The Representation of the Non-Conformist as a Health Threat

I’m finding it interesting that in both the NY Zucotti Park ‘Occupy Wall Street’ clearing and the more recent incidents that took place at UC Davis, people in positions of authority have used ‘health concerns’ as justification for curtailing public protest.

In New York, Mayor Mike Bloomberg said that “health and safety conditions became intolerable”. UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi also reported that  “the encampment raised serious health and safety concerns“.

I find this very interesting. Although the ‘safety concern’ excuse has been used widely since 9/11, this new concern for peaceful political protect becoming the vectors of disease is something new.

Or… something very old.

All over Europe, during successive waves of the Bubonic Plague, Jews were identified as carriers of the disease and slaughtered in their thousands.

In 1915, venerable scientists determined that although African Americans under slavery were almost completely free of the disease of syphilis, 50% of free African Americans were ‘prone’ to venereal disease.

Before and during WWII, under the Nazis, Jews were first herded into ghettos under the excuse that they spread disease when allowed to walk around freely. Then the ghettos themselves were razed because they were breeding grounds for disease.

In the Soviet Union, dissidents were routinely locked up in mental asylums for their own good and treated for schizophrenia. The argument was that to allow them to mingle freely with the population was to risk ‘spreading’ their mental illnesses.

During the 1980s, movements to keep homosexuals out of various professions used the excuse that they were spreaders of HIV.

Historically, describing racial and politically unpopular groups of as disease vectors has been a very effective way for authoritarian regimes to treat these people as sub-human, to deny them their civil rights, and to distract popular attention away from the more problematic issues that these groups bring to light.

When I look at the footage of pepper spraying at UC Davis, I have to ask myself what health and safety concern hyperbole was at work in giving both the university administration and campus police leave to over-react against seated, peaceful protesters the way they did.

It reminded me of the Stanford Prison Experiment, where people in authority roles and the enforcers of that authority created false and threatening mythologies about the ‘prisoners’ in their charge in order to enable them to behave in cruel and inhuman ways towards them. I suspect that a similar psychological pathology emerged within the upper echelons of authority at UC Davis.

What we know for a fact is that poverty and lack of education are now and have always been two of the greatest factors in the spread of disease. The OWS protests are specifically protesting the rise of poverty in the US and the rising cost of education.

Ironic, ain’t it?

#PennState : A Study in Prestige, Power and the Abrogation of Responsibility

Are we not men? No, clearly we're not.

On a March evening in 2002, Mike McQueary -  then a 28 year old graduate assistant – walked into a locker room at Penn State and witnessed an adult man, Jerry Sandusky, raping a 10-year old boy. This 28 year old, physically imposing adult man doesn’t stop what he sees. He doesn’t step in to save the child further trauma. He doesn’t pull the rapist off the child. He doesn’t call the police. One might assume that as a graduate, he had been taught some leadership skills. Clearly not.

He walks out of the locker room and calls his father.

His father doesn’t tell him to man up, go back in the locker room and stop it. His father doesn’t tell him to call the police and make a report. One might assume a the father of a grown man would have some leadership skills. A sense of responsibility and understanding of the law. No, apparently not. Instead, he tells him to come home and report it the next morning to the head coach, Joe Paterno.

Meanwhile, the 10-year old who has been victimized, who has been raped, is left in the care of the criminal who has just assaulted him. We must assume he’s been pat on the head for being a good boy and dropped off at his underprivileged home.

And they wait until the next day to report the incident to Joe Paterno at his house.  Mr. Paterno does not call in the identified perpetrator and suspend him on the spot and take away his keys. Mr. Paterno does not call the police.  Although he is head coach of one of the most prestigious college football teams in the US, although he has what comes as close to ‘godlike’ powers as anyone can have within his organization, he ALSO shows absolutely no leadership. Instead, he ‘follows procedure’ and calls his superior, Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley to meet with him at his home 24 hours after he has listened to McQueary’s account.

Meanwhile, the 10-year old rape victim has not received any help at all. He is as vulnerable to his rapist as he was 2 days before. He has not received any medical care, not had a rape kit done, not received any counseling. This child is living with this horrific trauma and the world has abandoned him.

Meanwhile, Mr. Paterno is too queasy and sensitive to give a clear account of what McQueary said he saw. Instead he tells Curley that the incident was ‘sexual in nature’ and involved ‘fondling’.

