Our need to know–the ACLU and Abu Ghraib

The New Neo Posted on by

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight: US District Court Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein has ordered the release of more Abu Ghraib photos to help the ACLU prove that prisoners have been abused, and it’s OK because the terrorists don’t need those photos in order to hate us, they can do it very well for no reason at all.

And to think I used to give money to the ACLU.

This article from about a month ago makes the situation even more puzzling. Apparently, back then, Judge Hellerstein seemed to be very hesitent to release the photos because of the national interest involved. Why the change in one short month?

I haven’t found an answer, but the article explains why the ACLU is so hot to have these photos splashed all over the cable news networks and the newspapers: they’re only thinking of us:

ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh argued that release of the pictures was necessary for the public to assess the scope of the abuse and whether it could have been carried out without the knowledge of military leaders.

Thanks a lot, ACLU. I really, really appreciate it. I’m sure that once I look at those photos I’ll instantly know how high up the responsibility goes–no doubt, one of them features Rumsfeld holding a naked prisoner on a leash.

The underlying basis of Judge Hellerstein’s decision appears to be compliance with the Freedom of Information Act. Apparently, the present rule is that information should be released under the act unless “disclosure would be harmful.”

Our legal system ordinarily requires that a rape victim’s name not be released because it might be harmful to her. A juvenile’s court records are sealed because it might be harmful to the minor in question. The potential harm in both situations trumps the public’s right to know.

In the present case, the public has seen photos of Abu Ghraib ad nauseum, so seeing a few more is hardly likely to give the us needed and vital information. The only effect such release is likely to have is to harm us, our soldiers, and our country still further.

Whether or not the terrorists need such information to hate us is hardly relevant; they could certainly use it.

I’m with Dickens–the law is an ass (not to mention the ACLU).

[ADDENDUM: I didn’t see this when I wrote the post, but in the NY Times article on the subject, it mentions that, when the photos are to be released, the rights of the detainees to privacy will be protected:

Judge Hellerstein ordered that the images be edited to hide the faces of the Iraqi prisoners, to avoid violations of their privacy under the Geneva Conventions. He concluded that one videotape sought by the A.C.L.U. could not be adequately edited, and that it not be released.

So, to recap: a certain videotape will be surpressed because the right of the detainee to privacy overrides our need to see still more and more and more photos of abuse that has already been more than adequately covered in the press. But the rights of our servicemen and women to be protected from further inflammatory publicity on the matter, and our own right to be protected against increased rage in the Islamicist world, are both less powerful than that detainee’s right to privacy. I’m in awe.

It’s certainly possible that this decision makes perfect sense, if I were to read the entire transcript of the judge’s ruling. Sometimes learning the details of a case makes all the difference in the world. But from what I’ve read in the press so far, this one seems misguided.

It’s being appealed; it will be interesting to see what ultimately happens. But I think cases like this are an excellent example of why the public has become more dissatisfied with the judicial system in general.]

Martha Gellhorn on press censorship during WWII

The New Neo Posted on by

After reading Martha Gellhorn’s remarkably prescient
1961 Atlantic Monthly article about the Palestinians, I wanted to read more of her work. I recently and serendipitously happened upon a copy of her Travels with Myself and Another (the “other” being short-term husband Ernest Hemingway), and have been slowly savoring it.

Gellhorn had a mordantly witty and idiosyncratic approach to travel in some very out-of-the-way places–in fact, the book is devoted to what she calls “horror journeys.” She throws herself into adventure with the reckless abandon worthy of a Hemingway heroine, although she herself was angry that her biographers tended to focus on her brief marriage to him. Despite the fact that this is a travel book–although it’s a travel book like no other–it was as a war correspondent that she made her name.

Gellhorn began her war reporting with the Spanish Civil War and ended it in the 80s with the fighting in Panama, and spent a long time arguing passionately against the Vietnam War (and those of you who have read my Vietnam essays here know that I now have some disagreements with that point of view).

In the following passage, Gellhorn is looking back on the outset of WWII. Though a seasoned war correspondent, she accepts the necessity for press censorship at the time:

During that terrible year 1942, I lived in the sun, safe and comfortable and hating it. News reached us at regular hours on the radio and none of it was good. But we didn’t understand how bad it was; piecemeal and (I now see) wisely censored, the news gave us no whole view. The only war I understood or could imagine was war on land and that was enough to shake the heart with the Germans moving like a tidal wave into Russia and Rommel rampaging in the desert. I think my ignorance was typical; the general public, which is most of us, did not realize that the fatal danger was on the sea. We would have lost the war if we went on losing ships at the appalling rate of 1942.

To Gellhorn, and to other Americans, censorship was a question of survival. Her words remind me of Sandlin’s essay on the chaos of WWII as it was actually lived through in real time, discussed here. That Gellhorn, a woman dedicated to getting the truth out during war, came to realize that it was necessary to block the terrible news of the first year of WWII in order to sustain morale on the home front, was an admission of the extreme importance attached to winning that particular war, the “good war.”

