The Republic of Dissent

The rule of law after torture

I almost agree fully with this:

Even in imagining the best possible outcome–a decision by the president to stop torture, close Guantánamo, get our soldiers out of Iraq, shift the trials of detainees to federal courts–the rule of law will not be restored until those officials who licensed torture are prosecuted. A country that tortures when it has a president who believes he is permitted to torture and then abstains from torture when it has a president who recognizes that torture is unconditionally prohibited continues to be a country living under the rule of men, rather than the rule of law; for it is allowing its moral fate to be determined by the personal beliefs of its rulers.
Righting a wrong is especially difficult if the wrong has been initiated by a president. Any occupant of the White House has tremendous charisma, and therefore a tremendous capacity to miseducate.

I agree that the assertion that when a country, which believes that it is a nation of laws not of men, has broken that principle by legitimating torture for egotistical reasons, the restoration of the rule of law must begin at the top and cannot mean sweeping the recent and disturbing past under the rug. The trouble comes from the fact that the past here hasn't passed and that Obama doesn't want to do what has to be done because he doesn't want to find himself with fewer choices than Bush if another terrorist attack happens on  American soil. My point is that most Americans are more grateful about the fact that 'nothing' followed 9/11 than they are outraged by the fact that the rule of law was superseded by the need to keep America safe by all means necessary and even if it meant sacrificing its values. My guess is that apologies and restoration will come after Obama and his successor when the ones responsible and most of us will be either too old to understand what's going on or dead.

Killing all lawyers

Quote of the morning from Sabin Willett, a lawyer who represented Gitmo detainees: 

(...) as the years went by, the right did learn one thing useful about Guantanamo detainees. The public can’t distinguish one from another. If imprisoned endlessly, the detainees will furnish an endless source of scaremongering — that rich mulch in which votes will grow.
And so Cheney and Grassley beaver away to Keep America Scared. Some Americans will see the rule of law as a threat, and lawyers as the enemy. Small men with loud voices will exploit their fears on cable television. Petty politicians will mine them for votes. It’s been this way since Shakespeare’s famous policymaker Dick the Butcher said, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’’

Criticizing lawyers

Quote of the day from David Luban:

There is simply no parallel between criticizing lawyers for violating the law and assassinating their characters for representing the "wrong" clients.

Bob Geldof's blinders

Bob Geldof slams the BBC for its report suggesting that some of the money he raised through Live Aid/Band Aid was used by mercenaries to buy weapons in Ethiopia:

But this BBC story was neither about me nor Band Aid. By disingenuously posturing as "serious" reporting, it pretended the total failure and negligence of all the great humanitarian workers and their organisations in the worst famine in modern times, and how miraculously not one of them spotted that no one was getting food despite everyone supplying it!
It beggars belief that anyone would take that seriously. Where were all the dead people then? If no one was getting food, why was nobody dying? That would have been one of the first questions I'd have asked. But they weren't dying because they were getting help, and massive amounts of it. But of course no one did ask where the bodies were at the World Service. That and many, many, other unasked questions.No, this story here is of the total collapse of standards and systems at the World Service, which has a special and particular duty of care to the truth.

I have to say that I don't understand why Geldof is more enraged at the BBC than at the possibility that the money that he raised was used to do something than to the feed the hungry in Ethiopia. He doesn't even want to consider the possibility that it might be true, which tells that he doesn't know about Ethiopia or about African countries because otherwise, he would be singing a different tune about finding ways to make sure that when celebrities raise money, it gets to the right people.  For some people, Bob Geldof is obsessed with the image of what he created, he wants to remain a perfect, pure and totally selfless enterprise, which was also absolutely successfully. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't work that way and more often than charitable funds because they go to places without civil societies, without accountable governments get mismanaged. That's reality. It may be a hard fact for Bob Geldof to accept, but he is going to have to accept and address it to show that his charitable acts are about more dealing with facts than perfect and commercialized images. Nobody is saying to Geldof not to dream grand dreams, but simply not forget that the real world is neither neverland nor celebrityland.

The Islamic republic of Canada ?!

Lysiane Gagnon on the recent expulsion from a French class in Quebec of an Egyptian immigrant who was wearing the Niqab:

In Quebec, most agreed with the decision to expel the niqab-wearing woman, including constitutional lawyer Julius Grey, who has defended the right of inmates to smoke in prison and the right of Sikh students to wear ceremonial daggers in class. “Accommodation should not lead to separation,” he said.
Yolande Geadah, an Egyptian-born writer, said: “There is no possible compromise with people with such inflexible attitudes.” Raheel Raza, a Pakistani-born Muslim women's rights activist, said: “When we come to Canada, we're not coming to the Islamic Republic of Canada.”
The irony is that, last fall, Egypt's top Islamic cleric said students and teachers at Cairo's Al-Azhar University would not be allowed to wear face veils in classrooms and dorms on the grounds they had “nothing to do with Islam.” The education ministry later barred the niqab during exams, to prevent students from sending others to take the tests. Although an Egyptian court subsequently ordered a stay on the Al-Azhar ban and overturned the education ministry's decision, we have to ask ourselves: Should Canadian colleges be more tolerant of Islamic fundamentalism than Cairo's universities?

Wow, in what world do we live in to make the argument that a woman becomes dangerous and infectious because of what she wears? And how convincing is it for Lysiane Gagnon to argue that Canada must be as open on the so-called woman's issues as Egyptians?  Did I miss a big part of this movie not to be able to understand why the body of a woman can never be fully their own, but an instrument to make either a political or a religious point? I'm forced to realize that Islamists and feminists agree on at least a central issue : a woman is what she wears.

Cynicism and the political instrumentalization of 'genocide'

I agree with Joshua Keating's conclusion to his post on the political intrumentalization of the Armenian genocide by American politicians:

All in all, the level of cynicism in Washington around this tragic historical event  is pretty disheartening. Like President Bush before him, President Obama was for using the word "genocide" as a candidate before he was against it as president. Former House Majority leader Dick Gephart, who supported recognition as a congressman, is now lobbying against it on the Turkish payroll.
Outside the Armenian-American community, whose grievance on this issue is understandable and shouldn't be dismissed, most Americans would probably prefer that the congress focus its efforts on preventing and ending current conflicts.

France passed a law recognizing the Armenian genocide in 2006 and it just gave politicians an occasion to grandstand or to argue that Turkey didn't have its place within the European Union for it was made much news since or has no impact neither in France or in Europe on the important questions. The argument is that genocide should be something politicians play football will and that only historians ought to write history.

Agathe Habyarimana, dirty hands, and responsibility

Philip Gourevicth on the arrest of the former first lady of Rwanda, Agathe Habyarimana and what it says about the new and improved relation between France and Rwanda

French statesmen are not in the habit of travelling to small African countries that they used to run as puppet regimes to eat fistfuls of crow. But that is precisely what Sarkozy did last week when he stood beside Kagame in Kigali and declared that France had made mistakes during the genocide, and had to reckon with them. Afterwards, commentators made much of the fact that Sarkozy had not issued a full apology. But in a country whose history is still bloodily contested, Sarkozy’s frank acknowledgment of the truth of his former antagonist’s reality sent an unmistakable message. Without France’s cover, the pretense that Rwanda’s genocide is an open question is stripped barer than ever. With this morning’s arrest, we can see that France’s change of attitude toward Rwanda was at least partly influenced by the facts presented in the case against Madame Habyarimana. In November of last year, a pair of French judges went to Kigali to study the evidence assembled by Rwanda’s Genocide Fugitives Tracking Unit. Meanwhile the French case against Kagame’s coterie appeared to be crumbling. Whether France will extradite Madame Agathe to Rwanda remains to be seen. She has already been released on bail. But such is the warm mood between the two governments that Rwanda’s prosecutor general, Martin Ngoga, declared today that he had every confidence in the French judiciary—a statement that was simply unimaginable from a Rwandan official six months ago.

I don't think that Madame Agathe will ever be extradited to Kigali. She is one of the few remaining relics of a stubborn an still alive past and she is the symbol of what used to the French Rwandan policy. Extraditing her is a risk that France cannot afford to take because it would force it to consider the responsibility of its own politicians and government officials. To me, the key question remains how far Kagame  is willing to go to prosecute of the members of the Habyarimana regime and those who played a role in the genocide and more importantly what price he is willing to pay to have them judged by a court of law. I may be wrong and it is surely too easy to say what I'm about to say far away from the situation, but I believe that an inflexible obsession with punishing all of those who have dirty hands as Sartre would say may hinder reconciliation for it is clear that the genocide happened because the majority of the population got their hands dirty or did nothing while people were being viciously slaughtered like animals. Thus, in short, the central issue is what does a country do when it becomes obvious that almost all of its citizens bear some responsible for the darkest hours of its history, what level of responsibility becomes forgivable or at the very least tolerable to move it forward?

