No, that's right, and just as likely that people who can't spell or keep track of subject-verb agreement will have made the right judgment, and suffered for it.
Right. I wonder how the guy who blew the whistle on Abu Ghraib is doing -- Darby? Was that his name? Last I heard, he needed security in his hometown because so many people were angry with him.
It is truly surprising and shocking what one will do given the right environment and support of superiors and or peers. One night, deep in my cups I wondered out loud whether I would have been a "good German" rather than a Nazi. It was sobering to realize that there was no way I would have been in the "resistance", since I wouldn't have been a communist or that alienated from society as a whole. Where you stand really does depend upon where you sit.
The idea that study of the great books will improve one's character is a bad joke.
a "good German" rather than a Nazi
My understanding of the term "good German" is that it means somebody who was well off at the time of the third Reich and did not make any waves as the country descended into Holocaust for fear of losing his social/economic position. Is this wrong?
Oh, that's the silly, self-indulgent part. I was apparently still clutching some 'people like me don't do things like that' as comfort. Biographically, St. Johns is as strong a predictor of 'people like me' as anyplace I can think of.
"We have met the enemy, and he is us."
I have a frat brother who, prior to going to college, did a six-year stint in the Army mostly as an interrogator. He wouldn't really talk much about it (the one time I asked, anyhow), except to say that the entire experience left him bitter, disillusioned, and unwilling to recommend military service to anybody.
5. That is my reading also. The point is I doubt I would have done "the right thing", which would have been to join the underground and help the Allies.
4: When I was going through Wheelock's Latin, it was tough going for me, in large part because so many of the example texts were so militaristic. Classical education wasn't foisted on the elites out of a naive belief in humanistic edification -- the classics told you what you needed to know to run an empire (or at least that was the belief). Caesar was one of the first authors one would encounter in many curricula.
When I was in college, I was really into the idea of a classical education, and I looked really closely at St. John's -- I still wish I had that stuff more under my belt just for utilitarian reasons, but I realize now that I was really naive back then about the "classical heritage."
8: What's tough about "doing the right thing" as a German in WWII is that the "good guys" included (in a paraphrase of Yglesias) an apartheid semi-democracy, a worldwide empire, and Stalin.
I went to St. John's College--the original campus in Annapolis, MD (by some accounts, it's the 3rd oldest college in the country after Harvard and William & Mary).
When you go to the Annapolis campus, you feel a little bit ignored by the rest of the world. "Annapolis" itself is synonymous with the Naval Academy where John McCain and so many other midshipmen are molded. The whole city--even the Maryland state capital, also located there--is subjugated to a sort of Middie Pride which beams down upon you from every direction. (This is literally true in the form of a giant Navy "N" emblazoned on the water tower, one of the higher structures in the low-to-the-ground bayside town.)
Johnnies do live in their own bubble of philosophy and socratic dialogue and strange customs like a unique adaptation of swing-dancing and an annual croquet game against--who else?--the Naval Academy.
But there's a fair bit of interaction with the rest of the world. Many of us become teachers or world travelers and a surprising number join the military.
I am so livid at the Bush administration to stain what it means to be in the military with this awful dishonor. I'm under no illusion that we were knights in shining armor before, but this is nauseating.
Call it the first law of Post-Weimar Civilization: No level of cultural attainment is enough to inoculate you from becoming vicious, savage, barbaric.
[shiver]
I think of Good German as being someone, of whatever socila class, who simply went along, doing whatever it was their role to do. The truck driver delivering produce to the concentration camp commisary, etc.
8 -- that's a reasonable doubt. My less-than-fully-informed understanding is that the underground was a tiny, tiny minority.
an annual croquet game against--who else?--the Naval Academy.
My sister informs me that skulduggery was often practiced by liquoring up the middies before the game. (She also went to the Annapolis campus.)
9: I agree. The classical education's target was the ruling class, and one has to remember that most of the classics are about hitting people with big rocks at the battle of Salamis while dividing Gaul into three parts.
Lizard Breath,
What year did your sister graduate?
17: You can never go wrong with the classics.
'91, but if you guys overlapped to the point where you want to figure out if you know each other, email me -- doing it in comments is insufficiently anonymous.
