Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Wherein I Get Political
This little rant was inspired by and intended for Jason Fried, a talented user-focused web designer at 37Signals, who posted
his take on the Iraqi prisoner abuses.
JF, I love
your work and
the philosophy behind it, but I have to disagree with your politics in this instance. This post smacks of unintended and probably unconscious American-flavored superiority and nationalism, as if we somehow always Do The Right Thing, the land that invented Superman, going around making the world a better place and that everyone should be that much more shocked when we make a relatively small misstep because we're so great. Different in intention and presentation, for sure, but it's just as dismissive of the abuses and along the same lines as Rush saying that we should cut the soldiers a break because it was on par with a typical night at a frat house. The dichotomy between how we perceive ourselves and our actual actions abroad has never been greater.
I don't think we're being held to a higher standard than everyone else - everyone else is just forced into caring about our actions more than we are aware of their problems because of the disproportionately greater impact our foreign policy has on their lives, whereas we can afford to be complacent about the atrocities being committed elsewhere as long as it doesn't affect our gas-guzzling commute or similarly impinge on our daily lives. Same thing with us not getting involved with WWII until Pearl Harbor, when Europe was aware of Hitler's evil acts and warring against him
for years before we joined in. Same thing with us not only turning a blind eye to Afghan abuses towards women and other cultures, but
actually supplying them with arms, training and the means to do so until they bit the hand that fed them. Same thing we did to Saddam while he was anti-Iran and before he became anti-Iran
and anti-occupationist American powers. This isolationism was the whole wall that 9/11 broke through, apparently only for a while for some people. We can't just sit here and get rich off of people buying our burgers and shoes while we want nothing to do with how our way of life affects theirs.
If you read foreign papers, they're constantly publicizing a broader world view and the problems within it, this is a well-known fact. The fact that the U.N. is mostly a toothless tiger unable to cope with these world issues, especially when it's biggest member either bullies it into submission or ignores it outright, is also well-known, as is the fact that N.A.T.O. is having a hard time with the transition from a us-vs-them Cold War mechanism into a European peace-keeping organization. It's not that people don't care about what's going on, but who's going to do anything about it? Hungary? Nigeria? Micronesia? Chile?
Going beyond the overall view and focusing on just this particular incident, even at that level you can see this dichotomy between our American view of the world and our actual actions. The current incident goes beyond "just [humiliating] some Iraqi prisoners" (forget for a moment that the Geneva Convention gets tossed out completely for just that and that we'd be similarly outraged if another country did this to our P.O.W.s) and extends into truly scary areas: death by beating, coating with flames under chemical lights and, in the case of British soldiers as I heard on NPR this morning, drowning prisoners in a river. Have you seen
the Abu Ghraib pictures? They're hard to stomach, but it's not just extreme sexual harassment. There's
dead bodies on the front page of the Sunday New York Times, nothing less than
outright murder, men beaten until they died and then packed into ice to reduce the swelling for investigators, who were told the men were simply "under duress" before expiring. I hope I'm never under that kind of duress. How in the world does that become something we just brush off and joke about around the office cooler? Is it not on a large enough scale to get your attention?
Jason, I thought you were a practicing web designer with a poli sci undergrad degree, just like me, or am I thinking of someone else on your team? Either way, I'll reiterate that I usually agree with most everything you publish here that has to do with politics, it's usually well-informed and reasoned very carefully, but in this case, you are way wrong. Perhaps this essay "
Why They Hate Us" might help along with realizing where some of both the torturing of Arabs and the hate that it fuels comes from.
As a purely weird aside, my friends from bowling and I were wondering last night about the insane irony of Germany being held up as an example of a bad European country because they refused to go to war, rather than as a bad country because they were a war-mongering invader in the previous century. Bowling being what it is, we're around some pretty old folk in our league and I'm sure we could have rounded up a few WWII vets within a stone's throw of our lane.
The only positive I see out of this whole mess is the digital camera/Internet combination as a revolution in wartime news-breaking, the way the TV was for Vietnam. The written reports were around for quite a while, since January, but this whole thing didn't blow up until people could visualize this whole mess. Wonder what else is going on in places with less liberal policies towards technology...