It doesn’t matter. I have a startling concept for you: there are people in the world whose politics are informed by factors beyond total self-interest. Wacky, eh?
Indeed. One often hears this from self-righteous college kids. Sometimes they posture a bit. And in the course of so posturing, they can and sometimes do join that small but vocal percentage of people whose politics are informed by the belief that every single act the government undertakes in pursuance of crime and/or terrorism prevention is proof positive that the dark night of fascism is nigh in North America.
I think many of us old farts who are inclined to look a bit askance at this sort of attitudinizing will agree, privately or publicly, that we vote and form our opinions based on what we hope to be enlightened self-interest.
Maybe yes, maybe no, Foam, but from what I’ve read in history class, the advent of facism has less to do with “self-righteous college kids” and more to do with “old farts” whose hopes of enlightened self-interest fall through when they finally realize that the world won’t listen to them just because they’re pissed off at it.
In other words, while you aren’t actually a facist, you’re the closest thing to it in this debate.
Handy rationalization.
Stoid
45 and counting…
I work for an immigration law firm. Not only have various aftereffects of 9/11 made my job a fucking nightmare, as the U.S. immigration authorities have been behaving in a manner even more devoid of common sense than previously was the case, but I have to do twice as much work in order to achieve the same result. They make up nonexistent rules and criteria for cases for which the legislation hasn’t changed, and I am expected to jump through all sorts of hoops to comply with their irrational and stupid demands. I am a big ball of stress; I’ve had an increased number of asthma attacks, just as one small example, and the fact that I am unable to sleep at nearly 4 am should also say something about my stress level. I am searched at least once on nearly every flight I board.
Plus I know fully well that many other people have it much worse than I do. I am a native-born US citizen, but many of my friends and acquaintances are not, and when they hurt, I hurt too. Are we not all human beings? I think too many people in positions of power forget that. If we treat people as less than human because of where they happen to have been born or what their religion is, then we are morally no better than those who treat Americans, or Christians, or Jews badly because of the facts of their birth or faith. No, so far we’re not killing most of them, but this is only a matter of degree if we are responsible for their suffering.
FoamChomsky, your question puts me in mind of a certain Martin Niemoller quote.
Although some would say that the word “enlightened” could often be dropped from such a sentence.
To Linty:
I am not entirely a “facist”, as you suggest, although I will concede that I do look at people’s faces when they speak to me. I am sometimes also a “bodyist”, and in certain instances a “hairist.”
To Eva:
I cannot tell from your post if you are in fact a lawyer, though your exposition leads me to suspect that you are. Specifically this:
I think you just described the vicissitudes of being a lawyer in these times in general, rather than of lawyering in the wake of 9/11 and increased security provisions. Wanna hear some good stories about professional liability premiums and how they skyrocketed after the attacks? Show me an unstressed lawyer and I’ll show you one who’s not practicing, or who derives his or her income from other sources.
Cute, Foam. Can you do reasoned well-thought out arguments too, or do you specialize in laughing at typos and lawyer-bashing?
When you make the same mistake multiple times in one post times in one post, Linty, I don’t think they call that a typo.
And I am anything but a lawyer-basher. Most of my friends are lawyers, and in fact I myself have been one for just under 20 years.
I’m not a lawyer, but I’m an immigration paralegal. So no professional liability premiums, but even less control over my work or how I do it.
And it seriously is ttaking twice as much work to get cases approved. In many situations, we are trying to get someone an extension of a work visa that was approved 2-3 years ago. Technically the legal criteria for the case haven’t changed and the person’s job hasn’t changed, but the BCIS will pick to death every conceivable detail and kick the case back, sometimes multiple times, for every conceivable reason and quite a few inconceivable ones. No common sense or logic whatsoever. Believe me, I’m as much a fan of naitonal security as anyone else - I work about 100 yards from the Sears Tower - but is this really going to accomplish anything?
You ask how I have been personaly injured?
I am ashamed that my country is holding one of its citizens without allowing him to confront the evidence against him. I am outraged that another US citizen is being held without access to counsel.
I am horrified that my government has created a new class of “domestic terrorists” entitled to less than full constitutional rights, and am dismayed should law enforcement be permitted to conduct searches upon less than a showing of probable cause.
As an individual who’s opinions and affiliations tend to reside outside of the mainstream, I feel potentially threatened by such actions.
As I run along the lakefront, I am deprived of the view of Meigs Field, which our mayor straight facedly claims he bulldozed in the middle of the night for security concerns.
I am offended that our government is disingenuously pursuing a law enforcement agenda through the Patriot Act and its progeny, under the guise of fighting terrorism. Similarly, as domestic streets and infrastructure crumble, I resent the billions being sent overseas to replace infrastructure we needlessly destroyed - in the name of fighting terrorism.
I am an extremely patriotic to the ideals and principles upon which this country was founded. Not to any particular administration or platform.