I dated in the same pool as St John's in college (I went to Avon Barksdale U. up in Baltimore) and I remember being seriously irked by the (monthly? semesterly?) swing dances they used to have, as it would attract all the lasses from our sister school. I also assumed that St. John's was all male, as no one ever went for the swing-dancing chicks.
16: This made me think of one of this week's PostSecret cards, which I consider to be one of the finest ever.
Wasn't it Jung who talked about integrating the aspects of ourselves able to commit horrible attrocities as a step on the path to better self-awareness? The understanding that we _can_ do evil is part of how we can be better able to avoid it.
25: I think Yoda before it said. Anyway, it's true. It's the people acting from the self-delusional purity of their motivations that are seriously scary.
10: Those weren't the good guys either.
8: Funnily enough, I've had wondered about it in the opposite direction. Meaning, that I (ok, realistically, a much younger me now) plausibly would have ended up on the `right' side, but not for the right reasons. It's a discomfiting thought, and fairly symmetric with yours.
10
Actually what is usually tough about doing the "right thing" (assuming you know what it is) is that it is personally inconvenient.
St. John's is actually not as good of a predictor of "people like us" as you might expect, at least not these days. Lots of hard-core Christians there for the rigorous Classical education.
I think torture must be part of the Great Books experience. My ex-girlfriend was a Johnnie, and she tortured me for years.
What's tough about "doing the right thing" as a German in WWII is that the "good guys" included (in a paraphrase of Yglesias) an apartheid semi-democracy, a worldwide empire, and Stalin.
I was pretty sure this was the post where he wrote that, but strangely that part of it seems to have been cut. Maybe I'm misremembering?
My son knew a whole family who went the St Johns ca. 1990-95 (3 or 4 kids). Hippy types.
I know someone who got expelled from St. Johns and Maryland.
25:
This reminds me of a post of yours, LB, that I cannot find in the archives. . .sorry. . .wherein you described some companion who confessed that he didn't drink much b/c when he did it made him violent, and so he just avoided drinking. And you were slightly horrified b/c you felt drinking just amplifies a person's character. And some people were like, well, avoiding the things that make you evil is itself a sign of good character b/c it's a deliberate, higher-level control.
35: That was one hell of an interesting thread.
I almost left architecture school after a semester to go to St John's - I was desperate for liberal arts, but archischool is super-intensive, with few electives (like, fewer than 10 in 5 years, unless you count "required science" as an elective). Fortunately, I found a couple of old-school English profs (specializing in Shakespeare, Chaucer, and 20th C Poetry) who saved my mind. But I was always intrigued by the St. John's experience.
So, lesson: St. John's may not keep you from becoming a torturer, but it can keep you from becoming an architect.
37: 10 in 5 years would have been a luxury! I had exactly 0 in 5 years, not counting `required N level X' where X was one of my two subjects. I think if I had done things slightly differently, I could have managed 2 in 5 years. The only thing I regret about undergrad is not getting to do any electives, of which loads looked interesting.
38: Wow! does that suck! Actually, I AP'd like 4 classes, so that added significantly to my total. The standard may have been more like 1 per semester for the last 2 years. Either way, soub, remind me not to study whatever the hell you studied.
The thing about St. John's, of course, is that there are no electives there.
It was sobering to realize that there was no way I would have been in the "resistance", since I wouldn't have been a communist or that alienated from society as a whole.
The proper response to this is to reconsider one's lack of alienation, and see if anything can be done about it.
10 is a good reason why arguments that x marginal improvement won't create a perfect society either suck.
39: I brought in on myself for doing honours in two subjects; I had 5-6 a term that were pretty much fully constrained to have any hope of meeting hons. requirements for both departments. Like I said, I don't regret anything about it except lacking the time and/or schedule space to take a few electives. I occasionally consider doing them now, or at least sitting it. Then life gets in the way. By which I mean I'm lazy.
41: marginal improvements, and well, 27.
The right thing to do wasn't to help the allies; the right thing to do was to help the oppressed, and/or resist the fascists. Insomuch as this helped the allies, good, bad, or ugly, was just lucky for them.
8 is correct.
