To anybody with more
than a child's understanding of history, the most remarkable thing
about wartime atrocities is that anybody pretends
surprise. As Orwell pointed out in an essay
written around the end of WW II, there had been
scarcely a year during his adult life when
terrible crimes against humanity weren't being
reported somewhere in the world. Yet people,
particularly intellectuals, tended to believe
or disbelieve the ugly truth depending upon their
own nationality and political ideology.
"The nationalist," he
wrote "not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his
own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for
not even hearing about them. For not quite
six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived
not to learn of the existence of Dachau and
Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing
the German concentration camps are
often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware,
that there are also concentration camps in Russia."
For the record, Orwell
had nothing against patriotism, defined as love of country.
By "nationalism," he meant blind chauvinism,
specifically "identifying oneself with a single nation
or other unit, placing it beyond good or evil,"
and thinking "solely, or mainly, in terms of
competitive prestige." In short, primitive tribalism
writ large.
Here in the United States,
anyway, things were different. Since few Americans ever put
faith in right- or left-wing creeds of militarized
utopianism to begin with, the crimes of the Nazis
and Soviets were more easily perceived. Committed
to the proposition that "all men are created
equal," to a written constitution and a government
of laws, our own kind of denial has consisted
largely of forgetfulness.
Whether it's the
19th century extermination of Native Americans, the use of nuclear weapons
against Japan, or the massacres at My Lai, what
historians call American "exceptionalism"--the
sentimental belief that the United States exists
above temptation and outside history--helps us to
reassert the national innocence again and again.
Even mentioning Hiroshima
all but guarantees furious rebuttals invoking Pearl Harbor and 9/11,
which, no, I haven't forgotten. Yet it's symptomatic
that within a year of the Toledo Blade's Pulitzer
Prize-winning series documenting previously unreported
massacres of Vietnamese civilians by the
U.S. Army in the late 1960s, Sen. John Kerry's
testimony about Vietnam War atrocities to a Senate
committee in 1971 can be used against him as
an issue in a 2004 presidential campaign. Unlike
another candidate I could name, he was right
and he was courageous.
To the extent other nations
have forgiven the United States its excesses and still see it as a
beacon of freedom, it has nothing to do with
being "God's country." Rather, it's the ideals of free
speech, due process and equality under the law
embedded in our constitution. They help
Americans rise above tribalism; the most moving
account of Japanese civilians’ suffering was
American John Hersey's "Hiroshima," an instant
classic. Nor did it take an invading army to
expose atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers
at My Lai, and to bring some semblance of justice.
It took an American journalist, Seymour Hersh,
and American courts of law.
Which brings us to the
offenses against humanity committed by American soldiers and civilians
at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Once again,
the indefatigable Hersh, writing in the New
Yorker, got the story. This time, moreover, there's
undeniable evidence in the form of digital photos
and videotapes shot by U.S. soldiers and sent
via e-mail to computers back home. (Will a
technologically-advanced nation ever again be
able to brutalize a captive population with impunity?)
It's one thing to read
the dehumanizing details in Major General Antonio M. Taguba's report:
Iraqi citizens (70 to 90 percent arrested by
mistake, the Red Cross estimates), beaten, forced to
masturbate and simulate sex acts, sodomized with
broomsticks, raped, attacked by guard dogs,
even murdered. It's another thing to see the
pictures. Even the most fervid chauvinists can't deny
the evidence of their senses. What’s more, no
less an authority than Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld says it's going to get much worse.
The shame is bad enough,
but the bad political consequences have scarcely begun. The worst
atrocities took place during the U.S. government's
futile search for non-existent "weapons of mass
destruction" used to justify invading Iraq. No
evidence has been found linking Iraq and al Qaeda.
Yet there’s no doubt badly-trained, undisciplined
U.S. troops encouraged to "go cowboy" on
Iraqi prisoners imagined themselves avenging
9/11. President Bush's sly rhetoric assured it.
This time, moreover,
the world's faith in American institutions has been badly damaged.
The Bush administration has systematically insisted
that neither the U.S. Constitution nor the
Geneva Convention applies to anybody the president
calls an "enemy combatant," which in the
aftermath of the Abu Ghraib atrocities appears
to include the entire Muslim world.
It's a betrayal of everything it means to be an American.