todorov on torture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzvetan_Todorov
If
we are to understand why you Americans accepted administering torture so
easily, we need not look for some ancestral hatred or fear of Muslims and
Arabs. No, the cause is far worse.
The top-secret memoranda released by the Obama administration concerning
torture practices in CIA prisons sheds new light on a fundamental question:
how is it that people acting in the name of the United States government
could so easily accept the idea of torturing the detainees in their
charge? The newly published documents do not disclose the very facts
of torture, which were already well known by whomever wanted to know them.
(water boarding in Iraq and Guantanamo) but they do reveal a great deal
of information about how the torture sessions unfolded and how the agents
involved perceived them. What is most striking is the discovery of niggling
little rules, outlined in CIA manuals and co-opted by the government’s
legal executives. One would have thought that torture was the result of
blunders or unintentional excesses committed on the spur of the moment.
On the contrary, these memos make clear that torture was a tactic formulated
in minute detail.
In the Bush administration’s “guidelines”, torture can be divided into three categories, of varying levels of intensity: “baseline” (nudity, dietary manipulation, sleep deprivation); “corrective” (hitting); and “coercive” (water-dousing, box confinement, water-boarding). And denegrating, shaming.
For a facial slap, the interrogator was supposed to hit with fingers slightly spread, at equal length between the tip of the chin and the bottom of the corresponding earlobe. Dousing a naked detainee with water was to last 20 minutes if the water’s temperature measured 5°C, 40 minutes at 10°C, and up to 60 minutes at 15°C. Sleep deprivation could not exceed 180 hours, but could start over again after eight hours rest.
Water immersion in a tub could last up to 12 seconds, no more than two hours a day, for up to thirty days in a row. Water-boarding could last 40 seconds at most, though two prisoners were subjected to this torment a combined total of 286 times in a single month. Confinement in a small box could not exceed two hours, but if the prisoner could stand in the box, it could continue up to eight hours at a time, 18 hours a day. If an insect was introduced into the box, rules governed that, too.
How the torturers were trained is also disclosed. Most methods were reverse-engineered from the training given to US soldiers preparing to face “long and extreme” situations (which somehow enabled executives to conclude that these ordeals are perfectly bearable). In other words, the torturers had been tortured themselves. An intense crash course lasting four weeks followed, enough to instruct them in their new jobs.
The Bush lawyers were the torturers’ necessary partners, whose work was intended to ensure legal impunity. This was also a novelty: torture does not appear as a breach of a common standard, unfortunate but justifiable. Instead, it has a legal standard.
Here, lawyers fell back on another series of techniques. In order to circumvent the law, interrogation had to be conducted outside the US, even if that place was an overseas American military base.
The legal definition of torture implies the intentional infliction of severe suffering. Torturers are thus advised to deny such an intention. As a result, the goal of a facial slap is not to inflict physical pain, but to induce surprise and humiliation. The purpose of confinement in a box is not to disorient someone, but to give the detainee a feeling of discomfort. The torturer must always emphasise his “good faith”, “honest beliefs” and the reasonable premise for them.
So euphemisms were systematically used: “enhanced techniques” for torture, “interrogation expert” for torturer. Leaving material imprints is contra-indicated. To that end, mental damage is preferable to physical injury. Any video recordings of these sessions, not surprisingly, would be destroyed afterwards.
Various professional groups were involved with torture practices. Thus, the contagion went well beyond the torturers’ limited circle. Besides the lawyers legitimating the deeds, psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors (whose presence was mandatory at any session), and scholars also regularly provided moral, legal, or philosophical justifications. And, while males inflicted torture, degradation in the presence of women enhanced the humiliation.
Who is to be held legally liable for this perversion of the law and basic moral principles?
The volunteer who carries out the task of torture is less liable than the high-ranking civil servant who justified and nurtured it. And the latter is less liable than the political decision-maker who asked for it.
Friendly foreign governments, especially in Europe, can also be held responsible: although they knew about the torture, and took advantage of the information thus obtained, at no point have they expressed the slightest protest, or even signal their disapproval. Their silence was tantamount to consent. Should we therefore prosecute them?
The best democratic punishment for politicians is not to re-elect them. As for unelected collaborators and enablers, we can hope that they will be sanctioned by their peers: who would like to study with a professor who advocated torture? Who wants justice done by a judge who authorised brutality? Who wants to be treated by a doctor who oversaw it?