The 10-year old  is STILL vulnerable to further abuse by his rapist. He STILL has received no medical attention, no counselling, no help at all. And the crime committed against him has been downplayed to ‘fondling’.

One and a half weeks later, McQueary is asked to come to a meeting with Curley, the Athletic Director, and Gary Schultz, President of Business and Finance (who has oversight for the campus police) and retells what he witnessed. These men are leaders, right? They are also in positions of power and responsibility, right? And yet, do they instruct McQueary to immediately make his report to the police? No.

They take away Sandusky’s locker-room keys, tell him he can’t bring his charity cases onto the campus, and pass on some information – we don’t know what kind – to Sandusky’s charity organization ‘Second Mile’.

What I would like to make clear is that ALL THESE MEN who held positions of prestige and power utterly abrogated their responsibility as decent, adult humans to this child. And not just to THIS child. By their squeamish, ass-covering, reputation-protecting inaction, they are responsible for what happened to every subsequent child Sandusky assaulted. They were complicit in covering up a vile criminal act and allowing this predator to go on to predate on many other vulnerable young boys.

There are many people who are upset at Mr. Paterno’s dismissal. Sports figures, members of the university staff, students feel that their hero has been treated unfairly. They insist he followed procedure and discharged his legal responsibilities.

Since when was this enough? Since when do we not demand more than the following of bureaucratic process of the people we consider heroes?

Meanwhile, that little boy who was raped had to wait 8 years before what happened to him was brought to the attention of authorities. He is now an 18-year old young man. Study after study shows that children who are victims of child abuse grow up to be very troubled, insecure, self-hating adults with enormous emotional and social problems.

Studies also show that, on average, pedophiles victimize 75 – 100 children before they are caught. More if they are not caught.

Sandusky is a criminal. Luckily someone finally put a stop to his predation. However, he was materially enabled by these men. There in that symbol of American masculinity, that bastion of leadership, that hallowed place so close to the hearts of football fans. Heroes, titans, winners. Not.

This men were reprehensible PUSSIES. Moral cowards of the first order. Despicable in their lack of courage to step in and act decisively when they had eye witness proof that at least one awful crime had been committed on their watch and any intelligent, educated adult would know there was every likelihood this man would carry on committing these crimes.

The fact that so many are puzzled and upset that Mr. Joe Paterno has been held responsible for his inaction speaks to the fact that the so called ‘values’ they hold so dear – courage, fairness, leadership – are nothing more than superficial platitudes.

Paterno, McQueary, McQueary’s father, Curley, Schultz, et al… are examples of how low our standards in what we expect of ‘MEN’ have fallen. None of these people are MEN. They’re worms.

And if you doubt it, please read the grand jury testimony.

My point is that this is not a Penn State issue. I don’t think anyone should cancel football games or even blame the very small minority of Penn State students who rioted. The real issue is that there are many people like this, in power all over the world, in positions of great responsibility. And very few of them would have acted much differently to the way these men acted. Somewhere, somehow along the way, money, status and power have come to mean much more than anything else. More than the welfare of a 10-year old child. More than courage, more than real leadership, more than decent, honourable and lawful behavior.

They are in our athletic departments, our banks, our politics, our churches… we have given these people power and were happy to celebrate their successes, but we have not demanded of them that they behave responsibly.

Debt Ceilings and Democracy

Democracy is both a powerful and fragile thing. There are many countries in the world with newly hatched democracies that struggle to really be democratic because of rampant and deeply entrenched corruption, because the middle-class is so small that votes can be bought for the price of a sack of rice, because of racial or religious factionalism, etc.

You really have to think of democracy as a rare orchid. This, in part, is what has made the United States of America such an extraordinary country.  Because what democracy needs most of all is a belief in democracy. Regardless of how much you wish to hold fast to your particular side of the ideological blanket, you must first and foremost believe in the sanctity of the blanket.  Right or left, you have to believe most deeply in the legitimacy of every vote, whether for your party or for another.

This demands a philosophical and emotional maturity that many societies have simply not reached yet, and which, I am sad to say, I think the US is losing very fast.

Let us be very clear. The current debt crisis looming in the US is not about debt. It’s about ideology. There is a small but very vocal and intransigent part of the US government that has decided to precipitate this crisis in order to further its ideology. This small group of, for the most part, recently elected Tea Party members want the US to have a radically smaller government. Not the usual debate between Democrats and Republicans, this is about decimating the power of the federal government to impose its will on the country.

