Friday, February 10, 2006
(8:02 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional: Better Than Stalin
I confess that I've been naive this whole time. I've shared the assumption that the US really is (or democratic governments really are) morally superior. One could make an argument, but it's always going to be a quantitative thing -- firebombing German cities, dropping nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, and interning the Japanese in the US is not as bad as setting up death camps and systematically annihilating six million Jews and three million others, nor as bad as Stalin's purges. Sherman's march wasn't as bad as the prospective effects of continuing slavery. The American revolution wasn't as bad as the French revolution. And even today, I'm willing to grant that the US's abuses are not as bad, quantitatively, as Saddam's were. As long as we're counting noses, the US always wins. It's almost as though our leaders are carefully calibrating it so that they're just a little better -- then they can beat domestic critics over the head with the US's moral superiority. In sum, the goal is not to attain some abstract idea of morality, but to be morally superior to the enemy.So I propose a new standard for us spectators to avoid disappointment the next time the US starts demonizing another country: take whatever the enemy is doing, ratchet it down a notch and a half, and you'll have a good approximation of the level of evilness that the US will employ. (The current rhetoric about Iran is a perfect example of this.)