If we are to understand why some Americans accepted administering torture so easily, we need not look for some ancestral hatred or fear of Muslims and Arabs. No, the cause is far worse. The memos that the Obama administration has disclosed teach us that anyone who complies with seemingly noble principles dictated by a “sense of duty” or by the necessary “defence of the homeland”, or who is urged by a basic fear for his own life and welfare, or the lives and welfare of his kin, can become a torturer.
Tzvetan Todorov
~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~
NOAM CHOMSKY
*American
*
Amnesia:
We Forget Our Atrocities
As Soon *
as We Commit Them!
By Noam Chomsky,Tomdispatch.com
Posted on May 20, 2009, Printed on May 21, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140137/
The torture memos released by the White House elicited shock, indignation, and surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable. The surprise, less so. For one thing, even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose that Guantanamo was a torture chamber. Why else send prisoners where they would be beyond the reach of the law -- a place, incidentally, that Washington is using in violation of a treaty forced on Cuba at the point of a gun? Security reasons were, of course, alleged, but they remain hard to take seriously. The same expectations held for the Bush administration's "black sites," or secret prisons, and for extraordinary rendition, and they were fulfilled.
More importantly, torture has been routinely practiced from the early days of the conquest of the national territory, and continued to be used as the imperial ventures of the "infant empire" -- as George Washington called the new republic -- extended to the Philippines, Haiti, and elsewhere. Keep in mind as well that torture was the least of the many crimes of aggression, terror, subversion, and economic strangulation that have darkened U.S. history, much as in the case of other great powers.
Accordingly, what's surprising is to see the reactions to the release of those Justice Department memos, even by some of the most eloquent and forthright critics of Bush malfeasance: Paul Krugman, for example, writing that we used to be "a nation of moral ideals" and never before Bush "have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for." To say the least, that common view reflects a rather slanted version of American history.
Occasionally the conflict between "what we stand for" and "what we do" has been forthrightly addressed. One distinguished scholar who undertook the task at hand was Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realist international relations theory. In a classic study published in 1964 in the glow of Camelot, Morgenthau developed the standard view that the U.S. has a "transcendent purpose": establishing peace and freedom at home and indeed everywhere, since "the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide." But as a scrupulous scholar, he also recognized that the historical record was radically inconsistent with that "transcendent purpose."
We should not be misled by that discrepancy, advised Morgenthau; we should not "confound the abuse of reality with reality itself." Reality is the unachieved "national purpose" revealed by "the evidence of history as our minds reflect it." What actually happened was merely the "abuse of reality."
The release of the torture memos led others to recognize the problem. In the New York Times, columnist Roger Cohen reviewed a new book, The Myth of American Exceptionalism, by British journalist Geoffrey Hodgson, who concludes that the U.S. is "just one great, but imperfect, country among others." Cohen agrees that the evidence supports Hodgson's judgment, but nonetheless regards as fundamentally mistaken Hodgson's failure to understand that "America was born as an idea, and so it has to carry that idea forward." The American idea is revealed in the country's birth as a "city on a hill," an "inspirational notion" that resides "deep in the American psyche," and by "the distinctive spirit of American individualism and enterprise" demonstrated in the Western expansion. Hodgson's error, it seems, is that he is keeping to "the distortions of the American idea," "the abuse of reality." Let us then turn to "reality itself": the "idea" of America from its earliest days.
The ipirational phrase "city on a hill" was coined by John Winthrop in 1630, borrowing from the Gospels, and outlining the glorious future of a new nation "ordained by God." One year earlier his Massachusetts Bay Colony created its Great Seal. It depicted an Indian with a scroll coming out of his mouth. On that scroll are the words "Come over and help us." The British colonists were thus pictured as benevolent humanists, responding to the pleas of the miserable natives to be rescued from their bitter pagan fate. The Great Seal is, in fact, a graphic representation of "the idea of America," from its birth. It should be exhumed from the depths of the psyche and displayed on the walls of every classroom. It should certainly appear in the background of all of the Kim Il-Sung-style worship of that savage murderer and torturer Ronald Reagan, who blissfully described himself as the leader of a "shining city on the hill," while orchestrating some of the more ghastly crimes of his years in office, notoriously in Central America but elsewhere as well. The Great Seal was an early proclamation of "humanitarian intervention," to use the currently fashionable phrase. As has commonly been the case since, the "humanitarian intervention" led to a catastrophe for the alleged beneficiaries. The first Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, described "the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union" by means "more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru."
