http://www.slate.com/id/2154567/nav/tap1/
The N-Word Unmentionable lessons of the midterm aftermath.
By Diane McWhorter
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2006, at 6:29 PM ET
Warning: This article contains the word Nazi.
There's been something weird about the denouement of the midterm
elections, starting with the pronounced absence of Democratic
triumphalism. The prevailing mood has been stunned relief rather than
glee, and nobody seems eager to delve too deeply into what exactly it
was about George W. Bush that the voters so roundly rejected. Put
another way, what were the sins included under the shorthand summary for
the president's failures, "Iraq"?
For some reason, I keep thinking about an observation Eleanor Roosevelt
made in an unpublished interview conducted in May of 1940, as the German
Wehrmacht swept across France. She expressed dismay that a "great many
Americans" would look with favor on a Hitler victory in Europe and be
greatly attracted to fascism. Why? "Simply because we are a people who
tend to admire things that work," she said. So, were the voters last
month protesting Bush's policies—or were they complaining that he had
not made those policies work? If Operation Iraqi Freedom had not been
such an unqualified catastrophe, how long would the public have assented
to the programs that accompanied the "war on terror": the legalization
of torture, the suspension of habeas corpus, the unauthorized
surveillance of law-abiding Americans, the unilateral exercise of
executive power, and the Bush team's avowed prerogative to "create our
own reality"?
Mrs. Roosevelt's example notwithstanding, polite discussion of that
question does not contain any derivative of the words fascism,
propaganda, or dictatorship. God forbid Nazi or Hitler. The extent to
which it is verboten to bring up Nazi Germany has now become a jape.
"Can't pols just have little Post-its on their microphones reminding
them not to compare anything to the Nazis?" Maureen Dowd wrote in the
Times recently, after yet another off-message senator was taken to the
woodshed. The ban applies equally to the arena of intellectual debate,
such that even the wild and woolly Internet has a Godwin's Law to
describe the cred-killing effect of dropping the N-bomb. So, even though
it is a truism that we learn by analogy, even though the Bush
administration unapologetically practices the reality-eschewing art of
propaganda—with procured "journalists," its own "news" pipeline at Fox,
leader-centric ("war president") stagecraft, the classic Big Lie MO of,
say, draft avoiders smearing war heroes as unpatriotic—we are not
permitted to draw any comparisons to the über-propagandists of the
previous century. That prohibition is reiterated in the coy caution with
which I introduce the topic here.
The taboo is itself a precept of the propaganda state. Usually its
enforcers profess a politically correct motive: the exceptionalism of
genocidal Jewish victimhood. Thus, poor Sen. Richard Durbin, the
Democrat from Illinois, found himself apologizing to the Anti-Defamation
League after Republicans jumped all over him for invoking Nazi Germany
to describe the conditions at Guantanamo. And so by allowing the issue
to be defined by the unique suffering of the Jews, we ignore the
Holocaust's more universal hallmark: the banal ordinariness of the
citizens who perpetrated it. The relevance of Third Reich Germany to
today's America is not that Bush equals Hitler or that the United States
government is a death machine. It's that it provides a rather
spectacular example of the insidious process by which decent people come
to regard the unthinkable as not only thinkable but doable, justifiable.
Of the way freethinkers and speakers become compliant and
self-censoring. Of the mechanism by which moral or humanistic categories
are converted into bureaucratic ones. And finally, of the willingness
with which we hand control over to the state and convince ourselves that
we are the masters of our destiny.
In America, the word fascism itself has something of the quality of a
joke—with its vague, '60s sense of meaning "anything we don't like." But
because I've been reading Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler; Richard
Rubinstein's explanation of the Holocaust, The Cunning of History; and
various studies of the Third Reich for a book in progress, I've acquired
a vivid picture of the real thing. (Before I continue, please insert
here whatever disclaimers it takes to stop yourself from listing the
ways in which we are not like Nazi Germany.)
The most literal shock of recognition was the repulsively callous
arrogance of the term "shock and awe." (The Iraqi people were supposed
to pause and be impressed by our bombs before being
incinerated/liberated by them?) Airstrikes as propaganda had been the
invention of the German Luftwaffe, whose signature work, the
terror-bombing Blitz of England, did not awe the British people into
submission, either. Then there were subtler reverberations. When Bush's
brain trust pushed through its executive-enhancing stratagems, I
happened to be reading about brilliant German legal theoretician Carl
Schmitt, who codified Hitler's führerprincip into law. (In the Balkans
of cyberspace, I discovered, lurked an excellent article by Alan Wolfe
detailing how Schmitt's theories also predicted the salt-the-ground
political tactics of the Karl Rove conservatives.) When the
administration established a class of nonpersons known as the "unlawful
enemy combatant," I flashed on how the Nazis legalized their treatment
of the Jews simply by rendering them stateless. And then in 2004, the
Republicans threatened to override Senate rules and abolish the
filibuster in order to thwart the Democrats' stand against Bush's most
extremist nominees for federal judgeships. This "nuclear option" (so
named by Trent Lott in acknowledgment of his party's willingness to
destroy the Congress in order to save the country) struck me as a
functional analog of the Enabling Act of 1933, which consolidated the
German government under Chancellor Hitler and effectively dissolved the
Reichstag as a parliamentary body.