Troubling American contradictions

I agree with David P. Forsythe on this:

The American penchant for at least the rhetoric of freedom and democracy morphed into the modern human rights movement after World War II under the leadership of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. During the Cold War U.S. alignment with brutal authoritarians like Mobutu in Zaire, or the overthrow of even elected governments, as in Chile in 1973, or the supervision of torture in Latin America never destroyed the dream of America as moral beacon. In public we accepted the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture. In the shadows we played the game about as tough as anyone else.
9/11 accentuated this duality, perhaps schizophrenia. George W. Bush said al-Qaeda hated us for who we were, our personal freedoms in thought, including religious thought, and our gender-blind democracy. They hated us because we rejected their deferential and patriarchal theocracy. But in secret we engaged in forced disappearances, torture, cruelties arguably just below that level of abuse, denial of reasonable dues process in places like Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Force Base, and military brigs in South Carolina. In defense of our moral greatness we engaged in policies that undercut that greatness. As Winston Churchill paradoxically noted in World War II, truth was so important it had to be defended with a  bodyguard of lies. So for us after 9/11, the rule of law and personal rights were so important they had to be defended by secret detention and torture.

What is troubling me more than anything is that Bushism is winning by default, without any attempt by Obama to offer an alternative that doesn't involve solely giving a speech, changing the facade while performing the same acts. It was because for this reason, because I sense within Obama, a reluctance to be bold when it comes to policy not campaigning that I had couldn't force myself to get behind Obama during the election. I  have always believed that because Obama was thought to embody change, to epitomize it because he was part black,  that he was going to have no incentive, no effective pressure to change America for the better.

Exceptionalism and Solitude

I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

The U.S. -- first under the Bush administration and now, increasingly, under Obama -- is more and more alone in its cowardly insistence that special, new tribunals must be invented, or denied entirely, for those whom it wishes to imprison as Terrorists (...) . 

I guess Obama really does believe in American exceptionalism after all. I just have the feeling that clashes are inevitable for how long can a president grandstand about being far superior than his predecessor while imitating him? May be the answer is forever for it is starting to occur to me that Obama might actually be the son of God.

A miscarriage may become a murder.... in Utah

Just one comment comes to me when I read this "Only in America":

A proposed Utah law that would open women who suffer a miscarriage to possible criminal prosecution and life imprisonment has enraged feminists and civil rights activists across the United States.
Adopted overwhelmingly by both sides of the state legislature in Salt Lake City earlier this month, the draft bill is now awaiting the signature of the state's Republican Governor, Gary Herbert. It is not clear if the growing national controversy surrounding the proposed law will slow or even stay his pen.
While the main thrust of the law is to enable prosecutors in the majority-Mormon state to pursue women who seek illegal, unsupervised forms of abortion, it includes a provision that could trigger murder charges against women found guilty of an "intentional, knowing or reckless act" that leads to a miscarriage. Some say this could include drinking one glass of wine too many, walking on an icy pavement or skiing.

The pompous sterility of state apologies

I agree with Paul Sagar when he makes this point about apologies done in the name of the state to argue that Gordon Brown should not apologized his country's past actions, that is its role in the child resettlement programs in Australia and elsewhere :

The idea that the government of the day merely represents – and speaks and acts for – a more powerful entity existing behind it, possessed of ultimate sovereignty which the Prime Minister of the day happens to wield but does not ultimately possess, comes from Hobbes. When Brown apologises to the deportees today, he apologises not for his own actions, but for that of the Mortal God, the Leviathan, which Brown presently speaks for.
That the apology will be widely welcomed, and that its bizarre logic will go largely unremarked, indicates the extent to which that artificial man called Commonwealth, or State (in Latin, Civitas) is now an integral part of all our lives. Again, how ironic that the central ideas of history’s greatest proponent of absolutism should come to have shaped the intellectual framework that we who call ourselves democrats, liberals, republicans or libertarians think within.

I agree with Sagar for two main reasons. The first is that I think that it is a religious idea that we are all guilty for the actions of those who came before us, that is the inhumane idea behind the one of the original sin and it can make people guilty and have to apologize for generations if it remains prevalent. The second is that apologies are worthless and simply propaganda tools that change neither the past, the present and the future because they simply feed a certain crowd's appetite for public shaming without addressing real issues and new realities. At some point, we mus accept that the past no matter how painful it is to do so is dead and that guilt isn't transferable although responsibility might be. That difference is critical for accepting responsibility doesn't mean having to apologize, it means acknowledging and taking some fruitful acts when it is necessary.

The Others

No comment necessary to discuss this "it is US against Them" mindset illustrated by Marty Peretz's comments except a brief one to wonder about its policy implications and its usefulness, well maybe those are just foolish/wimpish considerations:

Why are so many liberal Democrats reluctant to concede that there is an intricate international network of ideological gangsters who recognize each other as ikhwan? These brothers do not define themselves by nation. They define themselves by religion, although there are many hundreds of millions of Muslims who are defined out--and define themselves out--of the bloody fraternity of the faithful. Sometimes, they too are stigmatized as enemies, which means they are also targets. And, of course, there are the boundaries of sect, in which Sunnis commit mass murder of Shi’a at prayer (and vice versa).
Then there are the other designated victims: outsiders … us. Not just Westerners and certainly not just Americans. Or Jews, for that matter, although they have a very special place in the demonology of Islam, and particularly in the armed demonology of Islam. Jihad.

Ayn Rand's demons

Cathy Young in the Globe and Mail on what she calls the darker sides of Ayn Rand:

(...) Ms. Rand's work also has a darker, more disturbing aspect – one that, unfortunately, is all too good a fit for this moment in America's political life. That is her intellectual intolerance and her tendency to demonize her opponents. Speaking through her hero John Galt, Ms. Rand declared, “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.” She lambasted free-market theorists such as Friedrich A. Hayek for their lack of purity in allowing the government a legitimate role in alleviating poverty and its effects. In her novels, supporters of various forms of collectivism – moochers and looters – are shown as acting by stealth to take over and corrupt society and culture.
Ms. Rand's detractors have often branded her a fascist. The label is unfair, but her work does have shades of a totalitarian or dictatorial mentality. To refute this charge, Ms. Rand's defenders point to her explicit statements that force is acceptable only in self-defence. Yet her fiction sometimes seems to contradict this principle.
Particularly troubling is a passage in Atlas Shrugged in which bureaucratic incompetence and arrogance lead to a deadly train wreck. Ms. Rand sarcastically notes that many people would regard the dead passengers as innocent victims of a tragedy and then, in a series of brief character sketches, endeavours to show that they were far from innocent: All had benefited from evil government programs, promoted evil political or philosophical ideas, or both. Especially chilling is Ms. Rand's casual mention of the fact that one of these evildoers, a bureaucrat's wife, is travelling with her three young children.
Ayn Rand does not advocate these people's murder, yet she clearly suggests they had it coming. Both in Atlas Shrugged and in her nonfiction essays, political and ideological debates are treated as wars with no innocent bystanders.

Americans almost always have trouble accepting that the people they idealized can be complex figures instead of just being people whose purity would force the Vatican should offer them  up for sainthood. That said, I think that Young's point about war and innocence is both poignant and relevant because it may explain the reason why so many Rand's true believers are never troubled by the violent inequalities of liberal capitalism whitewashing them with the assertion that life is Hobbesian and there is nothing that even politics can do or should attempt to do. In any case, the point is that Ayn Rand's work is relevant, but also limited because she was such a defender for the market that she was unwilling to even acknowledge that its imperfections were great enough that it had to be addressed by society not just through charity, but politics and yes, Government. For after, having a Government who actually focuses on what it can fix instead of managing people's lives and making them happy cannot be proof of the beginning of the Apocalypse.

Mugabe at 86

Mugabe is or is going to be 86 years old. Bob Marley, if he can watch what is happening nowadays, wishes surely that he could rewrite his famous song, which celebrated proudly the hard fought independence, which Zimbabweans seized from Britain by warning them against providential men who believe that they are the state and their country cannot survive without them.
What do you wish a dictator who was once a national hero and an example for other leaders on the continent and who has become just a vulgar racist, narcissist, and autocrat on his Eighty-sixth birthday? : to die the mouth open in his sleep as soon as possible so that there is no bloody coup or political revolution and so that his people can at last start to build their country without living in the past and hanging on to old resentments.

Official high priests of intelligence and American presidents

Sugary excerpt from Jurek Martin's review of Garry Wills's Bomb Power:The Modern Presidency and the National Security State in the Financial Times:

The cult of secrecy has afflicted every president since, not merely the paranoid, such as Richard Nixon. Even Jimmy Carter was not entirely immune – the abortive 1980 rescue mission to extricate the US hostages in Tehran was executed without advising even his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, who resigned. Wills is particularly hard on the Kennedy brothers’ obsession with deposing Fidel Castro, a mindset so blinkered that it failed to acknowledge the reality that Cubans liked their president (ditto Salvador Allende in Chile, etc). That fits with Robert McNamara’s much later admission that the US knew nothing of Vietnamese culture even as it was losing nearly 60,000 troops in the war.

Presidents, Wills persuasively argues, have fallen into the trap of listening only to the official high priests of intelligence. Those without prized security clearance are somehow considered inferior, if not ignorant, even if proved right. That was the proposed sanction against Oppenheimer for opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb. To be in-the-know is to be omniscient. The Pentagon Papers, the in-house review of the Vietnam War published only after the Supreme Court so ordered, contained no state secrets. But they were highly classified and thus, for government, unfit for consumption by friend or foe.

