mass murderer is enough

So in response to some emailers and commenters, who feel that I have not spent enough time talking about how horrible a person Osama bin Laden was, allow me to say: for me, "mass murderer" is enough. That's enough to condemn him, for me. Is there a deeper insult? A more thorough moral disqualification? Perhaps "one who has committed genocide." In any event, acknowledging his horrific crimes on September 11th, and others, is more than enough.

I would ask what, exactly, might come from me joining the rest in showily beating my chest and heaping derision upon a corpse that was guilty of the most unforgivable crime we have. What would that accomplish? Is the idea that I need to prove to you that I condemn Osama, his organization, his actions, and everything that he stood for? I'm sorry, but proving what's in our minds remains beyond the powers of mortal men. Oh, but they try.... I'll tell you: all of the desperate signaling of so many these last few days, people working so incredibly hard to show that at this event they accept all of our antique, dust-covered national narratives-- the same that many of them showily reject when not doing so threatens their social positioning-- well, I can barely express how naked the crude postmodernism was, the kind where the need to show that you're feeling something completely obscures whether you're actually feeling it. But I can't blame them; that's the tragedy of our times: never to experience, always to show that you're experiencing. What's that line? "Welcome to the desert of the real"?

Well, what you feel is your business and what I feel is mine, and now he is dead and the question is only what kind of a country we want to rebuild in the wake of his death. For now I can only observe: we live in the kind of country where so many say "hey, just this once, don't question the government, don't ask questions, just go along." We live in the kind of country where someone as powerful as John Kerry commands us to shut up and move on for the good of the motherland. We live in the kind of country where countless random Twitter users attack Glenn Greenwald for keeping his convictions about civil liberties and the rule of law (for being principled), as loudly as they celebrated him when the president he criticized was on the other team. You can like these realities or you can dislike them or you can be indifferent towards them, and you can work as your conscience dictates.

But sell your fucking purity tests somewhere else. You cheered bin Laden's death in between twiddling with your Dominoes app and remembering to Tivo America's Next Great Fry Cook. I have no interest in public celebration, yours, mine, or anyone else's.

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apparently "the fog of war" is a spell from World of Warcraft that makes you lie all the time

Whoops!

Whoops!

Whoops!

I don't know what really happened. Neither do you. We'll never know, because the people who do know are never going to stop lying about it.

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because, you know, we never violate international law

So you see this rising tide of anxiety about the predominately glib reactions to putting a bullet in the head of a unarmed and disabled man, and like most anxiety in this culture it is expressed by a kind of full-throated insistence that there's nothing to feel anxious about. It seems that people, both right and left, are now finally turning to the question of whether this assassination was legal. There was an interesting Twitter debate about it between Adam Serwer and Will Wilkinson last night, although as is the way of Twitter, it's hard to weigh in on a conversation that happened in that forum.

Now, there's the fine print issues of whether the raid and killing (of five) was in fact legal according to international and US law, which I'm not qualified to weigh in on. (Here's an interesting article on the question from the foreign press.) But I'm perfectly qualified to point out that the whole debate is stunningly irrelevant to whether we would have proceeded or not. Is there anyone in the world who thinks that, had it been demonstrated conclusively to the administration that this action was illegal, they would not have gone ahead with it? Anyone at all? People who seek to justify the raid by pointing out its legality are engaging in sophistry, because they are well aware that the fact that we carried out the mission has everything to do with power and nothing to do with legality. Defending an action's legality when that legality was entirely uninteresting to the people who undertook it reeks of ex post facto justification, which is usually a sign of doubt.

The point of international law, after all, is that there be consistent standards of legal conduct for all countries. But international law exists in a context where everyone involved knows that no such consistency will ever exist, and that the relative military and economic powers of various actors determines everything. The United States can send a kill squad into a foreign country it has not declared war on because it is the United States and not for any other reason. And if we were particularly concerned about international law, we'd just flex our muscles and change it. That's life as the hegemon.

