Atrocity Minute

The Sudanese government, using the Janjawid militias it supports, has overseen the massacres of thousands of Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa Muslim civilians, the raping of their women, the burning of their villages and mosques, and the destruction of their fields. More than 1,000,000 people have been displaced, and now live in wretched camps in southern Darfur, subject to continued predation by the Janjawid. This is the result of a continuing, bloody conflict between Arab and African Muslims that has killed two million people and displaced twice that number.

Fortunately for the continued moral advancement of the species, Sudan continues to hold a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

During the Liberian civil war, the rebel forces of the Revolutionary United Front and the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council indiscriminately raped thousands of women and girls of all ages, ethnic groups, and social standings. The violence included gang rape and rape with objects such as guns, firewood staves, and umbrellas. Women bled to death from massive injuries to their genitalia and internal organs, and babies were torn from the wombs of the pregnant so that soldiers could settle bets about the sex of the fetus. Sexual violence was also perpetrated by peacekeepers of the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone and the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group. In addition, ritual killings to obtain body parts for use in rites of sorcery and incidents of forced human cannibalism have been reported. After over a decade of nearly continuous civil war, 250,000 are dead, half of the population is displaced, and Liberia has effectively ceased to exist as a nation.

President Charles Taylor, the man who oversaw much of this process, is a self-appointed Christian preacher who enjoys ping-pong and badminton, and is currently being sheltered by the government of Nigeria.

In Angola, soldiers are brutally conducting public anal and vaginal body cavity searches of workers from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Angolan government maintains that it is "repatriating" Congolese workers who are illegally mining diamonds in the gem-rich border province of Lunda Norte, and are conducting the searches to confiscate ill-gotten stones. The repatriation process also includes beatings, rape, and arbitrary imprisonment.

The United States is the world's largest purchaser of diamonds, to the tune of nearly $4 billion a year. A portion of that money goes to support various militias in Liberia, Angola, and other war-torn African nations.

In Iraq's Abu Gharib prison, members of the US military forced prisoners to strip naked and pile atop one another in the presence of female soldiers. They were subjected to sleep deprivation, forced to simulate sex with one another, led around on dog leashes, and sodomized with chemical light sticks. Someone thought it would be a fine idea to document these and many other abuses, and the photographs have been released to the public.

Shortly after this release, a videotape of a group of masked men sawing the head off of American Nicholas Berg surfaced, echoing the videotaped decapitation of American reporter Daniel Pearl that was released last year, which was, in turn, as horrific as the footage recorded in the mid 90s of a young Russian soldier whose head was being held against the ground by a Chechnyan boot as it was hacked off with a large hunting knife.

And so on.

And so forth.

I'm not making any real causal or consequential connections between any of the preceding paragraphs. The fact that you may have a diamond on your finger that was forcibly removed from a Congolese anal cavity doesn't really place any moral burden upon you, and is about as relevant to your character as Charles Taylor's predilection for ping-pong is to his. Similarly, Nicholas Berg bore no responsibility for the actions of American troops in Abu Gharib, and the Muslims who cut off his head and that of the anonymous Russian soldier have little to do with the Muslims who ran the little cigarette-snack-soda store underneath my old apartment in Queens.

The wretchedness of human behavior has been on rampant display for the entirety of our recorded history, and before we started writing things down we were doubtless heading over to the next valley to smash in the heads of the tribe that lived there with rocks and rape their females with hooting enthusiasm. Civilization, by and large, has consisted of the gathering of enough resources to sustain enough people at the same time in the same place so that this savagery could be held at bay for as long as possible. This feat has never been global in nature, existing only in secured pockets of varying sizes: a fortified city, an empire, a nation-state. Even within these supposed oases of civility--wherein we might achieve the leisure required to more fully express the nobler aspects of our natures--cruelty, torture and murder has always been present, either at the hands of fellow citizens or at the whim of the state.

It's a simple point, really: people kill people. People are cruel to other people. People will always find reasons to explain why it is necessary that they kill people, and will find other reasons to explain away cruelty. As the newly popular Stanford Prison Experiment showed in 1971 (DVD now available!), it really doesn't take much for the brittle coating of civilized behavior to crack and fall away. This is because the various lacquers and varnishes that we use to create that shiny surface are new, and poorly developed. A mere one hundred generations separates us in the Judaeo-Grecco-Christian West from the era when a fearful King Saul of Israel demanded the foreskins of one hundred Philistines as dowry for his daughter. His would-be son-in-law David went out, killed twice that number, and returned with the requested penile scraps (1 Samuel 18:20-27). It is neither the violence of the bloody gift nor the potential truth of the story that should give us pause, but the fact that the culture which recorded the tale regarded David's success as a sign of God's favor.

