“All religions are just as good as each other, as long as the people who practice them are honest, and even if Turks and heathens came and wanted to populate this country, then we would build mosques and temples for them”(1)
As quoted in Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1947
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I was going to do a rather obnoxious post about the Macedonian name issue, but decided not to. You can see a draft of it in the comments section over here.
Meanwhile, here’s an idea I’ve sometimes toyed with: a series of posts on the leaders of small European countries during the Second World War. There were some fascinating characters running around then: Admiral Horthy of Hungary, Salazar of Portugal, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and Ante Pavelic of Croatia. (Pavelic not so much fascinating as disgusting, but that’s a story for another time.)
Anyway, I don’t want to commit myself to this — I still have the series on frozen conflicts half-finished — but here’s a random post on one wartime leader: Marshal Antonescu of Romania. Continue reading
DTV (digital television) is here; just at a time when people are giving up on watching TV in favour of YouTube. Or so we might have thought. There’s also going to be a switchover in America. What if you’re poor and can’t afford a new television? US Congress has thought of this: two $40 vouchers are to be made available to every US household, on application; redeemable at your local Best Buy. Precedent: the Plebeian Games of Emperor Commodus.
A senior British police forensic scientist wants to put the DNA of children aged 7-12 on the British national DNA database (NDNAD). If they show signs of becoming troublemakers, that is. Precedent: criminological phrenology.
In the UK, unemployment benefit is taxable. (News to me, if not to anyone else.) Precedent: the Poor Law Amendment Act, 1834.
This is the first in a series of posts monitoring regressive trends in our supposedly modern globalised economy. If you have any stories to share, let me know and I’ll include them in next month’s roundup.
In James Gleick’s bestseller, Chaos: Making a New Science, one of the recurring phrases is “period three implies chaos.” Grossly simplified, once things start oscillating among three stable states, chaos is inevitable and ubiquitous. In politics, particularly German politics, three parties did not imply chaos, but rather orderly transitions with the hinge party making a switch from time to time. The advent of a fourth, the Greens, didn’t cause structural problems either. But the fifth, now called the Left, is doing the chaotic trick nicely.
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A developing story, of course, but the BBC is reporting that the US, UK, France, Germany and Italy recognizing or pledging to recognize the independence of Kosovo. Wikipedia is also quick off the mark with its entry on the now-official flag.
The EU has papered over its differences, with the common foreign and security policy consisting of saying that Kosovo “does not set a precedent,” and then leaving it to member states to decide their own relations with the territory. Spain is the biggest EU country withholding recognition; others in this group include Cyprus and Slovakia (worried about the Hungarian minority, one presumes, and given the approach of one of the parties in the governing coalition they may be right to, though a Köztásaság Kistranzdunaj (Republic of the Little Area Across the Danube) seems silly).
France has got to be a blow, considering it was the most pro-Serbian Western country during the conflict in 1999. If memory serves, some members of the French military were even charged with passing sensitive information to Serbia at about that time. French foreign minister Kouchner said that at some future date, both would be in the European Union together. I’m not sure that helps.
Consequences? Too early for me to say. It may indeed be a one-off, the last in the cascade of the former Yugoslavia.
John Quiggin writes about the banking crisis:
Suppose Bank A owes a trillion dollars to bank B which in turn owes a trillion to C which in turn owes a trillion to D which owes a trillion to A. Now suppose that A gets into liquidity trouble and can’t pay. Then B is similarly in trouble and so in turn are C and D. If D could cancel the debt to A and forgive C who would in turn forgive B and so on to A, all would be well. But in the normal course of business you can’t do that. The fact that it’s zero sum doesn’t help. You need either wholesale resort to bankruptcy, or outside intervention.
It has strong parallels with John Maynard Keynes’ description of the financial consequences of the first world war. Basically, he said, everyone had ended up by owing everyone else a lot of money. Rather than the UK running a trade deficit with the rest of the world (and a services surplus), and a trade surplus with the empire, it had been running a surplus with its allies and a deficit with the empire’s civilian economy and the rest of the world.