29 In the context of 10, "inconvenient" includes "can get you guillotined."
43 is interesting. What does "help the oppressed" mean? And "resist the fascists" for that matter? Do these injunctions vary by place? By time? (Even within, say, the framework of 1933-45 in most of Europe.) By ethnic origin? That is, are the imperatives for a German different from, say, the imperatives for a Catholic Pole?
Divesting oneself from Germany would probably have been the most ethical and pragmatic course of action for those who were able.
are the imperatives for a German different from, say, the imperatives for a Catholic Pole?
I don't think so.
So was Schindler a hero or a coward? He certainly helped some Jews, but he was part of the Nazi war machine.
As indeed many did. Einstein very early, one of Germany's future chancellor's -- Willy Brandt -- rather later, for example. The first post-war chancellor, Adenauer, never left. He tended his own garden in what has since become known as "inner exile." (Stalin is unlikely to have left a Soviet counterpart to Adenauer in peace.) Naturally, once the regime fell, many claimed to have practiced "inner exile."
Accepting 46 for the sake of an interesting discussion, at what point does actual exile become the proper moral choice? And can one expect large swathes of a population to choose this route?
48: He was a complicated person who did the decent thing to the extent that it was possible without risking himself.
In other words, neither: his actions were, I think, pretty much the acceptable moral minimum standard.
Accepting 46 for the sake of an interesting discussion, at what point does actual exile become the proper moral choice?
I tend to think that there's no such thing as "the" proper moral choice and that exile is pretty much always "a" proper moral choice.
46: Dunno. For people who had reason to believe they themselves were in danger? Yes. For your average German? Leaving is practical, certainly, and not really objectionable. But it's not especially admirable, either. It's better than staying and passively collaborating, but worse than staying and actively trying to resist, even in smallish ways.
It's an interesting exercise, but ultimately fails, unless we imagine ourselves Connecticut Yankees in King Arthur's Court. If instead, you imagine yourself to be an actual middle class German, born in say 1908, with all that that implies, the options (and the recourse to the high horse) become a little more limited.
I'll admit to have been a whole lot more certain and dogmatic about such things before meeting (and becoming related to) a bunch of Germans who were teens and 20s during WWII.
Deciding to join a resistance would include find one, deciding whether it had any chance of making any difference, deciding that it wasn't a government front designed to smoke out traitors, and deciding whether it was well enough run that you'd live long enough to do something. That's a lot of due diligence, and if you have any responsibilities at all -- like say, family members who might be killed if you get caught -- you might well opt to do what you can to keep your family alive (remember, you're getting the crap bombed out of you), and hope for the best.
How about imagining yourself in Colonial America with crazed Patrick Henry and others?
Of course we would all be helping Washington. Right. Sure.
I'll admit to have been a whole lot more certain and dogmatic about such things before meeting (and becoming related to) a bunch of Germans who were teens and 20s during WWII.
My in-laws are a little younger, but yes. That said, I *do* feel okay passing judgment on their respective attitudes towards the thing after the fact, though I won't say what those judgments are.
55: I'm quite certain that in Colonial America I would have basically been on the side of the Loyalists. And I think that actually that was probably the correct side to be on.
Everyone likes to hope they would have been part of the resistance, but how many of those protest anything now, when it's safe and nice and the worst that will happen is that you'll get clocked upside the head by an errant puppet?
Just think, b, if everyone then had been like you today this country would be just like Canada.
54. That was the "light bulb" moment for me. It is all well and good for me as an American in the early part of the 21st Century to say how I may have behaved, but to put myself in the shoes of someone with a completely different set of experiences and to to image how I would react leads me to some uncomfortable conclusions. "Good German" was the most desirable outcome I could reconcile with, although I never could get to "extermination camp guard".
But warmer. And I'd still prefer the west coast to the rest of the nation.
55: I don't think that really works, because I don't think we can say that supporting Washington was the only morally correct choice. We don't know what the world would have looked like if the American Revolution had failed, and many good things can be traced to its success (as well as some seriously bad ones), but I don't think it's terribly hard to construct an argument that opposing the Revolution was appropriate given the information available at the time.
The west coast would, of course, be part of another nation.
