In a weird way it is a bit of a relief to think about something deeply personal in response to the orgy of insanity that is the US electoral season. If not for this family thing, I'd be thinking about how maddening it is that among the highest laws of Respectable Political Discourse enforced by the mainstream media is a bipartisan respect for the honor, integrity, and moderate sensibility of Colin Powell, all of it a huge lie. And I'd be thinking, like Chris Floyd, about how BO's acceptance of an endorsement from a blood-drenched war criminal like Powell is yet another disturbing revelation about who Obama really is.
Instead of all that, I'm wondering how they're resolving their cognitive dissonance back home. My initial assumption was that their heads must have exploded. They fucking love them some Colin Powell, and Colin Powell just endorsed a secret Muslim terrorist for President.... HEAD ASPLODE!!! Maybe they'll rationalize and figure that he knew Obama was going to win anyway, so he might as well give a meaningless endorsement to help himself somehow (which does seem like a pretty good explanation for his actions). So maybe they'll excuse him on those grounds.
But then I started to think about how the reason Colin Powell is so universally beloved is because he's black (at least by American one-drop-of-African-blood standards, cause really his actual skin tone is very light), because he's a highly-decorated military man, and because he tells people what they want to hear. Bipartisan respectable Americans love the military and are racist in the same back-room way as my family, so it gives them great pleasure to have a negro in a high place ("one of the good ones") telling them what they want to hear, especially a (4 star) general who can make us all feel like American use of force is something other than the industrial-scale imperial terrorism that it really is. So that's why Powell has such a counter-factual public image, and why my family loves him.
Now that Powell is off the Republican reservation, endorsing "the most liberal member of Congress" who has deep associations with known terrorists (as opposed to actually being a terrorist bomber like McCain was), now Powell isn't telling my family what they want to hear. So maybe they'll actually decide they never really loved him in the first place, never trusted him. Those blacks, you know how they always stick together. It is probably Powell's fault that we never caught Bin Laden and aren't doing so great in Iraq! He probably was secretly undermining Bush all along, as part of his secret liberal agenda. Now we know what he really is, an Arab-loving commie traitor who hates America and always has! I'm getting a bit loopy here, but I'm serious that I think this kind of retroactive denunciation might be how they'll respond. But who knows. Maybe I'll find out somehow.
Alright, well I'm hoping to go home for Christmas this year, and there's some (very small) chance that some people in my family might actually read this, so I should do some damage control. First of all, my level of frustration and outrage with this unending election is getting a bit out of control, so maybe that is messing with my head a bit. Second of all, all the non-speculative things I said about you* are true. Most notably for its potential controversy, you're racist. If you don't like it that I think that, maybe you should have given me a reason to think otherwise. But there's always a chance to change that. None of this means I don't love you guys. It just means that I have some very serious problems with some of what you say and do, and that these relate to the very serious problems I have with US politics.
I don't know if that was actually damage control or not, but apparently I've been needing to write something like this, so here it is.
*Note that by "you" I'm not really talking about a specific person, but kind of the average of a group of people. For example, if one or two people say or do overtly racist things, and nobody speaks up against it, everyone in that whole group gets the "you're racist" tag even if you yourself don't say racist things. By not resisting a culture of racism, "you" are racist. I think it is reasonable to see some people as more responsible for this than others, but everyone has a share. How you, the person reading this, specifically fit into all this is for you to decide I suppose. Feel free to talk to me about it.
Lastly, courtesy of Guys from Area 51:
6 comments:
I can assume from your blogging that you hold anyone involved in the U.S. military to account for their individual actions as soldiers. McCain's a terrorist because he bombed Vietnam, etc.
I think I understand why you would say this, and it stems from an ethical principle of nonviolence unless violence is necessary (just war, yada yada).
I wonder, how do you reconcile your judgment against individuals with ubiquitous and obvious human vulnerabilities to authority, power, conformity, and propaganda? This is something that has plagued me in my ethics class. Sure, we can judge people against an ethical ideal, but it leaves psychology entirely out of it. That, of course, begs the very difficult question of "to what degree, if any, can we relieve individuals of their moral burden due to their inherent cognitive vulnerabilities?" I understand societal structures perpetuate these vulnerabilities, but they exist, so that is the reality in which we must conduct at least part of our moral judgment.
