Andrew Bacevich’s Recent Few Paragraphs about Torture Summarize What Needs to Be Said — about the American Republic’s Decline into Fomenting Perpetual War

11 December 2014

Professor-Colonel Andrew Bacevich and I are of the same mind about Entrenched Power’s ravaging effects on what America says it stands for

From his Boston Globe piece — addressing the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s torture report:

[T]he United States in our own time [has] indisputably embraced torture as an allowable practice while disregarding the rule of law and trampling underfoot the values to which the chief representatives of the state routinely profess to adhere.

To blame a particular president, a particular administration, or a particular agency simply will not do. The abuses described in the report . . . did not come out of nowhere.

War thrusts power into the hands of those who covet it. Only the perpetuation of war, whether under the guise of “keeping us safe” or “spreading freedom,” can satisfy the appetite of those for whom the exercise of power is its own reward.

Only war will perpetuate their prerogatives and shield them from accountability.

Since at least 1940, when serious preparations for entry into World War II began, the United States has been more or less continually engaged in actual war or in semi-war, intensively girding itself for the next active engagement . . . .

The imperatives of national security, always said to be in peril, have taken precedence over all other considerations.

“Taken precedence over all other considerations” . . .

. . . including (in my view) liberty, privacy, genuine democracy, and moral resistance to soulless blood spilling, as well as the international “soft power” that the United States used to wield with some moral legitimacy.

It is easy for those in charge to expend other people’s lives

Their rationale?

“Doesn’t hurt a bit, and look how rich and influential I am. Sadistically implemented patriotism spares me the trouble of intelligently examining my means, motives and results.”

Though grateful for the torture report’s release — I agree with Professor Bacevich that it serves only as a motive-camouflaging slap on the wrist

Pretended disavowal allows those at the helm to continue their wild ride into creating continually percolating hells on earth:

Critics will accuse Feinstein of endangering the nation’s safety, soiling its reputation, hanging out to dry patriotic agents doing what needed doing in our name. This is all nonsense.

Her actual failing is far worse. She and her colleagues are doing what the state always does for itself in these situations: administering a little public slap on the hand, after which an ever-so-quiet return to business as usual will ensue.

The moral? — Soul stains are arguably real

No American can hold, after decades of our warmongering, that he and she have not been warned about the peril that our track poses our alleged national and personal souls.

This is a subject that the 2013 film, The Book Thief, overtly addressed regarding Germany’s mid-20^th Century abominations. The parallels between Germany then and America now are not that far apart, for anyone willing to see how subtly institutionalized evil originates and maintains itself. True American patriots will consider the lesson.

Note

Some movie critics savaged “The Book Thief” — claiming that it was boringly trite, historically inaccurate, and lacked sufficient limb-from-limb drama.

These folks — the New York Times’ film critic, Stephen Holden, prominently among them — (almost obtusely) missed the film version’s soul-seeking point, apparently being themselves short on empathic imagination and an appreciation for visual poetry’s ability to synopsize without using heavy hands.

Mr. Holden even claimed that:

I can’t imagine that the creators of “The Book Thief” were aware of their movie’s underlying message that it really wasn’t that bad.

John Williams’s score . . . lends the film an unearned patina of solemnity, for “The Book Thief” is a shameless piece of Oscar-seeking Holocaust kitsch.

How Mr. Holden left the theater with that trivializing conclusion is beyond me — and I too am a product of the war generation — apparently geographically one-upping him in having been born of a Swiss mother, comparatively few kilometers from Germany and France, where my father had assisted in smuggling downed American flyers to safety. The Holocaust haunted both parents, and I have never lost the emotional immediacy of its overwhelming sadness.

Although the film’s deficiencies are obvious —

to those who know history, maiming, and are irritated by (among other things) the over-the-top anthropomorphization of the Death narrator —

its artfully delivered spiritual message is suitable for young teenagers, which is a substantial educational achievement in itself.

PeteFree.com

Andrew Bacevich’s Recent Few Paragraphs about Torture Summarize What Needs to Be Said — about the American Republic’s Decline into Fomenting Perpetual War