36: Thanks for finding me the thread; I'll have to reread it in a bit.
55: I was hiking with a historian/diplomat this last weekend, and he was telling me to read up on the actual sociology of the founding. He noted that after the defeat of Cornwallis, only about a third of the populace (and I'm not sure if he meant total populace or enfranchised men) were really pro-the-new state---a third were against and yearning for England, and a third were sort of "meh" about the whole thing. Luckily this last third was fairly easy to swing over to at least not cause too much trouble. . .He was also telling me how Washington was very careful to always refer to the ministerial army and to not frame the revolution as being against the Crown. . ..I'm totally condensing the conversation, which was interrupted by vistas and rattle snakes, but it made me want to read SEK's dissertation among other things.
DaveL is going to end up in a brig. No doubt about it.
DaveL is going to end up in a brig.
If you have the time, I recommend Freeman's series on Washington.
55. I have less problem with this because of beloved ancestors who did fight on the "right" side. Hard to see going against one's family.
64. yeah, B, how's yer Spanish.
This is a more difficult question in practice than it is in theory. Should we condemn members of the Communist Party in the USSR? China? Vietnam? Ba'ath Party members in Iraq? Democrats during the Japanese internments?
In retrospect, the Nazis were a singular evil, but was that really clear to the average German villager in 1936? 1941? I'd like to think I'd be part of the Resistance, but in reality I'm awfully lazy and risk-averse.
I was not meaning to equate Nazi's with Revolutionary War, just another example. The same goes for the Civil War. What side you would have fought for simply was a factor of where you lived, not your morality.
simply was a factor of where you lived
And even that was quite complicated.
71: Not to start fights or anything, but I think the Civil War comes a whole lot closer to being the analogy you were looking for in 55.
Yeah, compared to the Revolution the Civil War is a case where it's a lot clearer in retrospect which side held the moral high ground and how many factors besides simple morality determined which side someone ended up on.
In the Civil War there were many individuals who were forced to make difficult choices. In this area there's Baptist Church which was founded around 1869 by Union veterans from Kentucky or Tennessee who decided they didn't want to go home again.
74: Not just in retrospect, which helps to illuminate how large a role plain old tribal loyalty plays even among the more enlightened.
69.2: It's not bad for not having been used much in the last twenty years. But I'd be okay with being part of Mexico.
70: I'm okay with criticizing all those people, especially the ones who joined while the bad shit was going down and the Democrats who didn't criticize the internment, which as far as I know didn't even mean risking a jail sentence.
39: I was blessed with a relatively light major (English literature) and never ended up doing a minor, so my college experience was virtually nothing but electives. Look how I turned out.
The only class I took in college that has ever turned out to be useful was basic accounting, because it taught me how to read the financial disclosures for publicly-traded companies -- a skill that has somehow earned me thousands of dollars. No one has ever asked me about my skills in decoding medieval English, even though I list it on my resume.
77: Okay, but suppose you were trying to rebuild one of those countries and you had all these people around who had been associated to varying degrees with the odious former regime. What would you do about them?
45: Doug, I don't believe these injunctions ever vary, by place or by time, certainly not by ethnicity. When I said `resist the fascists, of course I meant the real, honest-to-goodness fascists operating in full view. It's a word that often gets misused today. Similarly, the oppressed really were not hard to identify. Of course, then as in any time, you could rationalize things away --- that's part of the point. If you are willfully ignorant, or rationalizing (more likely, accepting the rationalization some authority has handed you).
I'm not saying it is an easy thing to do, but it is, unerringly, the right thing to do. Unsurprisingly, identifying the right thing to do is often much, much more difficult than acting on it.....
Disagree re. Civil War. By that point in history, slavery wasn't new to anyone in the South, whereas herding up Jews in Germany and sending them to camps was. Also, a country at war with itself is a different issue than a country waging war on its citizens. To some extent, slavery itself is a better analogy, but even there the embeddedness of the institution makes a difference. I can imagine it being very difficult even for abolitionists to really imagine what the South would be like without slavery, but there's really no excuse for WWII era Germans not to know what Germany would be like if Jews were at least tolerated.
I fail to see the relevance of 27 and 49 to 79.
