EVENT
So I sent a call out for a serious political discussion in Calling Out and Vernaltide 3: I Know Why Kerry Lost. I’ve gotten some good responses. Check out the comments in response to those two posts, as well as The Disappeared and We Value Life Above All Else on Gemma’s Blog.
See? We’re legit. We get to play with the big kids.
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The responses I’ve gotten in general from people who’ve lived through the Red Scare is that it’s worse this time around. Which for some reason is surprising to me. I think a lot of that is my own bias… something seems bigger when it’s in your High School social studies book, with accompanying glossy photos. And at the same time, I don’t know that Montgomery Clift would agree. Today, if you’re a politically active communist, you aren’t particularly censored (you might be censured). Or, to cite a more pertinent example, Bush has said from time to time that Islam is not an evil religion, and makes clear distinctions between, say, the government of Iran and its official religion that McCarthy never drew between the Soviet Union and American progressive politics.
I know that the parallel has limitations. But the limitations have been useful themselves, in unexpected ways. I find that the points at which the analogy breaks down is where we might gain some insight into our present situation.
Two illustrations:
In his comment responding to Calling Out, Damien connected the current administration more to the Soviet regime than to McCarthy. He gives plenty of examples, or at least, policies that are easily extended to real examples.
Or as Gemma very spookily intones in The Disappeared (with appropriate references to Argentine fascism) the frighting difference between then and now is that there isn’t an openness to what’s happening in America these days. That’s only a component of her argument, but it does stand alongside Damien’s point that we’re really more like a oppressive regime than we’d like to think.
Looking at the Soviet comparison… I don’t think things are as bad as all that. Scale is important. There haven’t been any mass deportation to gulags or even interment camps such as Japanese Americans were subjected to during World War II. I’ll need to see a lot more before I think that something’s going on in W’s America equivalent to the nastiness of the Great Purges (or even fascist Argentina).
I think that liberals (such as myself) need to be doubly careful of exaggeration, since it’s a charge so often levelled against us. Even if I’m convinced that the other side of the aisle is much worse. (1000 Indonesians dead this week, but not one Terri Schiavo style emergency session.)
Scale matters.
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Does this mean that discrimination against homosexuals through bigoted state amendments, or racial minorities through broken voting machines, or the domination of the media by huge commercial interests isn’t grave and dire?
No.
Does that mean that Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and the profiling of specific nationalities isn’t grave and dire?
No.
Does it meant that the problem is as easily fixed?
The opposite, in fact.
The huge albatross for blatantly fascist regimes (I’m including both Old Argentina and the U.S.S.R. here) is that they rarely draw true support a majority of the people governed. Such regimes would be much more effective if they hadn’t the burden of what might be called perpetual “strong-arm PR.” As I understand it, the significance of “have you no sense of decency?” was specifically that it signalled a popular shift against McCarthy policies. He was denounced within months and dead within three years of that utterance. Remember: Hitler was, for all intents and purposes, running on the support of the people through most of the game. Even such a reviled dictator as Nicolae Ceausescu was admired in the start.
And here’s where the point turns:
Where Gemma really hits something hard is this statement:
What’s disappearing from America under the Bush administration is a sense of centrality. That is what nationalism rather than patriotism is. Patriotism allows us to collect at a center; nationalism pushes negativity outwards and leaves a vacancy at the center. And when there’s a vacancy at the center, you, as the president, can do what you want. It’ll work because nobody has a clear sense of what to care about anyway.
I do not know whether the implication of the dissolution of “moderate voters” (though as I’ve argued, democrats are incredibly “center” these days, if through expedience rather than essence) is intentional or not. Her analysis, however, of the cause and nature of the inaccountability is… physically affecting, at least to me.
The problem today is not that what is happening is below board. I can, if I wish, learn about any number of ways in which America has violated its own “values” both at home and abroad. The problem is that most Americans do not care very much. We don’t hold ourselves accountable. Our tolerance for injustice is much higher than we’d like to believe, so long as only affects us little. Our own sense of right-and-wrong is not anchored, nor are our values discovered so much as encountered.
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This is the point at which we step aside from scale.
This is the point at which the scale of an impropriety -> an injustice -> an atrocity does not matter in the least.
It is difficult to hold the Russians accountable for the slaughter of the Purges and collectivization because they did not know the extent of it, nor did they have to political capital to answer for it.
America, on the other hand, knows what is happening, and routinely elects leaders who adopt its policies. We stay the course.
We stay the course.
And that’s what keeps me awake at night.
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And most Americans neglect to acknowledge that Iran is, in fact, a democracy.