But the organic growth of the national security state needed theoreticians and they comprise Wills’s large Hall of Infamy. It was the (ironically conservative) Reagan justice department, under attorney-general Edwin Meese, that developed the theory of the “unitary executive” – which basically says that the law is anything that the president says it is. This produced a welter of “signing statements” in which a president says he can disregard, for whatever reason, any section of a duly passed congressional bill he has just, er, signed.

The ticking bomb scenario

I'm yet to see someone address the ticking bomb scenario used by too many to justify torture as well as Paul Sagar does here:

The ticking bomb scenario is a fantasy dreamed up by philosophers to test-out our intuitive and/or reasoned responses to a bizarre situation, to tease out exactly where our moral sensibilities lie. It is certainly not supposed to be the basis for legislative policy decisions, for example.
But let’s suppose, for the sake of philosophy, that we are in the (impossible) ticking bomb scenario. Is it wrong to torture our suspect? Yes. Because torture is a morally horrific thing to do to another human being, regardless of the well-intentioned motives that may (but usually don’t) lie behind it.So, should we therefore not torture the suspect? No. Because in this situation torturing one man is the lesser of two evils: letting the bomb go off and hundreds of thousands dying is morally more repugnant and unacceptable than torturing one man. But the point is precisely that this is a situation of choosing the lesser of two evils. Just because in this situation preventing the bomb going off is morally more important than not torturing our suspect, it doesn’t follow that the torture therefore becomes OK. It’s still a terrible thing to do. It is still morally wrong.
That’s a very important point to recognise: even when – under highly idealised, utterly abstracted non-real world conditions – we concede torture may be required, it’s still wrong. And that’s the tragedy of ethical existence: sometimes one simply has to do wrong things. “Here I stand, I can do no other”.

John Woo and others damaged severely (and I hope not irreparably) the moral compass of America and of all the others who believed that they were fighting "evil" by arguing shamelessly that they should apply situational ethics when their security is at risk  Sagar's points show that the goal of ethics is precisely to stop people who are making the argument that they are moral from using particularities either real or imagine to justify the abject.. 

Torture and other niceties

I agree fully with Adrian Hamilton on this: 

Torture isn't a matter of niceties. You can argue the circumstances in which you might feel it useful or even necessary. You can try and épater le bien-pensant by writing "A Modest Proposal for Preventing Poor People in Britain from Being Endangered by Torturing Their Children and Their Mothers", only without Jonathan Swift's wit or intention to satirise.
You can sincerely believe it right to cripple the grannies and dismember the family pets in what you conceive of the greater community good. What you cannot do, as the Government is trying to, is get around the fact that Britain, along with most of the developed world, has decided to ban the practice.
And for good reason. After centuries of abuse, torture has been found to be neither productive nor containable. It rarely provides accurate intelligence. It produces fantasy and misleading information born out of the desperation of the victim. For all the discussion of the "ticking time bomb" and the films of Dirty Harry and Spooks, there is no reported case where an explosion has been prevented because of the use of torture.
What its proponents never like to answer is the question of just who would decide who should be tortured. The answer, of course, is the "state". And once you add that to the equation you are on a straight line to General Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and all those other characters whom successive British governments were wont to support in their heyday.

Institutional anti-racism

It's been a long time since I've heard arguments about institutional anti-racism as pertinent the ones that Rod Liddle are making:

By ‘institutional anti-racism’ I do not mean people not being racist — that, we might all agree, is a good thing. I mean the state of mind which connives in wickedness, which is in a perpetual state of denial, which turns the other way, which does all this stuff because of the terror, the career-ending calumny, the shame of being accused of being ‘racist’.
(....)You can see institutional anti-racism pretty much wherever you look; as I mentioned last week, it is there in the closing down of any debate which touches upon race, unless it is to prove a charge of racism. It is there in the ludicrous sackings of people who are not remotely racist but who dare to speak their minds about issues concerning race; from the Bradford headmaster Ray Honeyford back in the 1980s, to the Conservative MP Patrick Mercer — who, it should be remembered, was booted off the opposition front bench for suggesting that it was not unheard of for some sub-standard black soldiers in the army to use race as a weapon when challenged as to their poor performance. What a shocking thing to allege; who could believe it, etc.
And institutional anti-racism is there in a subtle but no less corrupting way in your office, right now, or maybe on your TV screen; the suspicion that someone has been given promotion, or preference, or leeway, because they are not white and that as a consequence someone else has been done down. It is there in what sometimes seems to be an over-representation of non-white people on the news programmes, or in drama productions and that in both cases these people are treated a little differently because of their supposedly defining non-whiteness. And sometimes all of this is a misperception, and then again, sometimes it isn’t. Who knows? Either way, it springs from the same source.

Institutional anti-racism cannot be distinguished form institutional racism with institutional racism for it poses the same questions about meritocracy, societal ethics and the use of unkosher categories and criteria to promote or to punish individuals. The trouble is that it is an issue more difficult and less sexy to address than the racism/anti-racism of people because it is harder to shame, to guilt, and to silence institutions into a political correct behavior or into an accommodating silence than powerful institutions. As I get older and I hope wiser, I have the feeling that the issue of racism/anti-racism is not even close from being the issue of our times, it is one too potent and too flashily empty who blinds people from more pertinent ones such as equity and social justice. Of course, the reality is that in heterogeneous societies everywhere, people talk about racism/anti-racism really to question the distribution of power in order to avoid developing more substantive and universal (and in my view more convincing) arguments to delegimate/legitimate a power structure and the powerful.

A Dark continent

Provocative words from Leo Igwe:

Part of the reason why Africans are deeply religious, spiritual and supernatural in outlook is because the people have given up hope of achieving justice and happiness in this life and in this world. (...)Justice is light and injustice is darkness. Eradicating injustice is an enlightening and illuminating process. So tackling unjust systems is critical to the growth and development of humanism in Africa. Today Africa is a dark continent not because there is something fundamentally wrong or lacking or extraordinary with the regional geography and weather conditions. Africa is a dark continent because of so many acts of injustice that reign supreme in the region. Africa is mired in darkness because of the reign of anomie, the terror of barbarism, the ubiquity of impunity, criminality and savage acts.
Unfortunately, Africans always point accusing fingers on colonialism and imperialism for injustices on the continent. As if there were no unjust acts or systems in Africa before its contact and ‘corruption’ by the outside world. When it comes to analyzing and addressing Africa’s problems and predicament, colonialism is always a cop-out or an alibi. Imperialism is a reason or an excuse Africans always tender to avoid responsibility- accepting or taking responsibility for their mistakes and failures.
Africans always comfortably prefer blaming the West and the whites for their woes and troubles. Surely, injustices predate and post date colonialism in Africa. Unjust acts have been going on in Africa for ages.

The trouble is not that Igwe is right, but that he isn't wrong.

The neverending culpability of the West

What is wrong with Karen Armstrong? When she writes about her experience at a conference in Cairo, I have to wonder in what she lives:

(...)if the professors felt so enraged, what on earth could it be like on the streets of Cairo, where this level of frustration, aggravated by economic and political discontent, could make many people easy targets for extremist propaganda?
But the mood of our conference changed. During the last session an American theologian managed, with some difficulty, to take the floor and spoke on behalf of us all. We had, he said, been deeply impressed by the pain in the room; we knew that "the eight horrible years of George W Bush" had inflicted grave damage on the region, and would do everything in our power to work with Al-Azhar for a better future. Immediately, one of the most vitriolic of our assailants responded with generosity and the conference was finally able to issue a firm and positive joint resolution.
So far, Obama has not given the concrete sign that we felt was essential. But the Chilcot inquiry has also raised hopes. If there is any hint of whitewash or cover-up, the consequent disillusion will only exacerbate an already inflamed situation. In Cairo, we discovered that a frank acknowledgment of culpability could turn things around. In our dangerously polarised world, we may not get such an opportunity again.

Wow....I think that for one Karen Armstrong is way to religious to understand the Camusian difference between culpability and responsibility, and she fails to get the fact the problem here isn't for the west to acknowledge some type of culpability to turn things around in the streets of Cairo or Islamabad, but rather to live by its own ideals while stopping to treat the poor as victims and as incapable of taking control of their own destiny.  Karen Armstrong has a Mother Theresa like view of international affairs for she believes in guilt, in atonement and in all the disturbing sentiments, which always to Imperialism, paternalism, and just wars, which are later found to be unwinnable. The point here is that the "West" which doesn't exist except in the mind of those who love to divide the world into archaic categories doesn't have to bear a cross for the fact that shit happens and that more often that not, it strays away from the least unjust path because it is too complex and because it believes that national interests justify the use of any means. Thus, the question here is solely one of responsibility and of the continuation of Hobbes's state of nature in spite of progress and modernity. To put things simply: should we just accept that we are all barbarians and be done with ethics and accept that might makes right.
The goal of the Chilcot inquiring shouldn't be the same as those Witch trials in Salem that is to burn the guilty to appease angry mobs. The aim should be to make those who had power to assume responsibility of their mistakes in judgment and more importantly to force the electorate to realize that democracies only function when they realize that  they shouldn't be waiting for "the one" but rather should force the imperfect leaders that they have to live by the principles that make their country what it is.