I don’t want to debate whether smaller government would be good or not. I just want to clarify the situation. The massive debt incurred over the Iraq and Afghan wars under Bush, and then the massive financial bailouts under Obama have taken the US debt to astronomical levels. Nonetheless, the United States is a financial powerhouse, no matter what the media pundits are saying at the moment. There is no point in pretending that the US is Greece or Portugal. It isn’t. The US has the financial capacity to pay its bills.

Ideologically, the Democrats would like to do that by a combination of cutting some government spending (yes, no matter what Boehner says on television, Obama does not want a ‘blank check’:  there is NO plan on the table, Democrat or Republican – that does not contain very significant spending cuts) and to raise taxes – especially for individuals and corporations at the top 10% of the economic ladder.

What the Republicans (and the Democrat Reid proposal) have proposed is to bring down the debt solely by government spending cuts, with no tax hikes for anyone. Not because there aren’t some Republicans who would agree to some moderate tax increases, but because the Tea Party is so intransigent, it simply won’t tolerate having that on the discussion table.

Old style conservatives tend to be debt-phobic. And strangely enough, in this case, I would count myself fiscally as one.  Traditional conservativism would say that it is important to pay down the debt as fast as possible by a combination of spending cuts and tax increases because, in the long run, nursing a large debt is far more costly than short-term pain.

But the portion of the Republican party who is driving the agenda here is not really interested in paying down the debt. They are too short sighted to see that a debt-less US is a far more powerful entity. What they want is to impoverish the US government to the point where it has no power.  Their short-term debt-ceiling relief is not meant to keep government honest. It’s meant to ensure that, at the next election, Obama will not get re-elected.  What they are doing is running for office in the middle of an economic storm and using the current financial circumstances to force their way into power.

The crisis that this has precipitated is long-term. Financial markets expect that when you’re talking finance, you’re talking finance, not elections. The prospect of US Treasury bonds being downgraded from their traditional AAA rating is not a short-term issue. It will mean gravely higher interest rates, trigger a world-wide economic stagnation at best. The world has seen the US as a financially responsible haven where it puts its money in times of trouble. When that haven disappears, very bad things are going to happen – globally.

Homey stump speeches about big bad government are all very well, but Americans have to realize that there is no isolationism anymore. The biggest chunk of their debt is held by China. What happens in the next few days on the floor of Congress is going to  affect the whole world and come back to bite them.

Americans also need to acknowledge that many, many countries in the world are very prosperous, with high living standards, stable government and growth potential, while still paying far higher taxes than the US. Why are ordinary citizens in the US so adverse to having the upper 10% of their economic echelon pay some more?

And, if the Tea Party were really the conservatives they claim to be, why aren’t they demanding both cuts and tax hikes to pay down the debt. After all, it is getting rid of the debt that is truly, in the long term, the most fervently patriotic thing to do. If they want a shining, prosperous and powerful America, then getting rid of the debt by whatever means necessary, is the first step.

Their intransigent opposition to this is what reveals their real agenda. They don’t care about their country. They care about power.  And that, I am sad to say, is a pretty 3rd world attitude.

Whether the debt ceiling is raised on August 2nd or not, the damage has been done. The world has watched the most prosperous country on earth haggle about whether it will or won’t pay its bills. It is extraordinarily tragic to see the most stable democracy on earth do itself such damage. It acts as an exemplar for undemocratic governments like China. It allow them to say: see? that’s what democracy gets you! Chaos.

I can’t pretend this is an objective post. It’s not. As socially liberal as I am, I am indeed a fiscal conservative. Please, America, reconsider your prejudices. Cut your spending AND raise your taxes. Pay down your debt and purchase your economic freedom from countries that have far uglier political systems than your own.

You owe it to yourselves. And the rest of us – in the not so free world – would appreciate it.

Super-injunctions and the Speed of Twitterlight

I just finished watching a Dateline London round table discussion on the BBC with a group of journalists discussing the issue of super-injunctions and how technologies like twitter can render these kind of legal strategies powerless.

For the non-Brits among you, a super-injunction is a gag order imposed by the a British court that prohibits the publication of not only of the facts and allegations under examination, but even the complainants names and the very existence of the injunction itself. See the Wikipedia entry on this for more details.