The financially weaker allies had all turned to the next one up the chain for funds; Greece and Romania turned to Russia and Italy and they turned to France, which turned to the UK, which eventually turned to the US. As Europe was running a massive trade deficit with the rest of the world, the dollar claims everyone else accumulated could only be spent with the US; the adjustment path was meant to be that the British empire would spend the accumulated sterling claims buying things from the UK, and that the other allies would pay up. Netting out the numbers, Keynes concluded that the remaining dollar debt was manageable.
But the Russian revolution kiboshed this; if the Russians didn’t pay (and neither did some others), the French couldn’t pay, which meant the British couldn’t pay either. The solution the government offered was to make the Germans pay; Keynes pointed out that as nobody had any forex, there was no-one in a position to buy German exports, so they couldn’t pay either. Further, holding US dollars meant that Australia, say, could go and buy capital goods from the US instead. In a sense, the eventual solution was that Germany didn’t pay, but borrowed a ton of money from the US to finance its imports, paying with exports to the US; a Marshall Plan in one country, at least until the credit crunch meant it couldn’t roll over short-term paper.
Short-term commercial paper? Where have we heard that recently? Oh yes, at companies like IKB, Northern Rock, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley…substitute subprime mortgages for Russian bonds, SIVs and CDOs for France and Italy, and the UK for the major investment banks, and it’s quite eerie. But who are the Americans in this scenario?
Early 2004 photos emerged in the media showing Iraqi prisoners allegedly being abused and tortured by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq. The impact was devastating and the Bush administration, already under fire by critics for the way it handled the Iraq war, was faced with yet another serious public relations problem. America, the leader of the free world, the winner of hearts and minds, the liberator of people from oppressive regimes was seen to engage in the very same “evilness” it had denounced and gone to war for. The fact that the American abuse took place in the very same prison where evil dictator Saddam Hussein used to torture his own prisoners made the contrast even more poignant. Of course, the Bush administration had to respond and protect the image of their America. On June 22nd 2004 president Bush stated:
Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country. We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being.*
To cut a very long explanation short, the abuse was done by “rogue soldiers”, aberrational and not a matter of official US policy. The narrative was picked up and expanded upon by various actors in the public arena. The harshness of the various interrogation methods used at Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere, was heavily debated in, among others, the blogosphere. Both domestically and, yes, internationally people asked questions like: “Do loud music and bright lights really constitute torture?” Even vice-president Cheney chimed in when he called waterboarding “a no-brainer”. He proceeded to invoke “the terrorist threat” as a valid excuse for using controversial interrogation techniques and reiterated the official line that “we don’t torture”.
Between 2004 and now a lot has been written about the subject and the issue of torture and prisoner abuse continues to haunt the current US administration, especially in view of the upcoming US presidential elections, as evidenced by this recent article in The New York Times in which senator McCain chastises Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani for the latter’s failure to call waterboarding torture. About a week ago international media found the issue interesting enough to report that the “whistleblower website” Wikileaks had published the Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedure, an outdated copy of the manual for prisoner treatment at Guantanamo Bay. And, naturally, the issue IS interesting. But what did really happen? What are the ramifications, both politically and morally, of what happened, and may very well continue to happen in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay? What is the opinion of the experts, of people who actually deal with the interrogation of prisoners instead of laymen chattering about it on the internet? And what is it that sets this US Administration apart from others before it when it comes to the issue of torture?
With these questions I can introduce to our readers a truly remarkable book published by Columbia University Press, Administration of Torture, that answers all of them and is written by Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, two lawyers working for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Administration of Torture starts with an intriguing introduction in which ACLU lawyers Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh build their case that the current US Administration did condone torture, that the abuse of prisoners was indeed systemic, that senior government officials, like Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, were personally involved, probably for the first time in US history, in determining which interrogation techniques were to be used and that those techniques were possibly illegal and even unconstitutional bordering on war crimes.
The text of the introduction in which these allegations are made, 52 pages long, is corroborated by over 300 footnotes pointing directly to official documents that are reproduced in the book over 374 pages. The true scope of the enormous investigative work done by Jaffer and Singh becomes clear when you know that over 100,000 of these official pages have been released to the ACLU and its partners under the Freedom of Information Act.