Long after his own significant contributions to the process were past, John Quincy Adams deplored the fate of "that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty; among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgement." The "merciless and perfidious cruelty" continued until "the West was won." Instead of God's judgment, the heinous sins today bring only praise for the fulfillment of the American "idea."
The conquest and settling of the West indeed showed that "individualism and enterprise," so praised by Roger Cohen. Settler-colonialist enterprises, the cruelest form of imperialism, commonly do. The results were hailed by the respected and influential Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in 1898. Calling for intervention in Cuba, Lodge lauded our record "of conquest, colonization, and territorial expansion unequalled by any people in the 19th century," and urged that it is "not to be curbed now," as the Cubans too were pleading, in the Great Seal's words, "come over and help us."
Their plea was answered. The U.S. sent troops, thereby preventing Cuba's liberation from Spain and turning it into a virtual colony, as it remained until 1959. The "American idea" was illustrated further by the remarkable campaign, initiated by the Eisenhower administration virtually at once to restore Cuba to its proper place, after Fidel Castro entered Havana in January 1959, finally liberating the island from foreign domination, with enormous popular support, as Washington ruefully conceded. What followed was economic warfare with the clearly articulated aim of punishing the Cuban population so that they would overthrow the disobedient Castro government, invasion, the dedication of the Kennedy brothers to bringing "the terrors of the earth" to Cuba (the phrase of historian Arthur Schlesinger in his biography of Robert Kennedy, who considered that task one of his highest priorities), and other crimes continuing to the present, in defiance of virtually unanimous world opinion.
American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto
Rico, and Hawaii in
1898. But that is to succumb to what historian of imperialism Bernard
Porter calls "the
saltwater fallacy," the idea that conquest only becomes imperialism
when it crosses
saltwater. Thus, if the Mississippi had resembled the Irish Sea, Western
expansion would
have been imperialism. From George Washington to Henry Cabot Lodge,
those engaged
in the enterprise had a clearer grasp of just what they were doing.
After the success of humanitarian intervention in Cuba in 1898, the
next step in the mission
assigned by Providence was to confer "the blessings of liberty and
civilization upon all the
rescued peoples" of the Philippines (in the words of the platform of
Lodge's Republican
party) -- at least those who survived the murderous onslaught and widespread
use of
torture and other atrocities that accompanied it. These fortunate souls
were left to the
mercies of the U.S.-established Philippine constabulary within a newly
devised model of
colonial domination, relying on security forces trained and equipped
for sophisticated
modes of surveillance, intimidation, and violence. Similar models would
be adopted in
many other areas where the U.S. imposed brutal National Guards and
other client forces.
The Torture Paradigm
Over
the past 60 years, victims worldwide have endured the CIA's "torture
paradigm," developed at a cost that reached $1 billion annually, according
to historian Alfred McCoy in his book A Question of Torture. He shows how
torture methods the CIA developed from the 1950s surfaced with little change
in the infamous photos at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. There is no hyperbole
in the title of Jennifer Harbury's penetrating study of the U.S. torture
record: Truth, Torture, and the American Way. So it is highly
misleading, to say the least, when investigators of the Bush gang's descent
into the global sewers lament that "in waging the war against terrorism,
America had lost its way." (meaning they'd always
lost their way, for 60 years!)
None of this is to say that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld et al. did not introduce
important
innovations. In ordinary American practice, torture was largely farmed
out to subsidiaries,
not carried out by Americans directly in their own government-established
torture
chambers. As Allan Nairn, who has carried out some of the most revealing
and
courageous investigations of torture, points out: "What the Obama [ban
on torture]
ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done
by Americans while
retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system's torture, which is done
by foreigners under
U.S. patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture,
but he has chosen
not to do so."
Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but
"merely
repositioned it," restoring it to the American norm, a matter of indifference
to the victims.
"[H]is is a return to the status quo ante," writes Nairn, "the torture
regime of Ford through
Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more U.S.-backed strapped-down
agony
than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years."
Sometimes the American engagement in torture was even more indirect.
