Category Archives: History and Politics

“Enhanced Interrogation” and framing the debate

The recent controversy over releasing details of the torture program, or even whether the brutal practices, as redefined in a secret legal memo, technically even constituted torture, is the most recent, grotesque, example of what has happened to dialogue in our winner-take-all and the rest of you fucking losers go home culture.  

One side argues that torture violates our values, however you slice it, rename it, justify it in secret memos, and that the best disinfectant is sunlight.  The other side argues that to call coercive interrogation “torture”, and reveal the secret details about how, where and when such tough but necessary things were done, weakens our great nation’s security and makes us more vulnerable to those intent on destroying us — people who deserve to be tortured, in any case.

Instead of discussion there are twitch reflexes conveyed in our black and white mass media and reflected back by the populace.  Opponents of torture argue that ten years after the worst abuses by the CIA, with nobody in the administration that engineered and enabled the program ever held accountable (except by lifetime tenure on the Federal Court, appointment to the faculty of a major university, lucrative book deals and speaking tours, etc.), it is long past time to reveal the hideous details to ensure an episode like this is never repeated.   On the other side, former Vice President Dick Cheney, architect and proponent of the program, goes on the air and defiantly dismisses the report as a “load of crap”, 500 pages of weak drivel that misses the point entirely, written by partisan wimps who don’t have the stomach to do what must be done.

Here’s the funny thing, though.  There is no news in this report.  Virtually everything of consequence that this subcommittee took years, and presumably millions of dollars, to compile, and which was released (525 pages of the 6,000 page report, 90% still highly classified) amidst such trepidation and controversy, has already been published, in 2008, in a New York Times best seller and finalist for the National Book Award, Jane Mayer’s chilling The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.*

Reading the book I was chilled to the bone at what was being done in my name.  I am chilled today, even as I learn, from Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars, that the CIA was replaced by the equally secretive JSOC (at the time Donald Rumsfeld’s elite secret force) as the masters of the interrogation and torture program fairly early on– meaning that this revealed CIA torture was the tip of the iceberg as far as torture goes.  

At the time this “enhanced interrogation” was going on, and the first public revelations of it were rippling across the media, I was at a concert in Town Hall enjoying David Bromberg’s music.  Toward the end of his show he usually does a meditative tune based on  the Rip Van Winkle story. The narrator wakes up after a 20 year sleep and doesn’t recognize his home, his town, his country.   Bromberg, a humanistic and probably progressive secular Jew from Tarrytown, NY, (where Rip Van Winkle author Washington Irving spent the last third of his celebrated life), improvises a commentary about disturbing current events, his guitar vamping behind him.  

As he began musing about the arguably unAmerican things the Bush Administration had been up to, a man in the audience angrily cut him off, shouting that he was there for music, not politics.  The disgruntled man, a couple of rows behind me, wore a military jacket.   Bromberg looked at him, nodded and shrugged.  

He said “we torture people?  Now it’s OK to torture people?” and began singing again.

 

 

*   The book became a best-seller in non-fiction hardcover in the United States, with its author Jane Mayer booked on various news programs for interviews. It later made the New York Times Book Review editors’ list of “10 Best Books of 2008”[2] and was nominated for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction.[3] The book was a finalist for the National Book Awards.[4]

It also received the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights 29th annual book award in 2009, given to a novelist who “most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy’s purposes – his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity.”[5]

A Thought on Frederick Douglass and Justice

If you read the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, you will have no doubt you are in the presence of a towering refutation of the racist lies of American slavery.   You will understand, within a few paragraphs, why teaching a slave to read was considered such a serious offense.  To compare a man to a barnyard animal when that man can speak and write as eloquently and powerfully as Douglass does, shoves the smug comparison back down the ignorant comparer’s throat.

I received an email yesterday comparing our Founding Fathers to the Jewish warriors, the Maccabees, who drove the forces of Antiochus out of ancient Israel, a rebellion celebrated in the rare nationalistic holiday of Chanukah. The speaker gave the pertinent details:

 “The 167 BCE Jewish rebellion led by the Hasmonean (Maccabee) family against the Seleucid/Greek Emperor Antiochus (IV) Epiphanies, who was determined to ruthlessly uproot Judaism and replace it with Hellenic values.”

