed that an errant Newsweek report about the conduct of U.S. interrogators at Guatanomo Bay has damaged our image abroad and caused riots in Afghanistan and Pakistan that cost lives. It is, of course, an inadequate and incomplete explanation— and a claim that should be worthy of intense scrutiny. Where will the White House claim get this deserved scrutiny? Probably on the Daily Show, Comedy Central’s “fake news” program that revels in pointing out intellectual inconsistencies, faulty reasoning, and hypocrisy.
Much of the mainstream media will focus instead on Newsweek’s journalistic failure, which does deserve attention. The right’s spin machine will add fuel to this fire in another sleight of hand designed to deflect attention from the impact that our own government’s ill-conceived policies have had on our image abroad; and let’s not forget the cost in lives.
We might also remind ourselves of the U.S. government’s errors in reporting the facts during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Newsweek’s failure pales in comparison.
Posted by Andy Blackadar at 11:18 AM
