Re: [Pen-l] torture chic

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

Paul Krugman writes (in last Friday's NYT):
>... America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.<

The U.S. "nation" stands for "moral ideals"? This is the standard
liberal mode of argument: everything bad goes against "what our nation
stands for" or "the American way" or "what the founders said" or
whatever. It's all part of an unofficial civic religion that prevails
in official rhetoric.[*] It's bogus, because those founders and other
notables after that didn't live up to what we now see as the "American
way" or "what out nation stands for."

At the start of this thread, Carrol Cox wrote:
> It is absurd to attach special blame to the Bush Administration.<

Maybe you're right, Carrol, but at least Krugman motivates people to
do something about the torturers. After all, if Clinton, Bush 41,
Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Eisenhower, etc., etc. are just
as much in the torturing boat as Bush 43, so that there's no special
blame to be attached to his administration, what can one say? It's fun
to rage rage against capitalism, imperialism, and their inherently
evil nature, but it's much easier for most people to say "we can't
fight city hall" and give into cynicism, fatalism, and eventually
apathy.

By the way, I'd bet that torturing is not a _constant_ component of US
foreign policy. The Vietnam war produced mass revulsion. Some of the
resulting pressure on the US government went to curb the extremes of
its policy, as when many saw the CIA as a bad organization and then
Congress imposed some restrictions on its operations. I'd bet that
there was some ebbing of the US-government-sponsored torturing and
terrorist tide.

As part of the mass anti-war movement, there were a lot of people who
thought that JFK stood for the "nation's ideals" and believed that the
war went against "what our nation stands for" or "the American way" or
"what the founders said." Any new movement will have to welcome those
people, while developing an alternative, socialist, system of ideals.
-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.

[*] By they way, it's interesting and revealing that even though US
liberalism (including what's known as conservatism) is very critical
of Rousseau (accused of advocating "totalitarian democracy") and the
French Revolution (the original case of "state terror"), both liberals
and conservatives in the US claim to live by a concept made famous by
both Rousseau and the Jacobins, i.e., a civic religion.
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