Richard Feynman once wrote,

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

He was referring to the responsibility of scientists to proclaim the value of progress which is the result of freedom of thought, and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, but welcomed as the seed of all fruitful inquiry. That essential doubt has as much relevance in matters of international politics and moral conduct as it does in scientific inquiry. Do you think that America is the avatar of freedom in the world? Question that. Do you believe that America is the nexus of a global conspiracy to oppress the world's poor and brown? Question that as well.

And so, when I read the voluminous outrage against the particular stupidities of some of the monkeys America has seen fit to put in uniform, I shake my head, if I'm feeling charitable, or smirk and scoff if I'm not. They thunder on with terrible certainty, as though the cosmic balance of good and evil is tipping hellward, pushed only by the vast and incalculable malice of America. It may make them feel much improved within their own minds and social circles to have such a keenly developed sense of morality. Their indignant rage adds another thin coat to their civilized finish. This protective sheen allows them, in good conscience, to point at America now and demand that it solve these problems that it has created, forgetting that they kept their hands quietly at their sides while thousands died in Abu Gharib long before America arrived.

But such problems are not America's. They are humanity's. And the sooner the publicly righteous doff their pristine garments and get down in the mud to help out the rest of us monkeys, the sooner we'll be able to improve our solutions.

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Yes, I am back, although I can't really say for how long. Next week I'll be travelling to Zurich, and opportunities for posting will probably be scarce (I'll certainly make the attempt). This will be the first time that I've been out of the country since 1995, and it will be interesting to be an American in Europe. I plan to display a poor grasp of geography and will attempt to acquire a large number of firearms.

As for why I took such a long break: burnout, pure and simple. Not just the effort of production, but also the effort of wading through the cacophony of the Net and being beaten down by sheer volume of it. I became overwhelmed by the Legion of the Admirably Certain, of which I am not a member. Certainty doesn't suit me; it is quickly subsumed beneath my tendencies towards doubt and skepticism. Proclaiming positions with conviction, as I had been doing for over two years, began to create a Big Gong of dissonance in the cognitive soup 'twixt my ears.

That, coupled with an absurd increase in my overall level of general anxiety and psychological dysfunction, caused me to flee the blog. Some might call it a lack of confidence; I prefer to think of it as the inability to maintain the fiction of certainty. Vast quantities of wordsnot are being expelled all over the Internet about Iraq, for example, and it's fair to say that 90% of it is guesswork, at best. While it may be entertaining to read all the what-ifs and maybes and supposedlys, after awhile the brain withers and dries up, deprived of a healthy diet of Is.

Still others might call it being a neurotic ball of nerves, and that's fair enough. As my blog persona calmly carried on with business as usual, the gap between my public face and the vibrating twitch-fest that was the Real Me began to cause even more twitchiness, a sort of feedback loop, which unfortunately culminated in my donning a malady-appropriate supervillain costume and embarking on a life of crime, only to be apprehended by Batman, which is irritating because he's far nuttier than I'll ever be, but he's rich, so he gets to run around with all his fancy Bat-toys and do whatever he damn well pleases.

Did I write "pure and simple" a few paragraphs ago?

Apparently not.

Read more from the Verbiage Archive
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So, I thought I'd have a bit of fun and see what my addled head could come up with based on just the synopses of NYT online's stories. I will neither read nor comment on the articles themselves, because that would interfere with the thickness of my Big Dumb Fun.

And we can't have that.

U.S. Agrees to Suspend Fighting in Najaf After Deal With Cleric By DEXTER FILKINS 2:57 PM ET The developments represent a breakthrough in the unrelenting and bloody standoff as the American-led governing authority prepares to hand over sovereignty.

That's right, Dexter. It was unrelenting because our troops didn't leave, and bloody because they killed lots and lots of insurgents, sometimes more than once. However, we shouldn't let the fact that we kicked the ass of the Mahdi "Army" thoroughly and with with skill interfere with the standard narrative, which is that Things Are Going Very Badly Indeed.

Kerry Outlines Plan for Foreign Policy Based on Cooperation By MARIA NEWMAN 4:07 PM ET John Kerry criticized President Bush's Iraq policy and said Americans wanted a nation that "is respected and not just feared."

This might be some of that Kerryan nuance I've heard so much about. I wonder: does Kerry think I want a nation that is respected and feared? Or just respected? Let's see...this whole mess started because OBL convinced certain Muslims that America was a) weak, and b) cowardly. And, of course, they'll never respect us because we have liquor and strip clubs and women who show their bazoombas on Spring Break and then sell videos about the bouncing and the wet t-shirts and the hey hey hey I'm horny. I don't think the long Senator from Massachusetts will try to put a stop to that, so...unless! He must be talking about--wait for it--the respect of our allies! That's real chin-based genius, that is. Feared by our enemies, respected by our friends. But, wait...if our friends don't respect us...are they our friends?

