Straight Talk In Troubled Times
by digby
In the wake of Rachel Maddow’s interview with Jon Stewart and his explanation as to why he does not think it’s right to call President Bush a war criminal, one of her readers sends in a very thoughtful email, explaining and agreeing with that position:
I agree that Bush is guilty of war crimes. I say this because I don’t want that point misunderstood.
Bush actually did an excellent job of demonstrating the damage that poor rhetoric can do to the world. He painted a broad stroke across a region of the world and referred to it as the axis of evil. In doing so, he redefined entire regions as evil. This redefinition included civilians, soldiers and terrorists alike. This redefinition even included Americans. This rhetoric is why we’re still debating things like the Mosque in New York and boarder issues in the south. It’s because he helped inspire fear throughout our country. He created a monster for us to hate. What else can you do with a monster after all, but hate it. You can’t talk to monsters, can’t learn from them and you certainly can’t have diplomacy with them. They are monsters once adequately defined as such and all you can do is grab your steaks, mirrors and garlic and go to work.
I just don’t want to repeat Bush’s disaster from the other side. I’d rather keep things in perspective. Bush’s real crimes involved a lack of understanding regarding how to fight a just war. It involved too much faith in information, unjust torture and being too quick to go to war. We could call him a monster for these things but there’s a greater value to his presidency. We can learn from his tragic leadership. We can demand leaders who understand what a just war is. We can push for patience the next time we feel threatened and aren’t quite sure of who our enemy is. I’d rather Bush be a cautionary tale of poor leadership, poor rhetoric and impatience than a monster for us to chase with a stake. We may not get to see him to justice, but at least we can try to avoid such a leader in the future.
We can try. Many of us thought we had when we voted for the man who won the most votes and lost the election to Bush anyway.
It’s funny, because I actually think one of the few things Bush did very well was keep the domestic beast from rising up against Muslims in the wake of 9/11. He made a strong point of saying that Islam itself was not to blame and that it had been “hijacked” by extremists. There were certainly incidents of anti-Muslim violence but for all of his bellicose rhetoric, he was very careful to caution people against rank bigotry toward all Muslims, which is more than you can say these days about some of his stalwart defenders.
On the other hand, he admits that he approved torture, which is a war crime. And he created prison camps throughout the world where innocent people were tortured, abused and held without any kind of due process for years. And, obviously, he opportunistically invaded a country on a phony pretext which resulted in hundreds of thousands of lives lost. Letting that go without even any serious inquiry is an injustice of massive proportions.
So, I guess my question is, how do we “learn” from his presidency if in addition to giving him a pass on his crimes, we aren’t even willing to have an honest conversation, using real words with real meaning about what happened? If we dance around these things as if it’s wrong to call white white and black black and insist that someone who ordered war crimes shouldn’t be called a war criminal then I see a very different lesson being taken from that example than the one this commenter anticipates.
Yes, it’s pretty to believe that the country will self-evidently come to the right conclusion without any legal or even social condemnation of what went wrong. We’ll just “know” going forward that we need our leaders to have more patience, and be more thoughtful and less bellicose in the future. But I think this defies human nature and it certainly defies the reality of the world in which we live.
People are subject to a barrage of information and stimulation and the lessons they take from things are highly manipulable. There’s a reason that wealthy, conservative plutocrats (who know just a little bit about PR and marketing) are spending billions to influence elections and create an alternative media to sell their ideology and discredit liebralism. Being passive in the face of that onslaught, pulling our punches, being unwilling to be unpleasant and confrontational in this environment is highly unlikely to even be noticed, much less appreciated. It certainly will not create the space for average people to consider both sides and make a thoughtful, reasonable judgment about their government and their society — the necessary information simply can’t rise above the din to make itself heard.
I understand the impulse. If one believes that people are basically good and that they aren’t by nature irrational creatures, it’s reasonable to put your faith in their better angels to see them through times like these. But human civilization was created not just to allow our creative and social aspirations to flourish, but also to keep the not-so-better angels from overwhelming the good. And history has shown that there are times when being passive and failing to sound the alarm about those bad angels is a tragic mistake.
We are living in an era in which very powerful people are being allowed to commit crimes with impunity while millions of others are being imprisoned and worse. Regardless of how the people see that (and the plutocrats are working overtime to ensure they see it their way) it’s clear that the lesson the powerful are taking from this is not that Bush or any of them are “cautionary tales of poor leadership”. They are being perfectly insulated even from harsh words and uncomfortable references to unpleasant historical analogies, so they are being assured every day by well meaning liberals and cynical conservatives alike that they will not even suffer social disapprobation, much less be held personally accountable for what they’ve done. They have learned that they get away with anything.
And in perhaps the most clever turn of all, these same well meaning, thoughtful liberals are suggesting that their fellows turn the other cheek when they in turn are characterized to many millions of people every day as “vermin” and “infectious diseases” which must be purged from the body politic. It is a perfectly defensible moral position, proposed by a guy named Jesus Christ, so who am I to argue? But I’m not sure that passive resistance works without the resistance part. And in our cacophonous political culture I just don’t think you can persuade anyone to moral action without strong and meaningful rhetoric. “Yes we can” is great, but if the whole country is in distress and other side is calling you the “disease” that caused it, I’m not sure it gets the job done.
The conservatives created this hostile and aggressive discourse and now we all have to live in it. I wish I had the faith that others have that “good” will come to the fore without any necessity for liberals to defend themselves, but I don’t. I think it’s important to be truthful and to try to be fair, but I don’t think we’ll get anywhere by denying that war criminals are war criminals or covering over the fact that we have people on our airwaves dedicated to the dehumanization of their fellow Americans who call themselves liberal. Unfortunately, I see a strong liberal indication to pull back and rely on simple faith in the truth coming out in the end. I sure hope it works out.
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