I have to admit that the prospect of wading through even 374 pages of official documents seemed a bit daunting at first. Especially since I am not a lawyer myself. But my initial reticence, and even scepticism as to the importance of this book when the whole issue of torture was already well-discussed elsewhere, was quickly overcome when I actually started to delve into these documents myself and when I discovered how easy it is to justify illegal actions with legal “loopholes”, how it was not really torture itself that was seen as a problem, but the way it could tarnish the reputation of the country or put at risk the career of certain people, how cynical and bureaucratical the whole issue was dealt with. And all of this on the basis of real, official documents and testimonies from and by people who were directly involved. In any case, the whole issue is explained extensively and clearly in the introduction to Administration of Torture, which handily serves as a manual to correctly interpret all those documents.
In the introduction, or the indictment of the Bush administration, if you will, Jaffer and Singh demonstrate, among many other things, how the US administration managed to deviate from previously established rules and practices, how it managed to reinterpret laws “in a way that would allow government personnel to engage in interrogation methods that violate both domestic law and also international law”**. One very telling example and quote:
In Januari of 2002, then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales opined that the war on terror had “render(ed) obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on the questioning of enemy prisoners,” and he recommended that the president deny al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners the protection of the Third Geneva Convention to “preserve flexibility” and “reduce the threat” that administration officials and military personnel would later be prosecuted for war crimes. Stating that the war against terrorism had “usher(ed) in a new paradigm,” President Bush formally endorsed this policy in a memorandum issued on February 7.”
The opinion of Gonzales and the February memo of Bush are both reproduced in full in the book.
Jaffer and Singh also demonstrate how various government officials and agencies, who deal with interrogations as a part of their job, have expressed doubts about the efficiency of the recommended interrogation methods. Even within the military similar doubts had been raised. This alone blows to smithereens the whole argument that harsh interrogation techniques are by definition necessary to protect the average American from the “terrorist threat”. One example and quote, talking about aggressive interrogation tactics, with the corresponding FBI memo reproduced in the book:
Not only are these tactics at odds with legally permissible interviewing techniques used by U.S. law enforcement agencies in the United States, but they are being employed by personnel in GTMO who appear to have little, if any, experience eliciting information for judicial purposes. The continued use of the techniques has the potential of negatively impacting future interviews by FBI agents as they attempt to gather intelligence and prepare cases for prosecution.”
Remember, this memo was written by people whose job it is to gather intelligence.
Furthermore, we learn that many detainees have either “been arrested by mistake” or “were of either no intelligence value or were of value but innocent and therefore should (…) not have remained in captivity”. We learn of interrogations ending with the death of detainees, we learn that the interrogation techniques used in Abu Ghraib were also pervasive in other US detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay and that abuse was endorsed by senior officials as a matter of policy. Torture, in other words, did not happen in spite of policy but because of it. All of these allegations are backed up by official documents.
In Administration of Torture Jaffer and Singh present enough evidence of illegal abuse and even war crimes committed by, among others, senior US government officials to warrant at the very least a thorough Congressional investigation no matter what your personal stance on the use of torture is. If it is against the rules, it is against the rules. Like any other ordinary citizen government officials are accountable and have to operate within the limits defined by law. Since the authors include official documents in this book, among which testimonies of people on the ground, we get a better understanding of how devastating even “soft techniques” like loud music, bright light, stress positions and isolation can be when used too extensively, as seems to have been the case. We learn therefore that, apart from moral reasons, there are also practical reasons for limiting the use of certain interrogation techniques. Some of them are plainly counter productive. We learn that in the absence of clear guidelines, or deliberate obfuscation of them, the slippery slope theory can quickly degenerate into reality, etcetera.
So, even when so much has already been said about the subject, I would highly recommend Administration of Torture, not only because it is a formidable example of investigative journalism, not only because it shows that torture is not by definition the way to go, not only because of its historic value in documenting a very important part of American history, not only because of its current “political value” since it could form the basis of a legal investigation into possible war crimes committed by an American administration, but because, to all of us, it demonstrates the way power can and will corrupt if it is allowed to go unchecked.
As a matter of fact, regardless of all those freedom speeches made by George W. Bush in the past years, I would consider the very existence of this book as the prime example of the true free spirit of the American people. I do believe, as evidenced by this American book published by Americans, that the values of their country are such that torture is not a part of their soul and their being.
