Good Germans

[sabotabby]

By now, it probably isn't news to anyone that the U.S. tortures people. (Arguably, every state, democratic and despotic alike, tortures people, but for the moment, let's stick to the glaring, obvious examples.) It probably isn't news to anyone that the U.S. tortures its own citizens, even when said citizens have not been convicted of any crime.

If you haven't read the New York Times article about Jose Padilla, go read it now. I'll wait.

Read it? Good. At the risk of sounding a bit like Bush, if you're not against what has been done to this man—with every fibre of your being— you're against humans. Anyone who believes that there can be "compromise" about torture ought to be exiled from human society. Period.

But that isn't enough, because presumably, we're all against torture. We are also mostly complicit in it, and it's that complicity that I keep thinking about, in my usual haphazard sort of way.

There are different levels of complicity, from participating directly to paying taxes that fund torture to remaining silent even when one is strongly opposed to violations of human rights. The last is the trickiest, because what defines silence? It's all very well to go to demos or rant on LJ, but as an activist in Canada, I risk absolutely nothing and contribute about the same. (That wasn't self-deprecation, by the way. I have good intentions.)

I recently saw Das Experiment, which got me thinking about the Stanford Prison Experiment. Here is an interview with Philip Zimbardo, wherein he blows the "bad apple" theory of Abu Ghraib out of the water. He talks about why ordinary people can participate in evil acts, and also how these acts are enabled by the inaction of others. It'd be cliché ("evil triumphs when good men do nothing") except that Abu Ghraib is such a recent, glaring example of the phenomenon that the Stanford Prison Experiment examined.

In Das Experiment, one naturally identifies with the prisoners, and perhaps with the one "good guard" who tries to stop the abuse. But in the actual experiment, as in the film, the "guards" are chosen at random. Zimbardo says:

We like to think we're good, and down deep we'd all like to say, "I would be the heroic one. I would be the one who would blow the whistle." The limit of the situationist approach comes when we see these heroes, because it appears that somehow they have something in them that the majority doesn't. We don't know what that special quality is. Certainly it's something we want to study. We want to be able to identify it so we can nurture it and teach it to our children and to others in our society.

Similarly, as good leftists, we can identify with the villagers slaughtered in the My Lai massacre. Perhaps we like to imagine ourselves as Hugh Thompson Jr. But in a position where we are forced to choose between our own careers, freedom, and possibly our lives, we ought to ask ourselves whether we'd make the choice that he did.

On a personal note, I have been fortunate to witness very few acts of group cruelty. When I've been invited to participate in them, I've mostly resisted or abstained. The extent to which I've resisted is proportionate to what I have to lose; when wrong acts or beliefs are perpetrated by people I don't care about very much (say, schoolmates or the estranged part of my family), I've tended to oppose them. When it has to do with, say, the activist community, I've tended to stand aside, since the ramifications of resisting are worse. It's quite easy to mouth off to my father's family when they're being racist; it's much harder when a community of friends turns on one individual and asks you to take sides.

A bunch of you have linked to the story of Jerry Klein, whose radio hoax recently showed just how many good Americans were willing to inflict on Muslims the type of atrocities that make baby Godwin cry: tattoos, armbands, concentration camps. Some of you are shocked. Most of you aren't. One shouldn't underestimate tribal, casual brutality, after all.

A few years ago, I took the short bus ride from Weimar, Germany, to the Buchenwald concentration camp. I emphasize that it was a short bus ride. People in Weimar claimed that they didn't know what was going on 15 minutes away; they apparently didn't wonder where all the ash was coming from. For this, we call them "Good Germans," and we like to think that we'd do better than that.

We also like to think that we'd do better than the good Americans who want to put Muslims behind razor wire. But we know about the camps. We know about the torture. We know about what U.S. tax dollars (and the silent complicity of other governments and nations) did to Jose Padilla. We know that a great many ordinary people would support further abuses. We are, by and large, not doing anything about it.

I'm not sure if this post is a wail of despair or a call for revolution. Sometimes the two are indistinguishable.

Comments

Re: What Wailing Does

[sabotabby]

I suppose I tend to get lost somewhere between outrage and action. I blame, in part, the culture of action or activism as it stands in the West. One meme, "be the change you want to see in the world," and its variations, reduces social problems to an individual level, which is ultimately ineffective. It leads to people doing absolutely nothing but claiming that by "being good people," they are somehow subtly making the world a nicer place. Yay.

The opposing argument, that change can only be accomplished through mass movements, also renders people impotent because these mass movements don't exist as such, and amount to several thousand people in the streets shouting that war is bad. Also, yay.

It's because of this that smaller, winnable battles are so appealing.

Re: What Wailing Does

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

The opposing argument, that change can only be accomplished through mass movements, also renders people impotent because these mass movements don't exist as such, and amount to several thousand people in the streets shouting that war is bad.