It’s easy to understand, in an era where the press tramples all over people’s private lives, why the idea of a super-injunction might be necessary. Is it really anyone’s business that a footballer is having an affair? But the problem is more complex, because it has, at times, been employed to obscure facts that probably were very much in the public interest and which the public has had a legitimate right to know.  It provides a mechanism for even obscuring the actual functions of the law. Also, the legal costs of petitioning for a super-injunction are such that only the very rich can afford to obtain them. And finally, the newspapers who have so vociferously argued against them are often not, one imagines, doing it out of some altruistic belief in free speech, but in order to publish things that sell them more newspapers.

What has become clear though, is that technologies like Twitter make the upholding of a super-injunction almost impossible. If information contained within a super-injunction is leaked onto the net via a real-time streaming, it is simply impossible to prosecute all the tweeters who pass the information on.

I think we are looking at this in the wrong way. Imagine what life must have been like in a small village on market day and contemplate the barrage of true and false rumours and pieces of gossip that must have flown around – ruining people’s reputations, invading their privacy, false accusations and no way for the subjects to debate or refute them. Or real and true information about someone’s life which, for many people, should be considered private.

Twitter is very much like the global village at market day. And I’d suggest that it’s as popular as it is because, in fact, in a world where we no longer have the companionship and intimacy of market day, Twitter has walked in to serve something akin to a basic social need.

The problem is that the spoken word evaporates leaving only ghosts of itself behind on the tongues of others. Twitter is a database and the things posted remain trapped in digital amber for posterity and for all to read.

Any legal strategy designed to foil this is doomed to failure. Any notion of limiting the access of Twitter to within national boundaries where the breakers of injunctions might be prosecuted is ludicrous.

What is more important, for the civility of our societies, is that we teach our children that public speech has consequences. That gossip and rumour and the passing on of inappropriate and personally private information is simply not right.

We are not going to raise the level of public discourse by quashing it. The only way to improve it is by demanding of ourselves and our children a higher level of responsibility. A recognition that each of us are the creators of this intangible but very real landscape and we have an obligation not to turn it into a slag heap or a wasteland.

 

 

Party Poopers and the Curse of Legacies.

Am I glad that Osama Bin Laden is dead?

Well, let’s put it this way: I’m glad he’s not free to inspire another little Muslim boy to strap a suicide vest around himself and attempt to blow people up.  I’m glad he’s not planning the next large terrorist attack.

I would have preferred it if he’d been captured alive and put on trial. But I think it’s naive to think that was ever going to happen. For one thing, Navy Seals and Special Forces aren’t really known for their live captures (not that I’m criticizing them. I think they did their job and my hat off to them). But secondly, it didn’t really suit anyone to have him put on trial. After all, the prosecution would be asked to show how the extraordinary renditioning of hundreds and the illegal and indefinite incarceration, and torture of combatants at Guantanamo Bay led to his apprehension. More likely they’d just proclaim all that information out of bounds in ‘the interest of national security’. It would be messy. This is neater.

I would have preferred not to have to witness crowds of people gathering in Times Square and in front of the Whitehouse braying out their national anthem and singing ‘ding dong the witch is dead’ and generally comporting themselves with savage schadenfreude. It looked a lot like the impromptu celebrations that took place in Muslim countries when the Twin Towers fell. And I wanted to be able to expect something a little more serious and civilized from Americans. But hey, people are people, right? All over the world.

The Guardian has behaved itself and issued a very good and interesting Obituary for Osama Bin Laden. And I have to ask myself – was it worth it? After all, the 9/11 attack was the impetus for the Iraq war, not just the invasion of Afghanistan. So, over 7,000 coalition soldiers, 100,000 Iraqis and at least 20,000 Afghans are dead.

It’s worth remembering that the last casualty in this war, before the capture of Bin Laden, was the nameless, innocent Pakistani woman some devoutly religious man used as a human shield when the Special Forces came through the door shooting.

Well, c’est la vie. We don’t care about nameless Pakistani women any more than they do in Pakistan, where tribal elders sentence them to be gang-raped for something their brother did.

So, what will be this man’s legacy?

In my mind, it will be that in leading Al Qaeda in a jihad against the Western world, he effectively distracted many young Muslims from fighting the appalling tyranny taking place in their own countries.  After all, having a common demonized enemy has always been an effective way to shift the population’s attention off trouble brewing at home.

His actions legitimized countless brutal and corrupt leaders all over the Arab world, because the US saw them as strong men who could stand up to those dreaded and tenacious fundamentalists Muslim movements all over the Middle east who were all, we are assured, in cahoots with him.

