In Memes Begin Responsibilities
In comments downblog, Brother Eugene Callahan asks,
But Jim, â€we†never undertook the task of beating the Mideast — specific, concrete people did that. Isn’t this sort of blurry, collectivist blame that libertarians should oppose?
And that’s a damn good question. Arguing the contra is The Editors at the Poor Man, and heatedly. (Scroll through comments.)
And, you know, I’m conflicted. Intellectually I agree with Gene. Emotionally I feel a great deal of guilt. I had the delightful opportunity to meet and talk with Dave Trowbridge this afternoon and we had a great discussion that, while not about this question specifically, helped me think about it some.
The reason I know I’m still a libertarian, despite all my fine liberal readers and friends, is because I’m still sure Bill Clinton was lying when he said it wasn’t possible to love your country and hate your government. Tacitus said something similar last year, I believe: that “in a democracy” the government is the genuine expression of the nation or words to that effect. What Bill Clinton was really saying was that if you hated him you were a bad patriot. Say what you will about the Clenis – and I’d take him over the present occupant in the White House straight up, thank you – that was a necessarily self-serving thing for him to say.
Before “the government” is anything else, it’s specific, concrete people, whose first concern will be their own self and class interests. I mean: most of the time for most of them. I mean: enough so that you should distrust any philosophy of government that doesn’t foreground that truth.
As some of The Editors’ commenters note, there was never any genuine chance that “we” could have prevented the invasion of Iraq. I only succumbed to the delusion that we could for about two weeks in early 2003. I never imagined that the protests and arguments some of us made would sway this White House, but I did think it was possible, especially after the massive Hyde Park protests, that Tony Blair could lose the Labor Party or pull out of the war coalition to avoid losing it, and that the Bush Administration would, facing the loss of its one crucial partner, relent. My thinking was that while, in this country, the sorts of people who protest the prospect of wars are a despised class, in Britain those folks were an important component of Labor’s base. It was bad thinking – in retrospect I see I was reaching.
So “we” didn’t do jack shit to accrue affirmative responsibility for what happened. And the notion, which I’ve entertained from time to time, that if I or other doves had only tried harder – made better arguments; marched more; wrote more; pestered more of our neighbors – we’d have stopped the war itself, or extraordinary rendition, or the Gitmoizing of Abu Ghraib, or the Gitmoizing of Gitmo, or any of that – well, that notion is simple narcissism.
To which The Editors respond, in paraphrase: You paid your taxes.
I think what he means here is more subtle than his readers give him credit for. One immediately points out that refusing to pay your taxes is no so easy to do. (The Montana Freemen; the Branch Davidians – the original raid was just a tax case; etc.) And, again, the idea that a bunch of us engaging in tax protests, or hunger strikes, or emigration, or quitting our jobs and yelling at people on the subway with our pants around our ankles would move our rulers and such rump of support as they still enjoy; well, that’s not just fantasy but self-flattery. And violent protest would be useless and, more importantly, evil in itself.
Here’s the thing, though: the certainty of failure may be no excuse. Once you know you’ll fail to stop the idiocy and cruelty, you still have to decide what you’ll do to fail. I like my life in a country that launched a wasteful and stupid war more than I like giving it up to make a point. I like living in a country that buys people from strangers and then abuses its prisoners more than I like uprooting my family and starting from scratch Somewhere Else. I like playing Madden and sleeping with my wife and driving my kids around more than I like sitting in jail for the statement value.
Is “responsibility” too big a word for that? What about “consent?” I don’t know. By which I mean, I don’t know.
Comment by dsquared —
March 6, 2006 @ 5:28 am
I was depressed about this a year ago but coined the natty phrase ”it’s all our fault, by which I mean it’s all your fault” to cheer myself up.
Comment by matthew hogan —
March 6, 2006 @ 8:58 am
”I like my life in a country that launched a wasteful and stupid war more than I like giving it up to make a point. I like living in a country that buys people from strangers and then abuses its prisoners more than I like uprooting my family and starting from scratch Somewhere Else.”
It’s called being an individual.
And I am not being a wiseguy.
Comment by the talking dog —
March 6, 2006 @ 9:09 am
It’s an oddly frustrating point; certainly, as little power as we individuals have in this country over the macro, at least we have power as individuals… something not true, say, in the Islamo-fascist shithole we have just created in Iraq, for example (or in the dictatorship we just replaced there… although I’m guessing what we have installed will prove to be worse, certainly for womens, or doctors for example).
Most people don’t even regard it as a paradox, that the government ”in our name” is doing things we don’t like, by abdicating and refusing to vote or not even knowing the names of their senators.
All you can do is try to be as good a person as you can, live as responsibly as you can micro and macro. Short of successfully organized violence against the leadership of our own government, no one was stopping the Iraq war. The damned war was simply too popular at the time. Americans love a good show. And knocking down statues and blowing shit up was a good show.