I’m not suggesting we go back to generalized censorship of war news. I’m not even so sure it could be accomplished any more, global communications being what they are. But it sometimes seems nowadays as though we’ve gone to the opposite extreme, and that the news is skewed to the worst rather than the best. It’s almost as though the goal were to demoralize those at home.

Will someone please inform this woman how time zones work?

The New Neo Posted on by

Rand Simberg has a wonderful fisking of unrependent CBS producer Mary Mapes’ self-serving new book. Mapes’ head is bloody, but unbowed.

Simberg’s post is very very funny. Mapes herself, on the other hand, makes me very very sad, and very very angry. Her statements are so illogical that she makes me wonder whether any sort of critical thinking at all is required for a job as a producer with CBS. Perhaps not.

Mapes writes, among other things:

I was told that the first posting claiming the documents were fakes had gone up on Free Republic before our broadcast was even off the air!

Anyone who has followed the story knows that the theory of the early posting has been totally discredited by the fact that it involves a confusion between time zones. So Mary either doesn’t grasp the time zone concept, or she is disingenuous in using the covering phrase “I was told.” Either way, not good.

Mapes also writes:

There was no analysis of what the documents actually said, no work done to look at the content, no comparison with the official record, no phone calls made to check the facts of the story, nothing beyond a cursory and politically motivated examination of the typeface. That was all they had to attack, but that was enough.

Yes, Mary, let me try to explain it to you: ordinarily, when a document is proven fake, that fact automatically discredits its contents (some of the comments on the Simberg thread are hilarious along this vein). Mapes seems unable to grasp that simple concept–or perhaps she hopes that we will be unable to grasp it.

Is Mapes stupid, or is she ignorant–or is she banking on the fact that we are stupid and ignorant?

The varieties of pacifism: (Part I)–Gandhi’s absolutism

The New Neo Posted on by

While researching this post on the phrase “speaking truth to power,” I discovered that it originated among Quakers, and I promised that I’d write something soon about Quaker pacifism. I had planned that this post would be that “something.”

But my Quaker post will have to wait a little longer, because I got sidetracked when doing my research–one of the perils of Google. There are many varieties of pacifism, and although the Quaker version is an interesting, complex, and multifaceted one, today I’m going to write about a more absolute and extreme form of pacifism, that of Gandhi.

I had grown up hating and fearing war. As a woman, I knew I’d never be forced to fight one. But at the same time I certainly knew that I would and could (and, during the Vietnam War, did) have loved ones who would probably eventually fight in one.

The dilemmas inherent in deciding whether a war was just or not became familiar to me, both in the abstract and personally. How did I resolve them? You might say that, originally, when quite young, I had a sort of pacifist ideal; I just wanted us to “all get along.”

But even back then I realized there was a flaw; I hadn’t a clue as to how that might actually happen. The United Nations of my early youth was an early hope, but I soon began to realize that it was at best impotent (and later, at worst, counterproductive). It could not prevent conflict after conflict from happening. I was a post-WWII child, and it seemed clear to me that Hitler could not have been deterred by any human forces known to me–whether it be the power of love or that of the international courts–and those who thought otherwise seemed hopelessly, naively, and dangerously foolish.

Absolute pacifism–the most extreme form–eschews war in any guise. And what would absolute pacifism have suggested as a response to the Holocaust? Many years later I came across Gandhi’s answer, in an essay he wrote in 1938 advising the Jews on the subject of what to do about Hitler. In it, he sets out the case in unequivocal terms; and clearly, he understands that the Jews face grave dangers:

…the German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history. The tyrants of old never went so mad as Hitler seems to have gone. And he is doing it with religious zeal. For he is propounding a new religion of exclusive and militant nationalism in the name of which any inhumanity becomes an act of humanity to be rewarded here and hereafter. The crime of an obviously mad but intrepid youth is being visited upon his whole race with unbelievable ferocity. If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified.

So, Gandhi recognizes that, if ever a war would be justified, this is the war. And here is the Gandhian pacifist answer, that of the absolute pacifist–a non-negotiable and rigid faith that makes such justification impossible:

But I do not believe in any war. A discussion of the pros and cons of such a war is therefore outside my horizon or province.

So for Gandhi, whatever the question, “war is not the answer.”

And what is? He wrote:

Germany is showing to the world how efficiently violence can be worked when it is not hampered by any hypocrisy or weakness masquerading as humanitarianism. It is also showing how hideous, terrible and terrifying it looks in its nakedness.

Can the Jews resist this organized and shameless persecution? Is there a way to preserve their self-respect, and not to feel helpless, neglected and forlorn? I submit there is…If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.

When I read this passage of Gandhi’s, I experience a profound weariness. I have long felt that religions focusing on the transient nature of life on earth and emphasizing instead the glory of the world to come, although giving much comfort and joy to their adherents, run the risk of exhibiting just this sort of thing: a callous disregard of suffering in the here and now (not that they inevitably fall into that trap, of course).

