So here we are

I know. I mean, if I see one more book about the Holocaust… Sheesh!

Different order of denial, but same attitude: when George H.W. Bush was questioned by reporters in New Hampshire in 1988 about the Iowa caucuses, where he had been beaten by both Dole and Robertson a few days earlier, he brushed it off by saying “That’s history.” As in “dead,” “defunct,” “meaningless,” “forgotten.”

Entertaining story, particularly when you relate it to people who actually think of history as meaningful.

And two posts earlier his comment is even more succinctly to the point:

Damn … they must have gone a little too light on this dirtbag, considering he didn’t give up the goods and is now playing the propaganda game. Oh well, maybe next time!

ned,

I’m not hh, but The New Yorker story ensures even more that I will never be able to get the photo of the woman grinning over the corpse out of my head. She was clearly a deeply decent human being drawn into an utterly monstrous machine, completely overwhelmed by the monstrosity, aware that it was monstrous, but not really able to do anything except participate and document her participation. Her letters home are bizarre and terrifying, as she simultaneously tries to minimize the evil she is participating in and cry out about it.

Robert Jay Lifton’s book on Nazi doctors seems worth a plug here. I didn’t buy all of the psychology when I read it last (quite a while ago) but when we’re at our lowest I think this is the kind of horrifying book we deserve to read.

April Fools to all the April Fools, including myself, sitting here splitting hairs over the comparative degree of brutality between the British and German imperial ambition. The Germans and the Russians and the Chinese and the Japanese had less than a century to modernize their societies or face the alternative of colonial domination. The Europeans and, by extension, the US had more than five centuries to achieve the same results, through colonial domination. I know I’m oversimplifying the contrast for dramatic effect, but the transition from a feudal, labor-intensive, agricultural economy to a modern, capital-intensive, industrial economy generates a massive population of useless labor which, according to the historical circumstances of any given cultural group, derives its utility from a limited variety of available, brutal alternatives. Communism and fascism are the two extreme sides of the same coin, and the name of that coin is capitalism. Roman fascism. Early Cristian communism. The history of Western brutality is indivisible from the history of Western civilization.

Without wishing to be an apologist for imperialism, I’d note that blowing someone apart with a cannon is actually a pretty instantaneous, and thus effectively painless, death. While you cannot argue that the spectacular qualities are not gruesome, so too at the time was the customary fashion of hanging, which could take a lot longer…

Spectacular execution is not torture, and execution is what armed rebels against an occupying power could expect 150 years ago, in British India or anywhere else. There’s no point over-contextualising the consciously innovative brutalities of the present by slipping into a comparison with the accepted brutalities of the past. Unless, of course, it is your mission to proclaim that, because pretty much anything has gone at some point, anything continues to go now.

While I am diametrically opposed to everything that Mr. Riehl and his gang stand for, I was a bit surprised that apparently many people in the US hadn’t heard of the Kurnaz case until the 60 Minutes doc aired a couple of days ago.

That’s a tricky one Jim Harrison. I don’t agree that German intellectual life (or more precisely intellectual life in the German language) as a whole was consumed by imperialism, barbarism and machismo – it was much too diverse and vibrant right up until 1933.

I think one needs too differentiate a bit more between intellectuals/writers/artists and the educated middle class in this regard, though they cannot be neatly separated either. Thomas Mann is an interesting case here, especially his Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen.

Isn’t the USA the most benevolent superpower in history? As imperialism goes, it doesn’t get much more virtuous (notwithstanding the obvious exceptions).

True, the competition leaves a lot to be desired but that’s neither America’s fault nor an argument to the contrary.

humanitarianism has had more influence on public policy

Yeah, the WWII was a bit of a shock to everybody, especially the Europeans; made it a bit harder to hate-monger efficiently. But it’s all forgotten now, or twisted beyond recognition. Now it’s all about bad guys, good guys and righteous victims. Pretty much the opposite of humanitarianism.

Tiring and tired. Just be done with it already. Delenda est Americana.

Absolutely. The requirement to hold power to some kind of ‘moral standard’ has had a very shaky grasp on relevance for most of history – though also a long history of its own, as in ‘just war’ theory, etc. But for the most part, power does what power wants. This is not the significant part. That part is whether it is possible to stop such abuses, or necessary to acquiesce in them. And on that, I think you’ll find, debate continues. Shockingly, for those who don’t know the wider context, deplorably, for those who do, but vehemently nonetheless.

Steve LaBonne: “profound challenges facing our species that can only be dealt with by global cooperation”

Sadly, I first read that as ‘global corporation’.

I think it rather more the case that the post-1945 US hegemony has occurred at a point in time when humanitarianism has had more influence on public policy [Western public policy at least] than ever previously. Thus it is largely coincidental that such a claim might be made.