The idea that identical justifications could be used for similar actions by non-superpowers is of course a symbol of rank unseriousness. So we can think of the South American nations which have endured death squads and the killing of civilians by the military and intelligence services of the United States. They might decide that they have a responsibility to protect their citizens by, say, sending assassins to kill a CIA apparatchik, and they might use precisely the same reasoning used by bloggers and pundits all over the place now. (Here's a version from the New Republic-- you'll be shocked to learn that even the liberal TNR supports the legality of the killing-- but there are others bouncing around.) But to suggest that they might have a point is to excise yourself from the church of the savvy. Everybody knows it's different when we do it.

I'm glad the threat of Osama bin Laden is gone from the globe, although I wanted our 9/11 Nuremberg with him and Khalid Sheik Mohammed. I like for criminals to be tried in fair courts; I'm old fashioned like that. And there are a lot of deeply complex moral and ethical questions that stem from opportunities to stop mass murderers. Yes, we should analyze whether the killing was legal; it's an essential question, after all. We don't get to pick and choose when legality matters. But please. Please. Don't pretend that the question of legality mattered to the people who undertook this assault, and drop the notion that there would ever be any consequences for us if it was proven that it was illegal. This had nothing to do with legality and everything to do with power. We are the United States, Pakistan is a dirt poor Muslim country, and those are the only facts that will have any meaningful relevance in this case.

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establishment liberalism's turn

There have been so many moments, lately, that teach us about American liberalism. That so much of what we've learned is depressing is, I guess, just life. But Wisconsin, the Ryan plan and entitlement fight, Libya, the deepening cult of Obama, and finally, yesterday's big news-- each is revealing.

You have undoubtedly seen the rising chorus of scolding progressives, angry that those to their left have the temerity to insist on the valence of liberal morality even when person in question is a Very Bad Man. Whatever the philosophical justification for using liberalism as an excuse for blood lust and nationalism, the reason is clear: this is their turn. This is the professional liberal's opportunity to wave the flag, to celebrate violence-- there were fireworks in San Francisco-- to engage in the kind of patriotic conformity that they have been told for a decade is the duty of all decent people. This is their turn to feel tough, and anyone asking for discrimination or pause makes a convenient target. I've never been made to feel less than tough by a conservative critic. I've never felt like I have to showily demonstrate my willingness to lob ordnance when it's necessary. It seems most DC liberals do, and if I had to hazard a guess, it's because they aren't particularly confident in the moral calculus that underwrites their ideology.

You can see a lot of this tension in the way that liberals calling for the righteousness of violence are harping on the (unintentionally) misrepresented quote from Martin Luther King. They say to themselves that they are decent liberal people, and they want MLK to be their hero, but they are congenitally unable to live with genuine radicalism. So they take his message and they water it down; they make it palatable for the Very Serious mindset by taking what was unequivocal in him and rendering it a toothless, centrist mess. This is the way of all who radically ask for peace-- King, Gandhi, Jesus, the Buddha. Each insists on what is precisely not assimilable to the mass ideology of political violence.

So you have people like Adam Elkus, who performs a service for DC liberals by attempting to undercut the radical nonviolence at the heart of King's message. This post has been shared and twittered endlessly; that's service blogging  for you. You'll note that he harps on the fact that the quote being sent around is a misquote, but note that only the first line is misattributed, and that the elementary idea of that first line was stated with nothing resembling ambiguity by King in Strength to Love: "no one should rejoice at the death or defeat of a human being." Seems rather clear to me, but then all of the great pacifists resisted the mushy excuse making of the regular order. When you ask for the actual commitment to nonviolence that King stood for-- when you know aikido in combat-- there are consequences.

