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Inoculation
Mar. 25th, 2007 09:22 amZbigniew Brzezinski writes about the psychological damage wrought by the "war on terror". I do think that some of his stress on the historical uniqueness of the situation is a little overdone and self-serving:
Nevertheless, he's pretty much right on. The threat the US was facing during the Cold War was vastly greater, there was paranoia about Communist infiltrators in our midst, yet we ultimately didn't have the level of security theater or advocacy for checks on civic freedom that we have had for the past few years.
He has the same sort of meta-worry that I do, that we aren't thinking enough about how to maintain a free society in the event of another major domestic terrorist attack. Too often I hear, as justification for this or that draconian or aggressive measure, the claim that if somebody, say, managed to set off a nuke in Manhattan, the United States simply couldn't function as a free democracy any more; by some sort of reflex action, our country would naturally and automatically transform itself into a paranoid police state. I worry that this kind of talk is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Where in the Constitution does it say we'd have to become a paranoid police state? Where in statute or case law? There would be no good, rational reason for it. It isn't as if paranoid police states are good at protecting their citizens. Most historians seem to regard the closest American historical equivalents—the Alien and Sedition Acts, Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, the World War I sedition laws, Roosevelt's detainment of Japanese-Americans—as mistakes. Even if some despicable people managed to nuke Manhattan or gas Congress to death, the adoption of tyranny is something we would have to choose to do, and the long-term damage would be greater than that wrought by an attack. Thinking of the process as automatic is a way of preparing ourselves to choose to do it. We don't have to.
Abraham Lincoln talked about the importance of disenthralling ourselves, escaping from the pull of dangerous ideas. This is one of them. We must inoculate ourselves, and then we shall keep from further damaging our country.
nor is it the calm America that waged the Cold War with quiet persistence despite the knowledge that a real war could be initiated abruptly within minutes and prompt the death of 100 million Americans within just a few hours.*cough*HUAC*cough*Nixon*cough*Vietnam... and his shock that campus organizations have gotten into anti-Arab stereotyping indicates that he didn't spend much time around the Campus Republicans in southeastern Virginia during the Reagan years.
Nevertheless, he's pretty much right on. The threat the US was facing during the Cold War was vastly greater, there was paranoia about Communist infiltrators in our midst, yet we ultimately didn't have the level of security theater or advocacy for checks on civic freedom that we have had for the past few years.
He has the same sort of meta-worry that I do, that we aren't thinking enough about how to maintain a free society in the event of another major domestic terrorist attack. Too often I hear, as justification for this or that draconian or aggressive measure, the claim that if somebody, say, managed to set off a nuke in Manhattan, the United States simply couldn't function as a free democracy any more; by some sort of reflex action, our country would naturally and automatically transform itself into a paranoid police state. I worry that this kind of talk is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Where in the Constitution does it say we'd have to become a paranoid police state? Where in statute or case law? There would be no good, rational reason for it. It isn't as if paranoid police states are good at protecting their citizens. Most historians seem to regard the closest American historical equivalents—the Alien and Sedition Acts, Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, the World War I sedition laws, Roosevelt's detainment of Japanese-Americans—as mistakes. Even if some despicable people managed to nuke Manhattan or gas Congress to death, the adoption of tyranny is something we would have to choose to do, and the long-term damage would be greater than that wrought by an attack. Thinking of the process as automatic is a way of preparing ourselves to choose to do it. We don't have to.
Abraham Lincoln talked about the importance of disenthralling ourselves, escaping from the pull of dangerous ideas. This is one of them. We must inoculate ourselves, and then we shall keep from further damaging our country.