Here Gandhi, with what I believe were the best intentions, does just that. He is casually suggesting the Jews use his method of satyagraha (which he developed and honed against the far milder British) against the Nazis, an example of an attitude that can at best be called naive, and at worst, fatally flawed. The transformative power of nonviolent non-cooperation was something Gandhi had, quite literally, staked his life on, and it was an article of faith to him that it could (and should!) be applied universally. If it could save the Jews, fine. But if not, then at least they would be massacred while doing the right thing. It almost sounds as though, to Gandhi, one result would be nearly as good as the other,and that makes me shudder.

A belief that powerful can’t be argued with; it simply is. This is the case with absolute pacifism; it lies beyond the realm of logic and argument, and is an article of faith. But if one tries to imagine that somehow, all six million Jews–men, women, and children–had somehow complied with what Gandhi suggested, what would have been the result? He says their action would either have wakened the respect of the Germans and they would have been spared, or it would have stirred up German anger and they would have been killed on the spot. My guess is that German reaction would have resembled the latter far more than the former, although there is no way to know for certain.

However, it’s a moot question, and not just because the Holocaust is over and done with. It’s a moot question because no people on the face of the earth could be expected to sustain that sort of response in the face of such danger. So Gandhi’s premise would be impossible to test. His suggestion shows a profound lack of understanding of human nature, and is an example of where idealism can take us–to what appears to be an absurdity, and a dangerous one at that, well-meaning though it may be.

All great visionaries are extremists, and Gandhi was no exception. By the sheer force of his personality he managed to hold together a movement against the British that ended up with a measure of success in terms of winning Indian independence. But that initial success was followed by the unleashing of internal forces of violence of such an extreme nature that they dwarfed any outrages the British had committed in India. When partition (which Gandhi had opposed) occurred, the country was already on the brink of a turmoil that erupted into a series of massacres which killed at least a million or more, although the true figures will never be known. Gandhi’s methods were utterly powerless against the violence between Moslem and Hindu, as opposed to his relative success against the British colonial authorities.

Gandhi was not only extremist, he was utterly consistent as well. I was shocked to learn that what he had earlier recommended for the Jews in the face of Hitler, he also applied to his own people on partition: that they surrender themselves to death. In this article by Dr. Koenraad Elst, a Belgian scholar on India, the author discusses a number of mistakes he feels Gandhi made. Elst writes:

Gandhi refused to see the realities of human nature; of Islamic doctrine with its ambition of domination; of the modern mentality with its resentment of autocratic impositions; of people’s daily needs making them willing to collaborate with the rulers in exchange for career and business opportunities; of the nationalism of the Hindus who would oppose the partition of their Motherland tooth and nail; of the nature of the Pakistani state as intrinsically anti-India and anti-Hindu.

In most of these cases, Gandhi’s mistake was not his pacifism per se…The Khilafat pogroms revealed one of the real problems with his pacifism: all while riding a high horse and imposing strict conformity with the pacifist principle, he indirectly provoked far more violence than was in his power to control. Other leaders of the freedom movement, such as Annie Besant and Lala Lajpat Rai, had warned him that he was playing with fire, but he preferred to obey his suprarational “inner voice”.

The fundamental problem with Gandhi’s pacifism, not in the initial stages but when he had become the world-famous leader of India’s freedom movement (1920-47), was his increasing extremism. All sense of proportion had vanished when he advocated non-violence not as a technique of moral pressure by a weaker on a stronger party, but as a form of masochistic surrender…

During his prayer meeting on 1 May 1947, he prepared the Hindus and Sikhs for the anticipated massacres of their kind in the upcoming state of Pakistan with these words: “I would tell the Hindus to face death cheerfully if the Muslims are out to kill them. I would be a real sinner if after being stabbed I wished in my last moment that my son should seek revenge. I must die without rancour. You may turn round and ask whether all Hindus and all Sikhs should die. Yes, I would say. Such martyrdom will not be in vain.” (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol.LXXXVII, p.394-5) It is left unexplained what purpose would be served by this senseless and avoidable surrender to murder.

Even when the killing had started, Gandhi refused to take pity on the Hindu victims, much less to point fingers at the Pakistani aggressors. More importantly for the principle of non-violence, he failed to offer them a non-violent technique of countering and dissuading the murderers. Instead, he told the Hindu refugees from Pakistan to go back and die. On 6 August 1947, Gandhiji commented to Congress workers on the incipient communal conflagration in Lahore thus: “I am grieved to learn that people are running away from the West Punjab and I am told that Lahore is being evacuated by the non-Muslims. I must say that this is what it should not be. If you think Lahore is dead or is dying, do not run away from it, but die with what you think is the dying Lahore…”

This is absolute pacifism run amok; as Elst writes, “a form of masochistic surrender.” There is an ancient Talmudic saying: “He who is kind to the cruel ends up being cruel to the kind.” The fact that in Gandhi’s efforts to stop violence “he indirectly provoked far more violence than was in his power to control” is a good example of that principle in action.