Just as we soften up the Gitmo prisoners through sleep deprivation, and withholding food and water (or inserting diuretics and denying bathroom privileges)… we softened up the Amurkan people with 9-11 and a drumbeat of fear, hate and irrationality… We broke. It didn’t take much.
Many of us didn’t break of course, including some of us present in downtown Manhattan that morning… but enough did so that in an apparent democracy…
So… sitting in a jail cell for civil disobedience or tax protest (or anything short of shooting both Bush and Cheney), or moving to the French Riviera or Canada woulud not have stopped this war.
The time for massive street protests was back in November, December 2000, when our country was being stolen in the first place. After that… we got the government we deserve (I know, I know, I don’t recall knife-raping a nun either…)
Comment by Sven —
March 6, 2006 @ 10:13 am
Just for the sake of discussion:
Comment by Nell —
March 6, 2006 @ 10:39 am
Short of successfully organized violence against the leadership of our own government, no one was stopping the Iraq war. The damned war was simply too popular at the time.
That’s simply not true. In September 2002, the leadership of the Democratic Party made a decision to cave on allowing a war vote before the elections, and from that moment on it was hopeless.
Those spineless Dems didn’t do so because there was a wave of support for the war, but because they were afraid the Republicans would paint them as unpatriotic. And because several of them had presidential ambitions. And because they were deluded enough to think they could ’get the war issue out of the way’ and campaign on economic issues.
A strong 40% of the population opposed the war in the fall and winter 2002-3, despite that it was a done deal. Had Daschle and Gephardt and Kerry and others been willing to hold off on an authorization vote until after the elections, a real debate might have been able to happen. By then the UN inspectors were back in Iraq, finding nothing.
But political cowardice, abetted by lying (NYT), quiescent (WaPo) and cheerleading (TV) media, condemned us all to this hell.
Anyone who advocates keeping U.S. military in Iraq another minute is indeed sitting on another’s shoulders.
Comment by Jim Henley —
March 6, 2006 @ 10:51 am
What Nell said.
The war wasn’t ”popular” until the balloon was in the air. I don’t know what a genuine debate would’ve achieved – I said in 2002-2003 that the real aim of the Iraq invasion was to spare Bush a primary challenge in 2004, and no Democratic politician or voter could have guaranteed that for him.
But it would’ve been tonic for the country to have had a post-election debate rather than a pre-election one.
Comment by the talking dog —
March 6, 2006 @ 11:12 am
A majority of the American public favored the war, and that really continued until roughly the last year or so, when the obvious became obvious even to most Americans. If you measure that by Congress (a bad idea, I know), the support moves from ”majority” to ”overwhelming majority”.
My statement really didn’t go to the issue of whether the damned war was polling 55%, 75% or 2.7%… it wasn’t going to be stopped by the mere likes of us ordinary human beings.
I certainly agree, though, that Congress was a tipping point: the Bushmen felt they needed the political cover, and had it been denied to him, there might have been grave misgivings about the political fallout from doing this (the only misgivings they have).
Comment by VAMark —
March 6, 2006 @ 11:20 am
As has already been pointed out, the war was not particularly popular in 2003, and has only been popular for a few intermittent periods of weeks (around the fall of Baghdad, capture of Saddam, elections, etc.) since. But this administration didn’t care – they wanted their war, and popular support or lack of it was no more important in 2003 than it had been in November 2000.
Incidentally, my guess is that Congressional Democrats were equally powerless to stop it – a 50% + 1 straight GOP vote to authorize force would have been enough for these guys. What is open to question is how the 2004 or 2006 political environments would be different if the Dems could point to a history of clear opposition instead of ”I was for it before I was against it” equivocation. But I’m not sure if it would be better or worse for them.
Comment by Avram —
March 6, 2006 @ 12:16 pm
What Bill Clinton was really saying was that if you hated him you were a bad patriot.
I thought he was saying that if you blew up a federal building you were a bad patriot, but I haven’t been able to find the full text of the speech.
Comment by Jim Henley —
March 6, 2006 @ 12:20 pm
Avram, no. Bill Clinton used the Murragh Building bombing as a club against pretty much anyone to the right of David Gergen for the rest of his Presidency.
Comment by Jeff —
March 6, 2006 @ 12:51 pm
I don’t know if ”we” are responsible, either. If to any degree we are, I would suppose I am more responsible than some here, since I ”supported” the war to the extent I thought ”wrong time, wrong plan (I had no idea just how wrong), wrong case for war (I had no idea how wrong), but the sanctions cannot be maintained forever, sanctions are killing poor Iraqis and not bothering the elite much at all, so we will have to deal with Hussein at some point, so, okay, go do this.” In hindsight, I still think sanctions were killing Iraqis. I still think Hussein, absent the sanctions, the no-fly zones, and a permanent troop presence in Arabia and elsewhere, would have posed an incredible danger. In hindsight, obviously, I feel like an idiot for giving the administration even the limited credit of thinking ”well, they ought to be good at war-making, if nothing else.” I feel stupid for underestimating just how ill-timed the effort was (I thought it was a distraction from the real war, but I didn’t realize the degree to which we were abandoning the effort in Afghanistan to get ready for Iraq– again, I thought on this narrow issue at least, the people in charge could walk and chew gum at the same time). In hindsight, I realize that my instincts originally about Bush– i.e., that he was a idiot man-child protected from reality by money and connections and surrounded by venal morons– should have carried me through the post-9/11 craziness (when it was perhaps so frightening to think we were being led by an idiot and crazy man that I simply made myself believe that such was not the case).
