"War Is Hell!":The perfecters of chest-beating and their epigones.

Let's revisit our discussion of David Brooks's editorial in yesterday's New York Times, which Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald places alongside numerous previous instances in which this neoconservative, who usually plays 'good-cop', metamorphoses into a "grizzled warrior." As Greenwald illustrates, yesterday's transformation finds the usually ostensibly mild-mannered Brooks

perform[ing] a chest-beating war dance over Afghanistan of the type he and his tough guy comrades perfected in the run-up to the Iraq War.  It's filled with self-glorifying "war-is-hell" neocon platitudes that make the speaker feel tough and strong.  No more hiding like cowards in our bases.  It's time to send "small groups of American men and women [] outside the wire in dangerous places."  Those opposing escalation are succumbing to the "illusion of the easy path."  Chomping on a cigar in his war room, he roars:  "all out or all in."  The central question: will we "surrender the place to the Taliban?," etc. etc.

Indeed, in his remarkable piece of propaganda Brooks's appraisal of the political and military situation is selective and slanted in its relationship with facts and irresponsible and, frankly, comical in its use of rhetoric. But, as I pointed out yesterday, what's truly sinister and galling is the piece's attempt to bend recent history to its own political ends. I mean, basically, it conflates statements of unambiguous fact with statements evincing a heterodox conception of political and military historiography. To call it heterodox is maybe too nice: It is nothing less than a neoconservative wet dream of blood-lust, self-righteousness, pedantry and calls to the cause of freedom and destiny!!!, pitting the United States (unambiguously good, honorable, honest, free, saintly) against...

Well, let's pause there. Against who, exactly? Who is it that we are fighting, and what is it that makes our enemies so damned evil, Dave Brooks?

Since 1979, we have been involved in a long, complex conflict against Islamic extremism. We’ve fought this ideology in many ways in many places, and we shouldn’t pretend we understand how this conflict will evolve. But we should understand that the conflict is unavoidable and that when extremism pushes, it’s in our long-term interests to push back — and that eventually, if we do so, extremism will wither..*

We've been, for 30 years now!, engaged in a "long" conflict (i.e.: we're already knee-deep in this conflict, so giving up now would mean that the brave sacrifices of those who have gone before us will have been in vain!, a dishonor done to their memories!!!), a "complex" conflict (i.e.: a chess-like series of highly technical maneuvers, tactics, strategies, intelligence-gathering measures by way of "data-mining," spying, "harsh interrogations," computers and machines and all sorts of stealth, jargony technical and technological and academic and bookish stuff that you could never hope to understand in a million years, so just back off and leave it to us experts).

And the conflict has been with "Islamic extremism." But, wait, I thought it was a conflict with Al Quaeda? Or, wait: no!, it's a War On Terror, right? Or was it the Taliban in Afghanistan? Or was it in Pakistan? Or was it against Osama bin Laden? Or, wait: against Saddam Hussein? Or wait, what about Omar Kadafi? Or...uh...what about those mean-looking dudes in Iran? Hold on! I think I'm sensing a pattern here..... Don't tell me!

Okay: the idea of a "long, complex conflict against Islamic extremism" is so inexcusably hamfisted, willfully ignorant, so transparently calculated to render as ambiguous as possible the identity of our putative enemy, American aims in the putative conflict, its theater of action, and its putative moral authority, and moreover it's so classically, paradigmatically Orwellian (remember how the government kept switching the war enemy between Eurasia and Eastasia?: the point is that the more ambiguous the nature of the enemy/terms of conflict, the more potentially sinister, totalitarian and just plain dangerous it becomes for people like Brooks to issue absurd calls to arms in the name of empty, cynical and dishonest conceptions of quote-patriotism-unquote!!!).

I leave you with a side-by-side comparison of my own which I hope will illustrate in no uncertain terms why it's so very dangerous when asshole pseudo-intellectuals like David Brooks write like chest-thumping, fist-pounding neanderthals, particularly when they are saying War Is Hell, But We Americans Had Better Tough It Out To Preserve Our Honor And To Protect Our Way Of Live Against A Threat Posed By AN IDEOLOGY THAT'S INCOMPATIBLE WITH OUR OWN, This Is, If You're A Decent Honest Non-Terrorist American!!!!

Here's Brooks, giving it his best, really throwing the full strength of of his will into his appeal, the purity -- uncontaminated by 'foreign, un-American ideologies' -- of his thick-skinned, ideologically correct moral righteousness, his steadfast refusal to fall victim to the illusions of weaker men!!!!:

Always there is the illusion of the easy path. Always there is the illusion, which gripped Donald Rumsfeld and now grips many Democrats, that you can fight a counterinsurgency war with a light footprint, with cruise missiles, with special forces operations and unmanned drones. Always there is the illusion, deep in the bones of the Pentagon’s Old Guard, that you can fight a force like the Taliban by keeping your troops mostly in bases, and then sending them out in well-armored convoys to kill bad guys.