59: History tells us not that many. I was serious earlier, though, when I said given the right timing I expect I (a younger self, that is) would have ended up in a `resistance' of some sort for the wrong reasons. Resisting authoritarians because you have a knee jerk resistance to authority isn't noble. I could easily imagine this younger version of me getting into a space where I was all: well, they'll kill me if they catch me, so I might as well see how many I can get first. Besides, that way I can blow some shit up.
79: Most of them you've probably got to try to bring into the fold; the less odious ones are probably the ones making the trains and planes run on time, and you'll need them if your new friendly government is to succeed.
70: Democrats during the internment: absolutely. Communist party members after the purges: absolutely. I don't know enough about China (probably?) or Iraq (probably, but I'm hesistant because my info has been very spun) to be sure.
I don't think this is hard to see, it's just very hard to do.
Back in the day, when the Internet was smaller, I used to m/o/c/k/ converse with a young man who claimed that, if he were in Argentina during the Dirty War, he would have ended up working for the secret police.
That young man's name was... Ad/am Yos/hid/a. Yes, that Ad/am Yos/hid/a.
I believed him completely. On the other hand, he also claimed, "If I were German I would have tried to move to the United States or Britian [sic]." But I'm a little doubtful of that.
"It's silly and self-indulgent to have this reaction to the name of a college, but I saw that paragraph and thought -- I don't know -- that could be me? How do I know it wouldn't have been me?"
This is odd. Perhaps it could be you, LB. I discover lines I will not cross, and that's not a claim to moral superiority, but rather a recounting of personal history, perhaps.
The result is that I've dropped out of certain tracks once it became apparent to me what would be called for, and that I'd eventually become a crazy person if I proceeded.
I mean this on a mundane level, in one way: I was diagnosed with a seizure syndrome in college, for example, which was exacerbated by stress, and thereafter I simply explained to a professor or two that, no, I would not be turning my paper in on time, sorry. I draw the line here, take it or leave it (and I promise that when you get the paper, it will be worth your time).
I was educated in the ivies, a highly liberal education; I suppose I might have gone to law school instead of pursuing a philosophy graduate degree. Still I cannot imagine finding myself having taken a path that led to the sort of thing described in the original post. The dissonance would be too screamingly great.
m/o/c/k/
Is this abbreviation with which I am unfamiliar?
I haven't read the thread yet, but I want to respond to the post.
I'm ashamed for my alma mater. Shit like this strikes me as not only a failure of a particular educational institution, but of a philosophical education in general. Aristotle said we study virtue not for theory's sake, but to become more virtuous. Yet I see no evidence that the study of virtue (or of Aristotle) is particularly successful at this end.
Seems to me that if you're expecting any educational institution to produce nothing but perfectly virtuous alumni you're bound to be disappointed.
Yet I see no evidence that the study of virtue (or of Aristotle) is particularly successful at this end.
Necessary, but not sufficient?
If that. What I like about Zen is precisely the attitude that knowing *what* to do is 99% less likely to be the problem than is, you know, actually doing it.
A deep familiarity with the Nicomachean Ethics is not going to help there, though it's worthwhile for other reasons.
Hm, I put that badly. Let's try this:
Admittedly, no one knows how to teach virtue, but at least the classical tradition is up front with that problem. Start with Plato, and what do you get? Socrates observing that if virtue could be taught, Pericles would've surely taught it to his son, etc., etc.
So spawing a torturer isn't such a demerit vs. St. John's. How many guys did what Tony L. did, and not only haven't "come out" with it (he does a great Frontline interview, google it) but may even pride themselves on the experience?
Aristotle's most famous pupil was Alexander the Great. Quoth Alastair MacIntyre: "This should not be taken as a great success, but a great failure."
And I'm not sure why one would quote Alasdair McIntyre without great provocation.
81: But while it's common now to pooh-pooh the idea that the Civil War was about anything but slavery, the NC example is instructive. The state wouldn't join the Confederacy until they were ordered to invade SC and they provided more troops than any other state, despite having one of the smallest slave populations.
