Sunday, October 14, 2007
(10:19 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Our Country's Good Name
I normally enjoy Frank Rich's columns, but this week's column is problematic -- despite the fact that he is not afraid of the word "torture." Like all too many arguments against torture, Rich's is based on the fantasy that Americans have somehow been blameless in the past, until Bush came along and corrupted us.The current systematic use of torture does seem to be a new development, but it's not as though America has ever been anything but a violent and abusive nation, particularly toward the vulnerable. We are the only major developed country that still has the death penalty. We imprison a huge number of our fellow citizens, cramming them into overcrowded jails where they are subject to arbitrary violence -- including rape, to such an extent that "prison rape" is a common topic for jokes -- and often disenfranchising them once they get out. Of course all of this state violence falls disproportionately heavily on black men, who our society essentially views as criminals "by default," so that even clean-cut black professionals report that whites react to them with fear. This system is the successor of slavery, of the extra-legal terrorism to which blacks were subject after emancipation, of the violent suppression of the peaceful protests of the civil rights era, etc.
Blacks aren't the only minority group to be subject to violence: there's also the internment of the Japanese during WWII (which some conservative leading lights positively defend), as well as the wholesale ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. And it doesn't say much to me that interrogators were locked in a "battle of wits" with German POWs in WWII -- it's a little too convenient that the war that is looked upon as indicative of the way we really fight wars is one in which we were fighting against other white people. (And even then, we still firebombed an entire city indiscriminately, for example.) Try asking the Vietnamese about the supposedly upright American national character. Ask the Koreans how good a deal they got from America. Ask the Latin Americans tortured by military rulers we trained.
It doesn't even have to be foreigners or minorities, though. Just walk into any public school and note how the vulnerable and the outcasts are treated by their peers. Take a look around at the petty cruelty that infects nearly every aspect of our public life -- for instance, the nickle-and-diming of the poor, motivated by a deep horror that they will somehow abuse their pittance. Look at how many recent elections have featured the scapegoating of homosexuals or immigrants as major themes.
The American national character is violent and cruel, and it always has been. It's the myth of the upstanding American national character that has allowed the Bush administration to get away with so much -- just think of Sen. Durbin's abject, tearful apology for comparing Americans to Soviet torturers, even though we were directly modeling our practices on the Soviets. We have to fight against the current practices of torture, but if we do so in the name of some preexisting innocence, we'll just leave the door open for more of the same.
