Summary: It’s the time of year to look back on our deeds of the past year, and contemplate what we’ll do in the next. In the past American could think of bold exploration ventures (from Lewis & Clark to Apollo), great projects of domestic infrastructure (from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highways), and expansions of civil rights (from Emancipation to the 1960s). What have we to look back upon with pride? Or forward to with expectation?
… the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
— From C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, chapter VII
Americans watch Zero Dark Thirty’s depiction of torture, exulting in their moral decay:
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Contents
- Stage One: the rot starts in the government
- Stage Two: decay of professional institutions
- Stage Three: evil takes root in our hearts
- What comes next?
- For More Information
(1) Stage One: the rot starts in the government
Dark deeds were done in the Cold War, fighting a superpower in the shadow of atomic war. Sometime during those years evil took root in our government’s national security apparatus. Exposing soldiers to test their resistance to radiation. Testing LSD on government employees. Massive secret domestic surveillance programs. All this and more was revealed during the 1970s, especially by the 1975 Church Committee hearings.
Then Bush Jr’s neoconservatives exploited America’s panic after 9-11 — shattering our illusions of olympian invulnerability — to lead us into the pit. Nothing new, but embracing torture and assassination on a larger scale and openly.
And, of course, involving us in combat with more foreign insurgents — dirty wars, which have a long history of corrupting armies. All supported by a scaffolding of lies.
To see the effect on our armed forces: Bleak news, but vital for us to understand: American Morlocks: Another Civilian Massacre and the Savagery of Our Soldiers, 17 March 2012.
(2) Stage Two: decay of professional institutions
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In May 2011 I wrote More symptoms of decay: professional associations abandoning their standards and obligation to protect us. The following paragraphs still chill me to read…
The deterioration in the Republic proceeds at a speed beyond my worst fears (underestimating this was my worst mistake on these pages in 2010). Not just the government, although its institutions rot at an alarming rate. Torture, surveillance, assassination, foreign wars based on lies — the by now usual long list. It’s the failure of our private institutions that astonishes me. The ones that the Founders hoped would contain the government and defend our liberties.
Now attorneys write briefs justifying torture, wars without legal authorization, surveillance and detention without warrant, and indeed limitless Executive power under the authoritarian justification of the President as Commander in Chief. It’s not just lone actors, as the State legal associations have de facto ratified these actions though their inaction (e.g, the Pennsylvania Bars inaction on John Yoo, and the Alaska Bar inviting him to be their keynote speaker). And judges openly applauding the President’s violation of the laws.
Perhaps worse (as we expect little good from attorneys) even doctors participate in torture. Long rumored, now documented in “Neglect of Medical Evidence of Torture in Guantánamo Bay: A Case Series“, Vincent Iacopino (Adjunct Prof of Medicine, U of Minnesota) and Stephen N. Xenakis (Brigadier General, US Army, retired), PLOS Medicine, April 2011. Will the State Medical Associations act on this clear violation of medical ethics? {No, they didn’t. But the Brits did, see BBC, 21 December 2012.}
(3) Stage Three: evil takes root in our hearts
The rot has spread throughout the American people. Future historians might date our fall from the release of Zero Dark Thirty, and enthusiastic audiences watching a man tortured, leading to the hit by a heavily armed high-tech special ops team on an unarmed old guy and some women living in a suburban house. It’s mostly lies, but we prefer the lies to the truth — another sign that we’ve crossed a red line between civilization and moral decay.
For more about this see:
- Bloodlust – a natural by-product of a long war?
- No longer a danger, but a reality: bloodlust in our minds, an inevitable side-effect of a long war.
- National decay starts at the heart, and spreads like cancer
- Bin Laden won, with our assistance. Our applause shows the scale of his victory. About Zero Dark Thirty
(4) What comes next?
This decay has been documented on the FM website since we began in 2007. It has spread faster than in my worst nightmare, yet still most Americans remain oblivious to our rapid degeneration. When and where will it end?
Think of the unthinkable, then remember it can happen here. Remember how easily the NAZI’s got regular people to participate in their horrific activities. Research since then has provided more evidence, as in the Milgram experiment (getting regular people to torture; Wikipedia) and in the Stanford experiments (regular people quickly became cruel power-made jailers; Wikipedia).
Once a people are corrupted there are few limits to what follows. That might be the big lesson from Germany in the 1930s. For details see “Nazi Atrocities, Committed by Ordinary People“, Der Spiegel, 18 March 2008. For more evidence see these books: Christopher R. Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1991), Jan T. Gross’ Neighbors: the Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001), and Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996).
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I maintain that the very best of men may be coarsened and hardened into a brute by habit. Blood and power intoxicate; coarseness and depravity are developed; the mind and the heart are tolerant of the most abnormal things till at last they come to relish them. The man and the citizen is lost forever in the tyrant, and the return to human dignity, to repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible. … Society which looks indifferently on such a phenomenon is already contaminated to its very foundation.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Memoirs from the House of The Dead (1861), about the life of convicts in a Siberian prison camp
(5) For More Information
Nothing shows our decay like our changed attitude toward torture. See these posts for detailed evidence:
- Something every American should read, 25 March 2009 — Details about CIA torture programs
- We close our eyes to torture by our government. The Brits are stronger., 9 April 2009
- So many Americans approve of torture; what does this tell us about America?, 30 April 2009
- The Reverse Nuremberg Defense – “We were just giving orders“, 20 May 2009
- Our government does torture, but it is just like the treatment of young reporters by newspapers, 16 February 2010
- The US government at work, doing dark deeds in our name, 13 March 2010
- Reading about American torturers is a bummer. Let’s close our eyes and pretend it didn’t happen, and will not happen again., 22 March 2010
- An expert speaks to us about torture, 5 May 2010
- The long-term consequences to America of torturing Bradley Manning, 15 March 2011
- More symptoms of decay: professional associations abandoning their standards and obligation to protect us, 4 May 2011
They’re fighting over us
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