[...]

We have tried to fight the Afghan war the easy way, and it hasn’t worked. Switching now to the McChrystal strategy is a difficult choice, and President Obama is right to take his time. But Obama was also right a few months ago when he declared, “This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. ... This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

I can just hear the John Phillip Sousa march emanating from the speaker system of Brook's swanky corner office in The New York Times building. But the United States has not monopolized the use of careless bombast in attempts to justify not just warfare but ideological warfare, The same holds for ideological warfare in which the homeland's Weltanschauung or way of life or values or blood is cast as incompatible with another.

Who else was fond of saying, This planet ain't big enough for the both of us! and, It will take a long, possibly thousand-year struggle, but we must always be willing to attack in the most unrelenting and steadfast way, including the use of 'extraordinary measures, which will require a decisive break from the old, outdated philosophies, practices and values of the old, feeble-minded military hierarchy...?

I know who! A propagandist, political leader and military leader all rolled into one, who had the following to say to the German generals at a meeting in early March, 1941, before their glorious, hard-willed march into Russia and, as we all know, their eventual doom:

The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies. I know that the necessity for such means of waging war is beyond the the comprehension of you generals but...I insist absolutely that my orders be executed without contradiction. The commissars are the bearers of ideologies directly opposed to National Socialism. Therefore the commissars will be liquidated. German soldiers guilty of breaking international law...will be excused. Russia has not participated in the Hague Convention and therefore has no rights under it.  [Adolf Hitler, as quoted in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich]

Phew! I don't need to point out all of the parallels explicitly, do I? And the last couple of quoted sentences provide illuminating comparisons with not only Brooks's article but with the justifications used by Bush and Cheney, et al. for their (once-) secret approval of the use of torture in various "national security"-related interrogations.

Finally, just to really make everyone even more sick to their stomachs, let us consider what one Heinrich Himmler had to say to his S.S. generals on October 4, 1943:

...I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. Among yourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly...

I mean...the extermination of the Jewish race....Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time -- apart from exceptions caused by human weakness -- to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written...  [quoted in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich]

Of course I'm not comparing Brooks to these two dudes. Like I said, I'd happily have a beer with Dave Brooks, should the opportunity arise. He's a decent fellow, etc.

I mean merely to illustrate that the coupling of elegant/pretentious ideological certitudes -- and grand abstract principles generally -- with windy, high-minded rhetoric and fist-pounding putatively patriotic fervor is dangerous. Especially when this combination is used to advocate long, violent, multi-front wars against an enemy whose identity is ambiguous, whose goals are completely abstract and easily doctored both in the framing of present and future debates but in rewriting our collective/cultural consciousness retrospectively. The latter is at the heart of any decent definition of Orwellian governance.

Last of all, don't let Brooks and his friends get away with convincing the American population that we must violate our own values, principles and ethics in order to stave off an enemy with which we are supposedly engaged in a never-ending existential conflict. That's the worst kind of bullying in the world: It doesn't make sense, it isn't an argument but a exercise in rhetorical and symbolic power, and we must fight back against it.

I know, I sound like Bono or something, but this stuff is just so unbelievably sleazy and unjust....

__________________

* All quoted passages that appear in bold typeface were chosen for emphasis by the present blogger.

An atheist denunciation of Sam Harris.PART TWOHarris bends over backwards to justify torture & is an apologist for neoconservative militarism.

Sam Harris. Aw, shucks. What a nice, friendly, moderate, liberal, young man.

Into justifying the use of torture against enemies in the American War On Terror? Then, allow me to introduce you to the Reader's Digest-league philosophical musings of one Sam Harris. The following quotations are taken from an article that first appeared in the Huffington Post back in the halcyon days of 2005. The title of this pièce de résistance is 'In Defense of Torture'.

Golly gee, Sam! responds the unsuspecting HuffPo junkie, as she wraps her Reader's Digest-quality mind around Harris's provocative titular gambit. But isn't torture a bad thing?

Turns out, it's not! Well, not always, anyways. You might not, says Harris, have considered a strange bit of highly technical, jargony whatsit known as the 'ticking-bomb' scenario. If this term of art -- familiar to experts in highly specialized fields of philosophy -- has you confused, don't worry. Uncle Sam's gonna lay it out plain, in old-fashioned, workin'-man's English:

Imagine that a known terrorist has planted a bomb in the heart of a nearby city. He now sits in your custody. Rather than conceal his guilt, he gloats about the forthcoming explosion and the magnitude of human suffering it will cause. Given this state of affairs—in particular, given that there is still time to prevent an imminent atrocity—it seems that subjecting this unpleasant fellow to torture may be justifiable. For those who make it their business to debate the ethics of torture this is known as the “ticking-bomb” case.