Similarly, denouncing Democrats during the internment. I have to believe that the vast majority of Democrats weren't loyal to the party for any reasons having to do with the Japanese. Maybe they just believed in unions. Or Soviet Communists following the purges: your first obligation is to feed your children, which could be tricky in a Siberian jail.
It's really easy from our standpoint today to boil historical questions down to simple binary oppositions, but not so much when you're standing in the middle of it.
Are you trying to justify voting for Helms?
I certainly never voted for Helms. But, for a contemporary example, you might think that the Iraq War is horribly immoral, but if abortion is your #1 issue, you're still going to vote Republican.
93: It might be more salient to ask: How many of those guys will pride themselves 20 years from now? And how many of their kids will ever know about exactly what dad did during the war?
For an interesting case study of how one middle-class German born at the turn of the century turned out, you could check out Jan Valtin's Out of the Night. The description of what it was like to move through German society at the worst of the depression is chilling. A lot of people who were respectable, utterly ordinary folx before the war found themselves desperate, alone and starving. At that point, if you haven't previously been in such a condition, it's probably fruitless to speculate about what course of action you would follow.
More applicable to the case LB mentions is the story of Haymarket Martyr Albert Parsons, who went from deeply ideologized Confederate soldier (volunteered at the age of 13) to being an important anarchist labor organizer married to a woman of mixed race. How will these wars radicalize people, some of them perhaps as yet unborn? Sharing information about what the conflict was like, for the soldier on patrol, the interogator in the cell, the child left orphaned or the demonstrator on the picket line is critical to moving ourselves out of our current nightmare.
Geez, if you are going to be serious, I will agree that Apostropher makes excellent points.
minnepolitan makes a good point, but my problem is that those who need to hear those stories the most seem to not hear those stories.
97: it's common now to pooh-pooh the idea that the Civil War was about anything but slavery
...because in fact it's not true that the Civil War was about anything but slavery. Other factors may have played in, but the peculiar institution was the only factor that could generate a secessionist cause for NC to eventually join in the first place, even if NC was more reluctant and conflicted than most. (It's not hard to see why it happened, either -- the state had "one of the smallest slave populations" at 52%. It was a plantation economy that stood to gain in the short-term from extending slavery.)
it's not true that the Civil War was about anything but slavery.
Sorry, poor phrasing. In large terms, of course you're correct. I meant that any given individual's allegiance to one side or the other was not necessarily based on their views on slavery.
We also might consider the fact that the most ardent supporters of an end to chattel slavery in the US were working, not for a war, but for a slave insurrection. John Brown and his co-conspirators attacked a Federal arsenal, after all. Even up until Brown's hanging, it doesn't seem clear to me that very many people expected a full-fledged civil war to erupt. When you look at how quickly the dominoes fell -- Fugitive Slave Act, Compromise of 1850, Kansas-Nebraska Act, "Bleeding Kansas", the Raid on Harper's Ferry -- it's amazing to think of how much can change in just 10 years. Something that we might want to bear in mind the next time we hear about how everything is fixed, history is over and the triumph of bourgeois capitalism is assured.
The real problem I have with these discussions is that one could make a good case for the claim that we live under regime(s) sufficiently odious to make active resistance to those regimes a moral imperative. And how many of us are actively engaged in that resistance?*
We do, after all, live under regimes that have engaged in the unprovoked invasion of sovereign foreign nations leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and which have engaged in the wholesale removal of many of our existing rights and liberties.
* not pointing the finger, since, like most people, the most I've done in terms of 'resistance' is donate a small amount of money to some political pressure groups, go on a few marches, write a few letters, and vote ...
Christ, I haven't even been to any marches. I have, however, mocked a lot of conservatives at work.
Eh. Perfect enemy of good here, people.
A former President of St. John's went to Iraq to advise the Ministry of Higher Education. From "An Educator Learns the Hard Way" from the Washington Post back in June 2004:
After leaving the endowment, he spent 11 years as president of St. John's, a small, classical liberal arts college in Santa Fe known for its Great Books curriculum. He retired in 2000 and set up a consulting company. He spent his spare time preparing homemade Italian sausage and relaxing with his wife in their cabin near the Pecos River in New Mexico.