So, yes, Administration of Torture is a serious indictment of the Bush administration warranting further investigation. But it is also, and foremost, proof that the American democracy is still alive and kicking and that we can still look to America as an example of true freedom. That is why, in these often dark and insecure times, this very book can and must serve as a beacon of hope and as an example to all those, even here in Europe, who seek to curb constitutional freedoms in the name of the war against terrorism. We should all be better than our enemies.
*The Bush quote is taken directly from the book.
** This quote in between brackets is taken from an interview with Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh from the Columbia University Press podcast series, also accessible through the book’s webpage at Columbia University Press.
One of the things that’s generally known about Germany, but not often spoken about for various reasons(1), is how much continuity there was between the Third Reich and the early days of the Federal Republic. A certain degree of continuity is inevtiable any time a government changes; even the Bolsheviks brought back a lot of Tsarist officials simply because no one else knew how things worked. But the questions for West Germany after the war are how many, for how long and at what level?
Over time, and thanks in no small measure to confrontations in the late 1960s, more and more German institutions have taken an honest look at who did what to whom during the Nazi period, and where they ended up afterward. The answers to the three questions have often been quite a few, for their whole careers, and at leadership levels. Several forces have gotten companies and institutions to be more truthful about their activities from 1933 to 1945, and the continuity between that period and the postwar era. One such has been the simple passage of time. People who would have been expected to pay a price are now retired, or dead. No doubt, knowledge is coming at the cost of justice.
The latest institution to undertake such an examination is Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, or BKA). Credit to the BKA’s current president, Jörg Ziercke. He didn’t have to do it, and he didn’t have to let it be done so thoroughly. What has turned up in a study by historians is a remarkable number of SS men who went on to leadership positions in the BKA. Files used by the Gestapo to harass and persecute Roma and Sinti were taken over by the BKA, and harassment continued well into the postwar era, in some form at least into the 1980s. The views on “criminal biology” formed during the Third Reich were still influental at the BKA into the 1970s. The essential stories are here, here and here, from the newspaper whose web site still could be better organized. (I had hoped to translate these for this post, but real life kept getting in the way. The story hasn’t really made it into English-language media yet.) There was also a Sunday article, complete with charts of who from the SS rose to what position in the BKA, but I can’t find it online. The English-language Spiegel online has a summary here.
The questions resonate in the present, as post-Communist countries continue to wrestle with the legacies of their dictatorships. Who rose to power? Who did they step on to get there? What are the demands of justice in a new era? Other European countries have their own debates, and indeed their comforting myths, about collaboration, about wartime acts, about the fates of fellow citizens.
There aren’t any easy answers, especially more than half a century later. One good side effect is that the revelations may prompt Germany’s main intelligence service, the BND, and the constitutional protection office (Verfassungsschutz) to examine their pasts. With luck, they will be as honest as the BKA.
(1) Soviet occupation of Central and Eastern Europe was a key reason at the time. As years passed, additional reasons came to include embarassment, fear of personal consequences, unwillingness to bother the old folks and now the passing of people with firsthand knowledge and consequent general ignorance. Another is that Germany has turned into a reasonably well functioning democracy despite the Nazi pasts of many people in its institutions.
At long last Amazon has brought me something I’ve sought for a long time: Friedrich Reck’s Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten. Reck (or Reck-Malleczewen, as he sometimes styled himself) is a footnote to the history of the Third Reich; but an interesting and important footnote.
Born in Prussia into the minor landed gentry, Reck never quite fulfilled what his family must have expected from a young man of his station. Indeed, he ended up a journalist. He’d be forgotten today altogether, I’m sure, but for the facts that he opposed the nazis and died in one of their camps. Continue reading
Jean Baudrillard died recently and the obits – this one in particular – persuaded me to give his writing a try, starting with The System of Objects (1968), which addresses the interaction of the technical and the cultural. In conversation with Steven Poole a few years ago, Baudrillard said – apparently of this book – ‘I did this critique of technology, but I would not do that any more. I am not nostalgic. I would not oppose liberty and human rights to this technical world’.
