Fanaticism

Peter Conzen's Fanatismus: Psychoanalyse eines unheimlichen Phänomens (2005) [Fanaticism: Psychoanalysis of an Eerie Phenonenon] uses a number of case studies to describe fanaticism from a Freudian psychoanalytic viewpoint. The parts of the clinical sections that stand out most for me are the key role played by fixation on Good vs. Evil in fanaticism and his point that fanaticism can be a normal if not necessarily healthy response to relatively short-term conditions or extreme stress.

In psychoanalytic terms, "Fanatismus in seiner ureigentlichen Ausprägung ist freilich Ausdruck inneren Gespaltenseins, das Absorbiertwerden der Identität von hohen ethischen Idealen und gleichzeitig das Fixiertbleiben an starre Über-Ich-Introjekte." (Fanaticism in its most basic characteristic is a clear expression of inner division, of the identity becoming absorbed by higher ethical ideals and at the same time remaining fixated on inflexible superego introjections.)

Psychoanalysis assumes three distinctions in the mind's "software": the id, the ego and the superego. As Sigmund Freud himself explained in his 1926 Encyclopædia Britannica article, "Psychoanalysis":

Mental Topography.--Topographically, psychoanalysis regards the mental apparatus as a composite instrument, and endeavours to determine at what points in it the various mental processes take place. According to the most recent psychoanalytic views, the mental apparatus is composed of an "id," which is the reservoir of the instinctive impulses, of an "ego," which is the most superficial portion of the id and one which is modified by the influence of the external world, and of a "super-ego," which develops out of the id, dominates the ego and represents the inhibitions of instinct characteristic of man. Further, the property of consciousness has a topographical reference; for processes in the id are entirely unconscious, while consciousness is the function of the ego's outermost layer, which is concerned with the perception of the external world.

The superego, in this schema, is an unconscious part of the mind which is the internalization of parental and other social authority, including the conscience but not synonymous with it. In its healthy functioning, the superego tries to restrain the ego from deciding to do prohibited things as well as pushes the ego to do things that it considers necessary. So it would hold the ego back from indulging instinctual impulses toward violence or cruelty, while pushing the ego to fulfil positive duties and obligations.

In Conzen's view, fanaticism involves a division of the superego, in which the evil actions that have to be restrained are experienced not as internal restraints within oneself but as projections onto others, others who must therefore be restrained, attacked or destroyed. So, in examples he uses, those directing an investigation for the Inquisition or staging political show trials may be unconsciously detecting and combating their own doubts and forbidden impulses by projecting them onto the accused. In such cases, forcing the accused to admit their own guilt often becomes a primary and obsessive goal.

The focus in fanaticism becomes not so much the positive goal of the Good itself but on the obsessive hatred of the Evil that stands in the way of that goal. Reflective thinking around the hated object is suppressed by the fanatic. As a process based on fanaticism proceeds, the fanatics come to see more and more people as part of the enemy and become more isolated from reality. Or, to put it a slightly different way, their opportunities and skills in reality-testing can become drastically reduced, producing a fatal cycle of escalation.

In situations of stress produced by traumatic physical experiences, humiliations, sudden disruptions of personal relationships, "people not infrequently react passionately and explosively", writes Conzen. Such short-term moments in which strong feelings of hatred are direct in a concentrated way are instance of the kind of attitudes that become longer and more chronic in fanaticism.

Conzen points out that fanaticism can be and often is a part of a transitional period in a person's life, especially in adolescence and late adolescence. This kind of fanaticism, people usually grow out of it in some form or another. Other people develop personalities that have strong fanatical tendencies. And in cult-like groups or well-organized, "totalistic" mass movements, people can experience a type of induced fanaticism to which they might not be inclined if they were in more normal circumstances.

Conzen discusses several cases in which personal and group fanaticism played a major role: Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement; the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang; Al Qa'ida; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and, the Bush administration's "war on terror". While he is generally careful with his evidence and reasonably sparing in his conclusions, such discussions are an intellectual minefield because of the difficulties of "psychohistory" and of drawing conclusions from individual psychology for group phenomena.

For instance, in his discussion of Hitler's biography, Conzen draws some significant speculative conclusions from an episode in Hitler's childhood to which Conzen refers as the "Rienzi experience" in reference to a Wagner opera. This information comes from a story told by Hitler's boyhood pal August Kubizek in his book Adolf Hitler, Mein Jugendfreund, published in 1953, decades after the event. Brigitte Hamann, a Vienna historian who has researched Hitler's childhood and adolescence in great detail, also credits Kubizek's account of the "Rienzi experience". But it's a reminder that speculating about the psychological condition of even a figure like Hitler of whom we have detailed knowledge nevertheless involves a great deal of judgment on sources which, even if accurate, are not sufficient for a real clinical diagnosis.

Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ennslin, 1968

Conzen discusses in the case of the RAF members the role their images of the Third Reich and their elders' attitudes towards it may have played in their own actions and their understanding of the world. But he seems unaware that in the case of three of the four main founding figures of the RAF - Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ennslin and Horst Mahler - that either they or close family members had some significant direct contact with the "brown" (Nazi) scene. Meinhof's husband Klaus Rainer Röhl was an underground Communist Party member in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as was she. But he remembered fondly at least some aspects of his time in the Hitler Youth organization as a young person. And starting from the mid-1970s he moved to being a hardline rightwinger.

Mahler had also had a more "brown" political orientation in his youth, and he later swung even further to the right than Röhl. After serving prison time for crimes committed as part of the far-left RAF, he later wound up active in the far-right Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) and just this year was sentenced to six years jail time for Holocaust denial (Sechs Jahre Haft für Horst Mahler wegen Volksverhetzung AFP/Google Nachrichten 25.02.2009).

Ennslin's fiancee and the father of her child, Bernward Vesper, was the son of a famous pro-Nazi "blood-and-soil" poet, Will Vesper. She and Bernward actively marketed a book of his father's poetry to the far-right scene in the 1960s, though Ennslin was more generally drawn toward the left.

Conzen finds personal fanatical tendencies in those three as well as the fourth leading founder, Andreas Baader. The ideology of the RAF was a variety of Marxism-Leninism. But it was more directly influenced by the concept that Régis Debray developed as an interpretation of Ché Guevara's approach to guerrilla warfare, which Debray applied more generally to Latin America. In the view adopted by the RAF, revolutionaries in the Third World were at war against world imperialism headed by the US in a system of which NATO and the West German Federal Republic was a part. They saw their role as allies of that revolution in the imperialist world, who would hinder imperialism's operations in the underdeveloped world by striking at them physically in Germany. The also held a variety of Debray's "foco" theory, in which they saw an immediate revolutionary potential in West Germany which they would tap into by starting an armed struggle there. This would force the Federal Republic to drop the civilized and democratic mask hiding what they saw as its true fascist nature, thus polarizing the political situation and drawing more supporters to the armed struggle.

This was a reality-challenged understanding of the situation in both Germany and the world. But, as Conzen and others have observed, the RAF didn't spend a lot of time elaborating political theory. Their focus was very much on the hated enemy, which they saw incarnated in US forces in Germany and in the Federal Republic itself. In the case of Andreas Baader, although he had been hanging around the leftwing scene in Berlin since the mid-1960s, he never gave much evidence of having any well-developed political ideas. He was a narcissistic character who had a remarkable ability to attract intense loyalty from those who came under his personal influence. He and his girlfriend Ennslin were the real core of the RAF leadership until their suicides in 1977.

Conzen also notes that, once the main early leaders had been apprehended in 1972 after a couple of years underground, the RAF, including what became known as the "second" and "third" generations, largely became focused on freeing the imprisoned members of their own organization.

Conzen sees many others in the RAF as being drawn in to a state of induced fanaticism in the cultish hothouse of the underground RAF. He points to the intense pressure, for example, that it took to persuade Susanne Albrecht of the "second" generation to set up the intended kidnapping of her own godfather, an attempt that ended in his death instead. It's also a notable fact that a number of RAF members, after they left the organization, were able to live seemingly normal lives without the fanatical drive with which they operated in the organization. This was true of several "second generation" members, including Albrecht, who were taken in by the East German regime (DDR) and set up in normal lives with new identities there. And it was true of some others who served prison time in West Germany and went on to lead lives seemingly free of the previous fanaticism.

Tags: fanaticism, raf, rote armee fraktion

Now this is different

The Ché brand still sells

Vondo Sreeharsha reports for The Miami Herald, Forum on Guevara just part of U.S. rebranding: A U.S.-sponsored discussion of the branding of Ernesto "Che' Guevara signaled a new approach to Latin America.

