As I may have mentioned here before I’m scheduled to visit Chengdu, China next month. Blogging will be sporadic.
Given the recent headlines over the torch run I’m certain you’re wondering what I might tell my hosts.
The answer is — not much.
For one thing I expect few there to know English. But even without the language barrier I’d mainly want to listen. Listen to my son try to puzzle out the language barrier after three years of Mandarin. Listen to people greet me, and try to explain things by speaking Szechuan ve-ry slow-ly (as though that would help).
But there’s another, more important reason. I no longer have cause to condemn anyone.
Neither, frankly, do you.
Whatever oppression Tibet continues to suffer, you and I have
countenanced torture for five years. A citizen of Chengdu has an
excuse. They don’t participate in their government (isn’t that what we
like to say?) We don’t have that excuse.
In the case of our so-called democracy torture was approved of by
the highest levels of our government. Torture was authorized by documents which could have been written for Heinrich Himmler himself.
Abu Ghraib was not an aberration. It was policy, approved within the White House.
Given that fact, given the hundreds of thousands killed in Iraq in
our name, and the past wars of conquest our nation has engaged in, who
am I to condemn anyone?
How can I recite the Declaration of Independence or Bill of Rights
to Chinese people, praise the Statue of Liberty, talk about Dr. King
and the "better angels of our nature," with a straight face — ever
again?
I’d be like a German praising Schiller after the Holocaust.
You can no longer say you knew nothing about it. You have
been told. It has been reported. And now you are complicit. As I am. In
torture, in murder, in brutality without shame and without penalty.
"You condemned yourself the first time you allowed the murder of a man you knew was innocent." The final words of Spencer Tracy to Burt Lancaster (read his speech at American Rhetoric) in "Judgment at Nuremberg," the 1961 screenplay based loosely on the Joseph Altstoetter case. (Yet the Oscar went to the guy playing the defense attorney — very prescient.)
Here is the opening statement for the prosecution in that very real case:
a
court is far more than a courtroom; it is a process and a spirit. It is
a house of law. This the defendants know, or must have known in times
past. I doubt that they ever forgot it.
Yet we have.
We have allowed the same crimes, colored under American law, and no one
is being punished for it. The man who wrote the memo authorizing the
torture is now a law professor himself at the University of California
in Berkeley. (His boss insists he was only following orders.) The man responsible is still President of the United States. Some sergeants have been punished, but only sergeants.
So how can I go to China and get on any moral high horse? How could you? How can any American? Ever again, so long as those guilty here remain free?
That’s the real cost of the "Global War on Terror." There’s your moral equivalence right there.
Best thing I can do in Chengdu is have a nice big cup of…well, you know.
