Davids Medienkritik quotes (and translates) noted German feminist Alice Schwarzer’s article about the Abu Ghraib photos:
The first (photo) shows a hooded victim on a pedestal who, with his arms outstretched like the crucified Christ, symbolizes the world?s sufferings. ? The second photo shows a pile of naked men that reminds us of pictures from the concentration camps. ?
Well, the first thing we’re going to do is ignore the irony of a German woman making this kind of concentration camp analogy. Instead, I’m going to pontificate on an issue which shows this kind of idiocy as being symptomatic of a larger problem.
The problem is context. The problem is degree. The problem is a lack of proportion. It is this lack of a sense of proportion that allows one to make Bush=Hitler comparisons, jokes about “regime change” in America, and lots of other left-liberal idiocies that we’re subjected to on a daily basis. I think I understand the reasons why.
One of the by-products of the post-modern world that many politicos and self-styled intellectuals have been trying to foist upon us since the 50′s is the notion of moral relativism. If everything’s relative, if there is no objective moral standard to which you adhere, then it becomes very easy to use terms like “good” and “evil” almost interchangeably, because for you they have no intrinsic meaning. A perfect example of this kind of thinking is expressed in the oft-heard canard, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” To a moral relativist, all struggles have equal value. A moral relativist, upon learning that militant Islamists have murdered 3,000 American civilians, asks, “Why do they hate us?” because to him, there must be some kind of justification for such an act. Moral relativists are against going to war, because there is simply no reason to do so; no cause that is worth fighting and killing for. Saddam Hussein may have murdered thousands upon thousands of his own people, he may have tried to kill a former President of the United States, he may fund terrorist organizations that plan the deaths of other civilians: it doesn’t matter to a moral relativist. It could simply be a cultural difference that we as Westerners don’t understand. We don’t have a right to act on a moral imperative, because there really are none.
If you don’t believe that evil exists, then all bad acts can be lumped together; there are no shades of wrong, and putting millions of people to death because of their ethnicity is in the same moral ballpark as putting a pair of women’s undergarments on a suspected terrorist’s head. There is no right to self-defense, let alone preemptive action. What is important is…um…actually, I don’t know what’s important to a moral relativist, except perhaps adhering to the notion that all things are equal.
The only other reason I can think of why someone would make the Bush=Hitler/Abu Ghraib=Auschwitz comparison is because he or she hates President Bush/the U.S. so much that there is nothing he wouldn’t do to drag the object of that loathing down. This is a willful and deliberate smear attempt, and someone who engages in it shows himself to be as vile and opportunistic a slug that has ever crawled on the face of the earth. At least the moral relativist has an excuse: he just doesn’t know better.
I think I might rather be a moral relativist.
If you don’t believe that evil exists, then how can anything be wrong? This is the true evil of moral relativism: If you follow moral relativism to its logical conclusion, there is no basis for saying that any act or omission is morally superior to any other act or omission. A question I have for the academic Left — why is racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. wrong? You tell me that there is no ultimate authority for defining right and wrong, so by what authority (other than your opinion) have you determined that these things are wrong? How is feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and binding up the wounds of the afflicted morally superior to simply slaughtering them if there is no basis for declaring that any action is morally superior to any other action?
You raise some interesting points.
I’m not sure I’d qualify as a member of the “academic left,” however I’ll take a stab at answering the question of why is racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. wrong.
In my view, all 3 of those examples are only “wrong” if you ACT on the beliefs in a way that harms the person. Any one is free to believe what they want–I don’t care. But if you start harming (and that mean anything from enacting legislation to verbal abuse on up to murder) someone based on their beliefs then you start intruding on another’s right to live their own life freely. I think we should start from the basic level of treating ALL people equally, no matter what their beliefs, gender, race, etc. All people start out on equal footing–they get the chance to live in this world and be treated fairly by others living in it. Where I would draw the line is when a person (or groups) harms or attempts to harm others. These people have no right to intrude upon others’ right to live their life free as they choose.
Obviously, terrorists who harm innocent people have broken the basic rule. They don’t get to play anymore. As far as self-defense goes, again, if someone encroaches on MY rights and tries to do me harm, I will most definitely fight back. But do I judge all Arabs as intrinsically evil? No. Do I see Islam as evil? Of course not. Do I care if two guys want to get married? Doesn’t bother me. I am only concerned with my keeping my rights from being stomped on, and in most cases, protecting the rights of others to live freely.
While I am not a moral relativist and I concede the existence of evil, I also acknowledge the many shades of gray that can obscure the moral landscape. I am not certain if Alice Schwarzer was just pointing out that at a base level both Auchwitz and Abu Ghraib are examples of inhuman behavior, or if she was saying that they are on the same level of inhumanity. The difference, as David so aptly pointed out, is one of proportion, but it goes a little farther than that. The guards at Abu Ghraib are the type of sadistic and brutal little people you can find in countless jails, prisons, reformatories, mental hospitals, factory floors and school gym classes around the world. They find an almost erotic pleasure in having power over others and abusing it as far as it will go. When they are exposed, as they often are, a civilized society will be repelled by them and disgusted by their behavior as President Bush was, and like the little people that they are, they will scuttle away and crawl under the nearest rock to escape the public attention. However, when you take such people and make them the instruments of a society in their own image, as National Socialist Germany was, then you create monsters capable of crimes beyond the human imagination. The guards at Dachau and Belson as individuals were probably no more evil than Lyndie England and her thuggish boyfriend, but in our flawed civilized world they are nothing more than sick little bullies rather than the monsters they might have been sixty years ago in a place where the moral laws of a civilized society were absent.
It has been a cardinal rule of statecraft since the time of Pericles that all moral nations intent on survival must base their policies on an astute understanding of those shades of gray. In 1955 President Eisenhower embraced Spanish Caudillo Francisco Franco in Madrid because he understood the profound difference between the totalitarian Soviet Union and Franco’s authoritarian fascist dictatorship. In Franco’s Spain, the regime allowed the people to lead moral lives and left them alone unless they made the mistake of becoming political, while in the Soviet Union, the state demanded that your life become political, and a moral life was to a great extent highly proscribed. More important from Eisenhower’s view, Franco had no desire or intention to extend his rule beyond the Iberian peninsula, while the Soviet state proclaimed its intentions to spread its system to every corner of the globe in millenial fashion. It is the reason why Mubarak’s Egypt has been an American ally for 25 years and received billions in American aid, and why Iran, a more democratic nation, has been an enemy for the same period.
We are by necessity governed by shades of gray that determine our judgments as individuals and as a nation. A rational man understands that sexual assault is an act of evil in and of itself, but that running a red light at 2:00 in the morning under the influence of alcohol is a violation of the law and might have moral consequences, but it is not an evil act in and of itself. For men and women governed by moral laws evil is not difficult to discern, but for those who see no difference between George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler or between the United States and the Nazi state, there is no hope. They are either moral idiots or simply idiots that can be safely dismissed.