The U.S. charm offensive in Latin America took a small but provocative step forward on Friday when the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires sponsored two readings of a new book that explains the enduring iconic power of Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

U.S. taxpayers funded the discussion at the Buenos Aires 35th International Book Fair of the Argentine revolutionary who dedicated his life to armed struggle against capitalism and imperialism. For one day at least, photos of Guevara shared space with the Stars and Stripes. Dozens attended, including local grade school students.

Mara Tekach, the embassy spokeswoman, said that the United States was simply promoting free expression.

Che's Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image, by journalist Michael Casey, is one of the first books on a rarely discussed aspect of Guevara - his branding and why it has endured for more than four decades.

Ché Guevara is a perfect example of how an historical figure can become a symbol for people that may be distictly different that what he himself was in life. Killed by the Bolivian army in 1967 while organizing a guerrilla war against the Bolivian regime, he is honored today by Evo Morales, the elected President of the government of Bolivia, who has no interest in establishing a Cuban-style Communist regime.

Tags: che guevara

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 25:

Slave auction in Richmond(from The Illustrated London News 09/27/1856)

Our planter journal Southern Agriculturist in its June 1936 number ran an excerpt from a book by James Kirke Paulding, Slavery in the United States, with his initials erroneously shown as J.R. In the excerpt, Paulding makes a proslavery argument, "Of the Right of Property in Slaves". He straightforwardly bases his argument for property in human beings on the right of conquest:

Nine tenths, if not the whole of the property of the world is founded, not on purchase, but conquest. ... The United States were once the property of the Indian tribes, and though a considerable portion was fairly purchased, by far the largest was obtained by conquest alone.

That construction, "The United States were", was standard grammatical usage in American English prior to the Civil War. Since then, "the United States" has been treated as a singular subject.

The rest of this particular excerpt is devoted to legalistic chatter about the Constitutional right of states to make their own laws on slavery, including whether it was allowed or not. No one seriously disputed that the Constitution was so written. It was a way of restating as a Constitutional issue the policy issue at stake of whether slavery should be allowed and, more immediately, whether slavery should be restricted in new territories, whether free states and their citizens should be required to hunt down escaped slaves on behalf of their masters and whether the slave trade should be allowed in the District of Columbia.

In particular, Paulding directs this argument at the emerging movement among abolitionist activists, mostly women, to send petitions to Congress asking for various anti-slavery actions, in particular the banning of the slave trade in the Capital. If the leaders and political servants of the Slave Power had been someone other than who they were, they might have themselves pushed to ban the slave trade in the District, because there the sale of human being as property was paraded in the faces of diplomatic visitors from all over the world.

This excerpt by Susan Zaeske from her book Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women's Political Identity (2003) describes the movement:

From 1831 to 1863 women publicly expressed their opinion about slavery by affixing approximately 3 million signatures to petitions aimed at Congress. The addition of women's names beginning in 1835 swelled to a flood what was previously a trickle of memorials submitted almost exclusively by men. Women's efforts enabled abolitionists to send enough petitions to Congress to provoke debate over the question of slavery, a feat petitioning by men alone had failed to accomplish. Sparking discussion of slavery proved to be a crucial victory for the abolitionist movement, for as William Freehling has observed, the debates prompted by antislavery petitions in the 1830s were "the Pearl Harbor of the slavery controversy." Deluged with petitions, in June 1836 the House of Representatives passed a rule immediately tabling all memorials on the subject of slavery. The rule proved a "godsend" to the struggling antislavery movement, for it linked the popular right of petition with the unpopular cause of immediate abolitionism. Petitioning was intended not only to pressure congressmen but also to rectify public opinion with regard to the sinfulness of slavery. By gathering signatures in family and female social networks as well as through soliciting door-to-door, women discussed the issue of slavery with people who would never go to hear an abolitionist lecturer and who could not read abolitionist tracts. [my emphasis]

James Kirke Paulding

This was one of the signs that became more and more blatant as time went on that the existence of slavery in the South meant very real limitation on the freedom and democracy in other states, as well. Paulding addressed it with a disingenuous Constitutional argument:

The petitions for the abolition of slavery, every year presented to Congress, signed by people who neither see nor feel its consequences, whatever they may be, we consider an abuse of a constitutional right.

This was a defense of the kind of stupidly self-destructive action that the proslavery Representatives took with their gag rule on the petitions. And he justified it on the grounds that:

The civil institutions of a State, so long as they are not repugnant to the fundamental principles of the general government, as declared in the Constitution, are beyond the reach of the other States, who possess no right whatever to interfere with them. ... That which does not either immediately or remotely affect our right, our interests, our prosperity, or our happiness, by some outward and visible agency which all men distinctly comprehend, can be no "grievance;" it therefore requires no "redress" in regard to us, and consequently no petition on our part.

Such considerations of course, applied not at all to the question of slavery in the territories or in the District of Columbia.

A major marketing hook for Paulding's book is that he was a Northerner who traveled South to learn about the institution of slavery, which he discovered to be rather marvelous. It's always beneficial to have someone from the Other Side, a convert or a defector, making your case for you: the Yankee supporting the South's Peculiar Institution, the Iraqi defector alerting the naive Americans to the urgent dangers of Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction", the Jewish writer endorsing anti-Semitic fabrications.

The Southern Agriculturist in the same issue included an unsigned review of Slavery in the United States with a variety of quotations. Not having examined the entire book, I don't know how representative the book is of its contents. But the review highlights Paulding's argument that any attempt to interfere with the noble institution of slavery would bring on the horror of horrors in the mind of the white South, slave revolts, or "servile insurrection", as it was typically called. And if the review and accompanying quotations are any indication, Paulding's book was a maudlin, vapid defense of human bondage.

The turgid prose in the following passage the reviewer takes from Paulding shows what a large role projection played in the slaveowners' view of the world, in this case imagining raging fanaticism in the free states. Yes, there were some antislavery fanatics, but to reverse a popular witty saying, just because some people are after you doesn't mean you're not paranoid. The white South lived in exaggerated fear of slave revolts, and slaveowners faced a bizarre psychological dilemma of pretending at one level that their slaves were loyal and docile and on the other living with daily signs that reality was something else. And as public debate over anything touching slavery became increasingly restricted in the South from the early 1830s on, it became even easier for defenders of slavery to buy into such projective fantasies of menacing evil as Paulding paints here:

Fanaticism, when assuming the garb of universal philanthropy, is equally opposed to all patriotism, and all the social relations of life. It has no fireside, no home, no centre. The equal lover of "the entire human race," such as Mr. Garrison and his associates, is in effect a traitor to his country, a bad citizen, a coldhearted friend, a worthless husband, and an unnatural father, if he acts up to his principles. He is false to his native land, to the nearest and dearest ties and duties, moral, social, and political, for he stands ready to sacrafice [sic] them all for the benefit of strangers, aliens, and enemies. He will not light for his country, for all countries are alike to him; he will not devote his time, his talents, his labours, and affections to the happiness of his wife, his children, and his household friends, for he equally loves the whole family of mankind, and leaves them to the fostering care of the "entire human race," while he wanders away to the uttermost parts of the earth to overturn the social relations of nations, and establish a universal brotherhood, he scorns the sordid interchange of reciprocal duties, and disinterestedly devotes himself to those who are equally beyond the reach of benefiting by or returning his good offices. [my emphasis]

Aside from William Lloyd Garrison, Paulding in that excerpt doesn't name any of the four or five Abolitionists in the whole country that might actually have fit his description.

His heart is never at home. The centripetal force never operates on him. He is for ever receding from the centre to the circumference, and his sphere of action is the whole universe. Nothing less than the great human family can awaken his sympathies. Wives, children, relations, friends, and country, are not half so near and dear to him as the negroes of Africa, or the Indians of Polynesia; and as to all the little insignificant ties and associations that form the cement of families, neighbourhoods, and communities, the solace of human life, they are as burnt flax, scorching, smoking, and finally consuming in the fiery furnace of red-hot fanaticism. Nothing will content him but the sacrifice of his country to a world, or a dogma.

"Hence, beyond all question, arises that gradual decay of real piety and practical religion which, notwithstanding all the cant and pretence of the age, cannot but be palatable to every calm observer. We seem to be exporting so much of our zeal and religion to distant countries, that there is scarcely enough left for our own consumption; and like the old woman whom Rhadamanthus beckoned to the left hand, claim the rewards of Heaven, not on the score of our own reformation, but the pains we take to reform others. Such is fanaticism, which, setting itself above the restraints of law, and the supervision of earthly tribunals, arrogates the sanction of Heaven for all its excesses, and is consequently as deaf to argument as it is blind to the dictates of common sense. It neither reasons nor listens to reason. ... Their sincerity, even if conceded, is no apology for madness. [my emphasis]

You get the drift.