In a 1980 study,
Latin Americanist Lars Schoultz found that U.S. aid "has tended to
flow disproportionately
to Latin American governments which torture their citizens,... to the
hemisphere's relatively
egregious violators of fundamental human rights." Broader studies by
Edward Herman
found the same correlation, and also suggested an explanation. Not
surprisingly, U.S. aid
tends to correlate with a favorable climate for business operations,
commonly improved by
the murder of labor and peasant organizers and human rights activists
and other such
actions, yielding a secondary correlation between aid and egregious
violation of human
rights.
These studies took place before the Reagan years, when the topic was
not worth studying
because the correlations were so clear.
Small wonder that President Obama advises us to look forward, not backward
-- a
convenient doctrine for those who hold the clubs. Those who are beaten
by them tend to
see the world differently, much to our annoyance.
Adopting Bush's Positions
An argument can be made that implementation of the CIA's "torture paradigm"
never
violated the 1984 Torture Convention, at least as Washington interpreted
it. McCoy points
out that the highly sophisticated CIA paradigm developed at enormous
cost in the 1950s
and 1960s, based on the "KGB's most devastating torture technique,"
kept primarily to
mental torture, not crude physical torture, which was considered less
effective in turning
people into pliant vegetables.
McCoy writes that the Reagan administration then carefully revised the
International
Torture Convention "with four detailed diplomatic 'reservations' focused
on just one word
in the convention's 26-printed pages," the word "mental." He continues:
"These
intricately-constructed diplomatic reservations re-defined torture,
as interpreted by the
United States, to exclude sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain
-- the very techniques
the CIA had refined at such great cost."
When Clinton sent the UN Convention to Congress for ratification in
1994, he included
the Reagan reservations. The president and Congress therefore exempted
the core of the
CIA torture paradigm from the U.S. interpretation of the Torture Convention;
and those
reservations, McCoy observes, were "reproduced verbatim in domestic
legislation enacted
to give legal force to the UN Convention." That is the "political land
mine" that "detonated
with such phenomenal force" in the Abu Ghraib scandal and in the shameful
Military
Commissions Act that was passed with bipartisan support in 2006.
Bush, of course, went beyond his predecessors in authorizing prima facie
violations of
international law, and several of his extremist innovations were struck
down by the Courts.
While Obama, like Bush, eloquently affirms our unwavering commitment
to international
law, he seems intent on substantially reinstating the extremist Bush
measures. In the
important case of Boumediene v. Bush in June 2008, the Supreme Court
rejected as
unconstitutional the Bush administration claim that prisoners in Guantanamo
are not entitled
to the right of habeas corpus.
Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald reviews the aftermath. Seeking to
"preserve the
power to abduct people from around the world" and imprison them without
due process,
the Bush administration decided to ship them to the U.S. prison at
Bagram Air Base in
Afghanistan, treating "the Boumediene ruling, grounded in our most
basic constitutional
guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly game -- fly your
abducted prisoners to
Guantanamo and they have constitutional rights, but fly them instead
to Bagram and you
can disappear them forever with no judicial process."
Obama adopted the Bush position, "filing a brief in federal court that,
in two sentences,
declared that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory on this issue,"
arguing that
prisoners flown to Bagram from anywhere in the world (in the case in
question, Yemenis
and Tunisians captured in Thailand and the United Arab Emirates) "can
be imprisoned
indefinitely with no rights of any kind -- as long as they are kept
in Bagram rather than
Guantanamo."
In March, however, a Bush-appointed federal judge "rejected the Bush/Obama
position
and held that the rationale of Boumediene applies every bit as much
to Bagram as it does
to Guantanamo." The Obama administration announced that it would appeal
the ruling,
thus placing Obama's Department of Justice, Greenwald concludes, "squarely
to the Right
of an extremely conservative, pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed
judge on issues of
executive power and due-process-less detentions," in radical violation
of Obama's
campaign promises and earlier stands.
The case of Rasul v. Rumsfeld appears to be following a similar trajectory.
The plaintiffs
charged that Rumsfeld and other high officials were responsible for
their torture in
Guantanamo, where they were sent after being captured by Uzbeki warlord
Rashid
Dostum. The plaintiffs claimed that they had traveled to Afghanistan
to offer humanitarian
relief. Dostum, a notorious thug, was then a leader of the Northern
Alliance, the Afghan
faction supported by Russia, Iran, India, Turkey, and the Central Asian
states, and the
U.S. as it attacked Afghanistan in October 2001.
