Sociology Talk

Thaddeus Stevens · Guest

Moral breakdowns are, it appears, a regular phenomenon of American
national life. And, without getting into it very deeply, they are always
accompanied, as today, by false protestations that what is being done is
in the name of a higher civilization, is in the name of an asserted
moral imperative: slavery was claimed to be a positive good; Jim Crow
was claimed to be a desirable and necessary separation of the races;
socialists had to be eliminated lest they destroy the nation; we were
civilizing the benighted in the Philippines; we were stopping the march
of worldwide Communism in Viet Nam; today it is claimed we fight in Iraq
to stop the march of worldwide jihadism, worldwide Islamofascism, etc., etc.

Governmental Derelicts Moral Meltdown

By LAWRENCE R. VELVEL
http://www.counterpunch.org/velvel10072006.html

This country is in the middle of, a moral meltdown. What should one call
it but immoral when a country tortures people; when it kidnaps them off
the street; when its Department of Justice writes disgraceful memoranda
approving the kidnapping and torture; when it causes the deaths of tens
of thousands of persons by artillery, bombings, missiles and rifle fire
for a cause nearly all think a great mistake and one caused by lies;
when it claims it must continue this murder lest its position in the
world decline, though the history of its relatively recent prior
debacle, Viet Nam, in which it made exactly the same claim about a
potentially declining position, shows that the opposite result occurs
from terminating a horrid mistake; when it continues its horrid actions,
despite the lesson of Viet Nam, in part because the Pretexter-in-Chief
secretly relies on the advice of one of the arch, never punished,
criminals of the Viet Nam era, Henry Kissinger; when it continues its
horrid, losing actions even though a fundamental principle of the
financial capitalism it seeks to force upon the whole world is to cut
your losses?

What should one call it but immoral when the Congress (and the media)
willingly, enthusiastically jumped aboard the bandwagon for this war
that has caused tens of thousands of deaths; did so without questioning
its lying rationale(s) to any significant extent; has never taken the
slightest action to bring it to a close; refuses to even consider so
slight a punishment as censure of those who brought it on; will not even
mention the dread word impeachment; is in the grip of a tyrannical
Republican leadership and corrupt Republican followers, assisted defacto
by a Democratic leadership and followers who have no spine and who
stood, and stand, for no principles; and when the only thing members of
Congress care about is bringing home the pork -- including John Murtha,
the king of pork, you know, though he did speak out on the war, for
which he got blasted?

What should one call it but immoral when the Republican Party, with its
K Street program, has successfully imposed upon the country what may be
the most corrupt, the most bribe ridden, the most graft ridden,
Congressional autocracy since the Gilded Age of the late 19th Century,
and when the country's corporations and investment banks play ball with
this and are, besides, riddled with financial corruption?

What should one call it but immoral when the Congress, desperately
seeking reelection, and fearing to offend anyone, votes to give the
President the power to continue approving what in effect is torture: he,
after all -- the same man who previously authorized and desired torture
-- will define what is or is not permitted; and when the Congress and
media willfully refuse to recognize the obvious truth that the Pretexter
and Vice Pretexter were the cause of the torture and kidnapping?

What should one call it but immoral when things mentioned in this essay
have been permitted because so many conservatives in the country -- so
many citizens who are red staters in viewpoint regardless of where they
live -- have agreed with what has been done; continue to agree with it
and want it done; vote for the people who are responsible for it; and by
their agreement and votes have enabled it to continue, especially since
the cheap hacks in politics who -- often knowing no trade or profession
or job but politics -- fear loss of an election above all else?

What should one call it but immoral when American citizens, unlike the
Germans of the 1930s and 1940s, could speak against the criminals, and
vote to throw them out, without fear of being hung from lamp posts or
meat hooks, yet instead speak in favor of the criminals and vote to keep
them in office?

There is, one thinks, only one conclusion from all of this. This has
become, at least currently, a deeply immoral nation. It is a nation in
the throes of a moral breakdown, a moral meltdown. Yet people are
surprised when some nut walks into a school building and starts shooting
children? Surprise is possible only because this country has not, as a
country, looked in the mirror.

Iraq is by far not the first time this country has suffered a moral
meltdown. Other examples are, unhappily, legion. This country approved
of slavery for nearly 90 years and reviled abolitionists for decades.
Southerners murdered black prisoners of war during the Civil War. The
country allowed Jim Crow to be imposed by a brutal South for 90 years
(and allowed the South defacto to run Congress and therefore the
country, as it still does). The country allowed the South to lynch
blacks by the thousands. The country has railroaded, and hung or
electrocuted, so-called radicals who likely were innocent of, or at
least some of whom were innocent of, the charges against them. (E.g.,
the Haymarket socialists, and maybe Sacco and Vanzetti too, though
opinions differ about the latter two.) This country acted unspeakably in
the Philippines Insurrection, when it tortured people, burned down
villages and engaged in mass murder -- all of which our historians
cavalierly ignored, reprehensibly ignored, for 65 or 70 years, until
Viet Nam was well advanced. The country acted unspeakably in Viet Nam,
which is too close in time for American actions to need detailing.

Moral breakdowns are, it appears, a regular phenomenon of American
national life. And, without getting into it very deeply, they are always
accompanied, as today, by false protestations that what is being done is
in the name of a higher civilization, is in the name of an asserted
moral imperative: slavery was claimed to be a positive good; Jim Crow
was claimed to be a desirable and necessary separation of the races;
socialists had to be eliminated lest they destroy the nation; we were
civilizing the benighted in the Philippines; we were stopping the march
of worldwide Communism in Viet Nam; today it is claimed we fight in Iraq
to stop the march of worldwide jihadism, worldwide Islamofascism, etc., etc.