So you’re saying that whoever emerged as the west’s post-1945 superpower, things would have turned out pretty much the same? Maybe so, but I’m less interested in disputing that (assuming I dispute it at all) than I am in illustrating the absurdity of comparisons with Nazi Germany or any other imperial power that history can throw up.

You wrote earlier:

There’s no point over-contextualising the consciously innovative brutalities of the present by slipping into a comparison with the accepted brutalities of the past. Unless, of course, it is your mission to proclaim that, because pretty much anything has gone at some point, anything continues to go now.

Not forgetting the alternative motivation to make false moral equivalences and pretend that “imperialism” is the same as it ever was.

Regarding an earlier post drawing the line from empire to atrocity in Germany, I’d recommend the short book “Exterminate all The Brutes” by Sven Lindqvist, for a disturbing and powerful argument on the horrors of colonialism.

Under this argument, the question is not so much the uniqueness of the German problem, but why it was that only Germany imported their colonial policy of murder, brutality, and genocide into their continental policy. (I don’t know enough about Russia’s imperial policy to know how much continuity there was from it to the Gulag.)

Even after 1945, France fought a series of vicious colonial wars (Madagascar, Indochina, Algeria, various adventures in East Africa…). During the same time frame, the US fought a number of wars (Korea, at least the part fought in North Korea, Vietnam, various adventures in Latin America and the Caribbeans, Afghanistan, Iraq…). I am not sure that the American record is significantly better than the French one and that the comparison validates the most benign superpower proposition of Brownie.

Before 1945, Americans conquered by force a whole continent, wiping out millions of native inhabitants. This cannot be considered much more benevolent that the behavior of France, Britain, Belgium or the Netherlands pre-1945. On the whole, I’d say that no superpower has a markedly better record than any other.

Let me also join the chorus of lamentations at seeing the casual way torture is treated in today’s United States.

Tiring and tired. Just be done with it already. Delenda est Americana.

Change that last word to Islam and you’d fit right in over at Riehl’s place.

One precondition of what happened to Kurnaz and so many others is the mindset that sees the world in terms of good and bad nationalities. As various people here have noted, it’s the *system* that matters, not the specific personnel at the top of it.

Please note that Karl Rove is currently paid tens of thousands of dollars each time he speaks before a hall full of pasty Rove wannabes at an American university.

American academics eagerly vouched for their patriotism and fanned the flames of the WAR ON TERROR that Rove conjured up, just as they eagerly expelled their unfortunate colleagues who failed to sign loyalty oaths in the 1950s.

American militarism and exceptionalism are alive and well on campuses all over the United States, and the academic community is largely absent from the “controversy” over whether America has been overzealous in prosecuting its war against the “evil ones.”

Douglas Feith, the famous “stupidest fucking guy on the planet” is on the faculty at Georgetown. His title is “Professor and Distinguished Practitioner in National Security Policy.” Yet any PhD with even the faintest knowledge of Weimar Germany and the Reichstag fire would recognize the setting, the characters, and the dialog. Has there ever been a greater collective failure of courage in our intellectual community?

It is not just the unwashed rabble of TeeVee America that enabled Torture-R-Us; it is many of the best and the brightest of our “intelligentsia.”

It’s hard to hold out any nation-state at any time in history as a moral exemplar. The current foreign-policy behavior of the United States is inexcusable, but the U.S. has done far worse and weathered far worse moral crises in the past, and come out for the most part better for it (as perverse as that may sound). Certainly it has come out with a greater consciousness about its behavior and a generally lower threshold for accepting its own moral turpitude. No, the progress has not been monotonically increasing, but I consider that fact that ‘only’ 40% of the population is not acquiescing or complacent toward our behavior to be heartening, not discouraging.

Brownie, you didn’t get it, did you? There’s no historical evidence to suggest that the USA, had it acquired hegemonic power at a different historical juncture, would have acted any differently from the range of states that shared, and continue to share, its broad cultural heritage, and which did produce brutal imperial regimes…

But there’s nothing super-super shiny special about the USA…

I think you’ve assumed rather too much about what motivated me to make my original comment. I certainly don’t subscribe to the notion that the US is possessed of some inherent and unique moral virtue that means she and she alone is immune to the worst of imperialist tendencies. I think you oversimplify matters, but for sake of argument I’ll happily accept that the dominant western power in the later part of the 20th century and early part of this would behave pretty much the way the US has, whoever it was.