Legalism and the definition of just wars

Brendan O'Neill has a thought provoking article on Elizabeth Wilmshurst and her arguments for the illegality of the Iraq war:

There are three irritating things about this strictly legalistic opposition to the attack on Iraq. First, it is delusional. It is based on the massive self-deception that international law and its brave defenders and practitioners – lawyers – kept the world in tip-top shape until that cowboy George W Bush and his heel-snapping poodle Tony Blair came along and ruined everything.
(...) The second irritating thing about the legalistic opposition to the war in Iraq is that it is deeply dishonest, duplicitous even. Many of those who moan about the illegality of Iraq were fervent supporters of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. Yet that futile and fatal intervention also did not win the support of the UN Security Council, and thus was ‘illegal’. A Guardian writer penned the 10 Days to War drama, and the Guardian has been singing the praises of Wilmshurst’s performance at Chilcot over the past week. This is the same Guardian which in 1999 slated those who said Bill Clinton and Tony Blair should wait for UN backing before bombing Yugoslavia. The UN is not ‘the only legitimate law-giver’, the Guardian insisted. Indeed, the UN constitution is a ‘recipe for inaction’, and ‘its imprimatur cannot be the sole trigger for international action to right an obvious wrong’.
The third and most irritating thing is that the legalistic-not-political critique of war (well, of certain wars) is inhumane. Judgements about military interventions are made, not from the basis of what is good for humanity, or from any analysis of what terrible consequences the war might have for those on the receiving end and for international peace more broadly, but rather from the lawyerly approach of making sure that all the boxes are ticked and all the right procedures were followed. Legal niceties are elevated over people’s lives, over questions of democracy, sovereignty, stability, equality.

I agree with O'Neill on his main point that the law isn't the main tool to define just or rather unjust wars, that other factors have to be taken into considerations, and those who fail to at least, accept that the complexity of the concept of "just war" are ideologues and hypocrites. I think that even if the Iraq war could have been justified (my feeling is that it couldn't have been, but I'm willing to consider the possibility that I'm wrong) under the international law principles established by Wilmshurst and others, it would have still been an unjust and I'm making this statement, of course, with the help of hindsight. The main reason is that it was both unwinnable,  unnecessary, and too expensive since its most touted accomplishment is the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. International Law is a tool among many other indispensable to determine the justifiability of a war. If the French without the backing of the UN had intervened and had stopped the genocide, what would be the argument of legal scholars today who wouldn't have a crystal ball to know that that unlawful intervention had stopped the dead of hundred of thousands innocent people. The point is that even as a lawyer, I'm forced to accept the despairing realities that laws are minimal, but essential tools to address grave societal problems and that more often than not it doesn't provide an acceptable solution to issues, which politicians and the people should have the guts to confront directly.

Decorum

I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

(...) the behavior of Justice Alito at last night's State of the Union address -- visibly shaking his head and mouthing the words "not true" when Obama warned of the dangers of the Court's Citizens United ruling -- was a serious and substantive breach of protocol that reflects very poorly on Alito and only further undermines the credibility of the Court.  It has nothing to do with etiquette and everything to do with the Court's ability to adhere to its intended function.

Guinea and its dangerous manly man

I would find this video outrageously funny if it wasn't about the fate of a poor, small, and martyred African nation, Guinea, in desperate need of leadership taken hostage by a dangerous and manly idiot who believes that God made him king. Even by the worst or the most generous of standards, Captain Dadis Camara is a clown who should have never been allowed to rule Guinea. He is convinced that to be Guinean, African, and finally a statesman means to be just as Harvey Mansfield would say manly that is to scream when he can neither reason nor convince and to crush the people who contest his authority. It's heartbreaking to say, but the fact that an African country can have such an idiot as its head of state shows that its future generations, because they were lied to by a previous group of political leaders, which was more or less polished and "western," will in the hope for change (here those two hypnotizing words again) be tempted to follow manly fools who will try to convince them that to be authentically African (whatever that means) is to defy reason and civilization.

Tragedy

Good point from Christopher Hitchens on the media and what it considers to be tragic:

The media now say tragedy when they mean that bad things have happened to good or—even worse—famous people. But the types of tragedy that really deserve the name are of two main kinds, the Hegelian and the Greek. Hegel thought it was tragic when two rights came into conflict. The Greeks thought it tragic when a great man was undone by a fatal flaw.

Ambivalences, equivocations, and simplifications

Bombastic sugary excerpt from a letter written by Vanessa Redgrave, Julian Schnabel and Martin Sherman in the New York Review of Books (Hat tip: Norm Geras):

A group of prominent filmmakers has protested the Toronto Film Festival's choice of Tel Aviv, in its "City to City" section showcasing films from and about a particular city, as "a propaganda campaign on behalf of...an apartheid regime." Their letter declared that the signatories were not protesting against the Israeli filmmakers who were included or their films. Their stand seems to us to be improperly thought out and to have distressing implications.
The protesters use the term "apartheid regime." We oppose the current Israeli government, but it is a government. Freely elected. Not a regime. Words matter.
In their letter the protesters say that "Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages." True. Just as much of America is built on obliterated Indian property. Are they implying that Tel Aviv should not exist? At least not in its present form? Which would mean that the State of Israel (the original State of Israel, not including the occupied territories) should not exist. Thousands of Palestinians have died through the years because the Israeli government, military, and part of the population fervently believe that the Arab states and, indeed, much of the world do not want Israel to exist. How then are we halting this never-ending cycle of violence by promoting the very fears that cause it?

I have the sick feeling that defending just causes too often give people the permission not so much to use words without weighing their meaning, but assertions without verifying their veracity or without caring about their truthiness precisely because they are defending a cause, which they feel is noble. But again, do you have a decent chance to be heard and to make a difference in the current environment if you don't shout, provoke, or are just fanatically/religiously inflexible ? Of course words matter, but so does every little thing that pollutes capital debates by making them about who is good rather than about what is right and what should be done.

A beer and six cane strokes

Thought-provoking story in Der Spiegel about a woman in Malaysia sentenced to six cane strokes for having a beer in a hotel:

The whole thing began in July 2008. Kartika took a long weekend trip to a beach-side hotel in Malaysia with a few friends, a relaxing break from the stressful daily grind. Her husband, Muhammad Afandi Amir, watched the children while she was gone. Born in Singapore and a member of the country's Muslim Malay minority, he makes his living as a computer technician.
In the afternoon, Kartika checked into the Legend resort hotel in Cherating, whose slogan is "discover heaven on earth." The hotel has an international clientele, so the six guests from Singapore aroused little interest when they met up in the hotel bar in the evening and ordered a small Tiger Beer each.
Beer is available throughout Malaysia. The 7-Eleven convenience store chain, for example, offers nine different varieties, from Singapore's Tiger Beer to Guinness from Ireland and Carlsberg from Denmark. About 26 percent of Malaysians are of Chinese descent, while 8 percent are of Indian descent and 12 percent belong to indigenous populations. The alcohol ban affects only the Muslims, including the 53 percent of the population who are Malays. These last are the group that has steered the country's fortunes since its independence. Shariah law also affects only the Muslims, and is enforced especially strictly in three of Malaysia's 13 states. The Legend hotel is located in one of those three: Pahang.
The young women in the hotel bar raised their glasses to each other at around 6 p.m. Kartika was the only Muslim in the group -- the rest were Chinese and Indian. None of them seem to take particularly seriously the strict alcohol ban that applied to Kartika. The waiter didn't seem to care either; at least, he didn't ask to see her identity card, which would have shown her religious affiliation.
Half an hour later, religious police came storming into the hotel foyer. Was it a routine check? Or had an informer in the hotel blown the whistle? Kartika was the only one brought in to the station, where she had to give a urine sample. The police questioning lasted until 6 a.m. And at some point during her interrogation, Kartika admitted to occasionally posing for advertising photographs in Singapore. The keepers of the country's religious code were suddenly all ears.

Perplexed and saddened by BHL

I respect Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL). I don’t always agree with him, but I have never thought that he was a man without substance. Therefore, I’m disappointed to see that he is supporting Polanski by using arguments that he himself would find laughable and disturbing in he weren’t so close to the situation. I was listening to him on Tom Ashbrook’s radio show On point yesterday and I had to wonder if people who are willing to defend Polanski at all cost have any credibility left on any other issue whether it is a moral, a social, or simply a political one. I’ not sure that I will be able to listen to BHL discussing other subjects such as Iran, French politics or anything else and wonder whether he thought what he is saying through or whether he is just too close to the trees to even imagine that there might be a forest there. BHL recently wrote, a book, Left in Dark Times, about the sad state of the extreme left in which he argues that that left was vanishing because of its willingness to give up its moral compass to save its dying ideology. Listening to him today, I wonder if the decay is further along and more widespread than he thought. It seems clear to me the elites and the creative class in the most modern of our societies only people believes that the law and other societal norms don’t apply to them because they are on top because they are good, better people and therefore do not need to be judged and tread as the masses. Because it is clear that BHL is supporting Polanski because he is Polanski and therefore cannot be responsible for any indefensible (morally not legally) action and should not be condemned because he has given so much to society with his craft.

Biases and biases

Chris Dillow has a great post on the supporters of Roman Polanski and the problems of the arguments that they use to defend him. Sugary excerpt:

Having decided that Polanski is a good man, people refuse to believe that he can have done a bad thing: “It wasn’t rape-rape” says Whoopi Goldberg.
The error here is to exaggerate the extent to which character determines actions, and to fail to see that good people can do bad things under certain circumstances. It’s in this context that Polanski’s being a victim of the Holocaust is ironic. That episode teaches us that ordinary people can do atrocious things.

