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Time For a Walk
Some Sunday morning reads:
Frank Rich’s column is liberated here. Why is he the only one in the major press writing this strong?
[E]ach day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren’t, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless.
A NYT story on how the administration makes up rules in "enemy combatant" cases. Short conclusion: There ain´t no rules.
The Washington Post’s Pincus writes about the expending Pentagon spying within the U.S..
Torture, American-Style
Blair to be investigated?
Allawi says human rights in Iraq are worse than under Saddam. Al Hakim wants more leeway to torture.
Iraq is really worse than Vietnam. Maybe that´s why Col. Westhusing killed himself – or was he killed?
It´s a bit cold here, but the sun is shining. Time for a walk.
Well the sun has just come up here, which means it is probably going down up there in the ‘civilized’ part of the world.
I made myself read the article on Westhusing which is probably not the best way to start a new week but I felt that if he had resolved the conflict between practice and principles so earnestly and according to his lights, honestly, the least I could do as a fellow human was to listen to what he was trying to say.
Then I got to thinking about why conspiracy theories whilst diverting and in the way they recast the world into black and white, simple, also corrupt and distort the very ‘truth’ that many conspiracy theorists claim they want to reveal.
If Col. Ted Westhusing was murdered by a private security company, Virginia-based USIS in order to prevent Westhusing’s knowledge of corruption and abuse wreck their contractual relationship with the US government, this is an old story we have heard many times before.
Corrupt capitalists when confronted about their corruption by a loyal and honorable servant of the state; plays and then kills servant as in:
“Westhusing reported the allegations to his superiors but told one of them, Gen. Joseph Fil, that he believed USIS was complying with the terms of its contract.
U.S. officials investigated and found “no contractual violations,” an Army spokesman said. Bill Winter, a USIS spokesman, said the investigation “found these allegations to be unfounded.”
So no one denies that they abused Iraqis and padded their bills just whether doing so was a breach of contract or not. If Westhusing was murdered then the company will be investigated and maybe some corporate officers charged. The contract will be rescinded and then let to a different corporation.
Not much of an outcome if you are a confirmed opponent of war, particularly imperialist war conducted to steal from the already marginalized.
But let’s just imagine for a moment that Col Westhusing did kill himself. Here we have a loyal and honorable servant of the state who has been lapping up the kool-aid all his life:
” Westhusing, 44, was no ordinary officer. He was one of the Army’s leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor”
I am always a bit confused when I come across these characters. People who are so certain that the beliefs they hold are universal truths, when it seems to me that anyone who takes the time to step back and look would see that the ‘truths’ are in fact self serving bullshit designed to confuse the sheeple but not to be subscribed to by any thinking person.
However as one reasonably intelligent Xtian fellow student said to me at high school “You just don’t know what faith is do you? Why not just trust. We don’t have to question everything you know.”
I was naturally flabbergasted. Trust? Trust who? The people selling you a product whose chief motivation is to take your money or the politicians selling you a line whose chief motivation is to take your vote. How about the bible bashers selling you a false paradise whose chief motivation is to take your power?
However I did learn something important that day which is that there are some people out there who are genuine believers. Their beliefs aren’t a pose to justify their questionable actions, there are actually some people who honestly believe that you must kill for peace or imprison for freedom.
Those people are often rigid in their views about life though. Where I see someone studiously avoiding any confrontation with anything that may conflict with their beliefs, they believe they are expressing their beliefs in some ‘pure’ form by showing complete faith and trust.
Yeah I know whoever sold them that line of horseshit seriously needs to be either ennobled or executed, or as is more likely nowadays, given their own advertising ‘shop’.
But such people do in fact exist and while I may not respect their views you have to have a certain grudging respect for their dedication and sacrifice.
The real question that cynics like myself want answered is; What happens when something so obvious that they can’t avoid it rubs their nose in reality and makes them see what they had previously averted their eyes from?
The cynic in me says that the chances are they will take the low road of opportunism. In Westhusing’s case that would be keep the mouth shut and finish up your tour in Iraq, then head back to your safe sinecure at West Point.
TV fans will reckon he should have taken the issue up with…? Who? His bosses who let the contract out with these crooks? Hmm How about some politician that will be offended by the corruption and abuse? Yeah right where? Any with any power in the administration are already getting their share and any with any conscience about these things have already been thoroughly discredited by the administration and a compliant media.
Westhusing may have been a fool but he was an intelligent man and he would have seen very early on in the piece, probably from about the time he was asked if “USIS was complying with the terms of its contract?” that forcing an investigation was just tilting at windmills. In other words his superiors made no expression of concern about the morality of the issue, just a strictly legalistic approach to the problem.