The Founding Fathers and the Maccabees, he said, were determined, idealistic, brave, visionaries who prevailed for freedom against powerful enemies in spite of the massive odds against them.   Their truth goes marching on, the email intimated, as does the connection between American democracy, a light unto the world, and modern day Israel which embodies the ancient code the Jews gave to the world.

As I read the email I thought of the same speech being delivered by any number of true believers.   Every true believer believes their cause is uniquely just, that their greatest leaders are determined, idealistic, brave visionaries fighting often impossible odds against evil enemies intent on their destruction.  One woman’s freedom fighter is another woman’s terrorist and so on.  I replied that I wondered how someone like Frederick Douglass, who gave a famous speech on July 4th, 1852, years after his own escape from an American slavery still heartily underway, might feel about this discussion of American Freedom and the Light unto the Nations bit.

My friend wrote back that she meant to read a bit more about Douglass, but that it was her impression that he was a “‘Jeffersonian-type’ thinker,’ always able to see the whole picture and understand the context of the times.”

I wrote back suggesting she read more from the pen of Douglass and then ventured, in my opinionated way:

For him to have been a Jeffersonian-type during slavery would have been like a guy in Auschwitz taking a nuanced view of Hitler.  I think even Jefferson’s most privileged house slaves probably were not enlightened enough to see the “big picture” and be consoled by the idea that in just a couple of hundred years there would be a black president.  

Here is the heart of the speech Frederick Douglass delivered on Independence Day 1852:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

The whole speech is here.

footnote on Messianism

These days it is easy for a person with any scholarly inclination and an internet connection to almost instantly clarify shaky memory and insert a citation, as here:

The readiness of the Jews to believe the messianic claims of Sabbatai Zevi may largely be explained by the desperate state of European Jewry in the mid-17th century. The bloody pogroms of Bohdan Khmelnytsky had wiped out one third of Europe’s Jewish population and destroyed many centers of Jewish learning and communal life (Cohen 1948). There is no doubt that for most of the Jews of Europe there could not have been a more propitious moment for the messiah to deliver salvation than the moment Sabbetai Zevi made his appearance.

source

If you click on the Khmelnytsky link above you will learn, among other things, that a town less than 100 miles from Vyshnivets, where the families of my maternal grandparents were shot and left in a ravine, is named after the famous Ukrainian nationalist.   I had previously known Khmelnytsky only as an infamous murderer of Jews, though it turns out he did many other notable things in his life.  The killing of Jews, in the larger account of his notable life, can be relegated to a footnote.

I was tickled, if I might say, by the deadpan, almost New York Times-like, objectivity of the beginning of this description of the dim Jewish view of Cossack hero Bodhan Khmelnytsky, situated at the very end of the Wikipedia account of his distinguished life and career: 

Jewish history[edit]

Main article: Khmelnytsky Uprising § Jews

Jewish history‘s assessment of Khmelnytsky is overwhelmingly negative because he used Jews as scapegoats and sought to eradicate Jews from the Ukraine.  Between 1648–1656, Khmelnytsky’s rebels murdered tens of thousands of Jews.[29]  Atrocity stories about massacre victims who had been buried alive, cut to pieces or forced to kill one another spread throughout Europe and beyond.  The pogroms contributed to a revival of the ideas of Isaac Luria, who revered the Kabbalah, and the identification of Sabbatai Zevi as the Messiah.[30] Orest Subtelny writes:

Between 1648 and 1656, tens of thousands of Jews—given the lack of reliable data, it is impossible to establish more accurate figures—were killed by the rebels, and to this day the Khmelnytsky uprising is considered by Jews to be one of the most traumatic events in their history.[31]

 and, speaking of footnotes:  

  1. Whether Khmelnytsky was or wasn’t a noble is still uncertain. He himself claimed nobility when it suited him, and it wasn’t often disputed by his contemporaries. Chmielnicki himself once wrote in the letter to King Jan Kazimierz that he was “born Chmielnicki”–however, that surname was never associated with the Abdank Coat of Arms hesed. His father, a noble himself, was married to a Cossack woman and according to the Polish Statute of 1505 that might have put Bohdan’s szlachta status under scrutiny. There are other theories: that his father or grandfather were stripped of their noble status or–perhaps most controversial–the theory of 19th-century Polish historian Tomasz Padura, who claimed (without giving sources) that Chmielnicki’s father was a Jewish convert to Catholicism.

