Digging Digby

What she said. Be sure to read this source of hers.

As a youth, I had heard all about the banality of evil, but I persisted in denial. There must have been something particular and defective in the German character, for instance, that permitted Hitler to coarsen ordinary morality out of his people. First, jealousy and fear, then petty cruelty and thuggery, then aggressive war and torture, and then holocaust.

By now, I know that the moral and judgemental defects that lead from fear to mass murder infect the entire human race. Russians, Chinese, Cambodians, Hutu, Turks, Arabs, Israelis, and of course Americans. I should have known this earlier; what we did to Africans that caused the Civil War should have been enough. Before that, we committed genocide on native Americans. Even before that, my people in the British Isles brutalized and killed each other for the slimmest mindfuck reasons like divine right of kings or "Christian" sectarianism.

The yawning abyss between humane and human might be more obvious, I guess, though only in the way that a runaway train is more obvious when you're standing on the tracks than when you're momentarily safe on the platform. Atrocities come naturally to us. They are our cultural and genetic heritage, and we live in a period when the Bushists have largely rendered law impotent to restrain them.

The Bushist excuses for torture committed by Americans continue their - and our - lapse from the hope that liberty and democracy could ameliorate our brutal human nature. Now, having abandoned our higher principles for base and bloody violence, we Americans are simply another senescent empire on the verge of self-destruction.

The same goes for the redemptive hope that Christianity sometimes gives. Those in power call themselves Christians, but they have rationalized the same expedience as Pontius Pilate. Their excuses for torture would permit crucifixion so long as we cut down and revived Jesus before he died from blood loss and exposure.

As for me, I have to work hard to restrain myself from advocating the gallows and instead to suggest that we may need a new Spandau - perhaps Guantánamo - not for terrorists but for our own home-grown war criminals.