THE REVELANCE OF 'THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS'
My brother sent me a piece from The New York Times on the film "The Battle of Algiers." According to the article, the Pentagon is studying the film for "the advantages and costs of resorting to torture and intimidation in seeking vital human intelligence about enemy plans."
I read a book some time ago on the Algerian War and it's totally fascinated me since. The Algerian war was fought between nationalists who wanted the evict the French colonials and make Algeria an independent country. The guerilla war, which lasted from 1954-62, was very bloody and culminated with Algerian independence. It was a seminal war in French history as it pretty much led to the end of France as a world and imperial power. French African colonies were granted independence so the French state could put its resources into maintaining French Algeria, since the North African territory was legally considered part of France proper, just like Normandy or the Riviera.
The war was a disaster for France. Basically, Algeria was France's Vietnam (or more accurately, considering the timeline, Vietnam was America's Algeria). It divided French society bitterly. Algeria showed how a relatively small group of guerillas could defeat a much greater military power. France had far more impressive military force but the Algerian nationalists had home field advantage.
More importantly, the nationalists had a psychological edge. They were defending THEIR territory. While Algeria may have legally been a part of France proper, psychologically most French didn't really think of it as such. As a result, the nationalists had a much higher tolerance for casualities and fought with a greater ferocity because they were defending their homeland. The French had a much lower tolerance because after a certain point, they didn't think it was worth it to shed so much blood for mountains and sand. French society soured on the war much more quickly than the nationalist community. The nationalists had the stomach for a long fight; the occupiers did not. The nationalists didn't have to win the war decisively. They just had to not lose it. They could inflict by a thousand cuts. And they did. And it worked.
This is pretty much the same thing that happened to America in Vietnam a decade later. A nationalist guerilla movement fighting for their homeland against a foreign power from another continent. The Viet Cong didn't so much beat America as outlasted us. Americans lost the stomach for a fight because, after a certain point, it became too costly for something that wasn't really our fight. In combat between a nationalist movement and a foreign imperial power, the nationalist movement is going to almost always win a war of attrition. Not because they have more resources but because they have more incentive to go the last mile.
This is why empire is so difficult, so expensive and requires so many resources, human and otherwise, to maintain. This is why the Europeans got out of the business of physical empires and went to the much less taxing economic-only empire business.
The film 'The Battle of Algiers' is fascinating, though difficult to follow if you're not familiar with the basica outline of the history. The Battle of Algiers was a French crackdown on FLN (nationalist) militants in the Algerian capital in 1957. It was brutal (and the FLN was an equally brutal enemy) and ended up being an example of the phrase "winning the battle yet losing the war."
There was a lot of torture which the French justified at the time as being necessary. Though it's interesting to note that nearly 45 years later, the French general who oversaw the Battle of Algiers, Jacques Massu, told the French newspaper Le Monde that Torture is not indispensable in time of war, we could have gotten along without it very well. Which certainly calls into question whether torture is "necessary" for extracting vital information or if it's just an excess indulged upon by captors out of an understandable anger or desire for revenge. I've heard former torturers argue that torture is actually counterproductive because you don't know if the information extracted via that method is actually reliable, or if the victim is merely telling you what you want to hear so the torture will stop.
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
ANTI-AMERICAN BRITS, PRO-AMERICAN FRENCH
Bizarre, though probably accurate, paragraph from an article in the British paper The Independent.
Regarding a report concerning the anxieties of Americans:
Attitudes towards foreign countries have changed fundamentally [since 9/11/01]. The latest report shows a hardening of negative feelings towards France and, to a slightly less extent, Saudi Arabia. Yet, Americans seem to be engaged in a full-blown love affair with the British. Never mind that anti-Americanism is seen to run far higher in the UK than in France.
Now most of the 9/11 hijackers came from which country: Saudi Arabia or France? Yet who is the prime target of our national temper tantrum?
Bizarre, though probably accurate, paragraph from an article in the British paper The Independent.
Regarding a report concerning the anxieties of Americans:
Attitudes towards foreign countries have changed fundamentally [since 9/11/01]. The latest report shows a hardening of negative feelings towards France and, to a slightly less extent, Saudi Arabia. Yet, Americans seem to be engaged in a full-blown love affair with the British. Never mind that anti-Americanism is seen to run far higher in the UK than in France.