What I have been wondering if whether the reactions be different if the illicit act, which Polanski had, to use an euphemism, had been with a boy of 13 instead of with a girl of the same age. Would people be as willing to argue that it wasn't rape rape and that the child in this case in some way agreed to have sex with the charming genius so wounded by fate? My answer is a resounding no because people in our societies are most willing to fight back against the sexualization of little boys than the one of little girls. To put it differently, Michael Jackson would have had better luck escaping wide spread public condemnation if his accusers had been little girls because there is within our society the accepted belief that a girl's body can provoke/awaken the sexual desires of manly men.

Competition of victimhoods

Interesting, disconcerting, but I'm afraid true analysis from Brendan O'Neill (I promise to get over my Polanski's obsession soon):

But perhaps the worst aspect of the Polanski affair is the competition of victimhoods. It is testimony to the domination of the victim culture in contemporary society that both Polanski haters and Polanski defenders, both sides in this bizarre re-enactment of the Culture War of the 1960s and its aftermath, have used the language of victimology to make their case. For many American and British commentators this is all about Samantha Gailey, whom they have transformed into the archetypal and eternally symbolic victim of the alleged great evil of our time, Child Abuse. ‘Remember: Polanski raped a child’, says a headline in Salon, in an article that provides sordid, misery-memoir-style details of what Polanski did with his penis to Gailey’s vagina and anus. For European observers, by contrast, Polanski’s actions can be explained by his own victimised past, especially during the Holocaust. We have to understand his ‘life tragedies’ and how they moulded him, says one filmmaker . Anne Applebaum, the American commentator who spends much of her time in Europe, says Polanski fled America in 1978 because of his ‘understandable fear of irrational punishment. Polanski’s mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived in Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto.’ (Applebaum fails to disclose that she is married to the Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, who is actively campaigning against Polanski’s extradition.)
This spat in victimology confirms that the politics of victimhood, the pursuit of law, politics and morality in the name of respecting and helping victims, dominates debate on both sides of the Atlantic, but in the Anglo-American sphere it is the victim of child abuse that is most sacrosanct, while in Europe it is the victims of the Holocaust who enjoy the greatest, most unquestioned moral authority – to the extent that Polanski’s pretty cowardly fleeing of America in 1978 can be excused as a latent reaction by a tortured man to the emotional horrors of Auschwitz

Disgusting mise en scène

Bill Wyman has a great article on the Polanski Affair, the salacious documentary that confirmed the fanatical belief of many of his admirers that he was the true victim in this care, and on the role that the media plays in this case. Disturbing sugary excerpt:

In "Wanted and Desired," it's weird how detached Zenovich [the director] stays from the victim, and how she undermines her in subtle ways. The tone is set early on, when a friend of Polanski's tells of being woken up and informed that the director had been arrested. The moment is actually played for laughs, with interspersed shots of a worried Mia Farrow using the phone in a scene from "Rosemary's Baby."
A filmmaker attuned to the psychological undercurrents of the characters in her drama might have been conscious of the state of a 13-year-old girl, who had just been drugged and raped and had spent the next period of time at a police station reliving the incident; and shaken by the story of "Rosemary's Baby" -- that, too, about a horrifically abused woman.
But the scene isn't used to illustrate the victim's story -- it's about poor Roman. He's the person making the desperate phone call. It's an odd juxtaposition when you think about it. That's when the friend, having just been told Polanski has been arrested, says, "This is somebody who could not be a rapist!" Here again, Zenovich is playing with semantics. It's obvious the friend was saying he couldn't imagine Polanski, say, following a woman down the street and grabbing her in an alley.
If Zenovich wasn't tipping the scales in Polanski's favor, she could have asked the guy, "Well, what about statutory rape, having sex with an underage girl? Could you imagine him doing that?"
We also hear people note, meaningfully, that meeting someone like Polanski could help a potential young actress's career. Such a remark about a grown woman would be slightly offensive; about a 13-year-old it's exceedingly so. The girl told police at the time she had repeatedly told Polanski no; on the screen Zenovich runs a line to that effect from the girl's grand jury testimony, but immediately follows it with a quote from Polanski's: "She was not unresponsive." This creates a subtle he-said-she-said dynamic that, in a case in which consent isn't a issue, represents another bit of moral prestidigitation.
It's strange to see a female filmmaker anchor her documentary's arguments with such atavistic attitudes. It gets worse: In the media circus of the time, some of the European press reported that the victim hadn't been a virgin.

I feel dirty just hearing people doing everything to justify having sex with a 13 year old girl just because they love the movies or are moved by the personal history of the man who had sex with her. In many less developed countries. perverts who have sex with little girls always argue that their victims are women, that they provoked them, that they wanted it or that they weren't pure anyway. I guess that we can no longer argue that the "West" cares more women than the rest.

Justice for all

I agree with this:

It is easy for people to be swayed by considerations of personality in such cases as the Polanski arrest. In general the law does well if it addresses itself to individuals and their circumstances rather than imposing rigid blanket laws that contradict justice as often as they serve it, precisely because they ignore the special individual circumstances. But with the great crimes of rape, murder and genocide, prosecution and punishment are about society’s struggle to protect itself now and in the future against the worst aspects of its own members’ behaviour. There is room for a degree of compassion towards prisoners even if they have committed monstrous crimes, but there is no room for failing to punish the crime itself.
In line with these thoughts, and with the regret that comes from having to acknowledge yet set aside two things, namely the existence of human frailty and the contribution gifted individuals such as Roman Polanski make to society, I conclude that it is right that the United States authorities are seeking to extradite him to serve his sentence for rape. Neither fame nor wealth, neither time nor distance, should render anyone immune to laws protecting against serious crimes against other human beings.

The brilliance of parliamentary government

Signs of modernity..:

Catherine is an activist at the International Union of Sex Workers, which has for years, together with other groups like the English Collective of Prostitutes, organised press briefings and public meetings. In the face of this bill they met MPs, gave evidence before committees, and presented data (which the government had not released) showing that while blanket laws against buying sex don’t stop trafficking, they do make identifying trafficked women harder. The cops say information on possible victims often comes from punters, who are hardly going to go to the police if threatened with arrest. Hookers, health workers and cops also oppose the bill’s attempt to ban brothels; working alone is a lot more dangerous than sharing a receptionist and a maid with other prostitutes.
Such lobbying seems to have done the trick. The amended bill now allows two prostitutes to share premises and take bookings through an agent, while ensuring that men who buy sex from women who sell it willingly will avoid prosecution. It still contains some elements that are unworkable, bordering on idiotic. If a prostitute tells a client she’s a willing seller and later turns out to have been lying, the client can be jailed. But with the efforts of Catherine and her friends some of the remaining silliness may get ironed out. The fact is that people who work in the sex trade are beginning to influence the laws that govern them. Some may think this is no way to run a country, but I’ve yet to see a better idea.

On vengeance and justice

I find Norm Geras's following point on vengeance and justice thought-provoking:

(...) justice is not exhausted by the aim of retribution, by its punitive purpose. It must pay attention to the possible rehabilitation of the wrongdoer. Furthermore retribution, and therefore the retributive element within remedial justice, is not the same as revenge. The desiderata of proportionality and, where appropriate, mitigation mean that just punishment may not be excessive, where revenge sometimes is excessive. It 'may' not be, in the sense both that it isn't justified if it's disproportionate and so must not be, and that in certain circumstances it is permitted to be less severe even than what would be proportionate and so could well be.

Last week, I wrote that I thought that the Madoff's sentence wasn't punitive. What I meant wasn't that he should have received more time in jail, but rather that the condemnation didn't punish his crime in the sense that it was inadequate and that it didn't serve any purpose other than to shatter the few years that he has on earth. The American system of justice is so obsessed with the idea of retribution that it focuses rarely on doing the right thing or rather on incorporating other ideas such as remedial and reformative justice in its sentencing on the people found guilty. I don't think that that Madoff spending the rest of his life in justice accomplishes anything moreover, I think it jut shows that America doesn't know how to deal with his crime and encourages that the idea that white collar crimes are crimes that can pay.

Punitive sentences

Bernie Madoff is getting over 100 years in jail. Somehow, this sentence just feels shallows to me . It isn't punitive. It doesn't even serve as deterrent for all the crooks out there. After all, if you can steal billions of dollars, live the life of a super-rich most of your life and then just spend your old age in jail, why wouldn't want to be Madoff and try to f**k, beat the system?

The glitz of minority status

This assertion from Elaine Lafferty is hilarious, but it also exposes a truth, which worries me almost as much as it makes me uncomfortable:

But here’s the good news for those doomed identity-less white guys. You actually do have an identity! You are in fact a minority in America. Embrace your status, file a brief, find your own voice. Because judges like Sonia Sotomayor, what with their identity and their empathy, who have spent a lifetime outside your members-only clubhouse, may be more willing to listen to you than you ever thought possible.