 

The truth would make them REALLY hate us

There’s a debate now, as there always is, when it comes to telling the truth– how much to tell and which version of the truth will be the last word on the subject.  In our bleeding America, this debate, when churned enough, often leads to veins popping out on necks, sprays of spittle and physical violence.

The present kerfuffle (a word VP Cheney dusted off to describe the brouhaha over his accidentally shooting an acquaintance in the face with buckshot while trying to kill tiny birds) is over how much to reveal about our recent torture policy.   An official government report is finally about to come out, a decade after the most extreme forms of ‘dark side’ interrogation techniques were systematically used against thousands of captured Muslims.  

The report concludes, from what we hear, that torture was routinely committed, even if deniability was maintained for the actual architects and engineers of the program.  It was more widespread, and even worse, than the designers of the program intended, the report concludes.  This conclusion is excessively fair, one suspects, to those who commissioned, mandated and legally justified the specific policies and techniques while urging their unsupervised use.  

The report is also said to conclude what every credible expert on interrogation always says:  no reliable intelligence was extracted through the use of torture, in spite of the muscular claims of ‘enhanced interrogation’s (torture’s)’ forceful public defenders.

Our president has already made things bad enough by admitting, with awkward candor, that, after 9/11, good Americans, with the best of intentions, and in genuine fear, well, “we tortured some folks.”  Just another example, his enemies will say, of the illegitimate tone deaf idiot making life harder for the lovers and protectors of the American way of life.

Here is the concern:  if murderous fanatics who already hate us intensely learn the actual details of the cruel tactics we routinely used against many, many Muslims who had nothing to do with fighting America, as well as some who did, they will have good reason to seek revenge.  Think of the incendiary propaganda too many actual details would provide the terrorists!   

America invaded Muslim countries under sometimes false pretenses, admittedly, ousted a few bad leaders (a good thing) and then humiliated, terrified and tortured many people, innocent and guilty, suspected of hating America and plotting to kill our citizens.  Fair enough, fair-minded defenders of the torture program will say, but why should any of that really be a problem now, so many years later? Mistakes were made, passive voices used, folks were tortured.  Nothing to see here, move on, folks.

The audacity of hope is one thing.  The audacity of “fuck you, asshole, what are you going to fucking do about it?” is another thing.  Then there is all that grey area in between, where the devil resides, in unspeakable luxury.

 

NY Times version of last paragraph:

The audacity of hope is one thing.  The audacity of “nuts to you, fool, are you going to do something about it?” is another thing.  Then there is all that grey area in between, where the devil resides, in unspeakable luxury.

 

I Mash Yer Fez– rewrite

There is irony that flies and irony too heavy to leave the ground.  Sometimes you can tweak the flightless variety a bit, sometimes not.  I tried and failed in my first attempt at this one a couple of days back, to the horror of more than one reader.  I will give it a more straightforward shake, lose some of the italics, try to say directly what I meant to say the first time.

I endorse gentleness and mildness, and strive to maintain these qualities above all, although it is not easy work.   Our society is violent, competitive and challenging, for one thing.   Most humans are prone to anger when mistreated or frustrated.   It is an almost irresistibly good feeling to be right, to feel justified, to prevail.  This reflex to prevail is a common cause of friction and leads to righteous anger when we feel wronged or victimized in our zero sum society.   Wars are fought, faces punched, prisons filled, lives destroyed, out of righteous anger.    

Our society’s laws, not always designed to ensure fairness, can be seen as the organized expression of this rage to be right.   Follow me here: laws are made by those with the power to institutionalize their unfair advantage, no matter how grotesque, and to enforce it by deadly state action, if necessary.  The penalty for looting after a natural disaster and making off with a bag of groceries — prison, if you’re not shot first.  The penalty for participating in, and profiting handsomely from, billion dollar financial fraud — it’s complicated.

Our land of the free and the home of the brave, the worlds’ first modern republican democracy, was for a century a land of slavery.  This history is considered ancient and is rarely discussed at any depth.   The arguments against slavery are many, well-known, have in recent times won the day. It seems beyond dispute now that slavery is evil, morally repugnant and illegal.  The single compelling argument for a century of American slavery was this:  we need them to make ourselves wealthier by having a slave economy, fuck you, stay out of our way of life.  

The bitter, bloody struggle that resulted in the abolition of American slavery was over for less than a decade before a legally sanctioned new version of The Peculiar Institution was set in place for a century by Supreme Court skullduggery and racist codes of strict segregation violently maintained by terrorism winked at under the laws of the former slave states.   The struggle for freedom for the descendants of slaves during that century cost many brave lives.  