Personally, I think Al Qaeda’s day was over the moment that Egyptians took to the streets of Cairo and demanded the ousting of Mubarak. From Morocco to Tunisia, from Syria to Yemen and Bahrain, the Islamic world is starting to look inward for a cure to what ails it. I don’t think they have much time to hate us now. They’ve found the local culprits of their misery and are taking their complaints to the streets.

I think his legacy is going to be that his war against the West was a sham. That it perpetuated and entrenched everything he said he despised. His terrorism had the opposite effect to what was intended.

And that’s a pathetic legacy, richly deserved.

Present and Engaged: It’s about Trust, Stupid

My workplace has recently gone through a lot of changes. The old guard leave, the new guard arrive, they want to make their mark, set their tone, achieve their objectives. Of course, you say.

I’ve watched successive changes of the guard at my place of employment. They come, they go, and at the coal face nothing much changes. They throw welcome parties, leaving parties, get to know you drinks parties. They ‘engage’ with the plebs. And hell, we like the free alcohol.

They establish new hierarchies, produce new instruments with which to measure our efficiency, our commitment, our ‘engagement’.  We learn the new position titles, attend the workshops on how to conform to the new management methodology, and complete the forms.

They look at their to-do lists, check off their accomplishments, and leave with a shiny new list of things they did at their last company.

But everything I see tells me that their own engagement and commitment to what we are supposed to be doing  is minimal. They pay it lip-service. Nothing more.

Today I read this article on ‘Engagement’ in the workplace by Matt Grawitch. He describes what he thinks ‘engagement’ means:

Engagement is about feeling mentally, physically, and emotionally present while you are completing your work tasks. Being present means you’re not distracted by worries at home. Being present means you’re not thinking about something else you’d rather be doing.
(A Psychologically Healthy Workplace: Some Things to Keep in Mind, Grawitch, M.)

It’s a good description of engagement, but he goes on to say:

So, if you want to better manage your people, create an environment and a culture that promotes actual work engagement, not just one that promotes friendships or effective management.
(A Psychologically Healthy Workplace: Some Things to Keep in Mind, Grawitch, M.)

He doesn’t go on to say how this is achieved in the article, and that would definitely be something worth reading.  I have read a number that propose all sorts of strategies for doing just that.

But subtextually, I think Grawitch absolves management from making an effort. He says “True, your boss can have a positive impact on the engagement experience, but there are many factors that can influence “presence.””

No one I’ve come across actually mentions the one thing that makes ‘engagement’ possible in any relationship. That makes people desire to be present. And it’s really such a complete no-brainer, I can’t believe anyone spends consultancy dollars on it.

Trust. Whether boss/employee, buyer/seller, parent/child, teacher/student, or even lovers, the single most important thing that engenders engagement and nurtures presence is trust.

Here’s the problem. The world is full of management techniques for persuading, manipulating, bullying or threatening employees into getting into line with management’s vision. And the reason it’s often so difficult is that employees don’t trust management not to take care of themselves at the expense of everything else. And this isn’t a mistaken mistrust. It’s a very legitimate one.

Because the reality is all those management consultancy dollars, all those seminars and courses and conferences are really about how to disguise the fact that you don’t actually care, that you’re really taking care of yourself, and that you are going to find ways to use me to fulfill YOUR agenda. Not THE agenda.

I’m an educator. So, if you’re my boss, here is what is going to ensure I am ‘present and engaged’:

• Make your first priority, your first agenda, mine – to educate students well. Period. Everything else is secondary, and if I don’t KNOW you feel the same way, I’m not going to trust you.
• Don’t allow your measurement instruments get in the way of our first priority. I understand you need to show numbers, but if the process of gathering them degrades the quality of my work, find a new one.
• Don’t use processes instead of relationships. KNOW what I do. Don’t read a form and pretend you do.
• Do not use me to make your CV look better. Your CV will look just great if you help me do what I do best.
• Measure me by relevant units. Measure me by how well I achieve our common goal. I don’t mind that you have to make it economically feasible as well. I can live with economic realities. What I can’t live with is lies.

If I trust that you care as much as I care about educating students, you need never have a moment’s doubt about my engagement. I’ll be the best employee you ever had.

Libya: the West’s Response

I’ve been concerned in recent days about the number of twitterers, journalists, and commentators from the Middle East who want to see Europe and the US materially or militarily involved in Libya.