An interesting historical/literary sideline to Paulding's book is a dispute as to whether Edgar Allan Poe wrote a review of it that appeared unsigned in the April 1836 Southern Literary Messenger, which Poe edited. (See The Authorship of the "Paulding-Drayton Review" by Joseph Ridgely PSA Newsletter Fall 1992; Bernard Rosenthal, Poe, Slavery, and the Southern Literary Messenger: A Reexamination Poe Studies Dec 1974).

I'll refrain from taking a position on whether Poe himself wrote the piece, though I would assume that since he edited the magazine, he presumably didn't find the sentiment expressed there terribly disreputable (but even that could be a big assumption). The review also covered another volume with the sober title, The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists by H. Manly.

Regardless of authorship, this review is also concerns about what the reviewer perceives as some malign and mysterious tendency of humanity in which, "men are always passing, with fearful rapidity, between the extremes of fanaticism and irreligion." The writer especially fears such contemporary attacks being directed against the sober and moderate institution of "Domestic Slavery (the basis of all our institutions)." But he faults the Yankee Paulding for having an insufficient appreciate of the deep loyalty of slaves to their masters, "and the master's reciprocal feeling of parental attachment to his humble dependant."

The reviewer also invokes the image of the loving master bestowing "assiduous care" to elderly slaves which "prolongs the life of the aged and decrepid [sic] negro, who has been for years, a burthen?" Actually, in the real world, most slave didn't live long enough to become old and decrepit. And if they did, when they were finally too old and feeble to work, the master would not infrequently give his elderly and infirm slaves the gift of freedom, so that he would no longer have to waste his money feeding them.

Maybe even a proslavery Yankee like Paulding wasn't gullible enough to buy that load of swill.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, slavery

The reality of the anti-torture laws is becoming more clear to even our press corps

Nick Anderson of the Houston Chronicle gets it right:


So does Paul Krugman in Reclaiming America's Soul New York Times 04/24/09. He makes a clear statement about what is needed for transitional justice, the legal actions that need to be taken to move back to the rule of law:

And there are indeed immense challenges out there: an economic crisis, a health care crisis, an environmental crisis. Isn’t revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can’t afford?

No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. "This government does not torture people," declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.

And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.

One very important thing about this Krugman column is that he also addresses the question of whether this actually would interfere with Obama's other priorities. The law is the law and needs to be enforced regardless of whether it's politically awkward for Obama or anyone else. But I've been amazed at how Democrats seem to be assuming that it's politically bad for them if they expose the full extent of Republican criminality in the torture policy. But if Democrats are implicated criminally or otherwise in the torture program, they should be treated by the same legal standards as the other torture perpetrators.

McClatchy's Margaret Talev discusses some of the important specifics that are now being clearly and specifically documented in the public record in Document: Cheney, Rice signed off on interrogation techniques 04/22/09. The broad picture of the torture policy we've known a lot about before. What we're seeing now is specific documentation of the kind that can definitively and in a legal sense show exactly who was telling whom to do what and when.

We still don't know how many people were kept in the Bush Gulag, how many were tortured and how many were killed. I'm still haunted by a comment from Robert Fisk a couple of months ago that if mass graves turn up in connection with this, we'll be dealing with a qualitatively grimmer picture. There are big holes in our knowledge of this. We don't know it's real scope or the number of victims.

Some regular sources for valuable updates on this whole torture story, which has really been breaking fast the whole last week, include: Marcy Wheeler's Emptywheel, Digby's Hullabaloo, Glenn Greenwald's Salon blog, and Scott Horton's No Comment blog at Harper's. Antiwar.com Radio has their Scott Horton in a recent interview with the human-rights-attorney Scott Horton here.

This isn't going away.

Tags: accountability for torture, torture

Another reminder of how badly the Scalia Five damaged America

This is the man we elected President in 2000. And the Supreme Court's Scalia Five put Dick Cheney and George Bush in the Presidency instead. This surely ranks with the Supreme Court's most infamous, destructive, heinous rulings, like the Dred Scott decision, Plessy v. Ferguson (approving state segregation) and the upholding of the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.



And while we're reminiscing about the overturning of the results of the 2000 election, let's not forget the massive dysfunction of our national press corps which contributed so mightily to that disastrous result. Tags: al gore, democratic party

Another reminder of how badly the Scalia Five damaged America

This is the man we elected President in 2000. And the Supreme Court's Scalia Five put Dick Cheney and George Bush in the Presidency instead. This surely ranks with the Supreme Court's most infamous, destructive, heinous rulings, like the Dred Scott decision, Plessy v. Ferguson (approving state segregation) and the upholding of the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.



And while we're reminiscing about the overturning of the results of the 2000 election, let's not forget the massive dysfunction of our national press corps which contributed so mightily to that disastrous result.

Tags: al gore, democratic party

GOP aggression techniques

The Republicans were pretty successful at blocking Bill Clinton federal judiciary appointments. And the Democrats weren't nearly so successful during the last eight years at blocking even genuinely bad Bush judicial appointments, not least of them the torture judge, Jay Bybee.

Now the GOP obstructionism is expanding. Al Franken was elected as the Democratic Senator from Minnesota last November. Here it is near the end of April and the Republicans are still tying up that election in court with the approval of the GOP establishment. Why aren't the Democrats in Congress baying like wolves over that outrage? They should be.

Now the Republicans are holding up the approval of the highly-qualified Dawn Johnsen as head of the key Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the office which was key to the Cheney torture policy, because she has spoken out in favor of enforcing the anti-torture laws and treaties. Now Sen. Ben Nelson of Pennsylvania is going wobbly on that nomination, too. Any backing down on the Johnsen nomination by the Senate Democrats or the administration will be a cave-in on legal accountability for torture, as well as another victory for GOP obstructionism.

That filibuster rule for me is not an excuse for anything. Whatever usefulness it had historically is over. And, in any case, in practice the Republicans Senate majority in 2006 abolished the filibuster with their threats about the "nuclear option" and the "Gang of 14" compromise that basically let the Reps have their bad judicial nominees. The Dems have a large Senate majority and Joe Biden as presiding officer. They can abolish the filibuster formally with a simple majority vote.

Meanwhile, honorary Democrat Joe Lieberman has joined with hardline Bush supporter a legendary Maverick John McCain to write to the Obama administration opposing any prosecution of lawyers criminally involved in the torture policy. After Lieberman spent most of the Cheney-Bush administration denouncing other Democrats for not sufficiently cheering for Republican policies, defeating the Democratic candidate in the 2006 Connecticut Senate election, and endorsing McCain in the Presidential election even during the primary season, they welcomed him into the Democratic caucus as a member in good standing. Unbelievable. Hillary Clinton reminded the House Foreign Relations Committee this week that the Democrats won the 2008 election. The Senate Democrats don't seem to have quite figured that out yet and still think they have to play the Beltway Village Idiot game of sniveling to the Republicans on things like this.

To quote Pete Seeger's famous song:

When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Tags: accountability for torture, democratic party, republican party, torture

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 24: Tender care of slaves by their affectionate masters

Slave auction (from Harper's Weekly 07/14/1861)

Returning again to the Southern Agriculturist of Charleston, South Carolina, we find an article in the November 1836 edition by "A Planter", offering a picture of a well-run plantation. Big parts of this one read like pure propaganda: the tender care lavished upon slave children, the encouragement for slaves to follow their marriage vows. Slave children were actually typically provided minimal care, if that. Marriage vows had no legal force among slaves. And planters often found no difficulty in forcing violations of them, and generally little compunction about splitting families in the sale of slaves.

Even the cheery propaganda, though, can't entirely hide the ugly sides of the Peculiar Institution:

I have a nurse appointed to superintend all my little negroes, and a nursery built for them. If they are left to be protected by their parents, they will most assuredly be neglected. I have known parents take out an allowance for their children, and actually steal it from, them, to purchase articles at some shop. Besides, when they would be honest to their offspring, from their other occupations, they have not the time to attend to them properly. The children get their food irregularly, and when they do get it, it is only half done. They are suffered [i.e., made to suffer], by not having one to attend to them, to expose themselves; and hence many of the deaths which occur on our plantation.

In other words, in the ideal patriarchal plantation, slave parents have no right at all over the upbringing of their children. And besides, the slaveowners give them too much work to be able to take care of their children anyway.

