Politics and torture

One reason I need to write occasionally about less cosmic topics like fun TV shows is that so much of what is central to our politics these days is so intrinsically grim. I've seen a couple of well-thought-out posts recently on the increasingly nasty tone of Republican political discourse by David Neiwert, Watching the Bus Plunge, Campaign for America's Future 10/15/07 and The demonic and the human Orcinus blog 10/18/07. Neiwert has reported on extreme hate groups for years and has done a lot of research and writing on authoritarian politics.

Neiwert points out an important point that others are making, though rarely so clearly as he does:

It is by small steps of incremental meanness and viciousness that we lose our humanity. The Nazis, in the end, embodied the ascension of utter demonic inhumanity, but they didn't get that way overnight. They got that way through, day after day, attacking and demonizing and urging the elimination of those they deemed their enemies.

They did this by not simply creating them as The Enemy, but by denying them their essential humanity, depicting them as worse than scum - disease-laden, world-destroying vermin, in desperate need of elimination. But that kind of behavior, over the years, has hardly been relegated merely to the Nazis; indeed, it has a long history in America as well, and has been bubbling up on the right increasingly in recent years.

And the ugly truth is that the increasing radicalism of the Republican rhetoric has already had a major influence on getting the public and Congress to accept some horrible practices we all know are wrong - even though not all of those who accept it in practice support it in an affirmative sense.

Jeremy Waldron in Is This Torture Necessary? in the print issue of the New York Review of Books 10/25/07 edition (link behind subscription) writes of how the so-called tradeoff between freedom and safety that the Republicans constantly urge on us has worked in recent years:

But trading off liberty against security has a treacherous logic. It beckons us in with easy cases - the trivial amount of freedom restricted when we are made to take our shoes off at the security checkpoint before we board an airplane is the price of an assurance that we will not be blown up by any imitators of Richard Reid. But it is also a logic that has been used to justify spying without a warrant, mass detentions, incarceration without trial, and abusive interrogation [i.e., torture]. In each case, we are told, some safeguards and rights that were formerly regarded as civil liberties have to be given up in the interests of security. But after a while we start to wonder what security can possibly mean, when so much of what people have struggled to secure in this country - the Constitution, basic human rights, and the rule of law - seems to be going out the window.

I believe that the adoption of torture as official American policy (despite the verbal comma-dancing about how anything Bush orders done isn't "torture") has opened the floodgates for the current Republican spiral of rightwing radicalism. Because once you've accepted torture, what would you not accept?

Paul Kiel points out how vapid Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey's eloquent but vague denunciation of torture really was in TPMmuckraker Is Waterboarding Torture? Mukasey: Yes, if It's Torture 10/18/07. David Luban at the Balkinization blog calls Mukasey's response on waterboarding A Severe Insult to the Brain... 10/19/07.

Brian Tamanaha in Hey America - Can You Explain This? Balkinization blog 10/19/07 describes a conversation he had with a European colleague about the spectacle of a nominee for the chief law-enforcement officer of the American government not being willing to say straightforwardly that "waterboarding" (simulated drowning) is torture:

Seeing the astonishment through the eyes of an outsider made me realize how far we have deteriorated in our moral sense about the impropriety of torture. For Mukasey to say that he first must study whether water boarding is "torture" is a disgrace.

My German colleague wanted to know how the Democrats and the American people could allow such a person to be confirmed.

Here was my response:

The Democrats are so cowed by the fear of appearing weak on fighting terrorism that they won't take a principled stand and insist that a person who cannot forthrightly state that water boarding is "torture" is neither legally nor morally qualified to be the Attorney General.

Torture is not an investigative technique. It's an instrument of state terror. The Los Angeles Times has an important article today on how torture has compromised the ability of the American justice system to deal with even the most heavily-implicated terrorist suspects: FBI working to bolster Al Qaeda cases by Josh Meyer 10/21/07.

I don't know how the Republican Party stops it's own descent into more and more radical approaches to government and rejection of democracy and the rule of law. But the public and Congress have to find a way to stop the torture policy because that's a red line for the basic rule of law and the integrity of the justice system.

Wilhelm Reich had some good ideas along with some pretty strange ones

I also read some blog post within the last several days that had an intriguing, Wilhelm-Reichian theory going about rightwing politics and miserable sex lives, but darned if I can find it now. Wilhelm Reich was a psychoanalyst who was part of Freud's circle who gravitated to the German Communist Party in the early 1930s. He had some intriguing ideas about things that attract people to rightwing politics, most notably in his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism. The Communists disowned him, he had to flee Nazi Germany and he progressively went crazy, developed a bizarre theory about "orgone energy" permeating the world, and eventually ended up as a raving rightwinger who died in federal prison in the US on charges connected with quack medicine claims.

Not exactly a rousing endorsement of his ideas, I realize. Still, with more attention being paid these days to the psychology of authoritarian politics, some of Reich's observations could prove useful. He describes, for instance, how the swastika, which was an ancient fertility symbols used in various cultures, was transformed into a Nazi political symbol and how it fit into the Nazis' psychological appeal.

Tags: authoritarianism, david neiwert, torture, wilhelm reich