What we’ve witnessed in the past few months is a radical shift in power in places like Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Abu Dhabi, etc.  And undoubtedly this is the kind of popular change that supposedly danced like sugarplums in the heads of neo-conservative dreamers like Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Robert Kagan and John R. Bolton and spurred Bush on to force a regime change in Iraq in the hopes of spreading democracy to the greater Arab world.

Hopefully, we can all agree that the invasion of Iraq did not produce any creditable spread of democracy in the Middle East. Yes, Saddam Hussein was undoubtedly a nasty bastard and,  yes, there were some very loud voices in the Arab world who also (although they would hardly admit it now) encouraged America to this adventurism.

However, what we are seeing in North African and some of the Arab states is really a homegrown desire to shrug off old models of autocratic rule in favour of something more democratic.

But it wasn’t so very long ago, just in case our memories deceive us, that the US was all smiles with Mubarak and Britain was helping Qaddafi repatriate one of the terrorists responsible for the Lockerbie catastrophe. These rulers, who we now are so happy to see overturned, were recently relied upon to quell fundamentalist Islamic movements in the region and provide us with oil. And it has been our support of people like Mubarak that lead to a virtual absence of any creditable democratic opposition Egypt, with the exception of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Many of these rulers allowed the spectre of vibrant Islamiscists opposition to exist in order to scare the pants off the West and garner donations for their military might. They might get rid of the rest of their opposition, but they kept the fundamentalists on the boil to show as exemplars for what, if the dictators were left unsupported, might inherit the power. And indeed, in some of the countries currently going through changes, they might. But hey, we wanted them to exercise their democratic rights, and now they’re doing it. Suck it up.

Indirectly but ironically, the foreign policy hawks have perpetuated their own worst fears by getting into bed with these bastards.

Now we have Libyans demanding that the US come in to help them overthrow Qaddafi. But the Arab world needs to learn, not from our rhetoric or what we say, but from our history.

Almost all significant and lasting regime change is brought about by civil war. They are bloody and tragic and live a very long time in the minds of the people in countries where they occur. America’s civil war is still written about, still referred to, still argued over more that a century after it occurred. The Spanish civil war still drives politics in Spain. Even the English civil war lives on in scars across the landscape – in buildings and destroyed churches, in the way English parliament is constituted and in what powers still reside with the English monarchy.

It is important to remember that Vietnam also had a civil war. After WWII, with the resumption of French rule in Vietnam, the country split apart fighting over how to either accommodate being in the French Union or get rid of them. What turned the Vietnamese civil war into something much longer and more tragic was the interference of the US, China and Russia.

As heartless as it sounds, these popular uprisings taking place in the Middle East must be fought and won by their own citizens. It will cost the shedding of their blood. And ultimately their victory will be all the more historically precious to them because it does. For the West to interfere in it is to delegitimize the internal and popular nature of these changes. It would give movements like Al Qaeda excuse after excuse to point to the West and represent it as overbearing and hegemonic.

In the west, during our various civil wars and violent revolutions, we learned that it was the tragic and bloody sacrifice of idealists that bought us the stable systems we have now. And it is the memory of those sacrifices that make what we have so precious. Freedom is NEVER wrestled away from despots without bloodshed. It is never attained painlessly. If it were, we would not place such a high value on what was won.

It would be nice if all the peoples of the world could transition seamlessly to democratic self-determination without a drop of blood being shed, but that is not yet within human nature to achieve. And until then, Libya needs to gain this freedom with its own hands.

Guantanamo, Manning & the Myth of Patriotism

In response to Daniel Ellsberg’s post ‘The Shameful Abuse of Bradley Manning‘.

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” Dostoyevsky

There are many critics of the United States who trace its moral decline from the end of the Second World War. This is not unreasonable. The emergence of the Cold War saw the US engage in dubious adventurism all over the globe. From its involvement in Vietnam, its participation in the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile, its support of the Shah in Iran, to its invasion of Iraq, the US has behaved like the empire it is. And like all empires, it’s done very questionable things abroad.

However, it is one thing for an empire to behave like a mad elephant abroad, and something entirely different to pull itself apart internally. I see 9/11 as the trigger of a different kind of misbehaviour. A kind of moral cannibalism that has done greater damage than all its misguided efforts abroad.

Something changed after 9/11. It changed at the very apex of the power structure. Perhaps it was just that George W. Bush was not intellectually capable of giving grave consideration to how the Al Qaeda threat should be represented and conceived of in the mind of the people of the US. Perhaps it was simply easier to respond to the tragedy by declaring a ‘War on Terror’?

