Decline and Fall

This one's a few days old, but you shouldn't miss Belle Waring at Crooked Timber having a blast with a few responses to "various right-wing Morrisette-ironic talking points." I second Unqualified Offerings' endorsement of this rule of thumb:

if Solzhenitsyn recounts some practice as one employed in coercive interrogations at Lubyanka, it’s torture. So, false execution: definitely torture. Also torture: long-time standing; exposure to extremes of heat and cold; forcing prisoners to kneel or stand in painful positions; putting prisoners in cells so small they cannot stand or lie down; keeping them awake for days at a time. These practices were the meat and drink of the NKVD, who preferred them to fingernail extraction for the same reason certain American torture advocates do: they can be made to seem as if they are not torture, even though they are, in fact, actually torture.

And then there's this, which I am also only too happy to endorse:

“Liberals don’t condemn terrorist atrocities in Iraq, such as the latest chlorine bomb attacks, because they think Arabs are sub-human scum from whom nothing better can be expected.” Um, who thinks Arabs are scum now? Moving on, I have a strong sense that my condemning such attacks is pointless (still, obviously, I read about such attacks with surprise and horror and regard them as evil). Give me a lever long enough and I will…er, scratch my ass with it in a spasm of useless, self-righteous moral preening! By contrast, since I am a citizen of a democratic state, my efforts to change US policy by criticizing, say, Yoo’s depraved torture justifications may actually have some effect, however small. Additionally, it’s true that qua terrorists (rather than qua Arabs), I don’t expect much better from Sunni ultras. On the other hand, I am a US patriot. This means I have a lot invested in our city on the hill image and don’t want to see my nation’s honor dragged through the mud by a bunch of incompetent authoritarian dillholes.

You see, it's not that the left is more outraged by the awfulness of America than by the awfulness of more demonstrably awful countries, it's that the left is more outraged by the awfulness of America when America claims a certain moral high ground and then acts awfully. It pisses us off when we look at our own society and say, "gee, that doesn't look like a very nice place, does it"?

Labels: conservatism, GWOT, liberty, terrorism, torture