After U.S. troops rolled into Baghdad, he got a call from his predecessor at St. John's, who asked whether he'd be interested in serving as the CPA's senior adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education. Intrigued, he placed a call to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, whose wife had served on the board at St. John's.
"I said, 'Do you think I'd be appropriate?' And he said, 'Yes. Absolutely,' " Agresto recalled. Agresto said he thought, "I'm almost 60 years old. I don't have that many years left to do good." And he accepted.
"This is what Americans do: They go and help," he said. "I guess I just always wanted to be a good American."
He knew next to nothing about Iraq's educational system. Even after he was selected, he did not pore through a reading list. "I wanted to come here with as open a mind as I could have," he said. "I'd much rather learn firsthand than have it filtered to me by an author." He did a Google search on the Internet. The result? "Not much," he said.
His training from the Defense Department was no more extensive. "They taught me how to put on a gas mask, how to get the helmet snug, how to button up your flak jacket," he said. "That's it."
None of that fazed him. He assumed, he said, that Iraq would feel like a newly liberated East European nation, keen to embrace the West and democratic change.
Not until he arrived in Baghdad on Sept. 15, and was assigned to live in a metal trailer with three other CPA staffers, did he realize how complicated his job would be.
86 etc: Party membership in an established dictatorship can be pretty meaningless in practice. Data point - in Francist Spain you had to be a member of the Falange to teach physical education in primary school. You didn't have to go to meetings or rallies or stuff, but your name was on the records. So you can imagine that a fair few people who weren't supporters of the regime compromised at that level, especially in the 50s and 60s when there was no obvious prospect of regime change. I gather the same sort of situation prevailed in Iraq.
Not to their credit, sure, but I'd hesitate to criticise them at all harshly. I'd be much harder on US Democrats who stayed silent about internment in WWII.
"we live under regime(s) sufficiently odious to make active resistance to those regimes a moral imperative."
That's a serious question, btw. At what point does a regime get sufficiently odious that we have a moral duty to actively oppose it? And assuming there is such a threshold, how do we know?
The people who joined the Weather Underground came to one answer to that question. Young Brits who go to Pakistan for AQ training have come to another. In both cases, I'd say the wrong answer: there's no moral imperative to futile violence. Or to futility in general.
re: 114
I'm not sure violence was only what I had in mind.
re: futility, I'm less sure. Given certain facts about totalitarian states -- Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, for example -- pretty much any course of action other than going with the flow was going to be futile but we still seem to condem Germans of a certain age for doing nothing and see people like Sophie Scholl as praise-worthy. I'm not sure if 'I did nothing because there was nothing effective that I could do' is a good enough answer. On the other hand, what other answer is there?
I don't condemn Germans of a certain age either.
My good friend has a photo of Kiev's central square during the Orange Revolution, with his caption: "In the Ukraine, this is what they do when an election goes wrong. In Ohio, they certify it." Seriously, people, clearly in 2000, and arguably in 2004, the Presidency was stolen, and not even a nominal General Strike occured. It doesn't take futile violence, but even minimal civic engagement (note: I am no better in this respect). If Florida 2000 didn't merit any meaningful public response, what makes anyone think that anything else would? We are, in fact, too fat and lazy.
Relative to the internment thing: I seem to recall another group denied fundamental rights during that era. Was there any meaningful opposition? Not to play "top my woe," but if I'm not mistaken, more African-Americans were lynched during WW2 than Japanese-Americans. It was a fucked-up country, and it's hard to see how white Americans who, at best, turned a blind eye to de facto apartheid were going to massively resist internment during a war.
Yeah, as I said, violence wasn't necessarily what I had in mind.
Just on the war in Iraq there are a lot of concrete things that could be done -- non-payment of taxes, non-violent blockades of ports and airports, boycotts of corporations directly involved, and so on.
re: 116
That's a consistent position to take, and I have some sympathy with it. I suspect, more generally, that our intuitions about how to apportion moral blame to individual members of a collective are confused. It doesn't seem always right, to me, that relative powerlessness be exculpatory but, on the other hand, I can't come up (glibly) with any simple principle we can use.
117 -- Neither Gore nor Kerry were prepared to step out of the system in that way -- and I think it's fair to say that if their public personas are at all accurate, neither could ever have been expected to step out of the system in this way.