Nobody has to get on board with my views; they are marginal for a reason, I guess. But I wish they would stop pretending that people who are not their heroes are, that people would stop, for example, emailing Andrew Sullivan, announcing that they are pacifist Buddhists, and defending the people who danced in the streets in the name of an event that killed five people. I assure you: the Buddha would not look kindly on putting depleted uranium into anyone's skull. Not even the bad man. (Whose Grave Would Jesus Piss On?) I feel about these liberals trying to square the circle of holding MLK to be a hero while supporting remorseless celebration of human death the way I feel about neoliberals who listen to Dead Prez. Feel however you feel, but please, recognize the incongruity, and perhaps look for new heroes. I recognized the genesis of the misquotes because I have had Strength to Love embedded in my consciousness since I was thirteen years old. It's important to remain conversant with King's actual words, not just the pale imitation of him that exists in the popular consciousness. If even the left is incapable of remembering the actual legacy of Martin Luther King, his voice has been silenced.

I also ask that any so engaged in this embittered campaigning against those who ask for pause at this moment consider context. There were thousands in the streets the other night. There are many hundreds of prominent Internet celebrities who are justifying and celebrating and expressing glee. How many are there of us who are asking for restraint, who insist that the expression of sentiments like "rot in hell" is antithetical to the liberal character? A couple dozen? The asymmetry of annoyance should be instructive. This is part and parcel with the common tendency among establishment liberals to dislike conservatives but hate the left. How often does the average professional liberal break bread with a conservative or libertarian? And how often with a socialist, or a pacifist? It tells you all you need to know about the American left, and why it is the way it is.

I wish someone could puncture the bubble, because what these liberals need now is precisely to feel the discomfort that comes when cherished ideas about the world and the self are brought into conflict with each other. That tension is the womb of the liberal project. But unfortunately, establishment liberalism has meticulously crafted a cone of silence around itself, precisely to prevent the uncomfortable questions that principle engenders.

Update: The number of posts now calling bullshit on that quote, without pointing out what Martin Luther King actually had to say on the matter, grows and grows. Megan had the good excuse of going first, but each new post on the matter gets less and less defensible. Because, again, liberal Internet media is run by DC liberals made uncomfortable by King's sentiment. It's remarkable how people can call bullshit on others without actually checking their own bullshit, how people who are paid to assemble facts can't bother to check them. Please-- professional journalists, do your job.

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fake MLK quotes, real MLK sentiment

Megan calls bullshit on a quote being Twittered.

Well, okay, but isn't the relevant context his book Strength to Love, and, you know, his entire ethos? Here's a few of quotes from StL, but you can find similar sentiment in dozens or hundreds of places in his collected speeches and writings.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction ... The chain reaction of evil--hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

and

When we look beneath the surface, beneath the impulsive evil deed, we see within our enemy-neighbor a measure of goodness and know that the viciousness and evilness of his acts are not quite representative of all that he is. We see him in a new light. We recognize that his hate grows out of fear, pride, ignorance, prejudice, and misunderstanding, but in spite of this, we know God's image is ineffably etched in being. Then we love our enemies by realizing that they are not totally bad and that they are not beyond the reach of God's redemptive love.

and

love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate; we get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity. By its very nature, hate destroys and tears down; by its very nature, love creates and builds up. Love transforms with redemptive power.

and

We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.

and

no one should rejoice at the death or defeat of a human being.

Seems relevant!

Update: Mystery solved, I'd say.

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the forever war

Josef Mengele died a happy old man, living in comfort with a family in a beautiful slice of South America. He drowned; I guess some might take solace in that. If you require a belief that justice is done on earth, slit your wrists.

Osama bin Laden is dead, and so our culture has made the curious decision to return to the world of 9/12: outwardly confident, showily defiant, wrapped in assertions of our power-- and yet, pecking and cawing beneath it all, the dirty bird of our fear. I don't know of a surer sign of a weak nation and a frightened people than so many working so hard to signal their toughness. It's true all the time: those who work to show you they're strong are weak. And as we assemble more and more little insults-- I'm sure bin Laden's ghost is all tore up that you won't call him Mr., Bill-- to add to the grand narratives of American power and moral vengeance, all those little lessons we learned in the aftermath of 9/11 shrivel and die. It's black humor, but it is funny, the way that our media (especially the supposedly free new media of blogs) parrots the administration's version of events, and each commentator tries more desperately than the next to find some new angle to degrade our enemy. (That he may have used his wife as a human shield-- which I don't know, by the way, and neither do you-- seems to me to be largely insignificant, when you consider he murdered thousands of innocent people.) We can't merely secure our goals, we have to "win." We can't merely win, we have to emasculate our enemy.