Perhaps it was that Bush, just like the rest of the population, had been so utterly infected by a culture and psychology of consumerism that whatever the response should be, it had to be something that would stand out on the shelf. Something packaged in bright, patriotic colours. Something easy to market and easy to grasp for a population who can’t seem to tolerate a news report that takes more than 3 minutes to consume.

However it came about, the result was a country with a drastically shifted moral landscape. A country that was willing to legalize and legitimize behaviour that, 20 years before, would have had to remain secret and covert.

It wasn’t that the United States had never tortured people or held them in awful conditions before. It’s that they could not do so publicly, because it was considered that the greater part of the American people would not tolerate it. Until very recently, the people of the US have seen themselves as obliged to present a higher moral standard to the world than other nations. It has prided itself on a constitution that aggressively protects the rights of the individual. America has, in the past, wanted to be seen as a fair, compassionate and just people. But to maintain this requires a population that can see beyond the three-minute sound bite. A population who, though angry and reactive in the moment, have the capacity to consider the long-term ramifications of legalizing uncivilized behavior.

Under the Bush administration, the Office of Legal Counsel contorted the laws of territoriality, of due process and America’s legal relationship with the Third Geneva convention into unrecognizable things.

It created the legal plausibility of a extra-territorial black hole in Guantanamo to serve the purposes of the administration. It legalized and legitimized the mistreatment of prisoners that went on there, and at the Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, and in the prisons of Iraq.  It indemnified senior members of the administration, the military and the CIA against prosecution for breaches in what, until very recently, have been hard and fast rules on the treatment of captured enemies.

And the population of the United States went along with this. Yes, there were people who protested it. But the majority of Americans re-elected the people who did this. It tolerated the imposition of the Patriot Act. It was, for the most part, the silent and acquiescent witness to the disemboweling of its own constitution.

It is immaterial whether many of the prisoners at Guantanamo were rabid terrorists or innocent. It is immaterial whether Bradley Manning is a brave whistle-blower or a damnable traitor. What the Obama administration has done in allowing Guantanamo Bay to stay open and tolerating the mistreatment of Private Manning, is to ratify a fundamental change in the moral structure of America.

And so Al Qaeda has gone some way to achieving its aim to destroy the fabric of American society. But not without the complicity of those great American patriots who swore to uphold the constitution of their country and the inviolate moral superiority of its citizens. And the proof that is has done so lies in the fact that anyone who points this out is accused of being unpatriotic.

Moreover, I have to wonder why so many more Americans are surprised that a government, once it gives itself permission to act with overt immorality to others, would not then turn around and do so to one of its own citizens?

Social Order & the Expectation of Justice: The Death of Zhao Wei

China’s central committee should spend less time worrying about what its citizens are reading on the internet or the threat of a jasmine revolution and more time worrying about the fact that its structure is systematically failing to deliver basic security and legal recourse to its people.

I grew up under a right-wing dictatorship in Spain, I have lived in countries with multi-party democracies like Canada and the UK. Since 1999, I’ve lived in The Socialist Republic of Vietnam.  I’ve seen many political and social systems at work. Unlike many westerners, I don’t hold up multi-party democracies as the only civilized system of governance; they all have their strengths and their weaknesses.

However, historically, one thing is very clear: when the majority of citizens in a country no longer believe that civil justice is available to them through the established legal channels, you have a serious problem if you want to hang onto power. Any political system can cope with and survive a certain level of corruption. And there is no political or judicial system on earth that doesn’t have its serious flaws. But there is a tipping point at which expectations of fair treatment by the civil authorities drop so low, that people take justice into their own hands and, ultimately, become convinced that it is worth considerable bloodshed and instability to establish a new system with a civic structure that serves the majority better.

In January of 2011, Zhao Wei, a student from Inner Mongolia studying at the Hebei University of Technology, boarded a train to go home for the Spring break. It is extremely hard to know exactly what happened to him, but what is clear was that, over a dispute about moving seats on the train, he angered someone in a position of minor authority. He died in the custody of the Railway Police. Not only was there clear physical evidence that he was very badly beaten, but also evidence that an effort was later made to cover up this mistreatment. Read the outline of his story here.