Ya see? So, now that we're equipped with the specialty knowledge required for rational discussion of the ethics of torture, we can begin to, as it were, unwrap some of the underlying presuppositions that we tolerant, middle-class, bleeding-heart liberal Americans bring to bear in approaching highly complex ethics of torture. What are these presuppositions....these variables, and in what manner might they becloud our usually adaptable, dynamic and context-sensitive sense of justice? Of right and -- as it were -- wrong?

Well, glad you asked. Turns out that

many variables influence our feelings about an act of physical violence. The philosopher Jonathan Glover points out that “in modern war, what is most shocking is a poor guide to what is most harmful.” To learn that one’s grandfather flew a bombing mission over Dresden in the Second World War is one thing; to hear that he killed five little girls and their mother with a shovel is another. We can be sure that he would have killed many more women and girls by dropping bombs from pristine heights, and they are likely to have died equally horrible deaths, but his culpability would not appear the same. There is much to be said about the disparity here, but the relevance to the ethics of torture should be obvious.

Yes, yes, Sam. Much to be said about the disparity, but no: let's waste no time pondering these disparities! I mean, we're talking about a 'ticking-bomb' here, right? No time to sit and chat! [To be read in the voice of T.V.'s Batman, as portrayed by Adam West:] Mustn't....waste time discussing....things to be said.....about....disparity........Only....time....to.....torture!

.....If you think that the equivalence between torture and collateral damage does not hold, because torture is up close and personal while stray bombs aren’t, you stand convicted of a failure of imagination on at least two counts: first, a moment’s reflection on the horrors that must have been visited upon innocent Afghanis and Iraqis by our bombs will reveal that they are on par with those of any dungeon. If our intuition about the wrongness of torture is born of an aversion to how people generally behave while being tortured, we should note that this particular infelicity could be circumvented pharmacologically, because paralytic drugs make it unnecessary for screaming ever to be heard or writhing seen. We could easily devise methods of torture that would render a torturer as blind to the plight of his victims as a bomber pilot is at thirty thousand feet. Consequently, our natural aversion to the sights and sounds of the dungeon provide no foothold for those who would argue against the use of torture.

Whew. I haven't learned so much since I took Torture 101, sophomore year of high school. Here is an objection: Harris is getting it backwards. The failure of imagination is his own: He confuses the aversion of we middle class Westerners to torture with our aversion to particular sets of aural and visual associations that the concept of torture brings to mind. After all, for 99 percent of inhabitants of the lazy, fat, TV-watching West, the 'conventional' military aerial bombing raid is every bit as unfamiliar to our lived experience as is torture. Therefore: if there is a basis upon which we shall formulate our ethical point of view as regards torture, it is not going to be our (non-existent) lived experience of how the monstrous, barbaric act is carried out. It is even less advisable that we formulate our view by way of comparison to another monstrous, barbaric act with which we also have no firsthand experience.

And anyone who is actually going to formulate his view of the ethics of torture v. the ethics of the aerial bombing raid without reflecting seriously upon his personal estrangement from the actual physical, lived circumstances of both is someone who lacks the imagination and empathy to defer to the firsthand testimony of others who have actually experienced these horrors. He is someone who is so myopic and solipsistic as to base his impressions of the outside world entirely on television shows crafted especially for fat uneducated rednecks: easy targets for indoctrination into ethical dispositions that would have seemed unthinkable and certainly un-American just a few years ago.

Shows like Fox's 24, which dramatizes during each episode at least one, if not two or three instances of Harris's 'ticking-bomb' scenario.

By the way, in real life, do you want to know how many times the 'ticking bomb' scenario has occurred? NEVER. Not once.

The creator of 24 -- a ultra-neoconservative whack-job called Joel Surnow -- knows that his award-winning show's portrayal of torture as useful, ethically sound, and consistent with American values in fact bears no relation to reality. And yet, he feels that his show is "patriotic."

Joel Surnow, creator of TV's 24: Doesn't he look like a guy who has chronic erectile dysfunction?

Patriotic, huh? Well, I think that Surnow is poisoning the well of civil discourse, imbuing people's commonsense notions of what it means to be a patriotic American citizen with an ideologically calibrated and exceedingly reckless fabrication that taps into the bloodlust, cultural resentment and aimlessness of wide swaths of an especially vulnerable (and, for a host of reasons, ticked-off [so to speak]) American population. Whatever vision Surnow wishes to advance of what it means to be an American is glaringly at odds with the vision shared by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry.

