On Character and Torture
by Mark Klempner

With each piece of breaking news, it is becoming increasingly clear that President Bush and his staff consciously reopened the door to torture after the rest of the civilized world had decidedly nailed it shut. The soldiers at Abu Ghraib didn't suddenly morph into bawdy barbarians. Directives — murky though they might have been — traveled down the chain of command.

The disclosures confirm my worst fears about George W. Bush: the cruelty lurking behind his half-cocked smile, the lies embedded in his persuasive, decent-sounding rhetoric. Yet, as a Holocaust historian, I am also reassured. Our democracy has been put to the test, and it still seems to be working. Our press has played its crucial function of exposing governmental malfeasance, and, unlike the citizens of Germany in the 1930s, we can choose to not reelect a leader who has taken us down a disastrously wrong path. There are no police hauling away those who speak out against President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld — although the abuses possible under the Patriot Act have brought us closer to that than we'd ever want to be.

Reports of secret service agents infiltrating nonviolent protest groups, police brutality against peaceful protesters, government agents requesting access to bookstore and library records and, of course, the growing number of people being held without recourse to a legal process — all of this is worrying. Yet, if someone like Michael Moore were arrested for being a possible security threat, people wouldn't stand for it.

Or would they? Sometimes I wonder if we, as a nation, really get the concept of "Never Again." As the writer David Rieff has pointed out, it doesn't mean "never again will Germans kill Jews in the 1940s in Europe." Unfortunately, taking action against injustice in one's own life and times seems to be a most difficult thing for human beings to do. It often involves stepping outside the social norms, risking one's career, safety, security, everything. Consider the young reservists: Why didn't the majority of them say, "Hey, this isn't in accord with the Geneva Conventions. This isn't the spirit of America; I don't want any part of it — even if it means a court martial." Isn't that what we wish the young men of Germany had said? Isn't that what we hope we would say if we were asked to do something immoral and illegal?

Reality intrudes. The photographs of smirking GIs reveling in cruelty, the lurid videotapes, the reports that rap music was blasted in the rooms where torture took place — all suggest that the soldiers not only weren't protesting, but that they were into what they were doing.

That sad state of affairs can only point to some deep defects in our national character, defects that interlock with those of the power-abusing politicians: our predilection for violence, our heartless response toward the weak and vulnerable. And, of course, in the photos one also sees a raunchiness that both mimics and was no doubt fed by the ubiquity of violent and pornographic images on the Internet and in the media.

How ironic that The Passion, a movie that focuses relentlessly on the torture inflicted upon a detainee, was released shortly before the Iraqi abuse scandal broke. While millions of Christians in the United States sat in plush seats viewing their savior's ordeal, the image of humanity was being desecrated anew in the fetid cell blocks of Abu Ghraib. Indeed, if the movie had been shown in Iraq to the soldiers at Abu Ghraib, it probably wouldn't have influenced them to change their actions. As Pete Seeger sang, "When will we ever learn?"

Back at the White House, George W. Bush had apparently been busy finding legal justification to circumvent the Geneva Conventions, thus paving the way for a revival of the kind of torture that his "favorite philosopher" had once endured, and, in dramatized reenactment, has continued to endure on screens everywhere. If even our icons and ideals have become equated with violence, it's no wonder that "strike first to ensure peace" made sense to us, and that "torture to stop terrorism" might as well.

Once upon a time, "character education," was right up there with "no child left behind" in Bush's rosy agenda, a fitting part of a vision to reform our cultural problems. But how did he get from there to torture? Another lesson from the Holocaust: As soon as you decide that certain people are inherently evil or otherwise subhuman, you can do anything to them. From "terrorists," to "suspected terrorists," to "possible terrorists," to "detainees," is a slippery slope — one on which it's very easy to break your neck.

The vital question is how do we as a nation respond when we see our elected officials slaloming down the sheer ice? One of the indelible lessons from Nazi Germany is that all need to take responsibility for what some are doing. We must especially take responsibility for what our elected officials are doing. And so, I have to agree with President Bush that those involved with the torture at Abu Ghraib displayed a "failure of character" — especially Bush himself, and Rumsfeld, but also all of us who would stand silently by while immoral acts are done in our name, with our tax dollars.