Gandhi is venerated by peace activists worldwide. I wonder whether they have studied his actual words, or the real-world consequences of his actions. If they did, would they still emulate and revere him?

[ADDENDUM: I decided to move this passage of mine up from the comments section. I wrote it in response to a commenter who asked what would have happened had the Jews resisted the Nazi roundups:

If you study the history of what the Nazis actually did, they practiced all sorts of clever deceptions to make sure the people they were rounding up did not know what was happening. There were told they were being relocated, and to pack bags, and many believed them. The entire roundup apparatus was geared to maintaining the deception to the bitter end, including the false showers at the death camps, in order to forestall any chance of rebellion. In additon, as many have pointed out, there were many women, children, and old people involved, and the populace, unlike that of the US, was not armed. Furthermore–and this is also of the utmost importance to remember–where would they have gone, even if they had been successful? Remember that Jews who managed to flee were turned back in droves, into the arms of the Nazis. Most of Europe would not accept them, nor would the US, and they were not even able to go to Israel (see the film “Exodus,” which contains a fictionalized version of some real incidents of this nature where ships were turned back to certain death). This fact is one of the main reasons the world later allowed the founding of Israel.

One likes to think there was a way out. It would have required 20/20 hindsight, perfect organization, knowledge, arms, and a safe haven–none of which were possible. As for awakening the German conscience–another nice dream, I’m afraid. Although the Germans (like the Jews) were not especially aware of death camps at the time, they witnessed and participated in terrible persecutions of Jews on a daily basis, mostly with no pangs of conscience whatsoever. It is hard and painful to look back and see how truly evil the behavior was, even without the death camps, but it was.]

[ADDENDUM II] Go here for the next post in the series, Part IIA, about the Quakers.]

Al Qaeda as media source

The New Neo Posted on by

Captain’s Quarters reports, (via this Washington Post article) that al Qaeda is now skipping the media middle man, and debuting its own internet video news site. I guess even al Jazeera isn’t good enough for al Qaeda–everyone seems to be dissatisfied with the media these days.

I’m not sure why al Qaeda isn’t more pleased with its coverage, though. Here, for example, is today’s Reuters report on the killing of Abu Azzam, said to be Al Qaeda’s second in command in Iraq, by combined US and Iraqi forces (and how that combination would have seemed an unbelievable pipe dream just three short years ago!).

In the Reuters article, writer Luke Baker is very careful not to crow too much about Azzam’s capture. A goodly portion of the article is devoted to “balancing” the good news: coalition statements are couched in the language of “US and Iraqi forces said” rather than of established fact. And al Qaeda statements on the killing are treated almost as respectfully, although Reuter’s does at least mention that the Al Qaeda’s sources’ authenticity could not be verified–that is, Reuters isn’t sure the speakers are actually from Al Qaeda.

Baker is quick to bring more “balance” to the story, which cannot be allowed to be limited to what seems to be an unequivocal US and Iraqi forces victory. Much of the article is devoted to downplaying the possible effects of the capture, and of course the obligatory “but things are still awful” appears fairly early on:

But attacks continued unabated.

In the latest act of violence, a suicide bomber…

I’ve often wondered why two stories such as this can’t be separated into–well, into two stories. But they almost never are.

Not the media’s finest hour–reporting urban legends as fact

The New Neo Posted on by

When I first heard the stories of widespread rape, murder, and other carnage at the New Orleans Superdome and Convention Center after Katrina, I was horrified.

Horrified, but skeptical. The last couple of years have taught me, as never before, that many newspapers are not especially keen on fact-checking or substantiating the veracity of their sources. What they do seem to be keen on, in this hotly competitive 24-hour news cycle, is getting the story out quickly–the more sensational, the better.

So I took those stories with some hefty grains of salt, since they sounded for all the world like urban legends. And now, with the passage of time, as the fog of Katrina has lifted, it turns out that most, if not all, of those stories appear to have been rumors (via Clive Davis):

Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities had confirmed only four murders in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina – making it a typical week in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this year. Jordan expressed outrage at reports from many national media outlets that suffering flood victims had turned into mobs of unchecked savages.

“I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two sites,” he said. “It’s unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn’t the case. And they (national media outlets) have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases, they just accepted what people (on the street) told them. … It’s not consistent with the highest standards of journalism.”

No, it’s not consistent with the highest standards. But it’s consistent with the usual standards.

And, in fact, if you read the entire article, it’s hard even for a media-basher such as myself to blame the media entirely. The rumors were so rampant and so global that even the Mayor and the Police Superintendent were fooled. Authorities who recently came into both venues searching for bodies were prepared to find scores or more, based on these reports.

