NOTE: My title is taken from the song, No Bravery by former British soldier, James Blunt. I think it is sadly appropriate for this terrible moment in our nation's history.
When I was a kid, popular literature contained many stories about torturers, machine-gun toting secret police who could kick down your door at any time and evil, power-mad regimes bent on world domination, but they were always about those other guys: the Nazis, the commies, the Russkies or the Viet Cong. They were supposed to be cautionary tales about how evil our enemies were and what they might do to us if they conquered us. There were few who realized, back in those days, that our enemy was within.
Is enemy too strong a term for the politicians and businessmen who have ripped us off while trashing the earth, observing no law, mocking our species and shaming our nation all in the name of greed?
I don't think so.
Where are all those patriots sworn to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic? How have the pack of thieves in the 1% gotten away with this heist?
They have trashed the planet, crashed the global economy, bombed innocents, imprisoned people without charge or trial, started bogus wars and tortured and brutally raped helpless prisoners, many of them to death...all in our names...yours and mine.
Are these the kind of people we wish to be ruled by?
Do we not deserve better?
Should we take it lying down when our 'leaders' shame us before the world, again and again and again?
Can we do no better than this?
If torture worked, would you love it then? Would the cruelty, inhumanity and horror of it then be worth it? That so many people think so is one measure of our decline, or at least our lack of significant progress.
Was civilization only a dream? Is morality just another illusion? Is this what we've come to?
There are children standing here,
Arms outstretched into the sky,
But no one asks the question why,
He has been here.
Old men kneel to accept their fate.
Wives and daughters cut and raped.
A generation drenched in hate.
Says, he has been here.
And I see no bravery,
No bravery in your eyes anymore.
Only sadness.
No Bravery by former British soldier, James Blunt
I may be an odd one to advocate for the law, we've had such a difficult relationship, but that's what I'm going to do. It takes law, good law, to tame the beast in men. It's not a problem for all men, of course, but there is always that guy, the guy who wants your shit and lacks the scruples that might constrain him.
Most people, to some degree, care about the well being of others and many people joyfully share what they have, but there are always a few who not only don't want to share but want everybody else's cookies too. The fact that we deal so poorly with these guys has cost us much and may end up costing us everything. It's time to end the rule of those greed-monsters who exploit the rest of us via poorly regulated cowboy/gangster/militant capitalism, making profits at all costs, including aggressive war without regard to environmental or humanitarian concerns, and using the plundered riches to buy more power only then to misuse it. If they're so rich, why aren't they smart?
Maybe because you don't have to be smart to get rich in this system, you have to be ruthless.
However, penalties for not being smart are going up.
How do the weak majority deal with the powerful and predatory few? That's what laws are for.
But they have to be enforced, and they have to be good laws, competently and intelligently legislated without any tricky-dick back-door bullshit or perverse intent (like this putrid 'Cromnibus' bill they are cramming down our throats). The law also has to be fairly administered, applied equally to all, and not subverted at every turn. Our Constitution guarantees all or most of these things. Anything less is not a free democracy and may in fact be a criminal enterprise. I think that's what we've seen, our government has become a criminal enterprise. They don't think of it that way of course, because 1%er's shit don't stink. But that's what they are, the lot of them. Any of them who aren't are outliers and largely inconsequential due to being overwhelmed by the depth of the rot.
People are talking about who needs to answer and what punishment might be proper for which guys, and that does need to be sorted out. Such egregious violations of human rights and international law have to be sanctioned in no uncertain terms. A powerful statement from the USA to the rest of the world is in order. We need to turn around, own up, reverse our hateful policies and drag the world out of the darkness we've been dragging it into.
But we must not lose sight of the big picture here. If we just deal with the guys and fail to fix the system that brought us to this sad and shameful place, we guarantee more of the same in the future. Inequality, racism, police brutality, domestic spying, forever war and now torture. These are not isolated issues. They are all related aspects and symptoms of a systemic rot, apartheid America – capitalism gone wild.
We need to seize this opportunity to tame the beast in our society and make it possible to have hope for the future. We begin to do that by arresting, charging and bringing to public trial the most guilty of the torture regime, starting from the head down, and then we start with the Robber Barons and Wall Street gangsters. Oddly enough, angry as I am, I can't help but see that they are also victims, to various degrees, of a rotten system. So I'm not calling for the guillotine, only justice, but the fix starts with a trial, it seems to me. The people who have done these terrible things must be held to account, or we will never see justice again. We need to become a nation of laws not men once again...but for real this time.
Yes, torture doesn't work but that is so not the point. Morality gets tricky, the word evil is trickier still, but some things seem obvious. 'Good and bad, I define these terms, quite clear no doubt somehow,' Bob Dylan sang in My Back Pages. Or as Jesus was said to have put it, 'The law is written on the hearts of men.' Somehow we all know how to treat each other, we just so often don't do what we know to be right. We are sometimes conflicted and complicated creatures, sometimes we're weak or damaged and sometimes our brains don't work right. We have invented the golden rule in every culture because we needed to.
We are a social species, but an imperfect one. There is also the stunning relatively new fact that we are all blood relatives. Every human on earth is descended from Mitochondrial Eve, a single particular African woman.
In the field of human genetics, the name Mitochondrial Eve refers to the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA), in a direct, unbroken, maternal line, of all currently living anatomically modern humans, who is estimated to have lived approximately 100,000–200,000 years ago. This is the most recent woman from whom all living humans today descend, in an unbroken line, on their mother’s side, and through the mothers of those mothers, and so on, back until all lines converge on one person. Because all mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) generally (but see paternal mtDNA transmission) is passed from mother to offspring without recombination, all mtDNA in every living person is directly descended from hers by definition, differing only by the mutations that over generations have occurred in the germ cell mtDNA since the conception of the original "Mitochondrial Eve". If descendence through both male and female lines is taken into account, the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all human beings lived only 2,000 to 4,000 years ago, though what makes Mitochondrial Eve different is that she is the last woman from which all matrilineal lines descend.
Wikipedia
We are, all of us, members of a single family who share a fragile and threatened planetary eco-system and have proven our high capacity for thoughtlessly ruining it in the name of corporate profits. These new facts, present circumstances and an onrushing and unforgiving future call on us to be mindfully and actively aware of these matters and to act as if we understand the stakes. Our future will either be more of this chaos and horror leading to a bad end or a time of cleaning house and regrouping for the long haul. We start by facing up and coming clean.
Unlike what we've done in the past, we are going to have to cooperate to survive the future. We need to take positive action to restore our nation as a trusted member of the world community, and we need to bring every country into the fold. We are all in this together and if we can bring ourselves to cooperate peacefully and act like the great extended family that we are, we might at least ameliorate some of the zombie-scale ecological nightmares coming our way. It's time for humanity to get its shit together. This could be last call.
We need to not let this opportunity get by us. Now is the time to reinvent ourselves as the people we long to be, the people we are capable of being, the people we will need to be in order to have any kind of future at all. All we have to do is stand up peacefully for ourselves and others and press for justice, fairness and sanity with every step - and stop taking no for an answer. We can't afford to let the beast within us win this. Loving kindness is the only antidote for greed and hatred. Pour as much of that into the universe as you can.
And let us bring our war criminals to public trial, or send them where they can be tried with all legal and humanitarian consideration, so the whole world can see justice done.
It's the only right thing to do.
CIA Torture Report: What Should We Think? (h/t Meteor Blades)