You can't say that lessons weren't learned from 2000. I was one of the lawyer volunteers assigned to a precinct in 2004, and would've gone to court had there been anything amiss. There wasn't, and we won the precinct (in SW Albuquerque), but not by the margin we should have won it. Talking with voters going in and out, we had problems on the war and on values: people understood the choice they were making, and made it. Not much can be done with that.
In Ohio, the problem was really in the weeks/months leading up to the election, and the voters of Ohio have taken corrective measures.
118 -- Mindful of the good doctor's admonition about not allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good, it seems that a fair starting point would be that the moral imperative to commit an immoral act is pretty much always going to be very weak. This cuts out the WU and AQ choices, and most other 'fucking for virginity' or 'destroy the village to save it' types of solutions.
119: Very good point about Gore (in particular) not leading any kind of opposition in 2000 - indeed, he called for unity. Still, there was a certain passivity in the populace that was disconcerting. But maybe that passivity is natural, and can only be overcome by leadership or direct confrontation (when people have their own ox gored). Which reinforces the idea upthread that only a tiny percentage of people anywhere will Do the Right Thing, except under extraordinary circumstances.
117: In The Responsibility of Peoples, published in the last year of the war, Dwight Macdonald made this exact comparison, between a murderous racism that was decentralized, part of the fabric of a society and its folkways, and one that was imposed by terror, largely against the folkways of that particular people, although proverbially not of the people further east. Both are bad, of course.
Looking back at the last fifty years, I think that the moral imperative coming out of the war, the worldwide revulsion, particularly in western societies, against the racism of the Nazis, and the need to "compete" against the Communists for the moral high ground, played a significant role in the momentum the civil rights movement built up, to eliminate both officially sanctioned racism and its underlying cultural support.
112: That's a good point. Let's reduce it to active membership, etc.
I don't like the formulation "moral imperative to commit immoral acts"; surely what's under debate is whether the resistance would be moral or immoral. So I think I'd reformulate it like this: There's a strong presumption against committing violence; when is permissible for a small insurrectionist group to commit violence against a tyrannical power? when is it obligatory to join such a group?
I don't have a well-worked-out position on this, but my sense of it is that permissibility involves a) the severity of the tyranny b) the availability of peaceful methods and c) the target of the violence. To make it obligatory, you'd need to add d) the likelihood of success and e) the likelihood of reprisals against innocents.
The idea here is that you first have to exhaust your peaceful options, that a tyrannical regime doesn't excuse all misbehavior (raping the citizenry != protest), and that the regime should be the target. The second set is fuzzier, but it seems that one of the things that need to be considered is whether the operation will succeed, or just take more lives without accomplishing anything. That might be permissible, but I don't think it's obligatory unless the violence has a reasonable chance of success.
re 120
Mindful of the good doctor's admonition about not allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good, it seems that a fair starting point would be that the moral imperative to commit an immoral act is pretty much always going to be very weak.
Pointing to the immorality of some acts of resistance -- AQ, for example -- doesn't help though except in the sense that it circumscribes certain kinds of acts and says 'these particular types of actions are ones which one cannot have a moral imperative to commit'.
Since an obvious point would be that many of the acts that we may have a moral imperative to commit are not themselves immoral -- the various forms of non-violent resistance, for example. Furthermore, if one isn't a pacifist, then there are also going to be instances where it might be possible that one has a moral imperative to act with violence (in that instance).
89: it wasn't all mockery. He had entire months approximating normality in his teens, and the information I gave him on enlisting was accurate. (This was before Abu Ghraib came out, which I have little doubt Ad/am fantasized about.) Make Our Canadians Killers.
Make Our Canadians Killers
They won't need much persuading; Basil Liddell Hart observed during WWII, and either Max Hastings or John Keegan has observed the same thing, how many atrocity stories from the western allies involved Canadians.
123, 125 -- Cala has eloquently filled in much of what I meant with the weaselly qualifiers pretty much always going to be very weak.
123: I agree about futile violent acts not being obligatory. What is obligatory, I think, is not being complicit.
Two different Candians have written histories of the military exploits of Genghis Khan. Beneath that bland exterior.....