The part about babies dying from exposure, presumably from heat in the fields or slave houses while their parents are working, paints an especially grim picture of life and death under slavery. Oddly, in the same paragraph where our Planter claims to provide tender loving care to slave children away from their parents - "I have a nurse appointed to superintend all my little negroes" - they still have many deaths of children by exposure. And this in an article bragging about the wonderfulness of life on the plantation.

Let's be fair to our author, A Planter. Since it was not uncommon for slaveowners to father children from their slaves, some of the wards allegedly being cared for in thee nursery may be biological children of A Planter. So it's not entirely fair to say that all these children are denied their parents' care.

Our Planter argues, "Cleanliness is a matter which cannot be too closely attended to." Now, some portion of this talk about cleanliness among the slaves, which was referenced in yesterday's quotes from Southern Agriculturist, was surely propaganda. The slaves' work in the field was scarcely free from untidy conditions. And the truth is that, despite the ideological claims to the contrary, owners weren't always overly solicitous about the health of their human property.

But even if we take the follow account as Gospel truth, think about what this says about the absolute power of the masters over the slaves, and how it visibly deprives all the adult slaves of dignity in front of all the others, including the children:

I appoint a certain hour for attending to this matter on each Sabbath, say nine o'clock in the morning. Every negro distinctly understands, that at this hour he will be reviewed. An hour or so previous to the review, I make it the business of the driver to sound the horn, for the negroes to prepare themselves and houses for inspection. When the hour for review has arrived, it is also his business to attend upon me, and report the plantation ready for inspection. This being done, I repair to the negro houses. At the door, of each house, the occupants thereof are seen standing with their children, if they have any. My business here is to call their respective names, and to see that every one has had his head well combed and cleaned, and their faces, hands and feet well washed. The men are required, in addition to this, to have themselves shaved. That they may have no excuse for neglecting this requirement, those that need them are provided with combs and razors. I now see that their blankets, and all other body and bed clothing, have been hung out to air, if the weather be fine. Their pots are also examined. I particularly see "that they have been well cleaned, and that nothing like "caked hominy" or potatoes is suffered to remain about them. I next enter their houses, and there see that every thing has been cleansed - that their pails, dressers, tables, &c. have all been washed down - that their chimneys have been swept and the ashes there from removed to one general heap in the yard, which serves me as an excellent manure for my lands. Being situated where my negroes procure many oysters, I make them save the shells, which they place in one pile, of which I burn lime enough each year, to white-wash my negro houses; both outside and inside. This not only gives a neat appearance to the houses, but preserves the boards of the same, and destroys all vermin which might infest them. From the inspection of the negro houses, I proceed to their well, and there see, that the water is pure and healthy. [my emphasis in bold]

An earlier piece in the February 1836 edition, this one actually signed with a name, B. Herbemont, "On the Moral Discpline and Treatment of Slaves", offers considerations about other aspects of slave control. Interestingly enough, he states, "I have reason to conclude, that there are very few planters who have any thing like a regular system for either the moral or physical government of their slaves." Since at a very basic level, slavery was very much about the "physical government" of the human chattel, it's an odd statement on its face. But it also is difficult to reconcile while the ideological image of patriarchal masters tenderly concerned for the well-being of their slaves.

He gives an example of how one slaveowner solved a problem:

He tells me that when he commenced planting, a few years since, he found the plantation which he had inherited from his father, and to which he had added very considerably, both in land and negroes, in an exceedingly disordered state; or, to use his own strong expression; "found it a wreck in every way." He found his negroes, to all appearance, devout religionists. Their practice was to congregate twice a week, besides Sunday mornings. From the inquiries he made of his overseers and neighbours, he had many reasons to believe, that no good arose from this course: but on the contrary, that all the most zealous pretenders to religion were the greatest rogues. He attended several of their meetings, and from their most absurd perversions of the scriptures, and the monstrous absurdities which they uttered, with the most sactimonious countenance, he was most fully satisfied that no morality could proceed from these meetings. He afterwards found that they committed depredations of all kinds, killing his beeves, hogs and sheep, thrashing his rice in the woods, breaking corn and grubbing his potatoes. He ascertained by the fullest and clearest proofs, that the coloured preachers were the greatest and most active thieves. He also found that among the women, those who had the most pretensions to religion, were nearly all implicated in the misdeeds. He was, therefore, induced to break up all their religious meetings, and to make examples by severe punishment on the most guilty ones. Punishment also followed any violation of his new regulations. He then resorted to a very different course, and adopted a system calculated to produce cheerfulness, and keep them in good humour as much as possible. Being determined that there should be no fault on his part, he fed and clothed them well, and induced them to occasional meetings for the purposes of meriment [sic]. He had fiddles and drums for their use, promoted dancing, and he found that by punishing certainly, though moderately, all ascertained delinquencies, they became much better tempered, and certainly much more honest.

He commends instead the example of "[t]hose gentlemen at the South who have hired white persons to preach to their slaves every Sunday". But he recommends to built upon the fact that blacks "are naturally prone to gaiety" by encouraging various recreational activities. He doesn't specify encouraging them to get drunk during their scant time off from work. But that was commonly done, and done consciously as a means of distracting slaves from activities potentially less wholesome for slaveonwers' interests. Herbemont cites historical precedent for this recommendation:

There never was, perhaps, a more happy, contented, honest, religious and moral people than the peasantry of the continent of Europe. I speak more particularly of the peasantry of France before the revolution. Their habitual cheerfulness and the good feelings which it promotes, were most probably the chief cause of it.

The oddities that appear in proslavery advocacy writing makes you wonder if such pleas had become so ritualized that a writer could expect the readers not to notice when they didn't even make sense. Here he holds up the example of the happy French peasantry "before the revolution". Uh, dude, that's a pretty big qualification, isn't it? And might it not suggest that peasants' apparent contentment at their recreational activities may not express their entire attitude toward the social order under which they live?

As from these proslavery articles directed at a slaveowning audience, neither the houses, nor their children, nor their recreations, nor their souls - and certainly not the bodies - of slaves were free from dictation by the master and the overseer.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, slavery

Amazing

Lily Galili and Barak Ravid report for Haaretz in Lieberman: U.S. will accept any Israeli policy decision 04/23/09

The Obama Administration will put forth new peace initiatives only if Israel wants it to, said Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in his first comprehensive interview on foreign policy since taking office.

"Believe me, America accepts all our decisions," Lieberman told the Russian daily Moskovskiy Komosolets. [my emphasis]

But what follows sounds more like an endorsement of the Obama administration's foreign policy priorities:

Lieberman granted his first major interview to Alexander Rosensaft, the Israel correspondent of one of the oldest Russian dailies, not to an Israeli newspaper. The role of Israel is to "bring the U.S. and Russia closer," he declared.

During the interview, Lieberman said Iran is not Israel's biggest strategic threat; rather, Afghanistan and Pakistan are.

This comes after years of Lieberman warning about the growing Iranian threat. Now, he has dropped Tehran to number two, with Iraq coming third. [my emphasis]

Tags: avigdor lieberman, israel

Cheney: the next generation

You think the next set of Republicans in the White House won't resume criminal torture? Just check this out: Liz Cheney: I’m Proud My Daddy Is the Prime Mover of Torture by Marcy Wheeler 04/23/09

There's a big difference between this torture program and lynch-law in the segregated South. In the segregated South, the governors of the states didn't publicly declare that lynching was a wonderful program and that "people are very proud of what we've accomplished" with lynchings.



This is what we're looking at, folks. The second-ranking member of the Cheney dynasty, who could well have ambitions as great as her father's, is saying bluntly on national television that she's proud of torture. Proud of torture.

Tags: accountability for torture, cheney, torture

Making war on Iran

I don't think it's necessary wrong for Israel and/or supporters of rightwing Israeli parties to "instrumentalize" the Holocaust by referencing it to present-day concerns (Obama warned at Holocaust memorial by Alexander Burns Politico 04/23/09).

But it would be wrong for the United States to go to war with Iran for no good reason. And if Israel initiates a war on Iran, that would be very damaging to American interests in the world, not least in terms of its consequences for American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons already and the most effective conventional army in the region. They don't need the United States to fight their wars. And their nukes provide an enormous deterrent even in the case that Iran gets a nuclear weapon, which they don't have, won't be able to develop for years, and which they say that don't even want.

