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.
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