Now most of the 9/11 hijackers came from which country: Saudi Arabia or France? Yet who is the prime target of our national temper tantrum?
Monday, September 08, 2003
THE ADMINISTRATION'S JIHAD AGAINST INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE
The Bush administration's jihad against the International Criminal Court [ICC] reached a new low a few weeks ago when it opposed a measure that would've treated attacks on humanitarian aid workers as a war crime. This measure was introduced after the car bomb that murdered over a dozen UN workers in Bagdhad. The US objection was that if targeting aid workers was a war crime, then those who commit such crimes would be subject to the ICC, whose jurisdiction the US rejects. What is unclear is why this matters in this particular case? American troops don't murder humanitarian aid workers. They wouldn't be affected by this measure. The president's opposition is an insult to our disciplined, well-trained soldiers.
The real source of the opposition, of course, is the ICC. If the US accepted this measure, it would be implicitly accepting the jurisdiction of the ICC. With this, the administration has made it clearer than ever before that it doesn't feel international law should apply to the United States. It has taken this policy since long before 9/11 became a pretext for unilateralism in the name of "western civilization." Waging a bizarre jihad against an organ of international justice is more important to the Bush administration than helping protect those who risk their safety to work with refugees or feed starving people.
A poll suggests that 69% of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. This despite there being no proof of any connection between the two. (And if there were, you can be sure the president and his team would be repeating that proof about every 10 minutes)
So why do so many Americans believe what is so clearly not the case? I suspect it's because most Americans ASSUME Saddam was involved. They do so not because most Americans are stupid, but precisely because they are logical. Or at least more so than the administration.
If the war on international terrorism began as a result of the 9/11 attacks and if conquering Iraq and toppling Saddam were an integral part of that war on international terrorism as the president insist, then one would logically assume that Saddam must've been involved in 9/11. Otherwise, why else would toppling Saddam have anything to do with the war on international terrorism?
Based on what they were told, Americans logically ASSUMED Saddam was dangerous. Based on what they've been told, Americans logically ASSUME that the International Criminal Court [ICC] is somehow an imposition of one world government. If I didn't know better, I might believe it too. The ICC is set up to try war criminals and other criminals against humanity who can't or won't be tried in their home countries or in the countries where they committed their atrocities. It's for countries where there are no functioning courts or where the courts are subject to political manipulation. The ICC wouldn't apply to Americans because our courts function. If you say that ICC would take jurisdiction away from American courts, you're saying that our courts are dysfunctional and subject to political manipulation. The ICC won't affect us because we have the rule of law.
Those who really have to fear the ICC aren't American GIs but rather people like Kim Jong Il and Charles Taylor. The ICC would be a natural place to try people like Robert Mugabe, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, since courts in those countries don't function.
Our active undermining of the ICC hurts our international credibility. When the administration speaks of the rule of law and respect for international norms in North Korea or Zimbabwe, those dictators can rightly point out that the US government rejects the rule of international law itself.
The US has been an integral part in setting up ad hoc criminal tribunals after specific terrible wars. Nuremberg for the Nazis. The Hague for the Serbs. Freetown for Sierra Leone. But those tribunals are perceived as "victors' justice" precisely because they are one-off and usually only target the losing party. They are also necessarily inefficient because they have to start from scratch every time. It also fails to act as a deterrent to the war criminals because they are always set up after the fact and only after certain conflicts. A permanent court would be there to try anyone who commits atrocities (and are from countries with dysfunctional courts), they would be more efficient since they would be on-going and they could serve, at least to some degree, as a deterrent.
The Bush administration doesn't realize how much its opposition to the ICC hurts its credibility in calling for the rule of law, justice and respect for international norms elsewhere. In light of the administration's great moralizing and crusading, that credibility is even more critical.
To learn more about the ICC, facts and myths, check out: www.iccnow.org
The Bush administration's jihad against the International Criminal Court [ICC] reached a new low a few weeks ago when it opposed a measure that would've treated attacks on humanitarian aid workers as a war crime. This measure was introduced after the car bomb that murdered over a dozen UN workers in Bagdhad. The US objection was that if targeting aid workers was a war crime, then those who commit such crimes would be subject to the ICC, whose jurisdiction the US rejects. What is unclear is why this matters in this particular case? American troops don't murder humanitarian aid workers. They wouldn't be affected by this measure. The president's opposition is an insult to our disciplined, well-trained soldiers.