Tags: iran,, israel

A Twitter-plus thought on law and order

The Beltway Villagers like Roger Cohen are mortified at the thought that torturers would be prosecuted for their very serious crimes. The Villagers are suddenly are becoming very fond of the idea of a Truth Commission, which sounds more every day like "let's set up a commission", the classic Washington solution to make a problem go away. When he was asked about war crimes in Afghanistan and the Geneva Convention in December, 2001, Don Rumsfeld sneered that he didn't care whether our allies were following "some convention" or not. And characters like Cheney, Rummy, Condi-Condi, and the rest of the whole rotten lot involved in the torture program don't care what "some commission" would say either. We need law and order on the torture crimes, not another report to say, oh, gee, it's too bad this happened, what a shame.

It can't be long until the Village people decide that the most urgent priority for the country is for Obama to issue Presidential pardons to everyone involved in the torture program. I figure it's inevitable. And once they decide that's the priority, the Pod Pundits will be drilling every Democrat they talk to, asking if they don't think Obama is being irresponsible by not already pardoning the torturers. Another prediction: when that becomes the Village script, none of the TV talking heads will bother to mention that the treaty provisions of the Torture Convention probably make any Presidential pardon for torture prior to actual conviction illegal and invalid.

Tags: accountability for torture, torture

If I used Twitter...

... I'd be writing, have we really reached the point where the law-and-order position on torture laws is a cause only of the "far left"? To the Beltway Village, that seems to be the case.

Tags: accountability for torture, torture

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 23: The gentle art of overseeing slaves

Song sheet for "The Fugitive's Song"

The Southern Agriculturist, as we saw in the previous post in this series, offered its readers practical advice on the management of slaves. In the unsigned article "The Education and Treatment of Overseers" in its April 1836 number, the South Carolina journal described the situation of the overseer's work:

... the occupation of the overseer is solitary, painful, and often attended with great risk of health and life. He is compelled to estrange himself in a great measure from all the pleasures of social intercourse; and to encounter during the sickly season, all the perils and terrors of that pestilential scourge, which infests our low country, and which walking in darkness, is seen only in the fearful havoc it makes. Surely, then, some compensation not only in the way of pecuniary reward, but also of personal consideration and standing, is due to those who willingly venture and sacrifice so much. [my emphasis]

Yes, one's heart has to be deeply touched by the plight of the self-sacrificing overseer. But a cynic might also think about what sort of person would be willing to undertake the management of a slave plantation under such circumstances. And with what degree of humanity they were likely to apply toward assuring the well-being of the human property that wasn't even their own. And how well that comports with the claims of the patriarchal care slaveowners bestowed on their chattel.

A couple of observations also suggest themselves here. One is that the overseers indeed had plenty of opportunity for "social intercourse" with the slaves. In a completely unequal power relationship.

And the summertime risk of disease that overseers faced in the Carolina lowlands was also shared quite obviously with the slaves themselves.

But our anonymous author was moved with sympathy for those poor souls, the overseers:

Now in what light are overseers usually regarded? How are they generally treated ? We are pained to answer, that in a great majority of cases, they are regarded by their employers merely as dependents; who are to be kept at a distance - as hirelings, who are hardly worthy the wages of their daily labour. The planter looks down upon his overseer, as one of an inferior and degraded caste; and the latter, generally speaking, is but too apt to lose, in consequence, all feeling of self-regard for principle, and all sense of a community of interest with his employer. What is the natural consequence? Why, that the overseers, as a class, sink low in the scale of respectability, and that very few, other than the indigent, the idle and the ignorant can be brought to accept employment in that capacity. It cannot be otherwise; for respectable men will not, under the goadings of absolute want, offer themselves for service in a line of life, that is supposed to subject them to humiliation and disgrace.

Nothing can be clearer, than that the planter, is in the end, the principal sufferer by this state of things.

Actually, on that last point, some of the readers of that article in 1836 might have wondered if such a situation was altogether pleasant for the slaves involved.

But the description of the problem our anonymous author is calling to the planters' attention for their urgent consideration is striking in what it says about the slave system itself as actually practiced. The overseer was the primary manager of the slaves, the executive director over the slave drivers who directly dealt with the slaves at work. Yet the job of overseers itself was considered so disreputable that no "respectable men" would seek or accept such a position even if faced with complete financial destitution, because to do so would be such a "humiliation and disgrace." Here, we don't need to speculate about what caliber of person would accept such a position. Our helpful anonymous author tells us: "an inferior and degraded caste; and the latter, generally speaking, is but too apt to lose, in consequence, all feeling of self-regard for principle, and all sense of a community of interest with his employer." Which again reminds us that whatever abstract feelings of Christian charity and patriarchal responsibility the slaveowner himself might feel for his human property, the overseer who actually managed their conditions of life on the largest plantations generally could be expected to take a somewhat less earnestly concerned attitude.

Anonymous pleads for efforts to raise the social status of the overseer to improve the quality of slave management, so that "the comfort and morals of the slave better secured." A security then obviously lacking in the eyes of this writer, who was by no means attempting a polemic against slavery.

Perhaps to encourage such a social elevation of the reputation of the overseer's highly dubious profession, Southern Agriculturist in its following (May 1836) issue featured an article by "An Overseer", titled "On the Conduct and Management of Overseers, Driver, and Slave". Offering model lessons from his own experiences, he describes how he managed the slave drivers, who were themselves typically slaves, giving us a glimpse of model Christian and civilized management under slavery:

Speaking of the driver, brings me to notice my management of him more particularly. I always required of him, that he should dress himself better than the other negroes. This caused him to maintain a pride of character before them, which was highly beneficial. Indeed, I constantly endeavoured, to do nothing which would cause them to lose their respect for him. With this view, I made it a rule never to scold or lecture my driver before the other negroes for any inadvertence or fault. If he did any thing which was out of the way, I took him by himself and lectured him severely. If the fault was of a flagrant nature, as was once the case with him, I publicly flogged him before the other negroes, and disgraced him by appointing another in his place. I would never listen to every tale that the negroes might have against the driver; but whenever they could urge any thing which seemed plausible or correct, I would consent to have him tried. At these trials, I would preside as umpire - would listen to the evidence for and against, and my decision always awarded a punishment of some kind to the guilty party - to the driver, if guilty, or to the accusers if they did not make good their charges. Persons might suppose that the fear of not making out their case, would prevent the negroes from accusing when really they had been injured; but I never found a case of the kind.

On that last point, it's not entirely clear to me how he would know of such a case if the victims were afraid to complain on penalty of flogging or some other form of physical abuse. But that gives a good picture of how "respectable" management might look on a respectable plantation.

Overseer gives another example of shrewd Christian, civilized management principles on the slave plantation:

Having laid down rules for the regulation of your plantation, the first consideration is the study of the character of your negroes. This will not take you long to do; in one month the full character of very slave you superintend might be learnt. For the breach of every rule, certainty of punishment is every thing. If a negro is permitted to go once unpunished for a fault, he will at any time afterwards do the same and risk being flogged. I have always discovered that where the overseer is positive, that the negroes are better disciplined, more mildly treated, and consequently more happy; once, however, a negro has been punished, the fault should be overlooked, and his spirits should not be broken down by continually reminding him of his past misconduct. Not observing this rule, has very often ruined some of the very best negroes.

No doubt the readers of the Southern Agriculturist could compliment themselves on recognizing the virtue of such progressive and compassionate management principles.

And here is a final example from Overseer of enlightenment management principles on the slave plantation:

Order should be strictly maintained among negroes. By this, I mean order, in their occupations and duties. Once or twice in the month, I made it my business to visit each negro house; I examined every thing therein; saw that the negroes permitted no dirt or filth to be collected about them, and as in variably punished them where I found they had done so, as if they had omitted to do their day's work. This plan of supervising your negro houses, works wonderful effects upon your plantation. It keeps your negroes cleanly and healthy; and prevents the concealment of all kind of roguery. If every overseer would follow this plan, I am convinced that there would be little use for patrol laws.

Imagine having your boss show up at your house on the weekend to inspect your house for maintenance of his own standard of cleanliness. And having the right to punish you if it didn't measure up. And this was a enlightened ideal being held out here.

The slave patrols were posses in which non-slaveowning whites were compelled to participate that search for blacks who were not on plantations. These patrols were often vehicles of arbitrary abuse. They were also a key social institution by which the slaveowners won the support of non-slaveholders for the Peculiar Institution. Free whites who might be inclined to violent anger against wealthy slaveowners were given in the slave patrols the opportunity to vent their anger on vulnerable blacks, slave and free.