But in any case (and I felt this at the time) I don’t think there was any stopping it by mere mortals. Democratic opposition from the start would have (perhaps) made 2004 winnable for the Dems, however, and that would make a difference now (I think). But even so, it is not so primitive to think in terms of collective guilt– or at least in terms of collective ”who gives a shit.” We thought that way about the Japanese and Germans just 60 years ago.
Comment by SiegeState —
March 6, 2006 @ 1:29 pm
Failure or no, we had to try.
Notwithstanding all the other points, we relied too much on the internet and gave too much emphasis to one big march. It was obvious that the rapists were going to rape, that they would find an alley to do it in no matter how many times we got them out of one then found them in other alley.
But the corporatists weren’t going to be stopped by one march; they were promised too much for the payments they made. They would only be stopped by the threat of rending the society’s fabric, which is what thousands of marches did in the Nam days. Eventually they drop their protection for the madness.
We are nowhere close to that. The corporate media is not just a cheerleader, they are GE, they are the connected class. They are protecting their own and their marketing is superb. They have only one soft underspot. They need our money.
Stop watching TV and let the advertisers know why. Stop going to the sports and the movies and stop buying the products.
The first cries will come from the workers then without jobs, but we are going to lose them anyway when our broken economy collapses. I would rather figure out how to feed my neighbors and myself than figure out how to put the lives together of all those that have been killed and maimed in our name. Blood on all our hands.
Comment by Leonard —
March 6, 2006 @ 2:08 pm
Jim,
”Consent”?? How about ”Stockholm syndrome”?
Comment by Sven —
March 6, 2006 @ 2:58 pm
I don’t think doves should be absolving themselves of responsibility for all that has transpired. There’s nothing wrong with giving credence to the powers that be, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t significant failures in foresight, strategy and rhetoric on our side.
Guilt is a wonderfully practical tool in forcing introspection (and thus identifying weaknesses) and motivating action in the face of overwhelming odds. Hey! Baptist Sunday School wasn’t a waste after all!
Comment by Francis —
March 6, 2006 @ 5:57 pm
IsThatLegal has a neat post on this, talking about how Germans who weren’t Nazis felt powerless.
The short answer is that there is no easy answer. Wearing a Not In Our Name button is hardly the kind of thing designed to give comfort to Gitmo detainees. I live in Dana Rohrbacher’s district, which has about a 2:1 ratio of voting Rs to Ds. No amount of local activism on my part will get him voted out of office.
”Cultivez nos jardins”?
Comment by Dave Trowbridge —
March 6, 2006 @ 7:14 pm
I found our conversation a tonic for my thinking as well. And there’s lots of food for thought in this post, most particularly about consent and responsibility.
I think that there is a point at which any degree of consent becomes responsibility. For instance, do I continue paying taxes if my country begins putting Muslims in concentration camps? In death camps? (Some might say we’re already there.)
Others may draw the line elsewhere. But I think there is such a line, and that there are situations in which anything, up to and including death, is demanded as a moral choice, rather than the implied consent of silence or inaction. The problem, of course, is discerning them, especially when there are others for whom or to whom one is responsible.
Comment by neil —
March 7, 2006 @ 8:55 am
I’m afraid that just leaving the country is not enough to remove the stain of collective responsibility. America made you and it made the Iraq war. You’re brothers for life.
- neil, who has not funded any wars since January 2005
Comment by Nell —
March 7, 2006 @ 3:01 pm
I’d like to thank everyone who participated in this thread. The thoughtful conversation was tonic, especially helpful in getting over the sick feeling induced by dueling outrages at The Poor Man.
Ever since reading Riverbend’s description of her nightmarish experience of going to her former workplace for the last time, I’ve understood what was to come. And I’ve felt helpless, yet responsible. Not primarily responsible — of course the warmakers and warmongers hold that spot. But partially responsible.
Right now we have to look deeply into our consciences, use our imaginations, and face and speak the truth of what is happening to Iraq and to this country. There are things we can do; it’s not as if there is a void between turning away to cultivate our own gardens and going to jail for ”putting your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels of the [war] machine.”
Comment by Barry —
March 7, 2006 @ 3:59 pm
I think that we have to start with what we can do. IMHO, the first thing is to witness for truth and against lies. This serves to let other doubters know that they’re not alone, and to let the liars/True Believers know that they wont’ get a free pass.