As said, this country's moral derelictions are not looked at as, or
described in terms of being, moral delicts. They are looked at and
described in other ways, and by the use of other terms. Why the country
shies from using the word immoral does not seem hard to guess -- who,
after all, wants to describe his or her own conduct as immoral, or the
conduct of those he/she votes for and supports as immoral, or his or her
own country as immoral. What American historian wants to say, and does
not fear the consequences to himself of saying, that the actions of this
country have been or are immoral?

Yet immoral is exactly what the historical and current actions discussed
here have been and are, and one suspects that a basic reason underlying
the bitter opposition of many of us to what has been occurring recently
is precisely that this country, its leaders, its media, its citizens
have been acting immorally, very immorally, and continue to act very
immorally. Call me radical (to steal from the opening sentence of Moby
Dick), and call all of us radical who are motivated by the fact that the
actions of this country have been horribly immoral, but that won't
change the fact of historical and current immorality. (Nor will it
change the fact, at the heart of one of Ibsen's plays, that persons who
are willing to see and enunciate the truth are reviled for precisely
that reason.) Nor will it change the justness of a comment made at an
anti-imperialist rally in 1899 by Carl Schurz, in a take -off of
Decatur's famous but usually incompletely quoted statement about my
country right or wrong. "Our country," said Schurz, "right or wrong.
When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right."

Lawrence R. Velvel is the Dean of Massachusetts School of Law. He can be
reached at velvel@mslaw.edu.
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TODAY as never before in their history Americans are enthralled with
military power. The global military supremacy that the United States
presently enjoys—and is bent on perpetuating—has become central to our
national identity. More than America's matchless material abundance or
even the effusions of its pop culture, the nation's arsenal of high-tech
weaponry and the soldiers who employ that arsenal have come to signify
who we are and what we stand for.
When it comes to war, Americans have persuaded themselves that the
United States possesses a peculiar genius. Writing in the spring of
2003, the journalist Gregg Easterbrook observed that "the extent of
American military superiority has become almost impossible to
overstate." During Operation Iraqi Freedom, U.S. forces had shown beyond
the shadow of a doubt that they were "the strongest the world has ever
known,... stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions
at the height of Roman power." Other nations trailed "so far behind they
have no chance of catching up."1 The commentator Max Boot scoffed at
comparisons with the German army of World War II, hitherto "the gold
standard of operational excellence." In Iraq, American military
performance had been such as to make "fabled generals such as Erwin
Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison."2
Easterbrook and Boot concurred on the central point: on the modern
battlefield Americans had located an arena of human endeavor m which
their flair for organizing and deploying technology offered an
apparently decisive edge. As a consequence, the United States had (as
many Americans have come to believe) become masters of all things military.
Further, American political leaders have demonstrated their intention of
tapping that mastery to reshape the world in accordance with American
interests and American values. That the two are so closely intertwined
as to be indistinguishable is, of course, a proposition to which the
vast majority of Americans subscribe. Uniquely among the great powers in
all of world history, ours (we insist) is an inherently values-based
approach to policy.
Furthermore, we have it on good authority that the ideals we espouse
represent universal truths, valid for all times. American statesmen past
and present have regularly affirmed that judgment. In doing so, they
validate it and render it all but impervious to doubt. Whatever
momentary setbacks the United States might encounter, whether a
generation ago in Vietnam or more recently in Iraq, this certainty that
American values are destined to prevail imbues U.S. policy with a
distinctive grandeur. The preferred language of American statecraft is
bold, ambitious, and confident.
Reflecting such convictions, policymakers in Washington nurse (and the
majority of citizens tacitly endorse) ever more grandiose expectations
for how armed might can facilitate the inevitable triumph of those
values. In that regard, George W Bush's vow that the United States will
"rid the world of evil" both echoes and amplifies the large claims of
his predecessors going at least as far back as Woodrow Wilson.3 Coming
from Bush the warrior-president, the promise to make an end to evil is a
promise to destroy, to demolish, and to obliterate it.
One result of this belief that the fulfillment of America's historic
mission begins with America's destruction of the old order has been to
revive a phenomenon that C. Wright Mills in the early days of the Cold
War described as a "military metaphysics"—a tendency to see
international problems as military problems and to discount the
likelihood of finding a solution except through military means.4
To state the matter bluntly, Americans in our own time have fallen prey
to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a
tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national
greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. To
a degree without precedent in U.S. history, Americans have come to
define the nation's strength and well-being in terms of military
preparedness, military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for)
military ideals.5

___________________________________

1. Gregg Easterbrook, "Out on the Edge: American Power Moves Beyond the
Mere Super," New York Times, April 27, 2003.
2. Max Boot, "The New American Way of War," Foreign Affairs 82
(July/August 2003), p. 44.
3. Bush remarks at the National Cathedral, September 14, 2001.
4. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York, 1956, rpt. 2000), p. 222.
5. The Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 6, p. 438, provides the following
four-part definition of militarism: "The spirit and tendencies of the
professional soldier; the prevalence of military sentiments or ideals
among a people; the political condition characterized by the
predominance of the military class in government or administration; the
tendency to regard military efficiency as the paramount interest of the
state." The new American militarism conforms to the latter three
elements of this definition, with the caveat that the present-day
"military class** in Washington is comprised chiefly of people who are
not themselves serving soldiers. They are instead politicians, civil
servants, journalists, and hangers-on who are fully imbued with a
militaristic mindset and worldview. The definition offered by The New
Oxford Dictionary of English, p. 1173, "the belief or desire of a
government or people that a country should maintain a strong military
capability and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote
national interests," also applies, but it fails to consider the
importance of military values, which also form an element of the new
American militarism.

~ from "The New American Militarism, How Americans are Seduced by War"
by Andrew J. Bacevich

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