These patrols were instruments of state terror against slaves and any whites who might attempt to assist escaping slaves. They were also a direct precursor of Reconstruction-era terrorist organizations of which the Ku Klux Klan was the most infamous.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, slavery

The road to prosecution

Raúl Alfonsín of Argentina: he also had to deal with his predecessors' torture crimes

Following the story of the torture prosecution issue the last few days has been a lot like watching an out-of-control car careering down the freeway. While the Highway Patrol is broadcasting special alerts nonstop saying, "Pay no attention to reports of an out-of-control car on the freeway. We need to look forward, not backward."

It may be wishful thinking. But despite the fainting spells over the whole thing among the Beltway Villagers at the thought that fine public servants like Dick Cheney and Abu Gonzales might be in legal trouble, last Thursday's release of the explicit torture memos may turn out to be a breaking point in the process of accountability for the torture policy. The information that is coming out since then and the increasing anxiety among those at risk for prosecution and their political allies definitely has the feeling of a new stage in this thing.

The collapse of our national news media has given this entire debate over torture for the last five years an unreal nature that it never should have acquired. Torture is a crime. It's a crime in American law and a crime in international law fully binding on the United States. And the pertetrators don't get to define torture; its definition is well established in the statutory law and case law, not least of which are case prosecuted against torturers by the United States itself in the past.

Our off-the-tracks news media and Beltway Village pundits have been discussing this in the manner that they have trained their Village-friendly minds to work: the horse race is the most interesting thing to report (who's bringing pressure on who, in this case); Republicans are more credible on "national security" (thus a group of operatives tying up a prisoner and subjecting him to the drowning torture is a sign of manly toughness); members in good standing in the Village should never be held legally accountable for their actions (while rude outsiders like the Clintons should be prosecuted for things they didn't do); Democrats must always show their credibility by siding with Republicans against the dreaded "left" (like law-and-order advocates who want to see torturers prosecuted).

This boneheaded foolishness renders it almost impossible for pundits to address this extremely serious issue in a serious way. As Obama finally stated clearly today, at least in regard to the Mob-lawyer actions of the government attorneys involved in facilitating the torture program, the decision on prosecuting criminals is not his to make. It the duty of the Attorney General - the legal duty that is especially sharply defined by treaties in the case of torture - to honestly investigate and prosecute torture crimes where there is sufficient evidence to prosecute. If the Villagers weren't so obsessed with protecting their own, and the reporters weren't so obsessed with protecting their precious "access" so they can write puff pieces and put out spin on behalf of their favorite politicians, they would be treating it as a scandal in the making that the Obama administration seems to be trying to avoid doing their straightforward legal duty on the torture crimes.

Let me say here that I'm not trying to make a judgment about what Obama's longer-term game plan may be. I'm trying to stick to what he's actually doing and what we clearly know about that. I'm convinced that as a political matter he would rather avoid it. Although why that should be so is no small mystery to me: how is exposing something that utterly discredits the opposition party a political liability? I'm assuming it's because he really would like to govern as a bring-everyone-together bipartisan concilator. But the very fact that the previous administration committed such serious crimes and that the Republican Party loyally supported it in doing so, that in itself makes it difficult for the Republicans to act in such a broadly bipartisan way, even if they were otherwise inclined to do so. Which they aren't.

What I will say is that Obama is clearly not cutting off all retreat for himself on the matter of prosecutions. At the risk of sounding like a starry-eyed fanboy, I would even say that his actions so far have not been inconsistent with a conscious policy of building a political demand for torture prosecutions such that it will force the Democrats in Congress to act like they have some backbone on the issue. I don't think that's actually what he's been attempting. I think he would like to have a way to avoid prosecuting the torture perpetrations for those high-minded "reasons of state". But it was specifically to rule out such discretion for "reasons of state" that the Torture Convention is so specific about the requirement to prosecute.

Dick Cheney made a somewhat strange statement Monday evening that he was asking the CIA to release currently classified information that would support his case that torture produced useful intelligence information. You have to wonder if he fully understands he's no longer running the government. More likely, he's invited torture supporters to selectively leak information to support that case.

Cheney is a genuinely evil man and his policies have produced more than one disaster. But he's no dummy. He's going with the flow here. Transparency won out on Obama's release of the torture memos. Cheney and other torture supporters blasted him for endangering national security by doing so. Now Cheney is challenging Obama to be even more transparent and release information about the specific information gained from torture victims. As long as the administration holds back on that information, the torture supporters can say, look Obama is helping The Terrorists by releasing the torture memos but abusing the power of secrecy by holding on to information that proves that torture helped prevent terrorist attacks.

Mark Danner points out the dilemma of such a state of affair in his New York Review of Books piece, The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means 04/02/09:

Unfortunately, these contrary accounts, however convincing ... generally come from unnamed officials and cannot serve as definitive proof, or as a sufficiently credible repudiation of what former officials, including the President of the United States, still assert. Far from ending the discussion about whether torture really was, as Cheney insists, "absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack," these ongoing battles between extravagant claims and undermining leaks will ensure that it persists.

It is because of the claim that torture protected the US that the many Americans who still nod their heads when they hear Dick Cheney's claims about the necessity for "tough, mean, dirty, nasty" tactics in the war on terror respond to its revelation not by instantly condemning it but instead by asking further questions. For example: Was it necessary? And: Did it work? To these questions the last president and vice-president, who "kept the country safe" for "seven-plus years," respond "yes," and "yes." And though as time passes the numbers of those insisting on asking those questions, and willing to accept those answers, no doubt falls, it remains significant, and would likely grow substantially after another successful attack.

This political fact partly explains why, when it comes to torture, we seem to be a society trapped in a familiar and never-ending drama. For though some of the details provided — and officially confirmed for the first time — in the ICRC report are new, and though the first-person accounts make chilling reading and have undoubted dramatic power, one can't help observing that the broader discussion of torture is by now in its essential outlines nearly five years old, and has become, in its predictably reenacted outrage and defiant denials from various parties, something like a shadow play.

Only the kind of definitive, court-vetted, legally-binding accounting that well-designed prosecutions will provide are going to lay the facts out in a way that will minimize the liklihood of such a thing ever recurring. That's what restoring the rule of law means.

It also reminds us of the balance that has to be struck between arguing against torture based on its inherent evil and arguing against it on pragmatic grounds, e.g., that it doesn't work. To put the moral case most bluntly, even if it is a valuable way to obtain information, torture is still wrong because it's a fundamental violation of human dignity and because it inevitably victimizes innocent people.

On the other hand, the pragmatica argument can't be entirely ignored because advocates of torture always use the argument that they are protecting us from the Very Scary People, whoever those may be at the moment. There's no doubt that torture sometimes produces accurate and/or useful information. There's also so serious doubt that non-torture interrogative techniques and the normal processes of law produced consistently better information.

And opponents of torture need to demand that torture supporters cop to the other known realities about torture. We know that torture produces bad information, more bad information than good. Acting on bad information often produces real damage. We also know that the use of torture means innocent people with no terrorist secrets to tell are injured in any torture program. We know torture produces false confessions, which in the case of real crimes committed means the guilty go free to commit more crimes. We know that torture's main function is as a tool of state terror, not as a tool of criminal investigation; the latter is only an excuse for the former.

The reality is that none of these "practical" consequences is entirely inseparable from the "moral" problems of torture. Opponents of torture and advocates of prosecuting torture crimes don't need to be afraid of discovering that some torture session sometime produced some kind of information that proved useful to law enforcement in some way.

This comic-book argument about the "ticking-time-bomb scenario" also deserves to be buried. Calling it sophomoric is an insult to even the most negative connotation of "sophomore", i.e., if we actually know someone has the vital information on the fabled ticking time bomb, why can't those same powers of telepathy tell us where the bomb is? It's a sign of the depths to which our public discussion has sunk that such a notion has been discussed by respected officials and Big Pundits for years now as though it were something other than the most simple-minded comic-book fantasy.

All of which is a way of saying, the Obama administration should call Cheney's bluff on this and get out as much material on this as they can. And use it in criminal prosecutions against the torture perpetrators.

I also want to mention again here that the torture apologists are not arguing any longer about an eminent repeat of 9/11. They are arguing that torture should be a permanent option in American policy.

It's also important to watch how the press and the administration use the word "torture". They shouldn't be using euphemisms about this any more. Torture is a crime. The odious Karl Rove told Sean Hannity on the subject of prosecuting torturers, "What they've essentially said is, If we have policy disagreements with our predecessors, what we're going to do is we're going to turn ourselves into the moral equivalent of a Latin American country run colonels in mirrored sunglasses."

No, the task facing the United States legal system right now is the task facing government that the one faced by the government of the late Raúl Alfonsín of Argentina: prosecuting the crimes of the military junta that ruled Argentina prior to the restoration of democratic government in 1983.