The real source of the opposition, of course, is the ICC. If the US accepted this measure, it would be implicitly accepting the jurisdiction of the ICC. With this, the administration has made it clearer than ever before that it doesn't feel international law should apply to the United States. It has taken this policy since long before 9/11 became a pretext for unilateralism in the name of "western civilization." Waging a bizarre jihad against an organ of international justice is more important to the Bush administration than helping protect those who risk their safety to work with refugees or feed starving people.
A poll suggests that 69% of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. This despite there being no proof of any connection between the two. (And if there were, you can be sure the president and his team would be repeating that proof about every 10 minutes)
So why do so many Americans believe what is so clearly not the case? I suspect it's because most Americans ASSUME Saddam was involved. They do so not because most Americans are stupid, but precisely because they are logical. Or at least more so than the administration.
If the war on international terrorism began as a result of the 9/11 attacks and if conquering Iraq and toppling Saddam were an integral part of that war on international terrorism as the president insist, then one would logically assume that Saddam must've been involved in 9/11. Otherwise, why else would toppling Saddam have anything to do with the war on international terrorism?
Based on what they were told, Americans logically ASSUMED Saddam was dangerous. Based on what they've been told, Americans logically ASSUME that the International Criminal Court [ICC] is somehow an imposition of one world government. If I didn't know better, I might believe it too. The ICC is set up to try war criminals and other criminals against humanity who can't or won't be tried in their home countries or in the countries where they committed their atrocities. It's for countries where there are no functioning courts or where the courts are subject to political manipulation. The ICC wouldn't apply to Americans because our courts function. If you say that ICC would take jurisdiction away from American courts, you're saying that our courts are dysfunctional and subject to political manipulation. The ICC won't affect us because we have the rule of law.
Those who really have to fear the ICC aren't American GIs but rather people like Kim Jong Il and Charles Taylor. The ICC would be a natural place to try people like Robert Mugabe, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, since courts in those countries don't function.
Our active undermining of the ICC hurts our international credibility. When the administration speaks of the rule of law and respect for international norms in North Korea or Zimbabwe, those dictators can rightly point out that the US government rejects the rule of international law itself.
The US has been an integral part in setting up ad hoc criminal tribunals after specific terrible wars. Nuremberg for the Nazis. The Hague for the Serbs. Freetown for Sierra Leone. But those tribunals are perceived as "victors' justice" precisely because they are one-off and usually only target the losing party. They are also necessarily inefficient because they have to start from scratch every time. It also fails to act as a deterrent to the war criminals because they are always set up after the fact and only after certain conflicts. A permanent court would be there to try anyone who commits atrocities (and are from countries with dysfunctional courts), they would be more efficient since they would be on-going and they could serve, at least to some degree, as a deterrent.
The Bush administration doesn't realize how much its opposition to the ICC hurts its credibility in calling for the rule of law, justice and respect for international norms elsewhere. In light of the administration's great moralizing and crusading, that credibility is even more critical.
To learn more about the ICC, facts and myths, check out: www.iccnow.org
Friday, September 05, 2003
BETTER WORDS, BETTER ESSAYS
An acquaintance of mine made a rather interesting argument that the lawsuit by Fox News [sic] against satirist Al Franken had a legitimate basis. The crux of his contention is that since Fox had trademarked the phrase "Fair & Balanced," they were required to defend it against alleged misuse, otherwise they would lose the trademark. He also says the flap is a bunch of whining by liberals who hate Fox. Of course, if the suit had merit, the judge might not have dismissed it so quickly.
He did make many legitimate points. The problem is that Fox didn't. Fox decided to name call Franken for name calling them as name callers. This made it come across as not a high-minded strictly legal argument, but as a loud-mouthed bully throwing a temper tantrum because he can dish it out but can't take it. Further, they advanced the farcical argument that someone might confuse Franken's book as a Fox product. If they'd made my acquiantance's arguments, they wouldn't have come across so ludicrously.
Newspaper headlines satirize trademarked slogans all the time, yet they're not sued. So it makes me wonder how unlimited trademarks are. Not having expertise in that area, I don't know. But according to the US Patent and Trademark office (USPTO), A trademark is a word, phrase, symbol or design, or a combination of words, phrases, symbols or designs, that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others.
