I think everyone should make time to read Tuesday’s New York Times article Secret Kill List Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will, which discusses at length the process undertaken by President Obama and his staff in to decide “who should be the next to die.” Glenn Greenwald has written three pieces, so far, that respond to parts of the article. Here is the second, but I recommend that people read them all.
The original article speaks volumes beyond the text. Greenwald, in his responses, makes provocative observations about the President and many of his supporters. Although I have little to add to them, both the Times article and Greenwald’s posts are so important that I wanted to link to them here.
However, there are a couple of unique points I will quickly make that relate to ACED’s mission of advancing social justice through citizen action.
1. The first comment beneath the Times article, contributed by Axel Schonfeld, concludes, “History will ask uncomfortable questions about this lamentable new direction (the policies described in the article).”
This comment reflects an air of passivism that defines most so-called progressives. Schonfeld considers the assassination policies “lamentable,” but leaves the questioning to future generations. Because the Democratic President Obama has embraced assassinations, he has established their legitimacy in our society. Thus, while “history” will judge us for it, it goes without saying that we passively accept.
This attitude goes a long way to explain the deep corruption of our own society. We must ask the questions of our own policies and the leaders who advance them. This is our core responsibility as citizens of a democracy. If we abdicate this duty to interrogate our leaders and our laws, we deserve to be judged.
As a society, we should know this, if for no other reason than because of WWII, the horrors committed by the Nazis, and the Nuremburg trials. Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, writing 50 years after 20 Nazi physicians were convicted for their roles at Aushwitz, revisited their trial at Nuremburg for a crucial “moral lesson.” First, he points out that it would be “dangerous” for us to assume that the people could not commit atrocities like those of the Nazis again. “Moral reasoning based on defective premises tends to recur in new settings,” he continued. (Do most people today undertake any moral reasoning in evaluating the actions of their own political party?). Finally, he examined the defective moral reasoning that allowed the physicians to set aside the ethics of their profession to serve the Nazi state:
“[T]hey justified their actions by what they considered to be moral reasons that have received insufficient attention. During the testimony, the defendants and their lawyers repeatedly advanced a few moral premises with a familiar ring: They were not killing by their own authority but obeying the laws of the state, which can determine the method of death. To resist would have been treasonous; ethics must be subordinate to the demands of war. Consent from those condemned to death was unnecessary. The death of a few prisoners would save many German lives; medical ethics could be set aside by law.
We see here the initial premises that law takes precedence over ethics, that the good of the many is more important than the good of the few, that national emergencies supersede ethics, and that some persons (prisoners in this case) can lose their claim to humanity. The lesson here is that moral premises must be valid if morally valid conclusions are to be drawn. A morally repulsive conclusion stems from a morally inadmissible premise.
Perhaps, above all, we must learn that some things should never be done. We will know when to say ‘no’ if we extrapolate our moral premises to their logical conclusions. This the Nazi doctors did not do.” (Emphasis added).
The invalid moral premise that too many Americans appear to have adopted replaces moral calculation with party proxy. Many people, for example, seem to believe that if you are a “good” or “progressive” person, you must vote for a Democrat as long as the actual or perceived left-to-right relative positions of the major parties persist (the relative positions will persist indefinitely, by the way). Laurence Rees details in his book How Mankind Committed the Ultimate Infamy at Aushwitz how even the highest ranking Nazi officials at one time believed that extermination of the Jews was out of the question because it violated the “German character.” However, the “final solution” flowed from their own premises about the Jews and the ideal/pure German state. Regarding the German people, they may not have expected the extermination of the Jews to result when they elected the Nazis; but if they had thought about the “logical conclusions” of the regime to draw out its logical conclusions and cared more about moral principles than personal gain, the Nazis might not have gained power. Once they did, the Nazis steadily consolidated power so that later on most German citizens would have viewed resistance as futile (rightly or wrongly – people excel at rationalizing personal gain).
I am most certainly not equating either American political party to the Nazis. However, I do believe that one can see the disturbing, immoral consequences of the Democratic-Republican regime’s values by “drawing them out”/thinking about them. And to state what should be obvious, one should identify the parties’ values not in their words but in the policies they pursue, such as those that have consolidated wealth, increased inequality, strengthened corporate influence on lawmaking and other policies, severely eroded constitutional protections, and ushered in a new era of permanent warfare (see the Times article). I do not believe that our society has reached a point where resistance is futile; but so long as most voters continue to believe that they have no choice but to vote for a Democrat or Republican, hoping for meaningful resistance is futile.
I have only alluded to German society during the Nazi regime once before when discussing American society because some people will find it controversial and possibly offensive. I certainly do not intend to offend or upset anyone. By comparing American citizens to German citizens during that time, I only mean to express my honest opinion that I believe our society is capable of doing much worse things than what we have already allowed. My question to the many out there who seem to accept whatever policies the United States adopts in the name of national security, or other “necessity:” Where specifically is the line that our government must cross before you reject our leaders as unjust/immoral/unlawful actors?
2. The second, much shorter point tacks on to those made trenchantly by Greenwald in his responses, but also relates to the one above. In short, it is that as a partisan society, we are not a free society.
As Greenwald discussed here (and ACED here), the reaction by partisans to specific policies depends on who is in power, and/or what their party’s leader endorses. For instance, when the opposition is in power, partisans feel liberated to criticize the actions and policies of leaders. When one’s own party is in power, people are not free in that regard because partisanship is the dominant value.
Of course, partisanship produces the situation where one cannot really know if, in the first instance above, one did, in fact, criticize freely; or instead criticized only as a result of the perception that the actions of the other party are inherently bad.
Imagine an existence of non-partisan freedom – freedom to think freely and criticize policies based on substance, not partisanship. Isn’t that preferable? During the Bush years and during the Obama years, there have been constant attacks leveled at supporters of the President for inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and refusals to criticize. Does anyone really believe we live in a free-thinking society? Can the non-politician partisans out there explain what legitimate advantages you gain by choosing to associate yourself with a party, rather than remaining independent?
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