I'm not disagreeing with you, or agreeing, but I think it's absolutely crucial to the argument you are making. It's not simple either. I'm just curious if you've considered this, and if so, what result that produced.
I understand the seeming dilemma you're mentioning but I actually think it is fairly easy to resolve. Consider a few dimensions:
John McCain killed civilians for political purposes, so he's a terrorist (just like a 9-11 hijacker). That is what he (they) did.
They both were following orders they felt overwhelmingly compelled to follow and bought into ridiculous propaganda. That is why they did it. (Although I should point out that McCain actively sought out the combat tours where he could be a part of these terrorist missions, so this section might better apply to a generic solider than to McCain)
John McCain still believes in what he did, and would do similar things again (or order them done). That is who he is.
I can judge actions, without judging a person. For example, someone who was in the military but is now a pacifist, I wouldn't judge them harshly as a person because they've learned. But I still judge his actions while in the military harshly.
I can feel sorry for a person while also judging them or their actions. This is how I feel about large numbers of Americans.
To your specific notion of "holding someone to account" for their actions, I'd say this: One's guilt or innocence is determined by the actions alone. The appropriate sentence for the guilty varies with circumstances. A deluded idiot following orders is more sympathetic than a McCain who wanted to go kill people.
Generally, judging actions is only one way of judging someone ethically. You can also judge the outcomes of their actions (utilitarian), or even judge the person's virtuousness itself (Aristotlean). Your statement towards the end actually skews moral judgment into Aristotlean terrain.
Leaving that aside for now, since you're using a comparison to a 9-11 hijacker, and you're analyzing actions, I could make the argument that the reasons behind the compulsion the hijacker felt was somewhat different than that which McCain felt. The hijacker's compulsion was based on a perceived threat that the U.S. posed to him and a strong religious component which backed this up. His compulsion led him to murder thousands of civilians who had little to do with U.S. military aggrandizement. The hijacker's authority structure (above him) was relatively weak, unless you consider the religious one. I think McCain was acting under an arguably similar power structure, but one with more formalism.
The nature of the two's actions, though, differs. McCain's actions were undertaken, again arguably, to protect a nation that had been attacked by another. His attacks were done in the hopes that they would kill the aggressors and save south vientamese life. His attacks might result in civilian deaths, but from a utilitarian standpoint, it could arguably be just.
Since you couched your argument in terms of this comparison, my counterargument is that the hijacker's and McCain's actions are not fully comparable. The difference in the actions is that one was aimed fully at civilians, the other at armed combatants. The line could be seen as blurring betwen civilians and combatants, but those who have raised arms against others are far more easily classified as combatants as those who have not.
Finally, your statement still does not fully address my question. I think you've confused my question by introducing this comparison, which appears to assume I've not appropriately equated McCain with the 9-11 guys. I think this is interesting but somewhat irrelevant. I'm thinking more generally. I want to figure out if and how to compensate for existing human deficiencies in moral judgment. People are generally moral, but they act immorally when psychology enters (authority, institutions, roles, etc). Who is the actor?
McCain killed plenty of civilians. His mission when he was captured was to bomb a power plant, which would have certainly led to civilian death and suffering. The entire use of US air power in Vietnam was to destroy the civilian population.
As to your final question (which I guess was also your original) I see no problem with assigning moral responsibility and blame to both the actor and the influencer. Everyone in the military chain of command, from the President down to the pilot is morally responsible for ordered actions.
by the way i think you've internalized some vietnam propaganda. you might want to reexamine some of your assumptions about what was going on in that conflict. chomsky is good on that, but i'm sure there are plenty of others.
there's a possibility that i'm just not reading carefully though and your point isn't about what actually was happening, but about what the average bomber believed was happening.
but even if you want to make the case that McCain believed the civilians he was killing were armed combatants (and then setting aside the debate as to whether killing an armed man defending his home from invasion is just), couldn't you make the same argument about the 9-11 guys? didn't they believe that the people they killed deserved what they were getting?
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