Today many Americans feel satisfied that slavery is deep in our past, some consider us a “post racial society”, since we now have a half-black man in the White House.  Can anyone really say with a straight face that our ongoing history of racism at law and in practice has ever been seriously addressed in this country?

Slavery and racism are considered by many as elements of ancient history, and they are hot subjects that raise hackles on both sides.  Fine, then, let’s grant that American racism is all in the past, for the sake of moving on and take a look at more recent outrages at law.  

We have been, since the devastating, coordinated terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, engaged in a permanent war against terrorism, The War on Terror, a war that is used to justify many excesses including the murder of many blameless civilians in a number of countries, right now.  

Soon after the 9/11 attacks Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld  fired chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Hugh Shelton, a commander reluctant to abandon legal safeguards designed to minimize the deaths of innocent people and ensure a solid intelligence foundation before employing elite, secret black ops squads to kill suspected terrorists.   Rumsfeld replaced him with a new general who agreed with the sleek, muscular, infinitely flexible new black ops policy the Bush administration had in mind to go after al Qaeda and similar groups.

They sincerely believed that preventing the killing of innocent civilians was a meaningless consideration in an all out existential world-wide War On Terror.  Collateral damage, Rumsfeld and the Bush administration believed, is inevitable and, if kept secret, not something many Americans would get excited about.  They were correct in that calculation.  What you don’t know, you don’t want to know, even if you thought you might have needed to know it, if you know what I’m saying.

Before circumventing the letter, spirit and intent of national security and anti-torture laws and treaties, the administration hired a team of lawyers to write preemptive justifications detailing why they are legally allowed, even obliged, to not follow the laws they were willfully violating.

What makes all this intolerable for an idealist who believes, Anne Frank-like, in spite of it all, in democracy, is that these legal justifications are classified, state secrets kept from the citizens of the world’s greatest democracy.   And once these secret policies are given a fig leaf of legality and put into motion, it is almost impossible to stop them.  Our current president has stepped up the secret killings and prosecuted journalists under a 1917 anti-espionage statute carrying the death penalty to prevent the release of truths about our policies that might embolden our many enemies.

Righteous rage can be intoxicating to a maniac.  While intoxicated with what feels to him like righteous rage, spraying machine gun fire at inhuman enemies seems like a reasonable thing to do.  After that, though, the let down often comes quickly.  After a moment’s reflection the maniac is as likely to turn the gun on himself as to do anything else.  

Personally, no matter how provoked or worked up, I would err on the side of pausing to take a few breaths before capitulating to rage and smashing someone’s fez.  

Unless under direct physical threat, being gentle, calm and soft-spoken is usually much more productive than being righteously enraged, agitated, loud, and ready for justifiable violence.  

Of course, I know where I live and I fully realize how idiotic what I’m saying sounds.  Even if I’m totally right.

 

The ongoing snit over who had it worse

Once again, writing here is the last thing I should be doing at the moment, but with Kristallnacht commemorated so evocatively the other night by a priest, a cantor, a pianist and singer, two dancers, the mournful sob of a shofar, the lighting of candles, the breaking of glass, I find myself thinking again about the mass murders of the early 1940s, the slaughter of both sides of my family in those years, equally atrocious mass murder during World War I (the war to end all wars), the Khymer Rouge Killing Fields, so-called Ethnic Cleansing mass killings and the ongoing large scale slaughters in Africa, the Middle East and wherever else they break out, plus the killing of innocents in wars, declared and covert, that is going on as I type these words.  This roll call of organized mass murder, genocide, if you prefer, puts me in mind of the painfully counter-productive, idiotic debate about which mass killing was worse than which other one.  It is not hard to figure out that every one of them is the worst.

“The Holocaust was a novum,” said a professor of mine once, introducing a theory that was not his own.  He was a German Jew who had left the Fatherland as a young boy, escaping with his family right before the heavy fist came crashing down on the Jews of Europe.  A novum, he explained, was something never seen in the world before but explainable by science — and he ticked off the features that according to this theory made the Nazi killings a novum— the systematic, mechanized organization of it (never seen before), the singling out of Jews and others (but primarily Jews– unless you were one of the others, of course), the unprecedented hideous efficiency of the bureaucratized killing machine, the incredible numbers rounded up, deported and killed in such a short period of time.  