Power, civil liberties and intellectual dishonesty

Glenn Greenwald on Obama, War powers and civil liberties:

Even if it's due to perceived political necessity, the more Obama embraces core Bush terrorism policies and assumptions -- we're fighting a "war on terror"; Presidents have the power to indefinitely and "preventatively" imprison people with no charges; we can create new due-process-abridging tribunals when it suits us; the "Battlefield" is everywhere; we should conceal evidence when it will make us look bad -- the more those premises are transformed from right-wing dogma into the prongs of bipartisan consensus, no longer just advocated by Bush followers but by many Obama defenders as well.  The fact that it's all wrapped up in eloquent rhetoric about the rule of law, our Constitution and our "timeless values" -- and the fact that his understanding of those values is more evident than his predecessor's -- only heightens the concern.
So now, we're going to have huge numbers of people who spent the last eight years vehemently opposing such ideas running around arguing that we're waging a War against Terrorism, a "War President" must have the power to indefinitely lock people away who allegedly pose a "threat to Americans" but haven't violated any laws, our normal court system can't be trusted to decide who is guilty, Terrorists don't deserve the same rights as Americans, the primary obligation of the President is to "keep us safe," and -- most of all -- anyone who objects to or disagrees with any of that is a leftist purist ideologue who doesn't really care about national security.  In other words, arguments and rhetoric that were once confined to Fox News/Bush-following precincts will now become mainstream Democratic argumentation in service of defending what Obama is doing.  That's the most harmful part of this -- it trains the other half of the citizenry to now become fervent admirers and defenders of some rather extreme presidential "war powers."

What bothers me is that politics has indeed become about good and evil since it is no longer about actions, but about personality, about who people think the person in charge is or rather how good/evil he is. The recent months have shown at least one thing and it is that Democrats would have had no problem with the Bush policies if they had been enacted by Al Gore or any good Democrats. In a strange way, Bush was right, everything is about good and evil, good guys and bad guys, those in power who are scared out of their mind to have another 9/11 happen on their watch and the public who doesn't want to ask question so that it can be outraged at the excesses committed in their name, for their security later.

The freedom to hate

Alexander Cockburn argues against the Hate Crimes Prevention Act :

The problem with the Hate Crimes Prevention Act is that it creates a thought crime. After all, violent acts like assault or murder or rape carry specific and very serious penalties for the perpetrators, if convicted. (The Laramie roofers were convicted of murder anyway, and will spend the rest of their lives behind bars.) Motive does not enter the matter. And how will a prosecutor prove that a lesbian was murdered because of her sexual preference or because the mugger who stabbed her in the darkened entry to her building did so because she refused to give him her handbag?
As Representative Lamar Smith, ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, protested: "All violent crimes must be vigorously prosecuted. Unfortunately, this bill undermines one of the most basic principles of our criminal justice system - equal justice for all. Justice will now depend on the race, gender, sexual orientation, disability or other protected status of the victim. It will allow different penalties to be imposed for the same crime."
Advocates insist that the Hate Crimes Act will deal only with crimes of violence and have nothing whatsoever to do with limiting free speech or thought. But given the way case law evolves, and the manner in which ambitious prosecutors advance their political careers, there will be an irresistible incentive to bring indictments against anyone speaking hatefully about members of protected categories of people. Speech itself will become a 'violent act' and therefore unlawful.

I agree with the assertion that Hate Crime Prevention Act will have dangerous consequences and that it will not be an effective mechanism against hate crimes. I would like to be on the popular side on those who argue for that legislation because it would give me the feel good illusion that it is an act that would stop horrific crimes, but I know better. What worries me the most about such kind of legislation is that it places the emphasis on what differentiates people instead on reasserting the fact that they shouldn't matter because we are all equal under the law and that a crime is a crime is a crime. I think that the issue here is that the Hate Crime Prevention Act in fact reaffirms the viewpoint of those who commit crimes against gays, blacks, or any other group of people, it reaffirms the idea that those differences matter and are of so importance that the law must take them into account. The purpose of the rule of law is not to satisfy any emotional need that people have whether they are victims or not or whether those needs are justified or baseless, the rule of law exist in society to remind people precisely that people aren't slaves to their passions and that punishment isn't about vengeance or making a great emotional point about hate and other vile motives that criminals have. In modern societies, people even when they are capable of barbaric actions must be allowed to hate and it is the responsibility, the obligation to find other ways than punishment through laws to change their ways. It is difficult to resist the temptation to obtain absolute justice in our societies, but we must resist it because as Camus asserted absolute justice negates freedom.

Our morality

I agree with Norman Geras on this:

It is important not to be a nation that tortures. But that is because of what torture is and what it does to people; it is because human beings have some rights from which there can be no derogation, not in any circumstances. It is because to torture is to violate a human right that is absolute and to violate a human being. For its own sake America - like every nation - should not want to be one that tortures, but the most fundamental reason for this is the violation of humanity that torture is. The nation that does it is degraded, but it is degraded through how others have been treated at its hands. While, for any 'us', it is about us, this is so because of what it does to some them.

Moral confusion and ambiguity

Norman Geras on Obama, the Torture memos, the politics, the legalities, and the morality of it all:

Worse still, Obama cites in defence of his decision a reason that has been discredited legally - namely that 'those who carried out their duties rel[ied] in good faith upon [the] legal advice' that was given to them, a version, surely, of acting on higher authority. But there is no higher authority that can legitimize the practice of torture. This is a crime under international law, as is all but universally recognized, and everyone may be expected to know that it is, irrespective of how they have been advised. Apart from the legal constraint, all people, everywhere, have a moral duty not to torture.
As regrettable as Obama's fudging of this issue - his failure, that is, to state forthrightly what is being sacrificed to the political goal of avoiding disunity - are the large numbers of liberal commentators who simply endorse what he did, as if it were to them the most routine matter. Of all people, Philippe Sands:

Obama is right not to target the interrogators in the sense that real responsibility lies much higher up.

No, that is not how 'real' responsibility is distributed. Those who order torture are indeed responsible; and so are those who torture. You'd expect Sands to know this.

I am not getting verklempt on this issue, but I have this unshakable sense that an opportunity was missed and there is a dangerous vacuum out there, which leads to the sad conclusion that a line was crossed on torture and that Obama and his administration have not shut the doors to all of this nonsense that in times of dangers for America, everything is permissible and the highest price to pay for corrupting America's ideals is simply public shame and disapprobation, which in these times last about a minute given modern society's attention deficit disorder.

Accountability

Glenn Greenwald praises Obama's decision to release the torture memos, but criticizes his decision not to hold those responsible for them accountable :

The most criticism-worthy act that Obama engaged in yesterday was to affirm and perpetuate what is the single most-destructive premise in our political culture:  namely, that when high government officials get caught committing serious crimes, the responsible and constructive thing to do is demand immunity for them, while only those who are vindictive and divisive want political leaders to be held accountable for their crimes.  This is what Obama said in affirming that rotted premise:

This is a time for reflection, not retribution. . . . But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America's ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.

That passage, more than anything else, is the mindset that has destroyed the rule of law in the U.S. and spawned massive criminality in our elite class.  Accountability for crimes committed by political leaders (as opposed to ordinary Americans) is scorned as "retribution" and "laying blame for the past."  Those who believe that the rule of law should be applied to the powerful as well as to ordinary citizens are demonized as the "forces that divide us." 

Obama did the prudent thing, which may end up being the right thing. I can't believe that some were really expecting him to do anything else that what he did considering the repercussions of the other choice that he had and that Greenwald would have wanted him to take. Hey, guys, welcome to a warm and disappointing place called earth where politicians aren't superheroes and actually care about politics, their legacy, and the stability of the country during their time in offire as much, if not more than about the Truth and the Right thing, which are too often too absolute and get in the way of governing. I love it when change means more of the same or rather the same old stuff done in more funky manner.

The consequences of racial politics

In the Globe and Mail, an eye-opening article on the consequences of racial politics in Zimbabwe. One of them is the disappearance of White Farmers, who have had their farms taken away/invaded in the name of racial and social justice even though these type short-sighted actions have led to the famine in the country:

Nine years ago, Zimbabwe had about 4,300 white-owned commercial farms. Today only about 300 remain, and many are reduced to small plots of land. Many of the invaded farms are sitting idle or neglected despite a desperate need for food in Zimbabwe, where three-quarters of the population is dependent on food aid from foreign donors.
Largely because of the invasions, Zimbabwe's farm output has dropped by 50 to 70 per cent in the past seven years, and most people subsist on one meal a day.
After reaching a peak of brutal violence during the national election last June, the invasions stopped for a while. But in recent weeks they have accelerated again.

I'm wondering what factors would explain the fact that Zimbabwe is in ruins and that South Africa has been able so far to survive the same problems of race, social justice, and economic inequality. Zimbabwe got its independence in 1980. Apartheid ended in South Africa at the beginning of the nineties. Can the differences in their fates since then be solely justified by political factors?

