UPDATE: Read the New York Times editorial about this issue, touched upon in the latter half of this post. Any American who holds dear the values of the Constitution should be outraged by these acts, as well as by the Bush administration. As my previous post makes clear, patriotism shouldn't be defined by which party you belong to or whether you support the present war, and that good Americans have been standing up to imperial, hawkish presidents stomping over civil liberties ever since John Adams and the Federalists were trying to shred the newly-inked Bill of Rights with the Alien and Sedition Acts. American History 1A, people – hello?
HORRORS
Often, I am reminded of why I do the kind of work I like to do, often by being inspired to emulate examples of people who did what they felt was right to do, despite circumstances that would have made it easier to simply just look away. I am also sometimes moved by stories from the real world that remind me of why the documentarian documents, why writers write, photographers continue to shoot, why historians record.
If you listen to the following stories that I picked up over the last few podcasts of 60 Minutes, I can't see how you can't be both moved and inspired by them.
It is interesting to think about two separate "holocausts", the recent one from which the world is still reeling, and the seminal "Holocaust" that has become a lesson for the world.
Just when you think there's not much more to tell, the huge cache of files – literally millions of files never before released to the public – have been opened. Oskar Schindler's actual list – confirming the stories told of the many who sang his moral praises, Anne Frank's actual signature and internment records, as well as the signatures of millions of the people whom the Germans kidnapped, brutalized, and killed.
The Nazis were meticulous doctors of not only death, but detail – they even record the size of the lice taken from prisoners. 60 Minutes takes a few remaining survivors of this ordeal to the archives, and even shows them the signature of one man, signed when he was a teenager and given the identification number that was tatooed into his arm. Can you imagine that? Seeing a record you were never meant to see, not only because you were a prisoner, but because you weren't expected to live? Or another man, who saw his named crossed off a list of people who were sent on a work detail from which no one returned? And he'll never know why his name was crossed off, whether it was an administrative quirk to send him on another menial talk, or whether it was some small kindness that gave him a long life, the very ability to look back upon these books of horror. Man. As a historian, that's heavy. On a human level, man – heartwrenching. You have to give over these 10 or so minutes of your life to listen to this. And for those who would deny this Holocaust – millions of separate and corroborating documents, survivor testimonies from all over Europe, and eyewitness accounts from all sides and nationalities – most damning being those of the perpetrators themselves – how could a responsible person really deny this genocide?
HOPE
After that, I urge you to think about one woman who survived the genocide in Rwanda, the murder of her entire family, and yet live to forgive the Hutus who nearly eliminated her people at the group level, but even the man who was convicted of murdering her two cousins and said in an interview that he would have killed her without hesitation had found her. She has lived on to write a book about her experience, and do activist work to prevent such genocides from occurring in the future. this is another story you simply have to read. Nothing you're doing in your life should prevent you giving over another 10 minutes of your life on earth to listen to this.
HEROES
And finally, the story of a man with whom I was far more able to identify with directly, a fellow American living in the present, the man who saw the Abu Graib pictures that were being passed around and decided that these pictures – and the truth, as well as what's right – was more important than the lives and careers of the buddies he signed up with, his reputation amongst his peers and in his community, and even his life.
He's been called a "traitor" and feared for his life, and was even subtly "targeted" by Donald Rumsfeld, who nominally applauded him in a speech that revealed the identity of the man who turned in the pictures, but was really an attempt to get back at the "snitch." One man interviewed asks of him, "How could a man put the enemy over his own friends?" I say that it's the kind of man who places enough values on what it means to be truly American above the fleeting and petty interests of the present.
Like the U.S. Marine helicopter gunner who turned his weapon in the direction of his own commander in a little village called My Lai, and ordered him to "cease and desist" lest he fire upon his own troops, the final 60 Minutes story here is one of a true hero. Anyone who thinks otherwise, I do declare, is a poor excuse for an American, a moral person, a human being.
At the time, in the moment, a soldier who aims his gun at his commander may be a traitor; in reality – in the moral and ethical reality that most civilized human beings nominally occupy – history will remember him or her as a hero. And the man who wanted to stop torture and murder of prisoners not even convicted of any crime – is not a "traitor" or a "snitch" or any other horrible word; that person is a true American, through and through.
HISTORY
The new-age, would-be fascists who would want Americans to "never question the President" or "just do as you're told" and "trust the government to do its job" and all those other phrases that encourage Americans to simply "Praise God and pass the ammunition" and not even think to ask, "Why are we violating one of God's commandments again?" or "Aren't there some worldly interests here worth being concerned about?" – these are not the true Christians, the true Americans.