I recall the professor seeming a little perplexed that some Blacks were angry about the term “The Holocaust” and the feeling, among certain Blacks, that the Jews were trying to corner the market on suffering when the Middle Passage, which went on for centuries, was as brutal, and killed as many, as Auschwitz and the rest of the novum of the capital H holocaust.

“But,” say those who argue that the Holocaust was the worst and most horrible example of man’s inhumanity to man, not an unreasonable claim, although the quibble misses the larger point, “6,000,000 Jews systematically murdered in four years, plus a couple of million others, is worse than perhaps 4,000,000 Africans killed over the course of hundreds of years, I’m sorry to say.”

“4,000,000?  Are you serious?  The number is more like 20,000,000, Mr. Novum.”  

The number of Africans killed during the slave trade will never be known with any precision, the slave operation was conducted by several countries over hundreds of years and there was nobody keeping count, or interested in anything but maximizing the  profit to be derived by increasing the number of live slaves that arrived fit for sale. The lives of those millions of enslaved people who managed to survive?  Not much better, in many cases, than the life of a slave laborer from Auschwitz, though the American slave master had an economic, and sometimes Christian, incentive to keep his slave alive whereas the slave laborers from Auschwitz were in most cases disposable.

“The death of one man is a tragedy.  The death of a million men is a statistic,” noted mass murdered Joseph Stalin is said to have opined.

It should be remembered that Hitler laughed off concerns that a mass killing program would be a public relations nightmare for his administration.  “After all, gentleman,” the famous psychopath is reported to have said, “who today remembers the slaughter of the Armenians?”  

He made the comment only about twenty years after the last of the brutal killings of Armenians herded into the desert, toward what is now the Syrian border, and in Turkish villages and towns, drowned in rivers, marched to death, burnt, whipped to death, shot, starved.  By 1940 few indeed remembered it.

This organized murder of more than a million people happened during the catastrophic World War, which was followed by revolution, the wildly roaring twenties, the stock market crash, worldwide economic depression and the violent, fevered lead up to the next World War.  The world was busy, busy!!!!

The world is still busy, busy!!!  We cannot stop to consider all the terrors we and this poor world are hurtling headlong into.  If we reach any conclusion at all about it we shudder to think of the continual murderous horrors, some done in our name, that we are powerless to stop.  The murderer may be sometimes be a patriotic American, pursuing a complicated policy designed and advertised as protecting our freedom, but the outcome for the murdered child and the grieving grandparents is the same as it has ever been. 

On the other hand — I smash yer fez

[warning:  this post contains violent, heavy handed irony which does not always work in written form.  In fact, it didn’t fare much better in an out loud reading, where it caused a tearful plea to please stop reading it (right before the too late redeeming ending, too).  Abhorring slavery, assassination, lynching, maniacal use of firearms, it uses violent language to try to show the amount of righteous rage violence unleashes, but it is a dangerous game not to be played lightly, as I have attempted to play it here.   I regret any upset this post may cause, even as I leave it here, for whatever redeeming social value it might have.  A less visceral, more humane version is here if you prefer your points made less brutally.]

 

And, with accursed French nuance, I confusingly add that, naturally, it also feels almost irresistibly good to be righteously outraged, you fucking fuck!  

What are the laws, after all, but the organized expression of this rage to be right?   They are made by those with the power to institutionalize their unfair advantage, no matter how grotesque, and to enforce it by deadly state action, if necessary.  Slaves?  We need them to make ourselves wealthier, fuck you.  Free the slaves?  Fuck you, get a rope, we’ll show you how we deal with fucks like you.  Oh, go ahead and call the damn sheriff, he can hold the end of the damn rope we hang you from, Mr. All Men Are Created Equal Pantload, sir. 

Or even better, and a more recent example– Rumsfeld, after 9/11, facing a reluctant chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Shelton so concerned with legal safeguards for protecting the innocent and due process when using elite, secret black ops squads to kill foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism.  “You’re fired, general,” said the jaunty Secretary of Defense, hiring a new guy who agreed that all terrorists and potential terrorists, everywhere on earth, must be hunted down and killed and the more secretively, the better. Any collateral damage?  Also secret.  State secret.  Classified.  Need to know. Don’t ask, we kill you.

The funny thing, if it is funny, is that even those circumventing the letter, spirit and intent of even the most high minded laws, or especially those, will hire the best lawyers in the world to write a preemptive justification for why they are legally allowed, even obliged, to not follow the law that they are willfully violating.