Matters of convenience and justice

Ian Bell has an article in the Sunday Herald on International justice and its contractions, which is worth reading. It asks questions about the International Criminal Court (ICC) for which I’m afraid there are no good answers. I believe that the trouble with international justice is that it is neither truly international nor truly justice that it seeks to administer justice since it takes too many other extra-legal factors into consideration. It deals solely with people against whom there is an almost surmountable presumption not only of guilt, but also of inhumanity. This presumption is always stronger with people who lost power or come from countries with no influence, which explains why international justice solely deals with losers and people of a particular nationality. Sugary excerpt:

It started, in effect, at Nuremburg, of course. Certain hazy concepts were brought into focus. The idea that crimes could be committed against humanity itself began to gain ground. Yet read any of the Nuremburg transcripts and you will find nothing resembling a fair trial. That was never the purpose of the exercise, not with Stalin's prosecutors weighing in, with no sense of irony.

No one cared, or cares: the accused were Nazis. They got better, in terms of a hearing, than they deserved. Should we then conclude that the Allies committed not a single war crime? Dresden might have made for an interesting trial. Do we then decide that the Soviets were spotless? The raped and tortured women of Berlin, in their tens of thousands, might have stood as witnesses.

None of this is meant to excuse the Nazis, or Karadzic, or al-Bashir, or any of the rest of a sick company. Of course not. No- one ever stood trial, anywhere, for the 1915 Armenian genocide, and to this day the Turks refuse to say an honest word about their nation's killing of 1.5 million people. But victors' justice and victors' guilt are often not so very different. Many Serbs believe the ICC is a plot against their nation. Many Africans believe their continent is picked on. They would, wouldn't they?

[…] KARADZIC's lawyer will waste his time if he attempts any of this sort of stuff, of course. Men such as his client understand political realities. Besides, they rarely have useful alibis. It is simplistic, nevertheless, just to celebrate the bringing of a known, shameless killer to justice. Karadzic, like Saddam before him, probably concludes that his only real mistake was to lose. Had he been smart or lucky, like an al-Bashir or a Mugabe, he could have told international jurists where to stick their international justice.

The lefts and change

Sugary excerpt from Martha Nussbaum’s article in Dissent Magazine on the violent divisions of the Indian Left :

HERE WE ARRIVE at an issue that lies at the heart of all the leftist political movements of the twentieth century: is solidarity itself a major political value or is the basic value that of justice to each and every person, treating each and every one as an end? The latter vision is that of left-liberalism, which has always held that the purpose of a politics of human welfare is to improve the lives of individual human beings, and that each human being counts as equally worthy of respect. By contrast, “solidarity,” both on the communitarian right and on the antiliberal left, has suggested to many that the lives of individuals may and often must be sacrificed in the pursuit of class or group goals, and that worries about the justice of such sacrifices are irritatingly bourgeois.

My sentiment is that antiliberal left is winning because the liberal left has realized that antiliberalism is a more potent force than liberalism since it puts it to trial by making it responsible for all the ills of the world and demands not just reform by change, a sweeping revolution that it going to “un-bourgeoised”  the world while at the same time, enabling leftists to escape responsibility for the mistakes and the victims they create on the road not to Damascus, but to Babel. Thus, the left is, in sense, back in the times of Manifest Destiny, a time when people had the arrogance to believe that the mission to civilize the world could be in the hands of the few and could be an excuse for everything. In short, “we want to change the world” is the new “we want to civilize the world” and solidarity is the basis for a new identity politics, which seeks to eliminate every that doesn’t fit the picture of an impure world.

The failure to mark recent history

Michela Wrong has a fascinating post about her stay in Kampala in a hotel that was used by Idi Amin to torture and to kill. She argues and I believe that she is right that the fact that marks of a violent past are being transformed into hotels is just a symptom of the fact that in Africa that very few monuments are build to remember recent history. Sugary excerpt:

The Nile Hotel was a starker building, with a stark past - as Idi Amin's living quarters in the 1970s. The dictator was said to keep the heads of his victims fresh in a fridge there, to be brought out so he could scold them while he dined. In the 1980s, under Milton Obote, Amin's even more brutal successor, it remained a place of horror. The opposition leader Kizza Besigye spent two months being tortured in Room 211. Unlike many of the hotel's "guests" of that era, he survived.

Staying there in the 1990s was a slightly creepy experience - probably why the Nile's rooms were so affordable. You wondered what had happened in your room, and whether the carpet stains were everyday grubbiness or something more sinister. Elderly Ugandans raised an eyebrow when I mentioned where I was staying, confessing they couldn't walk past the hotel without a shudder.

[…] You can understand why no one felt like saving the tatty old Nile; the violence felt very recent, very raw. But the commercial potential of this prime real estate was too lip-smacking to ignore. Yet a historic opportunity has been missed. The Nile could have been turned into a memorial to those who died in Amin's and Obote's ravages. Just as Rwanda has turned the schools and churches where its genocide took place in 1994 into museums and shrines, Uganda could have made the Nile part of a national attempt to come to terms with a largely unmarked past.

The same failure to mark recent history is seen across the continent, sometimes for obvious political reasons. History is written by the victors, and when that reality jars with the victors' vision of events, it tends not to get written up at all. But that explanation doesn't always apply. It would surely be in the Namibian government's interest to remind its citizens and foreign visitors of the Herero and Nama genocide of 1904-07. Instead, it is content to let the statues and museums built by the Germans tell their mendacious story. You would think Uganda's current president, Yoweri Museveni, widely criticised for failing to exit the political stage, would seize an opportunity to remind his citizens of just how dreadful life got under his predecessors. But no.

Even when there is political capital to be made, Africans rarely go in for plaques, museums, statues and commemorative sites. Maybe the traumas of the past hundred years are still too fresh. Maybe the leadership is too busy coping with the challenges of the present. Probably these artefacts simply feel, on a continent where history was traditionally relayed orally, like very western methods of passing on human experience.

I think that part of the problems is that it is easier for Ugandans and other Africans to remain silent on the recent past because there is no consensus on its meaning and its significance and moreover because it is a divisive issue, which would get in the way of the cohesion of most African states, which are made of different ethnic groups, which have one point or another have been at each other throats or have been complicit to the horrors of that past. In other words, it is easier to forget for the sake of national unity and to avoid reopening wounds, which would reemphasize the fact that no only African countries are young, but they were also baldy manufactured.

Prosecuting and convicting terrorists

My second favorite law professor, Kenneth Anderson has an important article on the trial of the Madrid Bombings verdicts. Professor Anderson argues that terrorism isn’t a different and therefore terrorist suspects shouldn’t be tried the same way as suspects of crimes with less victims:

We accept that freely, if not happily, in the case of ordinary criminality. Part of the reason we do so, however, is that we understand that the stakes are not as high in ordinary criminality as they are in the case of jihadist terrorists bent on suicide and mass murder. We accept—and should accept—a high standard of proof in order to protect the innocent in ordinary criminality, although a few minutes' conversation with any public defender will suffice to show that in reality, there are relatively few genuinely innocent criminal defendants out there. They exist and deserve all the protections Western systems of justice offer—and, as the Duke lacrosse case demonstrates—in our ordinary justice system, the prosecutor has too much power and too much discretion.

When the stakes get up to those of mass murder by people who cannot be deterred by threat of punishment, because they are in pursuit of heaven, then a different moral and prudential calculation ought to hold. If our Western legal systems are unable to find ways to draw differences, and apply different standards of evidence and procedure than those of ordinary criminality, then the result is likely to be what happened in Spain. Granted, the actual bombers barricaded themselves in an apartment and blew themselves up rather than face capture; but those in the dock included their handlers, controllers, planners, and suppliers. On any just calculus—and the extensive, but ultimately excluded, evidence—they should have been found just as guilty of murder. Yet the Spanish prosecutors were unable to secure more than three guilty verdicts of murder.

Spanish criminal justice is vastly more prosecutor friendly than the American system. It allows much more hearsay evidence, and really anything the judge deems of sufficiently probative value. The fact that numbers of defendants, even ones evidently culpable to an outside observer, were released for lack of admissible evidence, and that, if not for the fact that Spanish law permits something considered quite unacceptable in the American system under the First Amendment's freedom of association—conviction for membership alone, without evidence of action or activity—Spanish criminal justice would have obtained very few convictions—well, if one takes the obligation to keep terrorists from blowing up people, trains, and train stations seriously, then something is wrong.

I disagree strongly with Professor Anderson. Differentiating terrorists from other criminals is a red herring because it pushes the debate away from the central question, which is whether terrorists can be judged as common criminals, receive a fair trial, and still get convicted or whether in the case of terrorism, special rules are needed because the cost of a miscarriage of justice is greater. If the argument is that terrorism is different than other crimes, then why not just admit that all crimes are different and adapt the legal system according to what society feels is the gruesomeness of the crime and the threat that the accused to society? Why not have different courts and different systems for pedophiles, rapists, and serial killers? Why should the number of victims be the only exception for a different type of trial? Of course making exceptions would mean that we have a tailored made legal system that no longer recognizes the presumption of innocence. After all giving all accused the same treatment reinforces the principle that they may be innocent and that therefore they must be given the same opportunity to defend themselves no matter how great the accusations against them are. What the Madrid Bombings verdicts shows isn’t that Western legal systems are ill equipped to prosecute suspected terrorists, but rather Western anti-terrorist agencies don’t know how to build a convincing case against terrorism because their only priority is prevention and because they rarely think about prosecution.