So if I use a trademarked phrase in a context unrelated to that distinguishing/identifying purpose, am I violating a trademark? For example, if I say "Gimme a break" in response to something ridiculous, am I violating Kit Kat's trademark? If Franken uses that phrase in a context unrelated to news' delivery (Fox's goods), is he violating the trademark? If he uses the phrase as part of a longer title, is it a violation? Apparently at least one of these answers is no, since the judge dismissed the suit so quickly.
No one is challenging Fox's right to use "Fair & Balanced" as a trademark slogan, even most of THINK it's totally inaccurate. The question is: how far does trademark protection extend? Does it apply to things unrelated to that which the trademark is intended to protect?
I think this situation is far less bizarre than the lawsuit against Papa John's pizza a few years ago. Papa John's used the slogan "Better ingredients, better pizza." They were sued by a rival (forget which) who said they shouldn't use that slogan because their ingredients and pizza were no better than the rival's. Which begs the question related to my fundamental point, if I say 'my sister makes better pizza than me', am I violating Papa John's trademark?
'Better ingredients, better pizza' is a subjective opinion, just like 'fair & balanced.' Do you expect them to say they have crappier food than Pizza Hut? A news' channel that claims to be objective, are they going to say they're not 'fair & balanced.' That's what promotion is about! Convincing people you're better than your competitors.
And finally, and significantly, a search of the USPTO shows that Fox News Corp. trademarked the phrase "Fair & Balanced." Franken's book subtitle uses the phrase "Fair and Balanced." Sure, it's a miniscule difference, but law, especially trademark and copyright law, is often based on such miniscule differences. So technically, Franken did NOT violate Fox's trademark.
An acquaintance of mine made a rather interesting argument that the lawsuit by Fox News [sic] against satirist Al Franken had a legitimate basis. The crux of his contention is that since Fox had trademarked the phrase "Fair & Balanced," they were required to defend it against alleged misuse, otherwise they would lose the trademark. He also says the flap is a bunch of whining by liberals who hate Fox. Of course, if the suit had merit, the judge might not have dismissed it so quickly.
He did make many legitimate points. The problem is that Fox didn't. Fox decided to name call Franken for name calling them as name callers. This made it come across as not a high-minded strictly legal argument, but as a loud-mouthed bully throwing a temper tantrum because he can dish it out but can't take it. Further, they advanced the farcical argument that someone might confuse Franken's book as a Fox product. If they'd made my acquiantance's arguments, they wouldn't have come across so ludicrously.
Newspaper headlines satirize trademarked slogans all the time, yet they're not sued. So it makes me wonder how unlimited trademarks are. Not having expertise in that area, I don't know. But according to the US Patent and Trademark office (USPTO), A trademark is a word, phrase, symbol or design, or a combination of words, phrases, symbols or designs, that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others.
So if I use a trademarked phrase in a context unrelated to that distinguishing/identifying purpose, am I violating a trademark? For example, if I say "Gimme a break" in response to something ridiculous, am I violating Kit Kat's trademark? If Franken uses that phrase in a context unrelated to news' delivery (Fox's goods), is he violating the trademark? If he uses the phrase as part of a longer title, is it a violation? Apparently at least one of these answers is no, since the judge dismissed the suit so quickly.
No one is challenging Fox's right to use "Fair & Balanced" as a trademark slogan, even most of THINK it's totally inaccurate. The question is: how far does trademark protection extend? Does it apply to things unrelated to that which the trademark is intended to protect?
I think this situation is far less bizarre than the lawsuit against Papa John's pizza a few years ago. Papa John's used the slogan "Better ingredients, better pizza." They were sued by a rival (forget which) who said they shouldn't use that slogan because their ingredients and pizza were no better than the rival's. Which begs the question related to my fundamental point, if I say 'my sister makes better pizza than me', am I violating Papa John's trademark?
'Better ingredients, better pizza' is a subjective opinion, just like 'fair & balanced.' Do you expect them to say they have crappier food than Pizza Hut? A news' channel that claims to be objective, are they going to say they're not 'fair & balanced.' That's what promotion is about! Convincing people you're better than your competitors.
And finally, and significantly, a search of the USPTO shows that Fox News Corp. trademarked the phrase "Fair & Balanced." Franken's book subtitle uses the phrase "Fair and Balanced." Sure, it's a miniscule difference, but law, especially trademark and copyright law, is often based on such miniscule differences. So technically, Franken did NOT violate Fox's trademark.