Where can we find these legal justifications, we citizen members of the general public of the world’s greatest democracy?  Top secret, bitches.  We have a 1917 anti-espionage statute carrying the death penalty, you want to be charged and prosecuted under that deadly law, journalist bitches?   I don’t think so!  You want to act like the truth doesn’t embolden our enemies?  Get the rope!

Righteous rage feels good for a second, while you are spraying machine gun fire and screaming at the top of your lungs at inhuman enemies, real or imagined.  After that, though, if you reflect for a moment, you’re as likely to turn the gun on yourself as to do anything else.  I would err on the side of pausing to take a few breaths before capitulating to rage and smashing your fucking fez.  

I would argue, if I was an arguing fellow, that, when not under direct physical threat, being gentle, calm and soft-spoken is usually much more productive than being righteously enraged, agitated, loud, and ready for justifiable violence.

Of course, that’s just me, fucking Ahimsa-Boy.  What the hell do I know?

 

Remain soft-spoken and forgiving

Of course, it’s natural to want to defend yourself when you are in the right. It’s particularly hard to resist making your case in our competitive society, where it is an applauded tic to lustily plead one’s cause in a no holds barred, zero-sum game of winner take all.   In fact, if you fail to make your case, you not only lose, you’re a loser.  If the game is zero-sum, as this one here is, losing is a big deal.  If you lose you do not survive, except as a grim cautionary tale.   Yet, consider:

…if you could remain quiet, even though reason was completely on your side, even though you had every right to be be angry and nobody with a heart could fault you for being mad as hell — if you could speak softly and not argue your case, imagine the different outcome, the good will and friendship that could possibly be preserved?    You’d still be seen as a loser, of course, but the quiet victory over the reflex to self-righteousness would be yours and no harm would be done by your justified venting.  Good might possibly result from your kind example, for it feels very good to be forgiven.  Remaining soft-spoken and forgiving means that you’ve gone past the need to prevail, be right, win, convince, justify or rationalize anything.  Remaining soft-spoken and forgiving is the work of a lifetime, it would appear. 

 

                                                                 ii

My mind leaps sideways, on this 76th Anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night when the proverbial gloves came off in Nazi Germany and Jews were finally starting to be killed outright, and the first 30,000 rounded up and sent to prison camps, in a night of national rioting against the Jews, to the outskirts of Vishnevetz, in the Ukraine, not far from Khmelnystkyi, on a particular August day in 1943.   Nazi motherfuckers, working with local Ukrainian red-neck motherfuckers, marched the Jews out of the hideous Vishnevetz ghetto in orderly fashion, to the banging of drums.  

The Jews of Vishnevetz and the surrounding areas had been rounded up into the ghetto only a few months earlier. The Jews had been required to finish this work of creating the ghetto boundaries and kissing their chains in three days or else my grandmother’s brother, (or possibly her uncle or father– there’s no one left to ask)  who was one of the two Jewish hostages being held by the Gestapo, would be executed.  My grandfather’s father’s house had been designated as the Eastern edge of the fenced ghetto, and so it became.  The work was done on time and my grandmother’s loved one presumably released, or maybe shot by the Germans just for laughs.   Many Jews had already died in Vishnevetz under Nazi occupation, several summarily shot, others starved to death or dead of disease, or, one suspects, suicide.  Most of the survivors, always hungry, and, if sick, soon dead, lived the half-lives of the living dead, expecting their murder at any moment.

To the edge of the ravine, then, the Ukrainians have been preparing it for you all day.  All rocks and roots removed, the dirt combed nicely back from the hillside.  A soft bed of dirt, freshly turned, with that fresh earth smell. Perfect.  OK, clothes in neat piles, please.  You can leave your underwear on, it’s OK.  First group of Jews, please.  Yes, right this way.  OK, face to the left, that’s right, excellent, now slide down a few feet, there are a few more people here on the side who could fit in.  Yes, that’s good, well-done.  OK, lie down, it will all be over in a second.  A line of Ukrainians steps forward and shoots each Jew once in the head.  They then scramble over the bodies, straightening limbs and covering the freshly killed bodies with a fresh layer of dirt.  The drumming continues, to cover the sounds of the shots, the screaming, the wailing.  It’s like a parade for the Ukrainian onlookers, already starting to gather up the clothes to sell.