The point is that most if not all of the emphasis, understandably so, is on stopping terrorism and not on prosecuting terrorists, which is in my opinion that is going to take time to learn how to find the right balance between the two. It is both premature and too pessimistic to argue that the Madrid Bombings verdicts is part of a worrisome trend that shows that changes to the judicial system are necessary when more than likely they simply show that prosecutors need to adapt and to learn the fine art of prosecuting terrorists in this new age by for example educated anti-terrorist agents about the rule of law. In conclusion, it is difficult not to admit that the nature of terrorism itself already changes the nature of the crime by increasing the burden on the jurors or the judges who have to decide the fate of the suspects. This fact is the one of the strongest arguments against Professor Anderson’s point.

Seeing ruthless dictators everywhere

Increasingly, it seems that there is no middle ground between being a Hitler and being a Democrat. What I mean is that the conventional world views is that the world or rather specific regions of the world are full of bloodthirsty dictators that want to dominate not only their country, but extent their influence. According to this worldview, little Hitlers, Stalins, and Pol Pots are growing everywhere and the international community should not ignore them, but should confront them. A good example of this worrisome trend is the column of Peter Tatchell in the Times of London today in which he presents the world of yet another dangerous dictator, Yoweri Museveni, the president of Uganda. Sugary excerpt:

Uganda is drifting towards dictatorship, just like Zimbabwe a decade ago. The Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, is a new Robert Mugabe in the making, a budding tyrant who is subverting democracy and human rights (according to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) through voter intimidation, hounding opposition politicians, detention without trial, torture, extrajudicial killings, media censorship, corruption, suppression of protests, homophobic witch-hunts, and crackdowns on universities and trade unions.

The point isn’t that Tatchell is wrong about Museveni who is indeed a ruthless man. The point is that it is easy to grandstand and to condemn dictators when they come from what are considered unimportant or rather irrelevant countries. After all, what is the difference between Museveni and Putin or rather what is the difference between Museveni and Musharraf? Are African dictators more barbaric than others because there is something in the African air or in the African genes that makes them more bloodthirsty? Either a dictator is a dictator is a dictator or people who love to view the world as black and white need to accept that shades of gray exists. This acceptance of complexity doesn’t mean that the intolerable should become tolerable, but it means also that there are no absolute and that the world is never going to be clean or at least not at once. In other words, Tatchell should learn about Uganda and then write a column about something more important than his outrage. He could explain why Museveni is leading Uganda and has been allowed to “Mugaberize” himself.

Humanitarianism, war, and torture

John Laughland has the best article has read so far this morning on Comment is Free. He makes the point that it isn’t surprising that those who believe in “Humanitarian wars” also believe in torture:

Torture and "humanitarian war" are similar in many ways. Both involve the inflicting of violence in order to force a change of behaviour. Both are predicated on the assumption of guilt: torture is justified because the victim is said to be a terrorist, or an "illegal combatant" who has committed or is about to commit a terrible crime, while pre-emptive war is justified because a state is said to be "a rogue state" violating international law (Iraq) or committing crimes against humanity (Yugoslavia). It is therefore no coincidence that the US administration that justifies its wars in the name of claims about humanity and its right to liberty also advocates the use of torture to protect these.

I wish that I could argue forcefully that Laughland is wrong, but he is on to something even though things may not be as simple as he seems to believe that they are. I think that the term “Humanitarianism” has undergone a worrisome evolution that makes it possible for too many people with good intentions to justify the unjustifiable. However, experience has shown that good intentions can lead to catastrophes. The point is that I fear that increasingly the most important thing in the debates on torture and on the concept of just war, which are similar as Laughland shows, is the end; the means don’t matter as long as they lead to what it perceives to be a just end. In other words, the “modern” world has gone backwards since it has realized that its survival was at stake, the simplistic principle of the end justifies the means, whose dangers and contradictions was proven by Camus and others, has not only regained its prevalence, but it is at the center of our lives.

Torture and ordinary people

Martha Nussbaum reviews Philip Zimbardo’s book about torture and Abu Ghraib, The Lucifer Effect in the Times Literary Supplement. She makes following about torture and Zimbardo’s thesis, which I believe is essential in the current debate about the use of torture to protect society from Terrorism:

Research has amply confirmed that people of many different kinds will behave badly under certain types of situational pressure. Through the influence of authority and peer pressure, they do things that they are later amazed at having done, things that most people think in advance they would never themselves do.

Zimbardo’s first plea, appropriately, is for humility: we have no reason to say that atrocities are the work of a few “bad apples”, nor have we reason to think that they are done only by people remote from us in time and place. We should understand that we are all vulnerable, and we should judge individuals, accordingly, in a merciful way, knowing that we don’t really know what we would have done, had we faced similar pressures. His second appropriate plea is that we learn to “blame the system”: namely, to look at how situations are designed, and to criticize people who design them in ways that confront vulnerable individuals with pressures that human beings cope with badly. Zimbardo served as an expert witness on behalf of one of the officers accused of presiding over torture at Abu Ghraib, and his point was that we must not think that this is the work of a few unusual “defectives”. We must understand that good people can do bad things under pressure, and we must learn how to structure situations so that they do not put such pressures on individuals. In short, he calls for collective responsibility – not as a total replacement for personal responsibility, but as its necessary concomitant, if people are not to be faced, again and again, with demands to which they are very unlikely to respond well.

Zimbardo sometimes speaks as if situations are all that is important, and the insides of people explain nothing at all. That is clearly a wild over-extrapolation from his data, which support a much more qualified view. Even if people in these experiments had all behaved in precisely the same way, we could not conclude that their inner psychology supplies nothing at all: for they might be motivated by common human emotions and tendencies, one or many, and it would then be extremely important to know what these forces are.

Politics and genocide

I find this article on the politics of Genocide (What a terrible expression) alarming because it shows how polarizing history becomes when it is placed in the hands of politicians who even with the best interests in mind can only do harm. Sugary excerpt:

Normally, you might expect historians to welcome the interest of governments in convening scholars to explore questions of scholarship. But in this case, scholars who study the period say that the leaders of Turkey and the United States — along with that handful of scholars — are engaged in a profoundly anti-historical mission: trying to pretend that the Armenian genocide remains a matter of debate instead of being a long settled question. Much of the public discussion of the Congressional resolution has focused on geopolitics: If the full House passes the resolution, will Turkey end its help for U.S. military activities in Iraq?

But there are also some questions about the role of history and historians in the debate. To those scholars of the period who accept the widely held view that a genocide did take place, it’s a matter of some frustration that top government officials suggest that these matters are open for debate and that this effort is wrapped around a value espoused by most historians: free and open debate.

“Ultimately this is politics, not scholarship,” said Simon Payaslian, who holds an endowed chair in Armenian history and literature at Boston University. Turkey’s strategy, which for the first 60-70 years after the mass slaughter was to pretend that it didn’t take place, “has become far more sophisticated than before” and is explicitly appealing to academic values, he said.

The fact that politicians are “messing” with genocide worries me for two simple reasons. The first one is that it politicizes history by making the norm for politicians to write or rewrite history or even to simply create it. This isn’t the case with the Armenian genocide, but I think that the involvement of the US Congress and of the French parliament last year is counterproductive because it takes the focus away from historical events to put it on present events, which in turn diminishes what I believe is a sacred issue. The second reason why the politicization of genocide worries is that I’m afraid that it sets both a terrible precedent and a terrible example. What will the United States say if a country such as Iran for example writes a law to say that the US was guilty of genocide against Native Americans? What will the French say if, no when, an African country parliament writes a law that states that France was guilty of crimes against humanity and of genocide because it once was a colonial power? The point is a pandora box has been opened because politicians forgot that it is better to do nothing than to do something that will have dangerous consequences and that some things are just above politics.

Jeffrey Sachs and Sisyphus

Vanity Fair has a portrait of Jeffrey Sachs in its July Issue in which it talks about his dream of ending poverty. I like Sacks because he reminds me in a way of Bernard Kouchner in his hay day ( before he chose to take the bone, which Sarkozy threw him) and because it is refreshing to see a grown and cultured man who still has unwithered ideals and big dreams. Of course, the realist in me believes that he won’t succeed in making poverty history, but at the same the fact that he is trying inspires me because Sachs is doing something this world needs and that is the willingness to dream big and to as Sisyphus take on great tasks even if they seem meaningless and useless because they will fail. Sugary excerpt:

According to his account in The End of Poverty, Sachs's focus on extreme poverty began in 1995, when, for the first time, he traveled to sub-Saharan Africa: "Never, not even in the highlands of Bolivia, where illness is rife, had I confronted so much illness and death." Early in his career, when he was thinking about ways of improving people's lives, Sachs had been convinced of the power of open markets, free trade, deregulation, privatization, and fiscal discipline. Now, perhaps in response to this first trip to Africa, he started to promote benevolent intervention.

Some people believe that Sachs's crusade to wipe out poverty is the direct result of his failure in Russia, that he's atoning for his public errors of judgment and compensating for them. Sachs dismisses that simpleminded theory out of hand. As far as he is concerned, his work in the developing world is not all that different from his earlier work in Bolivia and Poland. In an e-mail, he explains to me that his goal has always been "to take on complex challenges and bring to bear expertise in economics and other disciplines to find workable solutions." What I think he means is this: it doesn't matter whether you're using shock therapy to save a nation's economy or prescribing interventions for a village to save human beings. The messianic pattern is the same.