The thesis that social change can only be accomplished as a result of mass movements is true of itself. The problem is that, in a situation where such movements have not been evident for quite some time, the left often mistakes "several thousand people in the streets shouting that x is bad" for a mass movement. Impotence thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't think that recognition of the necessity of mass movements need render anyone impotent, so long as it is conjoined to a recognition that mass movements do not simply come out of nowhere. The steady spadework of organization, propaganda, agitation, and periodic action on a limited, workable scale, even when these seem most futile, can be part of the necessary preparation for the necessary movements encompassing millions and transforming the structure of everyday life.

Re: What Wailing Does

[sabotabby]

That's what I meant, I think.

Re: What Wailing Does

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

That's what I thought you meant, but wanted to make sure. Cool.

Re: What Wailing Does

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

See I read "be the change that you want to see in the world" (If I must read it at all), as an exhortation to fit action to thought, wish, and rhetoric.

So rather than "be nice," I read it as an exhortation to do stuff, in addition to wailing.

Sure you can't do everything. Nobody does everything. Even people who do Big Things don't do everything. They just do the job that they see needs doing.

Re: What Wailing Does

[sabotabby]

I'd read it as such if it wasn't so often used as a critique of ideologically based activism. "You're wasting your time, dear; you have no control over anything but yourself, so start there. If you're trying to change the world, maybe there's something wrong with your own life that you're not examining." And so on. Individual responsibility and mass movements aren't diametrically opposed, but they tend to be presented as such.

Re: What Wailing Does

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and I think that's defeatist.

I do think that there's a connection between the Big Things and the Little Things, if for no other reason that that we practise standing up for ourselves in small ways, sometimes. It's easier to question a bill on torture if you have a framework for questioning authority in general. (Yeah, it ought to be a no-brainer --- torture is wrong, period, but I think it's easier to sway people with spin and rhetoric if they aren't in the habit of thinking critically to begin with.)

I'm going to make the personal political again.

If a person has a habit of taking personal risks: of risking friendship for the sake of principle, of making difficult choices rather than burying their head under their pillow and hoping it all works out, then they know that such risks are survivable. It's easier to say "If those so-called friends can't respect me for who I am then I need new friends if you've done it once or twice before and wound up stronger and with better friends as a result.

Similarly if you've practised doing what you preach, I think it becomes easier to keep doing it when things look overwhelming. You have a framework for activism both on the small personal level and on the big ideological level, even if you can't necessarily go out and foment international proletariat revolution right now.

Re: What Wailing Does

[derrick-reeves.livejournal.com]

I agree with what you're saying about individualist activism, and protest politics. Except that:

The opposing argument, that change can only be accomplished through mass movements, also renders people impotent because these mass movements don't exist as such, and amount to several thousand people in the streets shouting that war is bad.

This doesn't entirely follow. If mass movements have to exist for change to be accomplished, and they don't, then the first step toward change is to create a mass movement. So, even if you're individually powerless to alter the system, you still have the power to create the conditions for change.

Re: What Wailing Does

[sabotabby]

I phrased that badly; dobrovolets said it more clearly above. It's not that mass movements are not crucial, it's that many activists seem to believe that since nothing can be accomplished without a mass movement, there's nothing that they can do on a day-to-day basis. And large protests in North America tend to get mistaken for mass movements, which they aren't.

Re: What Wailing Does

[derrick-reeves.livejournal.com]

OK. I agree with you here, and suspect that concerns about burden-shifting are shared.

Consolidating from the other thread of discussion: do you think that causal explanation is sufficient? Most Socialists aren't Karl Marx, after all. It seems clear to me that you have an awareness not only of the troubling outcomes in the world, but of the problems in 'activism'. I'm not so sure about your grounding in revolutionary thought. While the choice of the Five Year Plan as an example of a programme gives the impression that you haven't read very deeply, I'm now wary of reading too much into a rhetorical flourish.
So, what I had in mind to ask was probably more like, "Do you have some reasons for not being a revolutionist (as opposed to an activist)?" I don't intend that to be a verbal jab; the same kind of question is still on my own mind.

Re: What Wailing Does

[sabotabby]

I suppose I vacillate, which comes out of both humanist concerns and cynicism. If a just society could be achieved without revolution, I would be quite happy advocating for reform. My experience of reform, though, is that it's ultimately just as bloody as revolution and not necessarily as effective.

In terms of why I don't call myself a revolutionary—whether it is out of cowardice, lack of opportunity, or just because I have too much of a stake in the status quo—I am not actively engaging in revolutionary action. This is separate from the question of whether I think that a revolution is a desirable thing.

Re: What Wailing Does

[derrick-reeves.livejournal.com]

I am not actively engaging in revolutionary action.

Actually, I think that you are. Discussion is action, isn't it?

Re: What Wailing Does

[sabotabby]

The Bush administration seems to think so. But I set the bar a bit higher.