Of course, most countries on the planet have their share of police brutality. Many societies have tolerated very high rates of this kind of behaviour. The difference in the case of Zhao Wei is that there is obvious evidence that news of his murder has been muzzled at extremely high levels. Many newspapers ran stories that were then suddenly pulled. Online reports disappeared.

Zhao Wei’s case is just the last in a long line of criminal cases which have been systematically buried by a collusion of a number of government branches. And this is what China’s leaders should REALLY BE FEARING. There is a clear accretion of simple, unpolitical crimes that are not being properly and fairly processed by the judiciary arm of the government. It’s just another example, after almost an entire village was infected with HIV, after a vast number of parents lost their only children as shoddily built public schools collapsed during the 2008 earthquake.

In any given society, people will tolerate only a certain level of systematic criminality before the leaders in power need to start worrying about their longevity. Oddly enough, the larger the cover-up, the more societies seem to tolerate it. The triggers, historically speaking, seem not to be the big offenses but the small ones. Perhaps this is because the public imagination has a hard time conceiving of the large scale offenses. So it’s the single, seemingly senseless individual tragedies that seem to stick in the craw most and become the rallying cry for change.

If China’s leaders want to hang onto power and maintain the system they have, Zhao Wei’s case is exactly the sort of thing they need to keep an eye on. Too many Chinese can personally identify with that poor student and his fate.

Too many young Chinese can stand in his shoes.

Zhao Wei

Lara Logan, Women Covering Conflict and the Myth of the Press as Observer

As a woman, I was disgusted and angry to hear about Lara Logan’s sexual assault and beating during the Tahrir Square protests in Cairo. I am also pretty disgusted by people who, albeit subtly, suggest that she was asking for it because she’s female, blonde and not wearing a head-covering.

Let me fess up to how I feel about Lara Logan: I have grave doubts about her basic understanding of the obligations of a free press. She was not just critical, but unprofessionally rude about Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone. I also found her reaction to the Wikileaks cables disingenuous and hyperbolic. Bottom line, I don’t have a lot of respect for her as a journalist, because I fundamentally differ with her on the subject of who the press is there to serve.

In 2010 alone, 94 journalists died pursuing their calling. However, there is nothing new about journalists being brutalized or murdered covering foreign conflicts and political upheavals. Over 1,000 journalists and media workers have been killed, worldwide, between 1992 – 2011. From the murder of Sean Flynn at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in 1971 to the kidnapping and execution of Daniel Pearl in 2002, and the Kremlin backed assassination of Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, journalism is a hazardous profession.

One of the reasons for this is that the press plays a significant part forming the opinions and sculpting the policy of powerful people and states. They are not ‘JUST THERE’, covering the event. Media presence affects and often changes the way any given situation plays out purely because of its presence.

This is a truth about which very few journalists are as honest as they might be. Kim Barker, in her NYT Op Ed “Why We Need Women in War Zones” doesn’t acknowledge this. She complains about getting groped herself, about women journalists she knows who have been sexually molested, but fears that Logan’s rape will prevent editors and press bosses from sending women into areas of conflict.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t demand equality of assignments for women journalists and not accept that, in many parts of the world, women are targeted for sexual harassment and assault. It’s despicable and unfair, but it’s a reality.

Journalists and photographers often make their reputations and their careers covering extreme situations – war zones, political upheavals, etc. So, as much as this is a personal tragedy for Lara Logan, it is worth remembering that the vast majority of journalists who have been violently assaulted and killed have been men. It’s also worth considering that there were probably a considerable number of Egyptian women protesters who were also raped and beaten in and around Tahrir Square on the very same night, but they will get little sympathy from their family or their society, and certainly won’t garner support through the media. A study done in Egypt in 2005 found that 34% of women report having suffered violence or sexual assault.

If female journalists want to make their careers covering chaotic and violent situations (and I absolutely think they should), then they must be prepared to take the same risks as their male counterparts. They must accept that the societies they are reporting in have very different views of how women should be treated. And finally, they have to accept that their presence and their reportage does affect the way these situations play out, and that will make them unpopular with some of the participants.

It’s worth remembering, though, that journalism doesn’t even rate up in the top 20 most dangerous jobs. It’s a lot more hazardous to be a fisherman.

P.S. I just got a good deal of flack for not condemning Lara Logan’s rape enough. So, for the record, and at the risk of sounding repetitive, I condemn ALL rape and ALL physical violence. I condemn it as much against journalists as I condemn it when it occurs to normal people who don’t get coverage.