But then, the dominant narrative in contemporary centre/centre-left circles is hardly that the US is uniquely virtuous in exercising its superpower status – or just slightly better than what has come before – but rather that her wilful malevolence is restricted only by the limits of her power. It’s the sort of thinking that leads otherwise sensible people to write palpable nonsense like: “Germany went from the front rank of civilization to unspeakable barbarism in one generation. America is headed in the same direction.”

I was calling out the absurdity of such claims and asking us to refelct on the US’s status as the most benign superpower the human race has yet produced is a good way of doing that, whatever the prevailing influences that make this so.

I could list a 100 misgivings about the way the US conducts her foreign policy and I despair at the justification for the use of torture and the naked stupidity of Guantanamo, etc., but when push comes to shove, I’m rather glad that the US IS a superpower. I get the distinct impression that this is not a view shared by many of those who would today self-describe as progressive and it’s this line of reasoning that leaves me non-plussed.

If you close your eyes for a second and imagine a world in which the US is just a larger and warmer version of Sweden, what do you see? I know what I see, which is why I just keep those eyes closed for a second.

This all sounds like rather obvious and insubstantial puff, but I’m never surprised by the number of people I encounter for whom this simple exercise would prove most enlightening.

If you close your eyes for a second and imagine a world in which the US is just a larger and warmer version of Sweden, what do you see?

I see a world where I and my (hypothetical) children are much more likely to lead happy, secure, fulfilling lives. And yes, I’m American.

the US’s status as the most benign superpower the human race has yet produced

Thank God I had lunch early and had time to digest it before reading that.

Heckuva job, brownie!

If you close your eyes for a second and imagine a world in which the US is just a larger and warmer version of Sweden, what do you see? I know what I see

Sorry, Brownie, but this seems so ridiculous and provocative that I can’t help piling on. What do you see?

Maybe we can get Sweden to invade North Korea to show us how it’s done.

If you close your eyes for a second and imagine a world in which the US is just a larger and warmer version of Sweden, what do you see?

Perhaps the iron Volvo in a velvet glove that is Liberal Fascism?

A hockey skate stamping on a human face — forever?

“I think it rather more the case that the post-1945 US hegemony has occurred at a point in time when humanitarianism has had more influence on public policy [Western public policy at least] than ever previously. Thus it is largely coincidental that such a claim might be made.”

But that can’t quite be right because it suggests that if Germany and Italy had been in charge post-1945, that things wouldn’t have been very different. Or if Russia had been the sole super-power that things would have been as well off (unless you don’t think Russia is ‘Western’).

You can believe that the US has made a number of very bad decisions, and that it is moving in the wrong direction without thinking silly things like “it was a US-independent humanitarian moment”. It was a humanitarian moment in world history largely BECAUSE the US was the power left standing instead of Germany, or France, or Russia, or China, or Japan, or Italy (to pick the likely alternatives.

The US under Bush is clearly moving in the wrong direction. That doesn’t change any of the above.

On torture:

nor is it remotely an enduring characteristic

Here’s hoping it doesn’t endure.

watching them grow up in a world with a docile, subdued and inhibited US isn’t one of them.

It’s striking to me how often conservatives frame the world in terms of their fears of emasculation (docile, subdued?) instead of pragmatic concern with the facts.

but the alternative is even less palatable.

What alternative is that? One way or another, the U.S. will no longer be the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation at the end of this century. It can happen peacefully, or violently. If it happens peacefully, it’s a very healthy development, as wealthier and more prosperous world makes us all better off.

Interesting conjunction, the return of Fafblog (however temporary) and the appearance of “ho hum, torture, old news”. Reminds me very much of the Fafblog post that had the most impact on me:

It’s so easy to kind of sweep it all under your brain an think “Well theres nothin more to be said an nothin more to think about it” cause let’s face it nobody wants to think about their government participating in horror. An right now the level of torture talk has gone from “Torture: Bad!” to “Torture: Bad, But Not As Bad As Saddam Hussein” to “Torture: Bad, But What About Ticking Bombs?” to “Torture: Bad, But Not Necessarily Proof That The People Who Ordered Torture Are Bad” to “Torture: We Still Talkin Bout Torture?” to “Torture: Bad?” An before we get to “Torture: Sorta Like Mowin Your Lawn” I think we should try as hard as we can to wake up.

‘Not to any of the three candidates who will come to occupy the Oval Office next year. ‘

That is actually false, although Republicans don’t want you to know it. Yes it is true that McCain sometimes talked the talk. But when push came to shove (possibly literally) he didn’t walk the walk.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/washington/13cnd-cong.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

‘There is nothing permanent or irreversible about any of the illiberal lurches made by the current administration.’

There wasn’t anything permanent or irreversible about the illiberal lurches made by the Nazis either. So what?