Dostum turned them over to U.S. custody, allegedly for bounty money.
The Bush
administration sought to have the case dismissed. Recently, Obama's
Department of
Justice filed a brief supporting the Bush position that government
officials are not liable for
torture and other violations of due process, on the grounds that the
Courts had not yet
clearly established the rights that prisoners enjoy.
It is also reported that the Obama administration intends to revive
military commissions,
one of the more severe violations of the rule of law during the Bush
years. There is a
reason, according to William Glaberson of the New York Times: "Officials
who work on
the Guantanamo issue say administration lawyers have become concerned
that they would
face significant obstacles to trying some terrorism suspects in federal
courts. Judges might
make it difficult to prosecute detainees who were subjected to brutal
treatment or for
prosecutors to use hearsay evidence gathered by intelligence agencies."
A serious flaw in
the criminal justice system, it appears.
Creating Terrorists
There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective
in eliciting information
-- the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then
it may be justified. By the
same argument, when Nicaragua captured U.S. pilot Eugene Hasenfuss
in 1986, after
shooting down his plane delivering aid to U.S.-supported Contra
forces, they should not
have tried him, found him guilty, and then
sent him back to the U.S., as they did. Instead,
they should have applied the CIA torture paradigm to try to extract
information about
other terrorist atrocities being planned and implemented in Washington,
no small matter for
a tiny, impoverished country under terrorist attack by the global
superpower.
By the same standards, if the Nicaraguans had been able to capture the
chief terrorism
coordinator, John Negroponte, then U.S. ambassador in Honduras (later
appointed as the
first Director of National Intelligence, essentially counterterrorism
czar, without eliciting a
murmur), they should have done the same. Cuba would have been justified
in acting
similarly, had the Castro government been able to lay hands on the
Kennedy brothers.
There is no need to bring up what their victims should have done to
Henry Kissinger,
Ronald Reagan, and other leading terrorist commanders, whose exploits
leave al-Qaeda in
the dust, and who doubtless had ample information that could have prevented
further
"ticking bomb" attacks.
Such considerations never seem to arise in public discussion.
There is, to be sure, a response: our terrorism, even if surely terrorism,
is benign, deriving
as it does from the city on the hill.
Perhaps culpability would be greater, by prevailing moral standards,
if it were discovered
that Bush administration torture had cost American lives. That is,
in fact, the conclusion
drawn by Major Matthew Alexander [a pseudonym], one of the most seasoned
U.S.
interrogators in Iraq, who elicited "the information that led to the
US military being able to
locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq," correspondent
Patrick
Cockburn reports.
Alexander expresses only contempt for the Bush administration's harsh
interrogation
methods: "The use of torture by the U.S.," he believes, not only elicits
no useful information
but "has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death
of as many U.S.
soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11." From hundreds of interrogations,
Alexander discovered
that foreign fighters came to Iraq in reaction to the abuses at Guantanamo
and Abu Ghraib,
and that they and their domestic allies turned to suicide bombing and
other terrorist acts for
the same reasons.
There is also mounting evidence that the torture methods Dick Cheney
and Donald
Rumsfeld encouraged created terrorists. One carefully studied case
is that of Abdallah
al-Ajmi, who was locked up in Guantanamo on the charge of "engaging
in two or three fire
fights with the Northern Alliance." He ended up in Afghanistan after
having failed to reach
Chechnya to fight against the Russians.
After four years of brutal treatment in Guantanamo, he was returned
to Kuwait. He later
found his way to Iraq and, in March 2008, drove a bomb-laden truck
into an Iraqi military
compound, killing himself and 13 soldiers -- "the single most heinous
act of violence
committed by a former Guantanamo detainee," according to the Washington
Post, and
according to his lawyer, the direct result of his abusive imprisonment.
All much as a
reasonable person would expect.
Unexceptional Americans
Another standard pretext for torture is the context: the "war on terror"
that Bush declared
after 9/11. A crime that rendered traditional international law "quaint"
and "obsolete" -- so
George W. Bush was advised by his legal counsel Alberto Gonzales, later
appointed
Attorney General. The doctrine has been widely reiterated in one form
or another in
commentary and analysis.