Thursday, September 04, 2003
'FAIR AND BALANCED' JOURNALISM
No, this is not another rant about the Fox News' [sic] slogan. But I thought about it in relation to Samantha Power's excellent and Nobel Prize-winning A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide which I'm now reading. The current chapter deals with Saddam's genocide against the Kurds.
I suppose there's a lot in the book I could write about relating to current events, but I won't. Mainly, reading this material (written before 9/11) just underlines the bizarreness of the justification for the conquest of Iraq. In the 80s, Saddam was our ALLY in the war against Islamist extremism. By 2003, he was our ENEMY in the war against Islamist extremism. This depsite the fact that the nature of his regime hadn't really changed in that time period.
But what I'm writing about today isn't really about that. Since the Kurdish genocide occurred during the Iran-Iraq war, Power noted that genocide, or at least the magnitude of the horror, is quite frequently masked by the fog of war (Armenians, German Jews, Cambodians, Rwandan Tutsis). Power also observed that American press accounts of Saddam's gas attacks against the Kurds always gave disclaimers. "Iran claims that Iraq is gassing Kurdish areas." These disclaimers diminished the power of the story and American journalists weren't in the war zone at the time; and if they had been, they probably would've died too.
But it raising an interesting point about journalism and the difference between fairness and balance. This conundrum was discussed a lot by those who covered the war in the Balkans in the early 90s. By coincidence, Power got her journalistic start in that war for The Washington Post. The problem faced by Balkans' reporters was that their editors wanted them to be more balanced (neutral) but what they witnessed was the Serbs committing a disproprotionate amount of the atrocities. I don't think this was a new quandry in 1992. Perhaps it became more pointed with the end of the Cold War and its artificial distinctions accepted for so long ("Government X must commit horrible atrocities to save its country from horrible Communist atrocities" as though an innocent victim cares about the politics of his murderer).
One of the stated goals of mainstream journalism to be objective in reporting the news. Most journalists try to be objective. They may or may not succeed, depending on your opinion, but most try. However, even taking the Fox slogan at face value, I think fairness and balance are not the same thing.
Fairness implies objectivity. It involves investigating and reporting a story thoroughly regardless of where it might take you. It involves presenting a story in a way that reflects the totality of what you discovered. If, in a conflict, one of the sides is more guilty than the others, then fair reporting makes this clear. It doesn't say one side is guilty of everything. But it doesn't use qualifiers, disclaimers or other devices which somehow imply an equality of guilty.
Balance implies neutrality. Think of a scale. A BALANCED scale has the same weight on one side as another. Too many journalists think that balance equals fair. That if they quote Bill Clinton, then balance requires them to quote David Duke, because one's on the left of center and one's on the right. However, one's considered mainstream left and the other's considered far right. Is that fair? Further, many journalists think of this balance as a simple numbers game. Three canned quotes from standard "liberals" and three canned quotes from standard "conservatives" makes a fair story, or so we are lead to believe. If you have two decent "liberal" quotes and one excellent "conservative" quote, why play a pointless numbers' game? The goal is to inform, not satisfy an artificial quota.
A balanced account of World War II in Europe might consider stuff like the Holocaust and Nuremburg laws. But since that's two things, the account would have to find two bad things on the other side, to balance the numerical scale. So such an account might read, The Nazis killed 6 million Jews and shredded civil liberties but the Allies firebombed Dresden and some French collaborated with the occupying Germans.
The phrasing implies that these two sides' crimes are, if not equal, at least comparable. This might be neutral but is it objective? It may be balanced but is it fair?
No, this is not another rant about the Fox News' [sic] slogan. But I thought about it in relation to Samantha Power's excellent and Nobel Prize-winning A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide which I'm now reading. The current chapter deals with Saddam's genocide against the Kurds.
I suppose there's a lot in the book I could write about relating to current events, but I won't. Mainly, reading this material (written before 9/11) just underlines the bizarreness of the justification for the conquest of Iraq. In the 80s, Saddam was our ALLY in the war against Islamist extremism. By 2003, he was our ENEMY in the war against Islamist extremism. This depsite the fact that the nature of his regime hadn't really changed in that time period.