‘It’s the usual case of no-one wanting the US to act like the world’s policeman except when they want her to.’

Actually I would rather the world was the world’s policeman. Given that it ‘has to be’ an individual country (one of the many irreversible and non-voteable-on decisions that I wasn’t consulted about) why, to echo one of the posters above, does it have to be the US? Why not Sweden? Or, better still, Costa Rica?

‘Rather than scoff, you could always list the historical, global superpowers whose altruism puts the US to shame’.

Well there are many things wrong with the European Union, but it doesn’t seem to me to be obviously inferior in the ‘altruism’ stakes, and, in terms of its economic and social policies, in many respects it’s streets ahead of the US.

Incidentally, ‘liberals’ who have a bee in their bonnet about the former Yugoslavia might care to reflect that one of the many reasons the EU was not in a position to take military action against Milosevic was that in the late ‘eighties, the French and German toyed with the idea of an independent EU ‘army’: which was quickly nixed by the US. ‘Pro-war liberals’ want to have it both ways: they point out that the US is the ‘only’ power capable of doing certain military things, without pointing out that this is because the US DECIDED to become the world’s superpower, for primarily economic (i.e. ‘selfish’, not altruistic) reasons and would move heaven and earth to stop any other power threatening that hegemony. They can then justify their continued pre-eminence by pointing out that the US and only the US can take military action across the globe. Which is true, but sorta to be expected, given that anyone who threatened this pre-eminence would be nuked.

I also wish that, giving how things turned out, that ‘liberals’ would stop trumpeting the illegal invasion of Yugoslavia, and the creation of the ‘Nato bases surrounded by gangsters’ we call ‘Kosova’ as if it was some kind of triumph for democracy.

This brownie logic is definitely half-baked. One clue regarding the presence of a cover story is uneven coverage. The cover story that the USA is motivated by good cop impulses does not explain why it only seems to be a good cop when the cop gets to keep some of the loot at the crime scene. The US has a colossal base in the middle of the Balkans now as a result of bringing peace to that unhappy part of the world. Similarly, we have massive permanent bases in Iraq controlling about a third of the oil in the Mideast.

If there had been oil in Rwanda, we would have rolled the US cop car into there with lights flashing and guns blazing. But Brownie’s goal is not to establish any logical case, it is simply to demonstrate that the tattered cover stories for US Neo-Imperialism still conceal enough of our indecent power projection to fool most of the people most of the time. In this, he is correct.

Did I miss the part where Brownie answered this question?

He sees a Swedenized America bereft of private jets, million-dollar Bar Mitzvahs, trans fats, gun shows, foreclosures, and a diabetes epidemic. He sees a boring society where Lilliputians tie down the Masters of the Universe by confiscating their earnings and blocking the creation of a hereditary aristocracy. Oh the horror!

<iOh hh, calm down.

This is my calm side. Don’t get me excited.

hh: The US has a colossal base in the middle of the Balkans now as a result of bringing peace to that unhappy part of the world.

If you’re talking about Camp Bondsteel, you should know that it doesn’t actually have a runway, and is thus useless from the point of view of power projection unless you want to project that power by truck. It also means that the base is supplied entirely by land (troops drive from the airhead at Able Sentry in Skopje, Macedonia).

I am also baffled as to why it should be so important to the US to put a base in Kosovo, when the US already had perfectly good bases (with runways) in Italy, Poland, Germany and Turkey. Where exactly can you reach from Kosovo that you can’t reach from there? Were they planning to threaten Bulgaria (by truck)? Was it vital to gain control over Kosovo’s lead mines?

Owning an Aston Martin is not, actually, that wildly improbable a dream.

Especially when the hedge fund boyz start unloading their toys to pay their bills. I feel their pain.

If there had been oil in Rwanda, we would have rolled the US cop car into there with lights flashing and guns blazing

A more likely response would be ‘do you want the eight or twelve-year support contract with these helicopter gunships?’

It seems to me to be a pretty unrecoverable error to try and understand the world in terms of good and bad countries. If you think in those terms, there is not really a way to colour the map black and white that is significantly wronger than any other.

As someone said above, in general systems matter, not so much personalities. But the systems are made of people, and under some systems a single person, like Mugabe in Zimbabwe or Bush in the US, can count for enough to be a bit of an exception.
And systems aren’t remotely limited to national borders: the common perception that a typical western civilian is in some sense ‘more responsible’ for Guantanamo than Rwanda is utterly without valid justification.

A better question is: “what do you think about the ‘US-Iraq-world@1975’ system, in comparison to the ‘US-Iraq-world@2008’ system?”

Which works? Which could be made to work, and at what cost? Which could be improved on, and how? Is there a completely different and better way fo doing things?