There is no doubt that conditions were abominable; everyone agrees on that. But civility seems to have reigned for the most part. The number of rapes may be impossible to ascertain, but the evidence indicates that the reports of rapes were probably greatly exaggerated as well. The situation was rife for rumors of horror to spread: huge numbers of people under extreme conditions of fear and privation.

Reporter Gary Younge of the Guardian (another surprise–the Guardian?) has been skeptical of the reports for quite some time. In an article he wrote back on September 6, Younge was already questioning the veracity of the reports. An excerpt:

New Orleans police have been unable to confirm the tale of the raped child, or indeed any of the reports of rapes, in the Superdome and convention centre…New Orleans police chief Eddie Compass said last night: “We don’t have any substantiated rapes. We will investigate if the individuals come forward.” And while many claim they happened, no witnesses, survivors or survivors’ relatives have come forward.
Nor has the source for the story of the murdered babies, or indeed their bodies, been found. And while the floor of the convention centre toilets were indeed covered in excrement, the Guardian found no corpses….

“Katrina’s winds have left behind an information vacuum. And that vacuum has been filled by rumour.

“There is nothing to correct wild reports that armed gangs have taken over the convention centre,” wrote Associated Press writer, Allen Breed.

“You can report them but you at least have to say they are unsubstantiated and not pass them off as fact,” said one Baltimore-based journalist.

“But nobody is doing that.”

The best thing one can say about these stories is that some journalists themselves seem abashed that they were taken in. The remedy, as the unnamed “Balimore-based journalist” states, would have been to have stated that the stories were unsubstantiated rumors.

But that doesn’t sell newspapers, does it? (Not that too much else does, these days.)

An ode to baseball–and invalids

The New Neo Posted on by

As an inveterate Red Sox fan, last year was really the pinnacle—it just couldn’t get any better than that.

So I have to confess that, although the Red Sox are doing fine this year, I haven’t paid all that much attention. After all, they don’t need me any more to sweat it out, to leave the room and pace and wring my hands when things get tight, to turn off the TV for a few minutes when things get really tight. Fellow Red Sox fans will understand what I mean; others might think I’m quite loony, but this is standard operating procedure in Red Sox Nation.

I said after last season that if the Sox didn’t win for the rest of my lifetime it wouldn’t bother me, because the curse was lifted in such dramatic and overwhelming fashion—first, by the record-setting and historic reversal against the dread detested Yankees, of all people; next, by the cakewalk in the Series itself. Wins are no longer necessary for many years to come, although they still would be nice.

Those of you who are not baseball fans (and I used to count myself among you) can’t understand what the fuss is about. It’s such a slow, boring, game, after all, isn’t it? I used to think that, too, until two things happened. The first was that my son played Little League (now, there’s a slow, boring game). The second was that I sustained a back and arm injury about fifteen years ago and was very limited for quite a while in what I could do.

The Little League games taught me the rules of baseball, in a venue in which I couldn’t help but care—watching my son’s rise and fall on the field. I came to appreciate the beauty and grace of the game, the extreme tension produced by slowness punctuated by moments of great drama, the sequential spotlighting of each individual within a team.

Then when I became injured, baseball was there for me—as, I learned, it is for many people facing health problems. Baseball’s season is long, and a game occurs virtually every day. Someone cooped up and housebound can have a daily appointment with something outside of him/herself, an activity that lasts a number of hours and becomes engrossing, when there are precious few other activities that fit that bill.

Baseball features players who look relatively “ordinary,” despite the fact that they are highly honed athletes. They are neither freakishly tall, as in basketball, nor hulking behemoths, as many are in football, but men who look deceptively like anyone you might meet on the street, although a bit more fit. Their faces and bodies are exposed, unlike in ice hockey or football, games in which helmets and equipment cover and distort to a certain extent.

Watching the same baseball team day after day (or evening after day), the viewer gets to know each player very well—how he moves, his facial expressions, his nervous tics (Nomar Garciaparra was famous for them; for instance, he had a ritual with the hands and the gloves that had to be seen to be believed, but it wasn’t magical enough to keep him with the Sox for the World Series win). And it’s not totally incidental—at least for women fans—that baseball players tend to be young, good-looking men.

When one is in chronic pain, the mind finds it hard to focus. Things that formerly were fascinating, like books, can sometimes require too much concentration and effort. Baseball’s pace seems just right. It kept me sane while I recuperated, which took a long time. But baseball’s got the time—one of the few things in this high-paced world that still does.

Kerry: stick a fork in him, I’m afraid he’s done

The New Neo Posted on by

John Kerry just can’t get no respect these days. Even Michael Crowley of the New Republic tells him–and none-too-gently, either, that his time is up.

Not surprisingly, the peculiar offness, narcissism, and tone-deafness that Kerry exhibited during his Presidential campaign have followed him into his post-campaign campaign. He doesn’t seem to understand that, according to polls quoted in the Crowley article, his popularity has dived precipitously.