OK, next group!  Thank you all for waiting, next group, this way please, come on, step up, please!  The Jews in their underwear stumble forward into the ravine, walking sideways in the narrow row to be lined up behind the barely buried layer of dead in front of them.  Thank you all for waiting. OK, here we go, lie down, please.  Make yourselves comfortable, and goodbye.  The Ukrainians step forward, pap-pap-PAP! and then they are nimbly dancing over the dead bodies, straightening limbs, neatening the stacks.  Their wives, meanwhile, have finished tying into huge bundles the first of the murdered Jews’ best clothes, which the Jews had been urged to wear for their relocation.  Relocation from life to death, OK, we lied just to get you to wear your good clothes and all remaining jewelry.  We’re fucking Nazis, what do you want?   Next group, please.

 

       iii

This is, obviously, not what I started out to write when I chose the title remain soft-spoken and forgiving.   The forgotten slaughter at Vishnevetz is nothing to remain soft-spoken and forgiving about– it is about the worst example I could find, although I did not find it so much as it found me, clearly.  It is only an example of something that burns the soul, presses hard against any vow to remain soft-spoken, forgiving, decent, human and kind.   It cries out loud for a different response.

When someone comes to kill you, if it is within your power, do not let them kill you. Nazis, although they take care to arrange things to make resistance as difficult as possible, must be resisted (not that the persecuted Jews of the Ukraine were in any position to resist).  Of course, this leads to the famous problem of specific cases, murderous laws like “Stand Your Ground” and things like that.  The clear right to avoid your own murder is an extreme case of having reason on your side, soft-speaking and gentility aside.

On the other hand, an in extremis situation like the grotesque events in that Vishnevetz ravine that August 1943 day is often used by philosophers to illustrate and test their points.   If a Vishevetz Jew could remain soft-spoken and forgiving… a far better universal moral principle than an unslakable thirst for vengeance.  The sickening slaughter does provide a good snapshot of how difficult it is not to rage sometimes, with reason screaming on your side.

I will try this post again with a better example, a smaller scale, more personal example having nothing to do with the mass murder of my family and many other families.  Right now, I’m still unaccountably lingering by the edge of that long-forgotten ravine full of the bones of my ancestors.

Facts: 0, Emotions: 1 (F) (Politics clipped from an e-mail)

It horrifies me that brilliant and courageous journalists like Jeremy Scahill, Jane Mayer and a few others, can make such airtight cases for their important and just causes, shine a clear light into unspeakably cruel darkness, and…. it changes nothing.  The detailed and coherent telling of the actual facts, even if they stir the emotions terribly, do not have any effect on organized human action (politics) next to the raw emotions alone, stirred violently with a buzzword or two and chanted over and over on the mass media.
 
Jane Mayer, in The Dark Side, lays out the many horrifyingly criminal illegalities involved in the torture program, with dates, names, details, memos, who authorized and ordered what, how the laws were violated, the exact techniques routinely used, the destroyed tapes of torture interrogations, etc.  A few years later President Obama, either in an unfortunate ad lib or reading a dick fingered teleprompt, admits that “unfortunately… we tortured some folks.”  Tortured some folks.   Harry Shearer does a good Obama imitation and that week on Le Show he did a musical number (at 42:00) with the hook, in unison with the Obama sound bite, a nonchalantly harmonized “we tortured some folks.” 
 
Scahill, as he details in his book Dirty Wars (a NY Times best seller it seems the NY Times never reviewed), travels to a village near Gardez, outside the Green Zone in Afgahnistan, to investigate a rumored massacre of civilians. There had been a party in a village called Khataba early into the morning of February 10, 2010 to celebrate the birth of a child.  The locals all have videos of the party on their phones, smiling faces, men dancing.  Suddenly a  helicopter lands, guys in heavy boots jump out, walk on the roof.  
 
One of the men who had been dancing at the party goes out to see what’s up and gets pumped full of lead by American commandos.  Likewise the two pregnant women who run to him screaming, likewise a teenage girl and another man, also shot to death.  Only a couple die immediately, the cop and one of the women linger, groaning, for five hours after the Americans dig their bullets out of the bleeding bodies with their tactical knives.  It would have been embarrassing and incriminating if local authorities, or NATO investigators, found American bullets in the bodies of the deceased, after all.  The commandos stop the others from taking the two mortally wounded family members to the nearby hospital.  They handcuff the remaining men, march them to the helicopter and drop them somewhere miles from home to have a nice day.   
 