Alas, West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd made the same connection. When he
cited the Enabling Act to admonish his colleagues across the aisle, they
hit back with indignation and ridicule and, for good measure, jeered him
for having joined the filibuster (led by Lott's hero Strom Thurmond)
against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But that ultimately averted A-bomb
proved to be minor compared with the more precise reiteration of the
Enabling Act to come. The official name of that 1933 National Socialist
masterstroke was the "Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the
Reich," and the distress warranting its transfer of dictatorial power to
Hitler was the state crisis provoked by the Reichstag fire the month
before. And so it was under the open-ended emergency created by 9/11
that Bush's Military Commissions Act, passed in September, gave the
president authority to designate anyone he so deemed, citizen or no, an
"unlawful enemy combatant" and, habeas corpus having been nullified,
send him away indefinitely.
In an interview on MSNBC the day the bill was signed, Jonathan Turley,
constitutional law professor at George Washington University, declared
the date one of the most infamous in the history of the republic, and
amazed at the "national yawn" greeting this "huge sea change for our
democracy." Where was the public consternation about this reversal of
our founding principles? That interested me more than the brazen coup of
the administration—which Carl Schmitt might argue was a categorical
imperative. Why had the decent people of the country mounted no serious
protest even against something as on-its-face objectionable as the
bill's sanction of torture?
Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a recent speech to
an American audience, summarized (in a different context) the formula by
which social evil gains mass acceptance: vilification of an enemy (file
under fear-mongering) and habituation to incremental barbarities.
Evidence of America's proficiency at this dual process is no more
distant than the era of Southern apartheid, even if our own
state-sponsored racism was a psycho-sociopolitical genocidal purgatory
as opposed to a final solution. While we may prefer to believe that the
Good German institutions capitulated to Hitler under the black boot of
the SS, current scholarship confirms that Nazification, like segregation
in America, was largely voluntary, even in the free press.
The Bush-era fourth estate has come up short not only against the Big
Lie of "fair and balanced" news but also against its equally cunning
cousin: the Small Inaccuracy used to repudiate the damaging larger
truth. CBS crumbled under the administration's mau-mauers over Memogate,
while Newsweek managed to withstand the hazing it took for its
Koran-in-the-toilet item—which, like the substance of Dan Rather's
offending report on Bush's National Guard career, was not only accurate;
it was old news. But why didn't the national media go on the offensive
and re-educate the government, and the public, about the inevitable if
regrettable price of a free press? Mistakes will be made in the
proverbial first draft of history, and holding reporters to a standard
of perfection would inhibit them from performing the vigilance crucial
to our democratic system. The media had become so habituated to the
paralysis of self-censorship that it took a fake newsman to diagnose
their Stockholm syndrome, and when Stephen Colbert acidly chided the
journalists along with the president at the White House Correspondents'
Dinner in April, the audience was not amused.
The ways our free press has served the powers it was supposed to afflict
range from the belabored (Judith Miller's WMD "scoops" in the Times), to
the grandiose (Tom Friedman's op-ed manifestos for a new political
species: the pro-war-if-it-works liberal), to the perverse (Christopher
Hitchens's flogging, in Slate, of a left-wing fifth column so much worse
than the Bush-Cheney-Halliburton complex). My favorite editorial pledge
of allegiance was a syndicated column by Kathleen Parker welcoming the
ministrations of Bush's domestic spies because, hey, she wasn't
conducting any phone business more controversial than making
appointments to get her highlights done.
We have become such "good Americans" that we no longer have the moral
imagination to picture what it might be like to be in a bureaucratic
category that voids our human rights, be it "enemy combatant" or
"illegal immigrant." Thus, in the week before the election, hardly a
ripple answered the latest decree from the Bush administration:
Detainees held in CIA prisons were forbidden from telling their lawyers
what methods of interrogation were used on them, presumably so they
wouldn't give away any of the top-secret torture methods that we don't
use. Cautiously, I look back on that as the crystallizing moment of
Bushworld: tautological as a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto, absurd as a
Marx Brothers movie, and scary as a Kafka novel.
So, is there a new, post-election normal? A recent Google search turned
up some impressive, learned commentary comparing the Military
Commissions Act of 2006 to the Enabling Act of 1933. A reader
congratulated one of the legal scholars, human rights lawyer Scott
Horton, for daring to defy Godwin's Law. Perhaps (to switch totalitarian
metaphors) we are in the midst of a little intellectual Prague Spring.
Of course, that democratic interlude met a swift and terrible end. If
the midterm election was a referendum on nothing more than Bush's
competence, then the message the Republicans have gotten is: Next time,
make it work.
/end
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a plethora of splinters.
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