As Crowley writes:

…while the political world hangs on every word from Hillary Clinton’s mouth, and Joe Biden seems to be getting more airtime than Anderson Cooper, no one appears terribly interested in what John Kerry has to say anymore.

Anymore? Who ever was terribly interested in what John Kerry had to say? Yes, in the 2004 election campaign people were paying attention to his words in order to see whether he would succeed in countering their arch-enemy, Bush. But, listening to him for its own sake? I don’t think so.

If, at the time, Kerry hadn’t been the only game in town in a position to defeat Bush, he would have stirred up about as much interest as he has for most of his political life since the its high point, the 1971 Senate hearings on Vietnam–which is to say, none to speak of.

“Truth to power”: deconstructing a phrase

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a popular phrase on the left, used here by Dan Rather, of all people (courtesy Roger Simon): “speaking truth to power.”

The expression, which has been around for quite a while, is brilliantly parsimonious. In just four simple words (really only three, since one of them is “to”), it succinctly encapsulates the left’s view–both of itself, and of the way the world works.

First, there’s “truth.” One of the hallmarks of much leftist thought is the idea of their own moral (not just doctrinal or analytic) superiority. The left’s definition of “truth” often seems to be that it consists of whatever they believe to be true. Ergo, whenever they “speak” (word three), it’s “truth” by definition; they certainly don’t need no steenking facts cluttering up their truth (as in the pesky Memogate).

Next, there’s “power.” The left is all about power differentials. Third-world countries or those perceived as powerless are always right (i.e. “truthful”); powerful countries are always wrong. It’s not, of course, just about international relations and countries, it’s also about people and economics: poor people=good (powerless), rich people=bad (powerful).

Want to know the origins of the phrase? I did; it turns out it has to do with Quakers and pacifism, (see this), a subject I plan to tackle some time in the not-too-distant future.

If Rather sees himself and CBS as an example of “truth,” particularly after Memogate, I’m not exactly sure what falsehood would be. The MSM and CBS are certainly also examples of power, too; hasn’t Rather ever heard of the expression “The pen is mightier than the sword?” (I know, I know; CBS doesn’t use pens much any more–or typewriters either, for that matter, unfortunately for CBS. But the expression is metaphorical anyway).

[ADDENDUM: In an attempt to head off possible misunderstanding, I will add that I am not talking about liberals here, I’m talking about the left. And I’m not saying Dan Rather is an example of the left; that’s why I was a bit surprised to read that he’d used the phrase.]

The Holocaust: was it unique?

The New Neo Posted on by

Norman Geras is a man who has thought long and hard about the Holocaust. Recently, he tackled the controversial question of whether the Holocaust was, “in some significant moral sense, singular or unique in the long catalogue of calamities that human beings have inflicted upon one another.”

Norm has anticipated many possible objections to the discussion and responded to them convincingly. He anticipates and deals with the question of whether the Holocaust stands in some mysterious way outside the realm of such inquiry, whether the discussion of singularity is meaningless because all events are unique, whether the Holocaust must have had one absolutely unique feature to be called unique, and whether the question of uniqueness is ill-advised because it places one group of sufferers above all others.

This last question is one that especially interests me. In attempting to deal with it, Geras places the focus squarely on the acts of the perpetrators rather than on the suffering of the victims:

…the consciousness that developed in Nazi-occupied Europe and in the decades after the Second World War that what the Nazis perpetrated was something historically new and exceptional was not based on any historical computation of the suffering of the victims in relation to other groups of victims. It was a judgement about the nature of the crime. So, at any rate, I propose. It was not some particularity of Jewish suffering, or of the suffering of the other targets of Nazi barbarism – gypsies, Russian prisoners of war (of whom some 3 million died in German captivity), gay people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled, Poles, and so on – but a particularity of the Nazi offence, an offence against humanity itself, that stood out.

Norm makes it clear that the Holocaust was not uniquely terrible because it was perpetrated primarily against Jews; it was uniquely terrible for other reasons. He uses the language of Nuremberg to describe the crime as one against humanity. The Holocaust was indeed also a crime against the Jews, but its uniqueness does not lie in its choice of victims, it relies in some qualities inherent in the offenses of the perpetrators.

Norm sees this uniqueness as having three characteristics, all of which acted together in a vile synergy to create an evil that was singular: (1) the industrialization and bureaucratization of death, using the full resources of a modern state; (2) the comprehensiveness of intent, in which the aim was to wipe out an entire people for no practical reason; and (3) spiritual murder, a devotion to destroying the humanity of the victims before killing them, a sort of blanket impulse to sadistically humiliate and dehumanize.

Geras does not suggest that we ignore the fact that the Holocaust targeted Jews, nor the long history of persecution of Jews throughout the millennia. His point is simply that the identity of the victims is not what makes the Holocaust unique.