One thing that I find galling about this is: where the hell is the sex and violence on T.V. crowd? I mean, is it, like, the new thing among Conservative White Evangelical Christian parents to say: "Well, sex is still bad, but violence may now be okay in particular circumstances; as long as it takes the form of lots and lots of explicit, gruesome, agonizing dehumanizing torture"?

I mean, I'm a First-Amendment Fundamentalist and feel that censorship in any form functions to undermine the capacity of human beings to live in the real world. But, I feel tempted to drive a pickup truck out to some megachurch tomorrow and ask the hoards of Bible-thumping parents: do you really want to bring your kids up in an American society in which torture is seen as not only acceptable but patriotic?

My answer's no.

Look: anyone that knows me will tell you that despite my habit of chatting about politics ad nauseum, I'm not much of a going-out-into-the-streets-and-chanting-things-through-megaphones type. But if there's any issue I'm passionate about, it's this one. As far as I'm concerned, to so much as attempt to justify legalizing torture on the basis of its putative utility is itself INSANE. Like, for instance, this washed-up mockery of a law professor

Alan Dershowitz: One of O.J. Simpson's defense attorneys. The first time around.

-- you know, Alan Dershowitz, the guy who was among the lawyers that represented O. J. Simpson? -- has written articles and even appeared on television proposing a law that would make torture legal under certain circumstances. Which circumstances? Why, of course, the ticking-time bomb scenario. You know, the one that's never ONCE happened in real life? His proposed law would, however, require getting a warrant from a judge. Now, honestly, would you want to become a judge if you knew that it meant periodically signing off on waterboarding people? It's a good thing no sentient human could possibly give a shit what Dershowitz says.

Should the neoconservative tendency ever -- God forbid -- show signs of reemergence on the scale of the pre-Iraq War National Brainwashing Project, I think it will likely be entirely necessary for the quote-unquote 'secular Left', Left-leaning Catholics and the non-evangelical Protestant Left to join forces with anti-torture portions of the evangelical Christian community in order to block the truly chilling specter of legally sanctioned torture from coming into existence.

Anyway, back to Sam Harris. Our friendly atheist continues his tortured explanation of why torture should be okay with us (albeit only in the specific circumstances that, as we have discussed, have never once occurred):

To demonstrate just how abstract the torments of the tortured can be made to seem, we need only imagine an ideal “torture pill”—a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their concealment. The action of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if, after giving this pill to captive terrorists, each lay down for what appeared to be an hour’s nap only to arise and immediately confess everything he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be tempted to call it a “truth pill” in the end? No, there is no ethical difference to be found in how the suffering of the tortured or the collaterally damaged appears.

All right. Instead of responding myself, why don't I just go ahead and quote George Orwell? The following is from 1984, in particular from The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, a copy of which the novel's protagonist Winston Smith is given to read by O'Brien, an Inner Party member who initiates Smith to the "Brotherhood," a secret organization that plots to overthrow the Party. Read this excerpt -- which lays out candidly the function of torture in the totalitarian state -- and compare it with Harris's assertions:

In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance -- meaning, in effect, war and police espionage -- the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life.

The banality of evil, indeed. Of course, as we know, O'Brien turns out not to have in fact been a member of "The Brotherhood," but is in fact himself a scientist -- a psychologist -- working for the totalitarian regime. For Big Brother. He applies his expertise in precisely the manner elaborated in the above excerpt.

Harris is said to be pursuing a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. Hmmm.

I shall conclude with a voice of sanity, that of the legal scholar David Luban (Virginia Law Review, 9/15/05):

The only reasonable inference to draw from these recent efforts by the government to defend its actions is that the torture culture is still firmly in place, notwithstanding official condemnation of torture. Indeed, given that lawyers at the highest levels of government continue to loophole the laws against torture as energetically as ever, more than half a year after the Abu Ghraib revelations, the only reasonable inference to draw is that the United States government is currently engaging in brutal and humiliating interrogations. At most, torture has given way to CID. The persistence of interrogational brutality should surprise no one, because the liberal ideology of torture fully legitimizes it. The memos illustrate the ease with which arguments that pretend that torture can exist in liberal society, but only as an exception, quickly lead to erecting a torture culture, a network of institutions and practices that regularize the exception and make it standard operating procedure.

For this reason, the liberal ideology of torture, which assumes that torture can be neatly confined to exceptional ticking-bomb cases and surgically severed from cruelty and tyranny, represents a dangerous delusion. It becomes more dangerous still coupled with an endless war on terror, a permanent emergency in which the White House eagerly insists that its emergency powers rise above the limiting power of statutes and treaties. Claims to long-term emergency powers that entail the power to torture should send chills through liberals of the right as well as the left, and no one should still think that liberal torture has nothing to do with tyranny.