You should be reminded of all the wrong turns we took following 9/11, and you should be worried now. Even if you don't feel a little discomfort at national glee over human death, you might remember how much these moments have cost us and will continue to cost us. There's no wondering if this action was legal; nobody cares. That's the sort of thing successful terrorists do to a free people.

Liberalism is the self-limiting discourse. In the small-l, classical liberalism, Enlightenment-values sense that I'm told all American political ideologies share, liberalism is not just a philosophy but a critique of all philosophies. In its only true form, it undercuts itself always, sets its own boundaries, and holds its own dictates to be immutable rules never. You can't go to war for liberalism; such a thing is a contradiction in terms. You certainly can't be a warrior for liberalism. And liberalism can't ever win, not really. If you ever find yourself in the kind of position that calls itself victory, liberalism tells you to question what happened, to never stop in asking questions. If you've really won, if you stopped and stood in a place you call victory, you've ceased to represent liberalism. It is a slippery, frustrating commitment, the commitment to liberalism. There's nowhere to stand. Ever.

There is no such thing as righteous violence and no such thing as confident liberalism.

We have longed for the declaration of victory, and this event, which has changed very little, gives us the pretext to do it. That this collapse into the symbolic is understandable makes it no less scary. Behind it all, the ceaseless, oppressive force of the cult of Obama pushes and pushes. I have never witnessed anything like it in my life, the way this man has become venerated by people who are ordinarily discriminating. At the height of Bush's popularity, I often wondered if the hero worship could go any deeper. But now I know that there's always another side, and here it is: so many liberals who so bitterly rejected the tenor of those times are now weeping and beating their breasts with adoration for our dear leader. I never cared much about what was American, but it is true that leader worship is un-American. It is true that it is antidemocratic. It is true that it illiberal. American progressives largely don't care, though; that was Bush. This is their guy. So much for them.

When people speak of Obama as a potential liberal Reagan, I ask them to really think about what they are saying. The problem of Reagan isn't just his policies. The problem is that the very idea of a fawning attitude towards a president gives us nothing. I like Obama's policies a lot more than I do Bush's. That does not make me forget the essential wisdom of distrusting authorities, and particularly our executive.

Have you seen pictures of him? Always this same face, always-- that gentle, beatific smile. What you have here is that rarest kind of man, the real true believer. The kind that really and truly believed that the murders he committed where blessed by god. There isn't anything that you can do to such a person; you can kill him, but you can't possibly puncture the emotional armor of his zeal. Bin Laden went to his grave assured that he had been right all along, right about everything, and that his project carried with it the objective blessings of human order. Print all the nasty newspaper covers you want of him, and sacrifice your dignity in summoning a Two Minutes Hate; it only feeds the monstrous ideas that created him. I'm sure he enjoyed the moment of his martyrdom.

Here is what history should teach you: every great act of evil in the history of humanity, every one, was committed by people who were certain. Certain that they were right, certain that they understand the world, certain that they had unique access to the truth, certain that they could plant their flag on one right thing, and take their stand. In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, you had this strange and constant assault on the various relativist boogiemen that, we were told, threatened our way of life. Few people asked what sense it made to complain about the Derridas of the world when it was men like bin Laden, who was as far from a relativist as any could ever be, who had committed the crime. But such talk was inconvenient. We had our own certainty and our own righteousness and the time was not for asking about root causes but instead for planting our own flags.