How about Westhusing going to Iraq because he had concerns about whether his belief set matched up to the ‘real world’?
The article implies that he volunteered for Iraq because he wanted to express his values about the military, honor, and democracy; but we don’t know that. Westhusing had been living the cloistered life of an army officer since adolescence. At some stage he felt the urge to swap that existence for a world nearly as closed, a residential college campus. He tried very hard not to let that world impact upon him:
“Plunged into academia, Westhusing held fast to his military ties. Students and professors recalled him jogging up steep hills in combat boots and camouflage, his rucksack full, to stay in shape. He wrote a paper challenging an essay that questioned the morality of patriotism.”
But it would not have been easy. Although West Point students must be encouraged to ask some questions it would be likely that those questions are posed within a frame of reference that accepts the basic goodness of leadership. That affirms the positive effects of militarism and capitalism. I know nothing of Emory but I doubt that those tenets would necessarily be taken as a given, so maybe Westhusing was already questioning his moral precepts before he went to Iraq. Iraq confirmed the worst of his fears and he stuck with his beliefs to the point where he ‘did the decent thing’. Took his own life with his service revolver. Right up to the end the poor fellow was an unwitting parody of the loyal tools of empire.
Now isn’t that a much more powerful narrative than good soldier meets bad capitalist, then bad capitalist concerned about good soldier’s ability to cause him trouble has him murdered? For a start the conspiracy theory implies that the levers are in place for a Westhusing to cause a USIS problems, when in fact much of what we discuss at MoA suggests it isn’t. So by arguing a conspiracy the theorists are unconsciously arguing that the corrupt and tottering regime that is the military-industrial complex is capable of redemption. Not only redemption, redemption from within. This is something that any thinking person must seriously doubt.
OK so the fellow killing himself may make more sense than him being whacked. So what?
Well lets apply this principle to other conspiracies. In the MoA reality, many of us accept that the deeds committed by both the US and Israel in the Middle East are self serving and corrupt, as well as causing hundreds of thousands of deaths.
In such a world it is not difficult to believe that intelligent members of the society that was being oppressed in this way would get together and plot a really public form of revenge and humiliation to payback for this horror. eg Fly some jumbo jets into a couple of obvious icons of US militarism and capitalism. The Pentagon and the World Trade Centre.
If on the other hand the 9/11 massacre was part of a BushCo plot then the oppressed people of the Middle East haven’t reached the level of frustration where they would plan, plot, finance and man such an incredibly complex and effective revenge. Ipso facto this oppression doesn’t exist or if it does, it is in such a mild form that people aren’t seriously pissed off.
As we have been saying around here of late; Cui Bono? Who benefits from the dissemination of that belief? How about the selfsame imperialists and capitalists we are accusing of commissioning the fell deed. Hmm! Even in the unlikely event that you could construct a rationale for that, if you are determined to resist the colonial adventures of the usual band of whitefellas in the 21st century, why would you?
On the same note some people look back on the post war period of Amerika being the ‘golden age’ of democracy. As one who was living in an already established democracy that wasn’t the US, that’s not how it felt to me.
Sure some Europeans felt life get better than it had been, but if you were living in a state comprised of amongst others, people who had fled the repression of 19th and early 20th century Europe, then the USA’s attempt to spread democracy felt like a reduction in freedom. A change from decisions being made by the people affected by them, to those decisions being made by those who would materially benefit from a certain outcome. eg the destruction of the ability of the left to seek and hold power. This is best exemplified in the dismissal of Gough Witlam and the murder of Norman Kirk.
OK! So what?
Well the US in the early sixties is claimed to be a time where old world virtues still applied. People enjoyed a relationship with their government that was supportive on both sides (if you were a whitefella that is). So in those circumstances it is unlikely that anyone, even someone with a borderline personality disorder would feel so dis-empowered by the society he lived in that he would murder the head of state. He would do that to try and assert HIS point of view on a community that had thus far studiously rejected it.
No it wasn’t that, say the conspiracists. The Kennedy assassination was little more than a turf war between one group of capitalist gangsters represented by the republicans and another mob of capitalist crooks, the democrats.
If you were a staunch advocate of centralized government would it be easier to sell the meme that this was a fight between bad buggers which could be sorted out by replacing aforesaid bad buggers with a good bugger, namely themselves? Or would you think it easier if you circulated the idea that big centralized government separates the people being governed from the decision makers to the extent that individuals become so dis-empowered they will commit a desperate act like murder to try to restore their feeling of self control?
And no I’m not arguing that all conspiracy theorists are either witting or unwitting tools of the powerful. I am arguing that always going for the complex answer ahead of the simple obvious situation, will obscure reality to the point where the powerful can conceal their base motives.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Nov 27 2005 22:00 utc | 10
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