The 9/11 attack was doubtless unique in many respects. One is where
the guns were
pointing: typically it is in the opposite direction. In fact, it was
the first attack of any
consequence on the national territory of the United States since the
British burned down
Washington in 1814.
Another unique feature was the scale of terror perpetrated by a non-state actor.
Horrifying as it was, however, it could have been worse. Suppose that
the perpetrators
had bombed the White House, killed the president, and established a
vicious military
dictatorship that killed 50,000 to 100,000 people and tortured 700,000,
set up a huge
international terror center that carried out assassinations and helped
impose comparable
military dictatorships elsewhere, and implemented economic doctrines
that so radically
dismantled the economy that the state had to virtually take it over
a few years later.
That would indeed have been far worse than September 11, 2001. And it
happened in
Salvador Allende's Chile in what Latin Americans often call "the first
9/11" in 1973. (The
numbers above were changed to per-capita U.S. equivalents, a realistic
way of measuring
crimes.) Responsibility for the military coup against Allende can be
traced straight back to
Washington. Accordingly, the otherwise quite appropriate analogy is
out of consciousness
here in the U.S., while the facts are consigned to the "abuse of reality"
that the naïve call
"history."
It should also be recalled that Bush did not declare the "war on terror,"
he re-declared it.
Twenty years earlier, President Reagan's administration came into office
declaring that a
centerpiece of its foreign policy would be a war on terror, "the plague
of the modern age"
and "a return to barbarism in our time" -- to sample the fevered rhetoric
of the day.
That first U.S. war on terror has also been deleted from historical
consciousness, because
the outcome cannot readily be incorporated into the canon: hundreds
of thousands
slaughtered in the ruined countries of Central America and many more
elsewhere, among
them an estimated 1.5 million dead in the terrorist wars sponsored
in neighboring countries
by Reagan's favored ally, apartheid South Africa, which had to defend
itself from Nelson
Mandela's African National Congress (ANC), one of the world's "more
notorious terrorist
groups," as Washington determined in 1988. In fairness, it should be
added that, 20 years
later, Congress voted to remove the ANC from the list of terrorist
organizations, so that
Mandela is now, at last, able to enter the U.S. without obtaining a
waiver from the
government.
The reigning doctrine of the country is sometimes called "American exceptionalism."
It is
nothing of the sort. It is probably close to a universal habit among
imperial powers. France
was hailing its "civilizing mission" in its colonies, while the French
Minister of War called for
"exterminating the indigenous population" of Algeria. Britain's nobility
was a "novelty in the
world," John Stuart Mill declared, while urging that this angelic power
delay no longer in
completing its liberation of India.
Similarly, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Japanese militarists
in the 1930s, who
were bringing an "earthly paradise" to China under benign Japanese
tutelage, as they
carried out the rape of Nanking and their "burn all, loot all, kill
all" campaigns in rural
North China. History is replete with similar glorious episodes.
As long as such "exceptionalist" theses remain firmly implanted, however,
the occasional
revelations of the "abuse of history" often backfire, serving only
to efface terrible crimes.
The My Lai massacre was a mere footnote to the vastly greater atrocities
of the post-Tet
pacification programs, ignored while indignation in this country was
largely focused on this
single crime.
Watergate was doubtless criminal, but the furor over it displaced incomparably
worse
crimes at home and abroad, including the FBI-organized assassination
of black organizer
Fred Hampton as part of the infamous COINTELPRO repression, or the
bombing of
Cambodia, to mention just two egregious examples. Torture is hideous
enough; the
invasion of Iraq was a far worse crime. Quite commonly, selective atrocities
have this
function.
Historical amnesia is a dangerous
phenomenon, not only because it undermines moral and
intellectual integrity, but also because it lays the groundwork for
crimes that still lie ahead.
the above was by NOAM CHOMSKY his books are two bucks each used, at ABE BOOKS
YOU
VOTED BUSH IN. DID YOU FORGET THAT?
So
you
tortured. You are part of Nazi America.
"For
evil to succeed, all that is necessary is that good men stand by and do
nothing."
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (retired) at MIT.
He is the author of many
books and articles on international affairs and social-political
issues, and a
long-time participant in activist movements.
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