You'll likely find an opportunity to feel solidarity with someone who is usually your political enemy, in the coming days. Some shared moment where you look over to someone who you know you disagree with, and say, "we got 'em!" and along with everybody else in the office, you feel all one, for a little while. Here's Conor, celebrating that unity. He means well. Unity is just conformity wearing a nicer dress. And I have to say to Conor at this moment what I had to say, after five and three quarter hours of weakness, on September 11th: I don't want to be unified with you. Not in this. Not behind the righteousness of violence. Not in the orgies of nationalism. Not in anything. Not at the moment when so many ask for unity, because those are the moments when the refusal of unity is most necessary. That, too, is liberalism: dissent in the heart of all things. The scariest word I know in politics is consensus. You should flee from it, if you find it.

That the good people in America want desperately to feel proud of the country again, I can understand, although "my country" is a concept I walked away from years ago. That people feel tremendous anger against a horrific person who committed inexcusable crimes, I understand. And that I am tempted to take up the flag and get with the communal program, I can't deny. I'm human, after all. But I know how things start, and I know that, within the crowds of people crowing and whooping and letting forth with anger, hides the most dangerous impulse that ever resided in the human heart.

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democracies do what they want

One of the petty hypocrisies involved in much American support for the Arab uprisings is that this support is based on the idea that Arab democracy is going to give Americans what they want. You'll find this attitude embedded in any argument that insists we should support internal rebellions because of all the good policies and benevolent changes that will occur in the new regime. People never seem quite to realize that support for the edifice of democracy that is conditional on support for the policies of that democracy is a sham. This is why, for as much as Afghanistan and Iraq reveal about the fundamental character of America, the most important foreign policy evolution of the Bush era was the election of Hamas in Palestine, and the requisite abandonment of democracy there by this country's policy apparatus.

Now, then, we're starting to get the kind of policy from Egypt that should start to throw people's real convictions into relief:

Chief of Staff of the Egyptian Armed Forces General Sami Anan warned Israel against interfering with Egypt's plan to open the Rafah border crossing with Gaza on a permanent basis, saying it was not a matter of Israel's concern, Army Radio reported on Saturday.... An Israeli official on Friday told The Wall Street Journal that Israel was troubled by the recent developments in Egypt saying they could affect Israel's national security at a strategic level.

National securitah, of course, being the reason for Israel to fear an opening of the border, and not their explicit aim to keep Gaza and its people in a state of permanent economic ruin.

For me, this is a heartening development, and if even some of the narratives of the Arab Spring are true, this kind of pressure is inevitable. Israel has been, for over forty years, perpetuating one of the great humanitarian and democratic crises in the world; amid all of this talk of the democratization of the Arab world, precious little has pointed out that the United States is the major (and moving towards sole) underwriter of an Israeli regime that keeps millions of Palestinian Arabs in a state of permanent dispossession. If the greater Middle East is indeed being swept up in a new spirit of freedom, Israel will find its position more and more uncomfortable. I pray that this new geopolitical situation in the Middle East never results in military action against Israel. But if they are truly surrounded by a newly empowered and engaged Arab people, Israel will come to find their position untenable, as well they should. Because the status quo for the Palestinian people is indefensible.

Meanwhile, those who so loudly cheer the intervention in Libya, and who push for the same in Syria, are going to have to come to terms with the fact that free people don't always do what you want them to do. I support the Libya resistance against the Qaddafi regime, although my support (crazily enough) doesn't mean I abandon the bedrock democratic principles of non-interference. But I don't pretend that the rebels are "good guys," that they will give me what I want, or that the spirit of criticism of all governments will be extinguished when they take power. The question is how far Egypt or any other can go away from American desires before people really consider the reality of true self-determination. How frosty can things get with Israel? Could Egypt transition to, say, a socialist government without western supporters of the Arab Spring jumping ship? Could a theoretical Saudi Arabian uprising be permitted to severely restrict the flow of oil to America and its allies? Could a new Arab democracy increase its government's interoperability with Islamic fundamentalism (as the Iranian revolutionaries did) and still earn the praise of Western intellectuals?

All of these aren't merely questions that you can ask about the difference between the morally preferable process of democracy and the morally uncertain outcomes of democracy. These are questions you have to ask, when your country is killing people in the name of other people's freedom.

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