But what I'm writing about today isn't really about that. Since the Kurdish genocide occurred during the Iran-Iraq war, Power noted that genocide, or at least the magnitude of the horror, is quite frequently masked by the fog of war (Armenians, German Jews, Cambodians, Rwandan Tutsis). Power also observed that American press accounts of Saddam's gas attacks against the Kurds always gave disclaimers. "Iran claims that Iraq is gassing Kurdish areas." These disclaimers diminished the power of the story and American journalists weren't in the war zone at the time; and if they had been, they probably would've died too.
But it raising an interesting point about journalism and the difference between fairness and balance. This conundrum was discussed a lot by those who covered the war in the Balkans in the early 90s. By coincidence, Power got her journalistic start in that war for The Washington Post. The problem faced by Balkans' reporters was that their editors wanted them to be more balanced (neutral) but what they witnessed was the Serbs committing a disproprotionate amount of the atrocities. I don't think this was a new quandry in 1992. Perhaps it became more pointed with the end of the Cold War and its artificial distinctions accepted for so long ("Government X must commit horrible atrocities to save its country from horrible Communist atrocities" as though an innocent victim cares about the politics of his murderer).
One of the stated goals of mainstream journalism to be objective in reporting the news. Most journalists try to be objective. They may or may not succeed, depending on your opinion, but most try. However, even taking the Fox slogan at face value, I think fairness and balance are not the same thing.
Fairness implies objectivity. It involves investigating and reporting a story thoroughly regardless of where it might take you. It involves presenting a story in a way that reflects the totality of what you discovered. If, in a conflict, one of the sides is more guilty than the others, then fair reporting makes this clear. It doesn't say one side is guilty of everything. But it doesn't use qualifiers, disclaimers or other devices which somehow imply an equality of guilty.
Balance implies neutrality. Think of a scale. A BALANCED scale has the same weight on one side as another. Too many journalists think that balance equals fair. That if they quote Bill Clinton, then balance requires them to quote David Duke, because one's on the left of center and one's on the right. However, one's considered mainstream left and the other's considered far right. Is that fair? Further, many journalists think of this balance as a simple numbers game. Three canned quotes from standard "liberals" and three canned quotes from standard "conservatives" makes a fair story, or so we are lead to believe. If you have two decent "liberal" quotes and one excellent "conservative" quote, why play a pointless numbers' game? The goal is to inform, not satisfy an artificial quota.
A balanced account of World War II in Europe might consider stuff like the Holocaust and Nuremburg laws. But since that's two things, the account would have to find two bad things on the other side, to balance the numerical scale. So such an account might read, The Nazis killed 6 million Jews and shredded civil liberties but the Allies firebombed Dresden and some French collaborated with the occupying Germans.
The phrasing implies that these two sides' crimes are, if not equal, at least comparable. This might be neutral but is it objective? It may be balanced but is it fair?
Wednesday, September 03, 2003
LESSON MIS-LEARNED
I was listening to an NPR interview with FBI Director Robert Mueller. The director was asked if the FBI's implementation of the Patriot Act was a threat to civil liberties. Mueller, not surprisingly, said no. He noted that the FBI even sends new agents to the Holocaust Museum to sensitize them about what can happen when intelligence services and other authorities don't follow the Constitution.
Except there's one problem. The Nazis DID follow their constitution. The Nazis came to power under the ostensibly democratic Weimar constitution. That constitution specifically allowed the chancellor (Hitler, before he declared the Reich) to suspend the constitution in case of a state of emergency. When the Reichstag was burned down, an act blamed on the communists though many believe it was done by the Nazis themselves as a pretext, the Nazis had their excuse to suspend the constitution... a suspension which was legal according to that very constitution. The Nuremburg and other acts that discriminated against and persecuted Jews were legal and constitutional.
I understand the point Mueller was trying to make. he was trying to reassure us that there were sufficient safeguards in the Patriot Act, even though most oversight is secret, opaque and non-public. So we have to take his word for it, which is exactly what makes many Americans uncomfortable. If something can't be justified and defended publicily, I'm automatically skeptical. While I don't think the leaders of this administration are a bunch of Nazis, I'm not pleased with the direction some of them are taking us. Learning the lessons of history doesn't meaning waiting until we get in exactly the same situation before we say "Oh wait, maybe this isn't a good idea." The situation doesn't have to be a mirror image to notice unpleasant parallels. It mustn't. By then, it's too late.
In the face of Director Mueller's observation, it's worth recalling Martin Luther King Jr's A Letter From a Birmingham Jail where he noted:
We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters [in the face of the 1956 Soviet invasion] did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today [1963] I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws.
