I wanted to find some links to discussions about how the Soviet Union utilized our Jim Crow laws to undermine our credibility on democracy and human rights during the Cold War, but I couldn’t really find anything. Maybe I suck at googling, but I think it’s interesting that links didn’t leap off the page at me. Particularly in the Third World, our Jim Crow laws did vast damage to our argument that we had a more compassionate, just, free, and inclusive society than the Soviets. Practical people did point this out during the debate over the Civil Rights Act.
When Republicans like former Bush press secretary Dana Perino argue that we shouldn’t be debating torture because the terrorists have a recruiting field-day as a result, they sound like a 1960’s segregationist arguing that we shouldn’t be debating black inequality because it plays right into Soviet talking points.
Back then, the problem wasn’t that we were having a national debate about something deeply corrosive and hypocritical in the makeup of our country. The problem wasn’t the debate; the problem was the reality. We were not living up to our creed. Our rhetoric was easily exposed as hollow, incomplete, and misleading. A contemporary equivalent is seen in Israel. How many times have you heard the phrase: ‘Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East’? Yet, the treatment of Arab Israelis and Israel’s insistence that they be recognized as a Jewish State’ undermines the power of their argument that they are a democracy. And that’s before we even discuss the occupied territories.
Our problem in this country is not that we are debating torture, but that we did torture (and that we are coming pretty damn close to debating legalizing torture). This completely undermines our credibility on human rights, and a world in which the United States is on the wrong side of the human rights debate is a bleak world indeed.
Not just terrorists, but all people and organizations that want to commit violence and violate basic human rights are having a ‘field-day’ with our hypocrisy. It’s cold and illusory comfort to argue that our torture was softer and more justifiable than other nations’ torture.
One more point. Sometimes, as with Apartheid South Africa and pre-1965 America, evil is so pervasive in a culture that it is prudent to fix the evil without making an effort to retroactively impose justice on the people most responsible for perpetrating that evil. When an injustice like racial inequality is completely woven into the fabric of a culture, it doesn’t even make sense to assign individual responsibility. It is enough to fix the laws and make some amends, and let time do the job of healing. But that is not the case with post-9/11 torture in American culture. Torture was not debated. It was not voted on. It was not practiced by entire regions of this country.
Yet, the torture apologists are basically making the argument that there was massive consent for these policies (which were covert, and officially denied when exposed). They are saying that we were all so collectively guilty that it doesn’t make any sense to assign individual responsibility. Even people like Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont are making a version of this argument when they call for a South African-style Truth Commission. A Truth Commission looks to uncover and air all the facts about a period of national shame, but does so at the expense of individual accountability. It is the appropriate remedy for overcoming a national, collective cultural evil. It is not the appropriate remedy for punishing a relatively few bad apples at the highest levels of government.
Those that argue that all must be forgiven because we all went collectively nuts after 9/11 (thereby mooting individual responsibility) are only indicting themselves, not our culture. The Blogosphere arose, in main, as an affirmation that our national values could and should endure, and that our leaders and media had abandoned them. We have every right to call for accountability. We do not accept collective blame. And we know that the problem is not debating torture, but failing to punish it when that is what we demand of other nations.