I’ve been thinking of adding a possible fourth element to these three elements of uniqueness. The fourth is related to the second element on Norm’s list (and perhaps is only a subset of it), comprehensiveness of intent. I would call this fourth element “global scope” or “comprehensiveness of reach.” By that I am referring to the fact that, in any other genocides or mass murders that come to mind, the boundaries of the geography involved were far more limited, either because the people who were targeted lived in a single region, or because the perpetrators only controlled a certain area. The Turks, for example, did not pursue the Armenians around the globe to hunt them down in countries to which they had emigrated.

If the Nazis had rounded up and murdered only the German and Austrian Jews, for example, it would have been a terrible crime indeed, but it would not have been the Holocaust. Instead, the Nazis were geographically expansionist in their genocide, because the Jews were widely scattered throughout Europe. In each country the Germans conquered and occupied, one of their most basic goals was to get the cooperation of the local populace in rounding up its own Jews and helping the Germans to eliminate them from the face of the earth. In this activity, most of Europe was compliant and cooperative, with only a few notable exceptions, among them Denmark and Bulgaria.

So some of the unique horror of the Holocaust is therefore the wide geographic reach of the genocide as well as the international cooperation involved. The Nazis were in charge, but they had many willing and eager collaborators in a large number of countries. The Holocaust was not just a murderous impulse, a question of marching into a country and slaughtering people indiscriminately; it required an intense effort of picking, choosing, and sorting out .

The Nazis lost the war. But they accomplished one of their major goals: the virtual elimination of the Jews of Europe. Before the Holocaust, the majority of the Jews of the world resided there. Afterwards, only a tiny fraction remained. Two out of every three Jews in Europe were murdered during the Holocaust, and most of the rest emigrated. This is part of the unique horror of the Holocaust, as well: that it succeeded almost completely in its audacious and seemingly impossible goal of making Europe Judenfrei.

Stalemate: the German elections

The New Neo Posted on by

To Americans, the finer points of parliamentary systems are, quite literally, foreign territory. So the recent German election results, murky and confusing to begin with, seem even murkier and more confusing to us Yanks.

One thing is clear, though: the elections have resulted in at least a temporary hiatus in which there is no real victor, and a jockeying for position in which no viable coalition has yet emerged. Jim Rose (via Willism’s Carnival of Classiness) has as lucid (and entertaining) an explanation of the German situation as I’ve seen. And Will himself offers an analysis of the German equivalent of a Red/Blue split in the election–in this case, a Pink/Pinker split–that clearly follows the old West/East lines of Germany’s literally divided years.

Why does it matter? It doesn’t bode well for the US or Europe if Germany continues to postpone decisions. As Will points out, and as David Frum has written:

German voters have just elected a parliament that will not address the country’s most important problems, that cannot make strong decisions and that will put off until tomorrow actions that desperately need to be taken today. That’s bad news for Germany’s five million unemployed. It’s bad news for Europe as a whole, slumped in economic malaise. And it’s bad news for North Americans, who are facing a future in which the democracies of Europe will matter less and less–and an aggressive and possibly hostile China will matter more and more.

About seventy years ago, the German parliamentary system faced a similar situation in which no party had emerged as leader and coalitions were hard to form. What was the result? Nothing less than the rise of Hitler.

No, I’m not suggesting that a new Hitler is about to emerge from the German stasis. In fact, one of the few encouraging signs in this election was that support for the neo-Nazis (whose strongest support is in the former East Germany, by the way) seems to have shrunk, and it was very small to begin with (I want to note that, in a masterful piece of understatement, the article says that the German far-right has mainly lacked a single charismatic leader since 1945).

Most of the many complex conditions that came together in a dance macabre to bring Hitler to power are–fortunately for us and the world–not present in the current crisis. But one condition definitely is, and that’s an election in which there is no clear winner and shaky coalitions must be formed.

It’s often forgotten that, although Hitler came to power through legal means, he and the Nazis did not do this by receiving over 50% of the votes; they were still a minority party at the time. The Nazis’ ascension to the leadership of Germany was the terrible fruit of an election in which their actual share of the vote was almost exactly that of today’s two leading parties in Germany: 36%.

What appears to my inexpert eyes to be an excellent summary of Hitler’s rise to power can be found here. Knowing what we now know about Hitler, it is a tremendous and bitter frustration to see how lucky he was in being the beneficiary of a number of unlikely events which happened to come together to allow him to grab power, and how unlucky we all are that they did so:

Between 1931 and 1933, vicious power struggles would break out between rival political parties. The power brokers in these struggles were Hindenburg and Schleicher. The problem during this period was that no party even came close to achieving the majority required to elect its leader Chancellor. Coalitions were either impossible to build, or were so transient that they dissolved as quickly as they formed. Ambitious leaders from every party began maneuvering for power, striking deals, double-crossing each other, and trying to find the most advantageous alliances. Hitler himself would ally the Nazis to the Nationalist Party. “The chess game for power begins,” Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary. “The chief thing is that we remain strong and make no compromises.”