I'm so confused. It might help if I read the article, but there's just no time! Onward to

Britain Arrests Radical Cleric Who Faces U.S. Terror Charges By ALAN COWELL 2:12 PM ET The U.S. requested Abu Hamza al-Masri's extradition for trying to set up a terrorist camp in Oregon and aiding Al Qaeda.

Well, lookee here. Maybe that's what friends do.

Finally,

Michael Moore Explodes in Paris Cafe By Q. DON RAMIREZ 2:19 PM ET Filmmaker Michael Moore, flushed with the success of his new film "Fahrenheit 911" at the Cannes film festival, blew apart yesterday morning after eating a basket of croissants. Horrified witnesses reported that his body was full of tiny Al Gores, which fled squealing into a nearby sewer grate.

Oh, the humanity.

Really, I've got nothing today--except a spiffy new suit. My burgeoning waistline has put me in that awkward category that is not quite Big, certainly not Tall, but not fashionably normal, so obtaining a monkey suit that fit properly was an epic task that required trips to a dozen stores and cost the lives of nearly half my squad of dwarf assassins. But it has been accomplished, so now I can impress the Swiss with my Anglo pinstriped and paisley-tied Calvin Kleiny goodness. It's a tonal affair: all blues. Blue shirt, multiply blue tie, navy blue summerweight wool with subtle dark striping, cufflinks with blue gems derived from petroleum.

It's all over but the shoes, which will be obtained tomorrow. The new Samsonite wheeled Bag O'Doom is downstairs, waiting to be filled with the suit and other body coverings. All I'm missing is my handy collapsible wireless IR keyboard, which will arrive via exhausted carrier pigeon tomorrow, and my US-to-Swiss plug adapter.

That last one is sort of important...no charging up the PDA without it. If it doesn't arrive tomorrow, I'm out of luck--Monday is Memorial Day, which means no mail, and I'll be reduced to rewiring the sockets in my hotel room using my travel sewing kit and a nail clipper.

That'll be OK, though...as I understand it, the Swiss like it when you do your own electrical work.

More on that later. The second train of the evening just rumbled by, tooting its mournful horn: wommm...wom...large tanks of chlorine are atmospherically moving through the evening...womm. We like the trains, actually. They don't barrel through town, they pass through, which is a difference that anyone who lives near an elevated subway track or commuter rail line will appreciate.

And that's the way it is. One more day of work stateside, then a weekend holiday which never really seems like a holiday, then a week of work in Europe.

How very odd.

Watch out!

Read more from the Political Effluvia Archive
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Ahhh...I am experiencing silver-hued techno-toy nirvana. On my lap is a box of ULTIMATE GERMAN, which is full of CDs and suchlike that are supposed to turn me into a competent Sprecher der Deutschenkopferzimmer, but that's not the exciting bit.

No, the exciting bit is what's on top of the ULTIMATE GERMAN, which I'm using as a kind of lap desk while I sit on the couch and The Who start up an hour of corpses on tables and specially-effected reennactments of lethal injury on television. That's not the exciting, bit, either.

(At this point, we cut to a large group of medieval peasants on a hillside, who all shout GET ON WITH IT)

My Think Outside Stowaway Infrared Wireless keyboard arrived today, snug in its leather pouch. That's the exciting bit. I installed the driver and software on my PDA/cell phone/iron lung, unfolded the keyboard, swung the little IR wand into place, perched the PDA in the proper position, and magical French word! I am sitting downstairs on the couch wirelessly communicating with you, dear reader, about...uh...vital matters of the day.

This really is a first-rate product: tightly designed, good travel on all the keys, with flawlessly executed software. In a decade, it'll be quaint because we'll be typing via telepathy. Right now, it's $69.99 worth of gadgety-geekthrob goodness.

[Of course, the fact that the super nifty gadget is indeed super nifty doesn't count for a hill of monkey colon-fermented coffee beans when I've got 0 bars' worth of signal. My wireless nirvana has turned into a standard pool of hardwired PC upchuck, so I'm upstairs on the desktop. I could write the post, see, but couldn't get it up to the blog from my PDA, because a flock of geese combined with swamp gas to refract the light of Venus, which interfered with my wireless throughput and caused a spate of UFO sightings on my block.

The fire department showed up as well, but they were here to track down the source of the wood-smelling smoke that was hanging in the air when we got back from wings/chardonnay/Guinness/chocolate pie at the Tap Room. They didn't find it, so I'll retire, disappointed by my fall from gadget grace and hoping that my house isn't covertly burning down.

Amen.]

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