Different people hold different values important. For some it is religion. For me, free speech and free association are about as bright-line as I get. Maybe adding in family and friends, and they might be the basis of my “religion.” So yes, I am personally troubled when such freedoms are needlessly restricted.
Maybe I’m a sap, but I get tired of being lied to.
Oh yeah, Eva is not a lawyer, but works in a law firm. And this lawyer of 17 years experiences little if any job stress.
Ah, the self-centeredness of the Right! “It doesn’t affect me so it must be okay!” I could launch into a full Godwinization of this thread but it wouldn’t change your mind.
Funny, I was going to post the same quote in reply to him, but got distracted and never posted…
Really, FoamChomsky, one doesn’t have to be personally harmed by some law to object to others being harmed in their name.
Okay. How do you do that without spawning a new generation of terrorists?
To Robert:
Ask the odious Hafez al-Assad. I do not recommend or condone the Assad method, which in his case involved razing the town of Hama and killing between 10,000 and 30,000 of his subjects a couple of decades ago because the Muslim Brotherhood was making trouble for him there. But an Assad still runs the show in Syria, and terrorism against the state has not been much of a problem there since the Hama atrocities. No one has to follow Assad’s lead. But Furt has a point.
To those who engage in the ritual incantation of Niemoller:
How original. How compelling. How… cutting edge.
Niemoller was – how shall I put this-- imprisoned for eight years, by the Nazis. His famous formulation was made public in 1945, after his imprisonment by one of the most atrocious regimes in human history.
To invoke Niemoller in today’s context is to argue that Bush is the equivalent of Hitler, a proposition I see bandied about the internet with varying degrees of seriousness.
This is morally purblind.
The people who post this sort of sentiment on this and other website do so not only as free men and women, but indeed do so fully confident that the distinctly nonfascist government under which they live will not track them down for what a truly repressive regime could well deem thoughtcrime and punish accordingly. While I am sorry that somone’s view of a field has been ruined and that the wheels of justice are grinding a bit more slowly on immigration cases, somehow this does not rise to the level of a duly elected government declaring a sizable segment of its own citizenry “life unworthy of life” and EXTERMINATING THEM.
I also find interesting the rather astonishing degree of self-congratulation that often accompanies the ritualistic and absurd invocation of a saint like Niemoller when no threat remotely equivalent to that which Niemoller faced can be shown to exist.
I do not know if Niemoller suffered the indignity of bureaucratic delay or demolition of a beloved park, but I do know that he spent years in – and nearly died in-- places with names like Sachsenhausen and Dachau.
I of course defer here to the moral gravitas, if not the grammatical precision of “an individual who’s opinions and affiliations tend to reside outside of the mainstream”.
I also marvel at the assumption that several have made that one who feels as I do must necessarily be part of the “right”. In point of fact I represent, among other clients, prisoners suing the government, and any number of civil rights plaintiffs. My last two plenary trials this year were in fact both prison claims, one actually tried in Mid-State Correctional Facility in upstate Rome, NY. As I have stated elsewhere I voted for Gore, and as a trial lawyer I find much of Bush’s domestic agenda repellent. Nonetheless I will probably vote for him in '04, as probably will any number of so-called “War Democrats” will as well.
I do not trumpet Gitmo as a civil rights bonanza; I believe the detainees have become an albatross hung around the government’s neck. But by the same token, and especially as one who has handled civil rights and discrimination cases for years, and who remembers only too well the wonderful years of the Nixon administration, I ask myself and others exactly what terrible infringements of civil rights are taking place, and all I seem to get is people coughing up Niemoller and vaporizing about “one man, somewhere, is possibly being wrongly accused…”
That just doesn’t do it for me.
Need I remind all and sundry that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, oversaw “supervised” voting in the border states in 1864, sidestepped the constitution by declaring a blockade and appropriating monies to private citizens, and delayed but did not commute or vacate the death sentence imposed on Lambdin P. Milligan after trial before a military tribunal. Lincoln’s infringement of civil rights was far more egregious than anything Nixon concocted. Bush isn’t even in the same galaxy. Yet Lincoln was by most accounts our greatest president. FDR, another presidential immortal, interned thousands of American CITIZENS of Japanese descent during WWII.
Invoke Niemoller when the jackboot and the truncheon are lurking… not before, and certainly not now.
That there was a group that wanted to establish an Islamic state to replace the Baathists is somehow evidence of Hussein’s collaboration w/ al Qaeda? Hussein was plotting to overthrow himself? What’re you getting at here?
From the article:
Also from the article to which Simon has linked:
All in all, informative and fair-minded. I don’t see all of this as being terribly inconsistent with Schanzer’s formulations, though clearly there are multiple areas of disagreement, and this article is more skeptical in tone.
Note: While clearly torture is morally “questionable”, (to borrow the writer’s phraseology), I would suggest that this does not mean that the quality of the intelligence gained thereby is also “questionable”, as seems to be at the least implied from the juxtaposition of elements there.