Here is a fine post by Mr. Boyd at ladypoverty. It reiterates concisely a point I've often made:
This is reflected nicely in the current "national debate" -- a debate over whether to enforce the law! -- with Republicans arguing that torture helps the republic by protecting it, and Democrats arguing that torture hurts the republic for miscellaneous reasons, including the notion that it "hurts our image around the world," thereby making the world less malleable to our interests.This reminds me of a recent conversation in which a liberal acquaintance insisted that if there were every a time to "prosecute Bush-era wrongdoing," meaning torture in particular, and thereby "regain credibility," it was now, because "global leadership," meaning America, was necessary "to craft a unified response to the economic crisis." These sorts of tossed-off stock phrases are now more ubiquitous than ever in our popular language, and their utter banality somewhat obscures the point the young man was making without quite noticing the point he was making, namely that our more medieval practices make our various clients and satellites (former clients and satellites?) less amenable to doing whatever it is we tell them to do.
(Of course, any random Middle Easterner suspected of something by US agencies who is subsequently detained and tortured would probably insist that the "image of America" is not the only thing harmed in the process, but that is not a concern which registers very high in the art of statecraft; as such, "harm to ourselves" -- to our very soul! -- appears to be the argument the Democratic Party prefers best.)
What is remarkable is the way that otherwise disconnected people, subjects out here in the provinces, nonetheless mouth the same official sophistry without even noticing.
9 comments:
yea but it's fun to take the official sophistry apart and reconstitute it to completely fuck with what people mean. it's mean, but it's fun.
like just the other night I was watching the game, and that damn Bud light commercial came on, the one where the guy is raving about Bud Light's "Drinkability." I was like, "heh, Bud Light: It's Drinkable!" I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in THAT meeting. Don Draper, smoking a cigarette: "well, your product is. . .it's drinkable. so we decided to turn on that meaning and go with "Bud Light: It's All About the Drinkability."
or
"America: Fuck Yeah"
or
"no problem is so big that it can't be solved by violence"
the trouble is you can do this only so far as you're willing to have a point yourself. so, ymmv. but I get by just fine most of the time in a Zen-like meaningless state. it also helps to just be nice to people, because then a lot of that cant and empty-headed pap falls to the wayside. not on the internet, of course.
i just thought the memos and the photographs were in really poor taste.
ps: kidding aside, i think regular folks out in the provinces who are horrified by the tortures we've seen evidence of, are kind of desperately throwing every possible argument they can at the issue. so if their adversary is unmoved by the 'torture dehumanizes both our victims and ourselves' they move on to 'also it produces unreliable intelligence,' and 'it harms our image,' etc.
and there are also those who must rely on the prepackaged tv arguments at their disposal. television accounting for the ubiquitous-ness of the banal-er arguments in both cases.
I am reminded of the military official who, some four years ago in the wake of Abu Ghraib, stated that they were not going to release some photos out of respect for the dignity of the people depicted in them.
The point about language is interesting. It isn't just these stock phrases and barely hanging together constructs are sophistry, they are also nonsense masquerading as sophistication. A way for people out here to talk about what's going on, feel informed, like active participants, without saying anything much at all.
I equate it to how I could probably give a reasonable sounding spiel about what the New York Giants need to do this year to win the Super Bowl without saying anything at all.
I agree with you, but I still think the argument is valid.
Assuming, magically, the US stopped thinking it had the right to get other countries to do exactly as it pleased, that doesn't mean diplomacy would end. We'd still be connected to other countries and would have to work together.
No one wants to work with an asshole. If France is all like "that dick tortured my citizens" then it's not going to want to work with us, no matter what our aims are.
So I think that the argument that torture makes us look bad still works even if you imagine a pretty place where American foreign policy was actually a force for good rather than for American interest above all else.
The point, for me -- whether the argument "works" or not -- is that it is inescapably an imperialist argument, and that it is to this argument that so many supposed opponents of torture almost invariably turn: torture hurts our "image", our "moral authority" -- and therefore our (tacitly just and natural) political authority in the world at large.
What is this ultimately based on, if not on the old exceptionalism? And how, on the other hand, is torture ultimately justified by those who defend it, if not in precisely the same way?
"more ubiquitous"? Is that like "more unique"?
"What is remarkable is the way that otherwise disconnected people, subjects out here in the provinces, nonetheless mouth the same official sophistry without even noticing."
You aren't joking. I am in Madison, Wisconsin and that sounds like a permutation of every comment in my int'l relations discussion!
What is remarkable is the way that otherwise disconnected people, subjects out here in the provinces, nonetheless mouth the same official sophistry without even noticing.Very true. I've also noticed this when I argued against waiting another year for the closure of Gitmo. The arguments were copied from the State's official propaganda: we need time to do it properly. What was true for Republicans and Fox News, is true for Democrats and today's White House.
Seriously. You write well enough that you ought to be doing it professionally. You're wasted on Wolverine movie reviews and torturesnark.
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