Scahill sees the videos and still photos of the victims, talks to the eye witnesses.  The brother of one of the murdered men, whose pregnant wife was also killed, tells Scahill that when he finally got back from where the Americans dropped him he was ready to put on a suicide vest and go kill Americans but his father wouldn’t let him.
 
Scahill follows other similar stories in various countries and eventually learns that these killings are all the work of JSOC (Joint Strategic Operations Command), the highly secretive, elite Special Forces killing units that work directly for the president.  “Do what you’ve got to do, boys,” says the president, presumably, and they eventually track down and kill Osama bin Laden, to the cheers of American hockey and football crowds.  Scahill, who had been slowly and painstakingly unearthing details about the secretive JSOC, was amazed to hear JSOC, a name that is rarely spoken and never seen in print, suddenly lauded on CNN, Fox and everywhere, embodied in heroic Seal Team Six.  
 
Scahill discovers that the kill list, once a few dozen names, now includes thousands of names.  The lists of those killed, and the civilians killed along with them are highly classified, naturally, although Scahill puts together a rough list of confirmed raids, drone strikes and confirmed kills that shows these happen multiple times daily, mostly by drone now, in literally 40 something countries the US is not at war with.  Every dead male of military age is considered a dead terrorist, like in the old body counts in Viet Nam where every dead civilian was counted as neutralized Viet Cong. It is unknown how many of the undisclosed numbers of killed children, older men and females of all ages are also terrorists, though it is also, probably, if we are justified in killing them, a substantial number, eh?  
 
Scahill, a guest on Bill Maher’s show, lays out some of the hellish details for the audience.   Fellow guest Jay Leno asks Scahill  “why haven’t they killed you yet?” and Scahill just gives him a grim look, says nothing. 
 
Fair question.  So much easier just to kill a troublesome motherfucker like that, you know?  Not that he offers any real threat to the tireless killing machine, the only thing the American people have endless funds for… but still, there is a principle here, one would think.

Scoring Political Points

A friend who sits far to the right of me on the political spectrum (as so many of our fellow Americans seem to) sent me an adorable short animation yesterday she thought I’d enjoy, even though it blames the poor for being lazy and greedy and shows how the hard-working wealthy are persecuted and exploited by the progressive tax system.  You can watch that delightful proof of the case here.

Although I have many things I need to get myself do today, every day, and am languishing at the moment, on many levels barely functioning, even though Sekhnet correctly growled when I mentioned it, I had to send this response to my friend.  Part of my effort to preserve our friendship and  to ward off future emails like the one she thought I’d like, the oversimplified and therefore irrefutable cartoon about the unfairness of a progressive tax system (or a progressive anything else, I suppose) in a magical world where everyone is born with the identical chance to prosper, if only they’ll stop being born in toxic slums and get a decent home to grow up in so they can embrace hard work and smart investment.

I wrote to my friend:

The problem with this kind of hypothetical is that it sets up an artificial, conveniently over-simplified example that can rarely be seen in real life to “prove” a proposition about the complicated real world.   If the set-up in this cartoon was the case in even one out of 100 cases it would be a lot.   
 
It sets up a straw man (the demanding lazy brother happy not to work, spending every penny and feeling righteously entitled to his rich brother’s forced charity) on an absolutely even playing field, excluding all inconvenient, complicating facts, to stand in for all the parasites, you know the ones– they are out screaming every time a policeman enforces the law and one of their illegitimate kids die, and those with guilty consciences who don’t believe the police always act with justification, even when the person they kill isn’t shown to have posed a lethal threat — and the wealthy, every one of whom, as we all know, got their money from their hard work and smart investing.  The wealthy who are persecuted and exploited by parasites and hated and envied for their every hard-earned advantage.
 
It always surprises me when, because you agree with the conclusion of some political piece, you send it thinking I will find it convincing.   I try to remain mild, and Sekhnet curses me for spending any time at all responding to these things whenever I mention it to her, but I really do find it amazing that you can’t see these things for the preaching to the choir they are.  And that they are also provocative (the kid in Missouri bashed the cop/racing car driver’s face in before the cop shot him to death, Obama lost the war in Iraq after Bush won it, etc.) especially when they turn out to not be true.
 
And, not to belabor the point, but you agreed not to send me these political things.  
 
Love,
[name withheld by request]