The System of Objects is aphorism dense. It is also somewhat puritanical. An example of the first:
The fact is, however, that automating machines means sacrificing a very great deal of potential functionality. In order to automate a practical object, it is necessary to stereotype it in its function, thus making it more fragile … so long as an object has not been automated it remains susceptible of redesign …
And an example of the moralising:
… sexual perversion is founded on the inability to apprehend the other qua object of desire in his or her unique totality as a person … the other is transformed into the paradigm of various eroticised parts of the body, a single one of which becomes the focus of objectification.
It’s hard to read The System of Objects without feeling fingered. Personally. Whether it’s your tastefully muted yet minimally accented interior decor (‘nothing but an impossible echo of the state of nature … aggressive … naive’), or your small collection of Galaxie 500 B-Sides (‘in short, there is something of the harem about collecting’), or the iroko antelope head sculpture you and your girlfriend brought back from Africa (‘… narcissistic regression … imaginary mastery of birth and death’), your way of living holds moral lessons for you. Yes, your plan was to pass a pleasant sunny afternoon reading on the sofa; but look, a swamp of guilt and self-doubt is rising around you, and it comes from all the things around you which you thought were good, or at least OK.
Baudrillard connects the moral to the everyday, the mundane, and so his net is cast very wide. This follows from his initial purpose of giving a systematic account of popular culture. The author’s opening challenge to himself – ‘Could we classify the luxuriant growth of objects as we do a flora or fauna, complete with tropical and glacial species, sudden mutations, and varieties threatened by extinction?’ – is followed up with a granular chapter structure that at first takes on items such as ‘… Walls and Daylight, Lighting, Mirrors and Portraits … Seats … The Lighter …’ and then shifts by way of cars and robots to broader classifications: ‘The Ideology of Models … The Ambiguity of the Domestic Object’. Ungenerously, you imagine Baudrillard starting out in his apartment – and writing about everything in it – then shifting his attention out the window (some cars down there), reminiscing briefly about that kinky phase he went through (embarrassing, frankly), then trying to remember how it was that time he went shopping at Christmas and found all the advertising incredibly irritating. In other words, The System of Objects has some of the qualities of a confessional. And because you too, reader, are bourgeois, your milieu will be very similar. And so you can connect, no?
The ambition to write big, to write it all, but then not to finish, also seems reassuringly European. (Being and Time remains two-thirds incomplete to this day, measured against its own table of contents.) Then again, Baudrillard’s contemporary, Roland Barthes, seems to have tackled the issue of popular culture by means of postcards and essays, and his piece on the Citroen DS from Mythologies (1957) is conveniently pocket sized.
I haven’t read enough Barthes to be able to convincingly compare him with Baudrillard (and I haven’t read enough Baudrillard either) but I suspect that not only did Barthes get there first, he had more poetry:
It is obvious that the new Citroen has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object. We must not forget that an object is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life), and in a word a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales.
Baudrillard’s metaphors, though similarly starry, are less beguiling:
… the intimacy of the car arises from an accelerated space-time metabolism and, inextricably, from the fact that the car may at any time become the locus of an accident: the culmination in a chance event – which may in fact never occur but is always imagined, always involuntarily assumed to be inevitable – of that intimacy with oneself, that formal liberty, which is never so beautiful as in death.
Yet when he is not reaching, he is often impressively direct:
Objectively, substances are simply what they are: there is no such thing as a true or a false, a natural or an artificial substance. How could concrete be somehow less ‘authentic’ than stone? We apprehend old synthetic materials such as paper as altogether natural – indeed, glass is one of the richest substances we can conceive of.
The modern idea of the nobility of materials is still very widespread; perhaps more entrenched now than it was in 1968, having acquired an environmentalist gloss. You can test the modernity of this idea yourself by taking a pocket knife into an eighteenth century grand house and having a (discreet) poke: underneath the gilding it’s cheap softwood and plaster.
So why would Baudrillard ‘retract’? One possible reason is that reactions to modernity are easily connected with fascism. And although technological ‘lock-in’ (‘fragility’ is Baudrillard’s term) remains a reality, a counter-force is technological entrepreneurship. And then there are computers, of course.
(My thanks to Alex and David for letting me guest post at AFOE.)