[Dean's World] Dave Price: Tortured Logic From Andrew Sullivan

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dave Price:
Tortured Logic From Andrew Sullivan
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1180595130.shtml


   Via [1]Jeff, Andrew Sullivan [2][DEL: screams "Bushitler!!" :DEL]
   gently employs Nazi war crimes trials as a comparison to U.S. policy,
   noting that for the interrogators "The sentence was death."
   First off, Iâm not sure Andrew understands what [3]empiricism is when
   he proudly announces his evidence is an âempirical fact.â There was no
   process of trial and error possible here, and he draws conclusions
   from one example rather than considering many. Empiricism would mean
   examining the known instances of which governments have used torture
   as an official policy, considering the techniques they employed and
   the outcomes they experienced, and thereby drawing conclusions about
   what kind of treatment is a reasonable balance between moral behavior
   and practical necessity. Rather, the invocation of an emotional
   trigger like Nazism is clearly intended to convey something sinister
   like âBUSH=HITLERâ without actually being so gauche as to say it out
   loud, because without that stigma of association the post really says
   nothing at all, as one quickly realizes with a little reflection.
   Andrewâs point is obviously ridiculous when actually considered on an
   empirical basis even briefly. The treatment described was not peculiar
   to the Nazis; the Allies were not gentle captors to unlawful
   combatants (spies and saboteurs could be summarily executed) and in
   fact one could reasonably assume beatings and such were being employed
   ubiquitously by local police on a daily basis (and not on terrorists,
   who fall outside conventional legal treatment, but on mere petty
   criminals) right here at home. Surely no one supposes the Red Army
   spared more than a chuckle for the notion of such niceties. From the
   data one would conclude, empirically, that all governments interested
   in effective information gathering employed coercive techniques in
   situations where such techniques were effective.
   Also, there was always an element of hypocrisy about Nuremberg and the
   other war crimes trials, something the Allied high command well
   understood, and even remarked upon later. The Allies [4]could have
   been tried on many of the same counts as were applied to the Nazis,
   certainly including the one Andrew cites -- as well as far worse. The
   firebombing of Germany and Japan was a horrific act, to say nothing of
   the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to this day the only
   nuclear attacks in history. And what Stalin had done in Ukraine
   rivaled Hitlerâs worst excesses, yet our sainted President Roosevelt
   shook his hand and said we should always be friends; rather than
   death, the sentence was âWelcome, Uncle Joe.â So it's problematic at
   best to hold those trials up as authoritative arbiters of morality in
   warmaking technique.
   As for the emotional argument Andrew is really making, interrogation
   techniques were certainly not by any stretch of the imagination the
   differentiator of evil between Axis and Ally. That delineation lies in
   Auschwitz and Dachau â and I wonder if Andrew, who invokes Dachau,
   knows about the [5]Dachau massacre, in which dozens of surrendering
   German guards (technically detainees) were massacred wholesale by
   Allied soldiers horrified by the death camps. Do we owe it to morality
   to find and punish those soldiers, disgrace their family names in
   history books in an orgy of self-indulgent modern guilt tripping? Or
   do we concede that as a practical matter we must sometimes accept
   something less than the Platonic ideal in treatment of the captured
   from those young men thrust into the frontline of the war for Western
   civilization, daily balancing on the knifeâs edge of terrible
   decisions amidst unspeakable horror?

References

   1. http://proteinwisdom.com/index.php?/weblog/entry/23187/
   2. http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/05/verschfte_verne.html
   3. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+empiricism
   4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_war_crimes_during_World_War_II
   5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_massacre