Scott Horton gave a Pearl Harbor speech at the New School in New York that puts our current policy of abuse, torture, and suspension of human dignity in the perspective that even the wingnuts might be able to comprehend.
In his first inaugural, Franklin Delano Roosevelt told us that "the only thing we have to fear... is fear itself." The Roosevelt presidency, and especially the conduct of the Second World War is the first proof of this statement. And in the last five years, Americans have lived through a second proof of it - if they only will open their eyes and see it. Those words sound simple to us today, and we need to remember the context in which they were uttered.
As Roosevelt spoke, a shadow of totalitarianism had fallen across much of the world - fascism dominated the European continent and the rising Empire of Japan and communism covered the great Eurasian landmass that stretched in between them. These totalitarian regimes shared many common traits, and chief among them was the use of fear as a political tool. Fear was used to render the domestic populace silent and stupid. Fear was used to threaten and win concessions from the surviving democratic states on the periphery of the totalitarian swamp. Roosevelt understood the threat perfectly, and he understood that fear and the use of fear was the essential dividing line between the Western democracies and the totalitarian states. But somewhere along the line, this fundamental truth was forgotten in America.
The always quotable Digby comments on the exchange between Tim Russert and the plagiarist Mike Barnicle, about how the US was filled with brave nylon hording heroes during the heady WWII days of Big Russ.
This is what Barnicle and Russert call wisdom --- Thomas Kincaide kitch in which sacrifice is not having any nylons or condiments on the dinner table. I think they are fairly typical of the ruling class in this country who really believed that this could be their WWII. There would be no messy counter culture this time, no rebellion, no complaints. Their biggest disappointment isn't that it's become a bloody meatgrinder and a foreign policy disaster. It's that people aren't coming together to sing "Hut Sut Ralston On The Rillaragh" and painting lines down the back of their legs so people would think they are wearing seamed stockings. It just seems like that was such good fun. The more than 60 million dead were a small price to pay for such togetherness. And maybe, when the new war is over, everyone will get oscars instead of medals.
This is why tens of thousands of people are dying in Iraq. In that sense Vietnam, for all its mistakes, was a far more noble undertaking.
But back to the point at hand. What make the greatest generation great is that they weren't putting Nazis in gas ovens or forming rape squads of Japanese women. They weren't succumbing to the basist instincts of human kind. But what if they had? Where would this world be today if we had waterboarded, and hooked wires up to the genitals of the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese? Scott Horton again
A short time ago, in Germany, I spoke with one of the senior advisors of Chancellor Angela Merkel. I noted that a criminal complaint had been filed against Donald Rumsfeld and a number of others invoking universal jurisdiction for war crimes offenses. How would the chancellor see this, I asked? There was a long pause, and I fully expected to get a brush-off response. But what came was very surprising. "You must remember," said the advisor, "that my chancellor was born and raised in a totalitarian state. She cannot be indifferent to questions of this sort. In fact, she views them as matters of the utmost gravity and they will be treated that way. The Nuremberg process happened in my country. It was painful for us. But we absorbed it. It became a part of our legacy. An important part of our legacy. We will not forget it. But I have to ask you: why has your country forgotten?"
If we tortured our way through Asia and Europe, would Germany, Italy, and Japan be the allies they are today? If we stuck chem sticks up the anuses of captured storm troopers, no matter how much "they may have deserved it", would Europe be as stable as it is now? Germany was marching throughout Europe, Japan was capturing island after island in the Pacific, after taking China. Was the situation not dire? Six million Jews were being slaughtered. Chinese women were turned into rape slaves. It looked like totalitarian communism, and totalitarian fascism might beat out democracy and the world would be shuttered in darkness.
We weren't asked to be afraid. We were not asked to create fear through torture. We certainly weren't told to go to the mall as our way of stopping a problem of generational importance. We are asked to look the other way as our government tortures in our name. It is a good thing that it was FDR and not George W. Bush who was in charge during a genuine historically altering moment. As bad as the internment camps were in this country, to our everlasting shame, they didn't come with rapists, attack dogs, and waterboard tables. The world has been as stable as it has been, because we did at least try to keep our values and not fear, even though fear was all around us.