In 1932, hoping to establish a clear government by majority rule, Hindenburg held two presidential elections. Hitler, among others, ran against him. A vote for Hindenburg was a vote to continue the German Republic, while a vote for Hitler was a vote against it. The Nazi party made the most clever use of propaganda, as well as the most extensive use of violence. Bloody street battles erupted between Communists and Nazis thugs, and many political figures were murdered.

In the first election, held on March 13, 1932, Hitler received 30 percent of the vote, losing badly to Hindenburg’s 49.6 percent. But because Hindenburg had just missed an absolute majority, a run-off election was scheduled a month later. On April 10, 1932, Hitler increased his share of the vote to 37 percent, but Hindenburg again won, this time with a decisive 53 percent. A clear majority of the voters had thus declared their preference for a democratic republic.

However, the balance of power in the Reichstag was still unstable, lacking a majority party or coalition to rule the government. All too frequently, Hindenburg had to evoke the dictatorial powers available to him under Article 48 of the constitution to break up the political stalemate. In an attempt to resolve this crisis, he called for more elections. On July 31, 1932, the Nazis won 230 out of 608 seats in the Reichstag, making them its largest party. Still, they did not command the majority needed to elect Hitler Chancellor.

In another election on November 6, 1932, the Nazis lost 34 seats in the Reichstag, reducing their total to 196. And for the first time it looked as if the Nazi threat would fade. This was for several reasons. First, the Nazis’ violence and rhetoric had hardened opposition against Hitler, and it was becoming obvious that he would never achieve power democratically. Even worse, the Nazi party was running very low on money, and it could no longer afford to operate its expensive propaganda machine. Furthermore, the party was beginning to splinter and rebel under the stress of so many elections. Hitler discovered that Gregor Strasser, one of the Nazis’ highest officials, had been disloyal, attempting to negotiate power for himself behind Hitler’s back. The shock was so great that Hitler threatened to shoot himself.

But at the lowest ebb of the Nazis’ fortunes, the backroom deal presented itself as the solution to all their problems. Deal-making, intrigues and double-crosses had been going on for years now. Schleicher, who had managed to make himself the last German Chancellor before Hitler, would eventually say: “I stayed in power only 57 days, and on each of those days I was betrayed 57 times.” It’s not worth tracking the ins and outs of all these schemes, but the one that got Hitler into power is worth noting.

Hitler’s unexpected savior was Franz von Papen, one of the former Chancellors, a remarkably incompetent man who owed his political career to a personal friendship with Hindenburg. He had been thrown out of power by the much more capable Schleicher, who personally replaced him. To get even, Papen approached Hitler and offered to become “co-chancellors,” if only Hitler would join him in a coalition to overthrow Schleicher. Hitler responded that only he could be the head of government, while Papen’s supporters could be given important cabinet positions. The two reached a tentative agreement to pursue such an alliance, even though secretly they were planning to double-cross each other.

Meanwhile Schleicher was failing spectacularly in his attempts to form a coalition government, so Hindenburg forced his resignation. But by now, Hindenburg was exhausted by all the intrigue and crisis, and the prospect of civil war had moved the steely field marshal to tears. As much as he hated to do so, he seemed resigned to offering Hitler a high government position. Many people were urging him to do so: the industrialists who were financing Hitler, the military whose connections Hitler had cultivated, even Hindenburg’s son, whom some historians believe the Nazis had blackmailed. The last straw came when an unfounded rumor swept through Berlin that Schleicher was about to attempt a military coup, arrest Hindenburg, and establish a military dictatorship. Alarmed, Hindenburg wasted no time offering Hitler the Chancellorship, thinking it was a last resort to save the Republic.

On January 30, 1933, Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor.

It’s too long to quote more here, but please read the whole thing. It is of particular interest today to note the role that terror played in Hitler’s further consolidation of power–basically, he intimidated the opposition into cooperation through violence and the threat of violence.

In the end, when Hitler was trying to get the two-thirds majority he needed to abolish the Reichstag and become dictator under a ruling meant to give a leader increased powers during a national crisis, he used terror tactics quite worthy of today’s “insurgents”:

In attempting to secure the votes, the Nazis made heavy use of terror, blackmail and empty promises. The Social Democrats adamantly refused to vote for the Enabling Act, but Hitler was able to win crucial support from the Catholic Center party, by lying to them about future concessions. On March 23, 1933, the Enabling Act came up for a vote. Nazi storm troopers encircled the Reichstag, and legislators had to pass through a ring of tough-looking, black-shirted Nazi thugs to enter the building. While legislators considered the vote, they could hear the storm troopers outside chanting:

“Full powers — or else! We want the bill — or fire and murder!”

To paraphrase Churchill: they were offered a choice between the bill, and fire and murder. They chose the bill, and they got the fire and murder as well.

As did we all.