I would note also that Spencer Ackerman, who is one of our better young journalists in Washington - an actual journalist, not a Village Idiot - is reporting on yet another unreleased torture memo in DOJ Sits on Secret CIA Interrogation Memo Washington Independent 4/21/09.

Tags: accountability for torture, torture

Is this what Cheney meant by all the useful intelligence we got from torturing people?

Jonathan Landay of McClatchy Newspapers, one news organization that distinguished itself by actually doing journalism during the Cheney-Bush adminstration, paticularly on intelligence issues, write in Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link 04/21/09.

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime. [my emphasis]

This is one of the inevitable abuses when a government starts torturing people systematically. In this case, you have to wonder if the main initial motivation of beginning the torture program for some of the senior-level perpetrators was their desire to concoct a phony case to invade Iraq.

Tags: accountability for torture, torture

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 22: Good overseer help is hard to find

Fleeing slaves

Reading Southern planters' journals from the antebellum days offers some insights into the functioning of the Peculiar Institution of slavery that were surely unintentional by the original writers. I'm quoting today from "On the conduct of Overseers and the general management of a Plantation" by an anonymous "Well Wisher" in the Southern Agriculturist and Register of Rural Affairs, a periodical published in Charleston, South Carolina, from 1828-1839. Well Wisher's article appeared in the October 1836 edition.

South Carolina was the hotbed of secessionist sentiment, from the Nullification Controversy during the institutional lifetime of the Southern Agriculturist to South Carolina taking upon itself the treasonous distinction of being the first state to secede from the Union in December of 1860. Neither the editors nor most of the readers of the Southern Agriculturist would have taken a skeptical position toward the institution of slavery itself.

Well Wisher was offering practical management advice for the hiring of overseers. Overseers were hired by slaveowners to manage their human property, and the slave drivers were the overseers deputies who dealt directly with the slaves. On larger plantations, the overseers would often have been more the face of slavery than the masters themselves. And in South Carolina in particular, for large portions of the year during the summers, the masters wouldn't even be present, so the overseers would have even more discretion in that situation. In this article, Well Wisher is encouraging masters to not be excessively stingy in paying overseers:

I am frequently perusing your valuable journal, and in your March number saw an extract of an address delivered by Mr. Seabrook, before the United Agricultural Society of South-Carolina. It is from some remarks which he has made concerning overseers, that has occasioned me to take up my pen. He there mentions, that from the sickness of the climate, the planting interest in the low, and unhealthy part of the state, has to be left to the overseers, and the great responsibility which is devolved upon them, and the great chance that they have to abuse it. I agree with the gentleman, that it is a responsible office, and one the abuse of which causes the ruin of many in a great degree, and therefore I would say to those, be choice in selecting a man for such a responsible situation; get one of tried fidelity, if not of your own trying, of your neighbour's trying. If you cannot have his entire services, join your interest with your neighbour, so far as to have a competent man to look over your business. There are many men that embark into the overseeing business, for an easy life; they are too lazy to work, and for that reason they will try to get an overseers birth [berth, position]. He is willing to live for a small salary, rather than go to the plough handle, and he calculates he can there indulge himself to his satisfaction.

His wages are low, and he is not going to exert himself on that account; he is at the height of his ambition, he does not care whether he establishes character as a planter and manager, or not; neither does he care whether he accumulates any property for himself, or not; for I have known men that have been overseeing for several years, at a fair salary, and have not added $500 to their capital in the time, and depend upon it, a man that can make himself so easy as that when self-interest is at stake, is not going to do much for his employer; but if the employer cannot see for himself, it is little worth while to try to open his eyes. There are many of them, that can employ a man for a reduced price, and because they get him for a trifle, they will keep him: at the same time, he takes no interest for his employer. He can amuse himself with his gun and dogs every day; he will say, my hands [slaves] are at their task, and the drivers are there, and they can see the work done.

The assumptions here include the following:

• Despite the patriarchal ideology by which slaveowners justified their ownership of other human beings in which the master cared for his slaves like members of his family, in fact many masters left direct management of the slaves to overseers and drivers, often without the owner even being present for long periods of the year.

• The overseers frequently abused their power over their slaves.

• Overseers were not the sort of person that slaveowners considered entirely respectable, nor were they noted for their high sense of responsibility.

• The fact that overseers were so frequently negligent and not-so-responsible characters raises obvious questions about the alleged superior productivity of slavery as a system of production which was claimed by its supporters.

• In fact, overseer abuse was so common that it "causes the ruin of many in a great degree", which not only points to the frequency of abuse conduct but also raises a question about the alleged superiority of the slave system of production.

• Overseers weren't paid very well, which means the job probably didn't attract the most competent managers.

• Many overseers are the sort of men who "takes no interest for his employer". Well Wisher makes it clear that he is more concerned with the production side of that interest than the alleged patriarchal obligations of the slaveowners. But obviously this mitigates the claim that the self-interest of the slaveowner was the best guarantee against abuses to the slaves.

• The overseer often feels free to "amuse himself with his gun and dogs every day". Well Wisher doesn't mention it. But the overseers also had human being with which to amuse himself as well, both sexually and in terms of abuse of power in other ways. And such occurrences were common in reality.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, slavery

Obama and the Establishment press, Week 13

One writer I don't quote nearly enough is Robert Perry of ConsortiumNews.com. In US News Media Fails America, Again 04/13/09, he lays out a brief history of how our Establishment media got to the point they did. There are so many major problems with our press no moderate-length article could possibly do justice to them. But this is a worthwhile overview. I found it especially useful in describing how the Republicans (he calls them "the Right", which is not strictly the same) managed to get such a Republican-friendly viewpoint so thoroughly embedded in our mass media.

Eric Boehlert points out how FOX News is reinventing itself as a loudspeaker for the "Patriot militia" far right and more actively mainstreaming crackpot extremist ideas in his Media Matters column of 04/16/09, Fox News' militia media: mainstreaming the fringe:

But let's take a step back and see just how extraordinary Fox News' latest lurch to the revolutionary right really is. And let's clearly understand how Fox News is actively trying to mainstream fringe allegations, how Murdoch's outlet functions as a crucial bridge -- a transmitter -- between the radical and the everyday.

What Fox News, and specifically Beck, is doing in early 2009 is giving a voice -- a national platform -- to the same deranged, hard-core haters who hounded the new, young Democratic president in the early 1990s in the wake of Waco (i.e. the Clinton Chronicles crowd). What Fox News is doing today is embracing the same kind of hate rhetoric and doomsday conspiratorial talk that flourished during the '90s, and Fox News is now dumping all that rancid stuff into the mainstream. It's legitimizing accusatory hate speech in a way no other television outlet in America ever has before.

Today's unhinged, militia-flavored attacks from the right against Obama are clearly reminiscent of 1993 and 1994 and the kind of tribal reaction conservatives had to the Democratic White House. What's different this time around is that that it's being adopted and broadcast nationally by Fox News, as it proudly mainstreams and validates the fringe.

For the past week, less significant than the continuing fanaticism and dishonesty of FOX News was the miserable failure of the Establishment press to deal adequately with the implications of the release of the latest torture memos. I've been posting about this already. George Stephanopoulos showed the frivolous attitude of the Beltway Villag toward the crime of torture in his weekend interview with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel. He waited unto the very end of his segment with Rahm to bring it up, and introduced his question as, "Final quick question." The PBS Newshour put on a shameful display of what passes for "quality journalism" on the torture story this past Friday. The Newshour did much better in a news segment on Monday. But that Friday Political Wrap is a showpiece example of the problems afflicting our national press corps.

The bankruptcy of our press corps on this issue is breathtaking. In terms of restoring the rule of law and maintaining Constitutional democracy, it's probably even more serious than the bankruptcy of major financial institutions.

Tags: establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press

Credit where due

Having bashed the PBS Newshour for its Beltway Village Idiot segment on torture during its Friday Political Wrap segment, I want to give them credit for their lead segment on 04/20/09, Obama Faced Tough Choices in Release of CIA Interrogation Memos.

This segment provided one of the best airings of the legal issues involved that I've seen on TV so far. (Admittedly, that could be construed as faint praise.)

The segment focused on the critical issue of prosecuting those at all levels who perpetrated the torture crimes. The anti-prosecution position was represented by former CIA official Jeffrey Smith, the pro-law-enforcement position by Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been doing excellent work on this issue.