I was listening to an NPR interview with FBI Director Robert Mueller. The director was asked if the FBI's implementation of the Patriot Act was a threat to civil liberties. Mueller, not surprisingly, said no. He noted that the FBI even sends new agents to the Holocaust Museum to sensitize them about what can happen when intelligence services and other authorities don't follow the Constitution.
Except there's one problem. The Nazis DID follow their constitution. The Nazis came to power under the ostensibly democratic Weimar constitution. That constitution specifically allowed the chancellor (Hitler, before he declared the Reich) to suspend the constitution in case of a state of emergency. When the Reichstag was burned down, an act blamed on the communists though many believe it was done by the Nazis themselves as a pretext, the Nazis had their excuse to suspend the constitution... a suspension which was legal according to that very constitution. The Nuremburg and other acts that discriminated against and persecuted Jews were legal and constitutional.
I understand the point Mueller was trying to make. he was trying to reassure us that there were sufficient safeguards in the Patriot Act, even though most oversight is secret, opaque and non-public. So we have to take his word for it, which is exactly what makes many Americans uncomfortable. If something can't be justified and defended publicily, I'm automatically skeptical. While I don't think the leaders of this administration are a bunch of Nazis, I'm not pleased with the direction some of them are taking us. Learning the lessons of history doesn't meaning waiting until we get in exactly the same situation before we say "Oh wait, maybe this isn't a good idea." The situation doesn't have to be a mirror image to notice unpleasant parallels. It mustn't. By then, it's too late.
In the face of Director Mueller's observation, it's worth recalling Martin Luther King Jr's A Letter From a Birmingham Jail where he noted:
We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters [in the face of the 1956 Soviet invasion] did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today [1963] I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws.
LESSON LEARNED
I was listening to a piece on NPR (or you can read about it at AFP via Yahoo! news) about the guy to be executed today for murdering an abortion doctor. I won't dignify him by mentioning his name. The convict is hoping that he will become a martyr for the most violent wing of the anti-abortion movement.
I usually don't write about abortion. Because on this issue, more so than any other in this country, civil debate is nearly impossible; with the exception of the Palestinian-Israeli question which, perhaps not coincidentally, also involves men who murder people in the hopes of ending up a martyr.
His execution seems a fittingly bizarre end to this tragedy. The state is going to murder a guy who murdered someone he considered a murderer. In order to send a message about the unacceptability of murder.
The convict murdered the abortion doctor on the principle that it was "justifiable homicide." I wonder where he could possibly have gotten the notion that homicide was justifiable. Where indeed...
I was listening to a piece on NPR (or you can read about it at AFP via Yahoo! news) about the guy to be executed today for murdering an abortion doctor. I won't dignify him by mentioning his name. The convict is hoping that he will become a martyr for the most violent wing of the anti-abortion movement.
I usually don't write about abortion. Because on this issue, more so than any other in this country, civil debate is nearly impossible; with the exception of the Palestinian-Israeli question which, perhaps not coincidentally, also involves men who murder people in the hopes of ending up a martyr.
His execution seems a fittingly bizarre end to this tragedy. The state is going to murder a guy who murdered someone he considered a murderer. In order to send a message about the unacceptability of murder.
The convict murdered the abortion doctor on the principle that it was "justifiable homicide." I wonder where he could possibly have gotten the notion that homicide was justifiable. Where indeed...
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
'SOPHISTICATED' POLITICS
Our lesson of the week comes from Waring Howe Jr., a prominent South Carolina Democrat. Warning against nominating his party nominating former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, Mr Howe was quoted as follows by Salon.com.
Some of us may say, `Don't do to us what you did in '88; that is, give us a candidate you liked a lot but who's defeated in November.
So the moral of the lesson is: vote for a candidate you don't like much but who (the establishment thinks) has a chance of winning in November.
Why anyone would want a candidate they didn't like for to win in November was not made clear.
Our lesson of the week comes from Waring Howe Jr., a prominent South Carolina Democrat. Warning against nominating his party nominating former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, Mr Howe was quoted as follows by Salon.com.
Some of us may say, `Don't do to us what you did in '88; that is, give us a candidate you liked a lot but who's defeated in November.
So the moral of the lesson is: vote for a candidate you don't like much but who (the establishment thinks) has a chance of winning in November.
Why anyone would want a candidate they didn't like for to win in November was not made clear.
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