Those who would knowingly send over American soldiers to die overseas without real justification, who don't care about the lives of Iraqi human beings just as much as American human beings – these people don't know Christian charity, nor do they occupy any moral high ground in my mind. Nor do they remember their own history, from the times of the first imperial president, John Adams, who would have jailed all who criticized him and called questioning of the government "sedition."
Am I traitorous, as an American, in saying that the President is wrong? Or that he should never have been president, because the Supreme Court decided the election and not the people? Not to a true American, I say. The true patriot, the truly moral being, is the one willing to buck authority, propriety, ideology, and society itself if it means doing the right thing. How do you know what the "right thing" is? Because you "know" gay marriage is "wrong," come hell or high water, and it doesn't matter if the President supports the torture of enemy prisoners or the illegal search of its citizens? Because you want Christian prayer in schools, even at the expense of other religions, which is clearly protected in the Constitution? Or should you go about asking academic questions such as, "What if I fall into a mode of universalist thinking that trumps the appropriate amount of cultural relativism needed to..."
That's the sort of worry-warting that disables action, that goes against what the gut, good home training, that respected teacher, Sunday school lessons, all that stuff – told you. Socrates wrestled with the same question. I simply believe that, in general, humans have a moral center, that humans are essentially "good." Specifically, I believe that American ideals – in their purest, lofty forms – are some of the best ideas the world has ever seen, and has given to truly lofty ideals, such as true democracy (an American invention), as well as freedom, and all the derivative ideas that come with it.
America has never been able to live up to these ideals and never will. That's why they are defined as "ideals" in the first place. But I believe American history – for all its blood and moral contradiction – has also been about a struggle for many to bring reality closer to the ideals that have infected everyone, and not just the people in power. It comes in fits and through struggle, but I feel the sweep of American history does at least have that story within it.
In terms of hope, in terms of people who live with their minds in the sky, whose beliefs are strongly ideological and work in the currency of grand ideas – I think Americans are fairly unique in that point, especially as the oldest continuous government on the face of the earth. In that way, for all of America's problems, there are still grand ideas and lofty hopes that motivate me, that drive American ingenuity, that creates a culture in which we can wage a horrible war in Vietnam against an imagined ideological threat but really against an innocent people, and in the midst of a horrible war crime, another American puts his gun in the face of his fellow American commander.
In the end, I think people know the difference between right and wrong. The vested interests and fleeting ideologies of the moment just confuse us. They make us hate the Tutsi, put Jews in ovens, or stack up Iraq bodies like cordwood and smile for the camera.
That's where I draw my lines in the sand. In my mind, my country stands for the ideals espoused in the Constitution, its attached Bill of Rights, and a people, government, and army that doesn't engage in secret kidnappings, secret trials, torture, and surveillance of its citizens. It is a country in which people have true freedom of speech – not just the technical right to say something, but a culture that actually values critical thinking and the appropriate questioning of authority. This is another story you shouldn't pass up.
And finally, a warning. This is the kind of behavior some people in my home country are condoning lately. What happened to common sense? To basic human decency? To thinking at all?
"I was just following orders?"
Things worked from both sides – both the parents who told her to "Do what you're told" and the manager who enabled this whole atrocity. That woman, almost as much as the man who sexually abused this young woman, is a disgusting excuse for a human being.
Such words are ones I never thought I'd hear in my own country, as words that enable all sorts of atrocities, that enable one's own ugliness to come out and find expression, under the excuse that that swarthy, brown guy in the wrong place at the wrong time's a suspected "terrorist" or that the teenage girl who's never committed a crime in her life's a "thief" or that the black man who runs from the men who don't identify themselves as cops obviously a "criminal."
This is the culture our country is creating, as we wage two wars that are being ineffective in actually catching the relatively few real evil mofos who caught a nation with its pants down with boxcutters that weren't even contraband items at the time of the 9/11 attacks.
Hello? Al Queda – a small and specific group of people, not an army or country or even political movement – has been trying to get us for decades now, and bad preparation, bad policy, and bad security allowed them to get through and pull off a guerilla operation that was truly grandiose and flashy. And we are helping them.
Terrorism works by destabilizing. A few determined men and box cutters have gotten the world's most powerful nation and economy overextended across the globe, has immersed an entire nation in its own fear, has caused nearly the entire world – even our former allies and friends – to start to dislike us. Now, people are willing to "shred the constitution a little bit – bend the law" to get the job done. Now, we're a culture in which there are people arguing that it's OK to torture? What?
And now, people – everyday people – are able to do this.
I have hope, of course. But amongst all this horror, we need more heroes. We need more history. And we need more forgiveness.
Otherwise, where the hell is my country – and the world – going?