True, Jeffrey Smith was straightforwardly advocating that people who violated the torture laws should not be prosecuted for their crimes. Despite initial disclaimers, it was clear that he also opposed prosecuting senior officials involved in the torture program, as well as opposing prosecuting the hands-on torturers. But, sadly, that has become a "respectable" position, at least in the Beltway. So far, a majority of the public are saying that torturers should be investigated for their crimes.

Here's an excerpt:

MICHAEL RATNER: I have no doubt that the people who wrote the memos, as well as the principal committee people, like Rumsfeld, Tenet, who was head of the CIA, Porter Goss, when all of the torture program occurred, should be criminally investigated.

I think the evidence is clear. It's actually screaming at us from the page. When Dick Cheney says, "I was one of the people who approved waterboarding and I would do it again," you realize why you need prosecution for deterrence. There's no issue.

And I do want to say that Obama has -- while he has not completely precluded prosecution of the architects, he has made statements that make you very, very worried, statements like, "We shouldn't seek retribution," that we shouldn't look backward, that we should look forward, that "I'm stopping torture." Those kinds of statements don't just apply to the agents who did it, but who apply to the upper-level people who were the architects.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Ratner, your use of the word -- you said it may not be a deterrence issue -- do you think it's a punishment issue? In other words, should these people be punished whether or not it's a deterrence for future conduct or not?

MICHAEL RATNER: Look, I'm less concerned about punishment, vengeance, whatever word you want to use, deterrence.

JIM LEHRER: OK.

MICHAEL RATNER: I'm concerned -- punishment. I'm really concerned about deterrence. I just worry very deeply that another president can simply say, "Let's do this again."

And one of the interesting things when we talk about this, you know, two of the people -- and that was one of the disturbing things about Obama's speech -- two of the people who he began the speech with...

JIM LEHRER: You mean today, the speech today at the CIA?

MICHAEL RATNER: Yes, the speech today, Steve Kappes and John Brennan are two people who were at the agency in important roles when the torture program was being carried out by the CIA, and these are people who Obama said he is currently getting advice from. I don't find that reassuring when I think about how is this country going to be torture-free going forward. [my emphasis]

John Brennan, you may recall, was the one Obama appointment that the much-dreaded dirty hippie bloggers had very sharply opposed. And opposed because of his pro-torture record.

Tags: pbs newshour, torture

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 21: Strategic issues in the slavery controversy

Republican Senator Jacob Collamer of Vermont

Earlier this month, I quoted Vermont's Republican Sen. Jacob Collamer on Congressional war power from a speech of his dated Feb. 21, 1859 as printed in The Congressional Globe, in which he was responding to comments from pro-slavery Democratic President James Buchanan asking for Presidential powers to take military action against nations south of the border. This was a continuation of long-standing Slave Power attempts to take Cuba and other Latin American territories to form new slave states.

In that same speech, he addressed those concerns more explicitly:

Mr. President [addressing the President of the Senate], as to the mode of obtaining these countries - I mean Central America, and, if you please, Mexico - do you not perceive that one of the objects which the southern people entertain is this very thing: how is it to be done? The President [Buchanan] apparently indorses [sic] their view. He sends in his message here recommending to us that he be clothed with power to establish military posts in Chihauhua and Sonora. ... The truth is, as he says, that our poor little weak neighbors down south of us are constantly marauding upon our people, invading their rights, violating their personal liberties, depriving them of their property, they are a sort of gang of outlaws upon us. It seems we have no good neighbors, especially if they are weak ones. Now, what is to be done with them? The president asks of us to invest him with power - and a bill is now before us for that purpose - to use the fore of the Army and Navy of the United States in procuring redress for such a violation. The bill before us does not provide anything in relation to making defense; it is not to defend our people that that bill is introduced. [my emphasis]

The slave state representatives in Congress pushed more and more over time for military expansion to secure more slave territory. This was the major issue at stake in the domestic arguments over the Mexican War (Guerra de los Estados Unidos a México) of 1846-48.

Collamer continues later in the speech:

The honorable Senator from Louisiana very eloquently described to us the condition of the West India Islands, and the havoc which he said had been produced by their attempt at emancipation, and the introduction of coolies, and other abortive efforts of that kind; and he says the danger is that the whole of that fertile region of the tropics will be entirely desolated, unless we take it and introduce our system of slavery. To aid us further in that, he proceeds to describe to us the tyranny inflicted on that people. First, having informed us that the slave-owners in Cuba, for nearly two hundred years have been using up African slaves, and coining them into sugar, molasses coffee, tobacco, and cigars, at the rate of some sweeping amount, so that twenty or thirty years suffice to carry over the whole mass of them [i.e., they die out in that period of time] - such is the cruelty and severity with which slavery is conducted in that country - he then tells us how much these very slave-owners are domineered and tyrannized over by the power of Spain. He then, I take it, addresses this nation now to come to the rescue. This is addressed to the whole United States - the people of the free States - to come to the rescue. This is addressed to the whole United States - the people of the free States - to come to the rescue. What is it? He seems to assume that it is our mission upon this earth to undertake a great crusade to right the wrongs of Cuba, and especially to relieve those cruel and domineering men who coin the blood of Africans into sugar to relieve themselves from the oppressions of Spain. Are they not a strange people to appeal to us for such help? Is it possible that gentlemen can use an argument of that kind with any idea that it will reach the hearts of the northern people? Do they mean to say to our people, "we want you to make slavery perpetual thorough all the West India Islands and the tropics, and help the masters from being in any way frustrated in this design by any foreign country?" The eloquence of the Senator from Louisiana for such a purpose is almost equal to, and almost as reasonable as, the eloquence of Peter the Hermit, when he preached the crusades of the middle ages. Sir, we will respond to nothing of that kind. We do not believe these men entitled to our help. They have manifested no such character as lays foundation for any claim upon our humanity; nor does the great purpose for which he asks our aid, address itself any better to our assistance. [my emphasis]

The cynicism of the Southern expansionists in trying to justify a war of aggression and conquest to expand slavery as a way to save others from tyranny and abusive conditions is amazing, even at this distance in time. And it's a reminder of how much even foreign policy questions had come to be dominated by the Slave Power's increasingly desperate desire to defend and expand their Peculiar Institution.

The last couple of sentences also imply none-too-subtly that slaveowners in the Southern US also have rather dubious claims on the cooperation of the free states more generally.

Collamer also addresses a key strategic question that seems to get insufficient weight in today's considerations of the stakes in the Civil War. The slave representatives had argued as a reason for taking Cuba that it could potentially be used as a base for restricting American commerce through New Orleans. Collamer rejects that notion as false. But he picks up on it to explain how the existence of a Southern Confederacy would strategically affect the United States:

One of those sentiments entertained, against which the honorable Senator from South Carolina labored with his people, was this desire of separation, secession, division of the Union. Among our great securities against such a result, was this very river Mississippi. We have believed that while the Alleghany Mountains stood where they do, and while the Mississippi flows where it does, a division of this Union is impracticable - absolutely impracticable. The whole of the head waters of the Mississippi and its branches are inhabited by the people of the free States. There never was, and never will be, a successful commercial people upon the face of this earth, that have the outlet and the inlet to their commerce in the hands of a foreign nation. It never can be endured. Our first settlement upon the Ohio, when the mouth of the Mississippi river was in the hands of Spain, was broken up; at least, it did not progress any; but the moment Spain refused to renew her treaty, they threatened to go down there and take possession of that country, even in that infancy of the Government. Now, sir, the natural outlet of all that region drained by the Mississippi and its upper tributaries, the whole region beyond the Ohio, Kentucky, western Virginia on each side, or, if you please, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, is by the way of the Mississippi.

This is the great channel of commerce, and always must be. I can merely say, if the slave States of this Union form a Confederacy, and choose to make a separate nation by themselves, they cannot retain the mouth of the Mississippi unless they take those western States in with them; and then they will be in the same condition of division and conflict that they are now. Those States [the free states along the northern Mississippi River] will of course take possession of it; and that divides your supposed and projected kingdom utterly in two.

This is also a reason that it's absurd to argue, as Lost Cause advocates often do, that the South just wanted to secede and live peacefully with the United States. Not only would the disputes over escaping slaves have intensified if the Union had been weak and foolish enough to adopt such an approach. But the stranglehold of the Confederacy over commerce on the Mississippi would have allowed them to exert tremendous pressure to pull additional states into the Confederacy and out of the Union.

Despite the common stereotype of Thomas Jefferson as sentimentally pro-French, during his Presidency's early years, control of New Orleans was the critical issue in his foreign policy. In his view, whatever power controlled New Orleans was the natural enemy of the United States.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, new orleans