The Morally Retarded Lorin Maazel
I’ve already said that I’m ambivalent about the visit of the New York Philharmonic to North Korea. They will play some good music, which will probably do little harm and little good. If we would just accept the music on its face value without injecting politics into it, this visit wouldn’t be taking on such a pernicious odor. Is that too much to ask? Apparently.
Spurred on by the mendacious appeaser Christopher Hill, the Philharmonic now imagines itself as an agent of detente. Only political bloggers appear to have overestimated their own capacity to influence events more (President Romney and President Richardson are unavailable to contradict me here). Reading about the orchestra’s naive pleas with the North Korean authorities to broadcast the concert on North Korean TV evokes a kind of resigned pity — picture a 120-pound tax accountant asking to cut to the front of the chow line at Rikers Island and you get the general idea.
The most harmful aspect of the concert might well be its effect on superficial wishful thinkers in its PBS audience. In your own minds, some of you are already defending the intelligence and sophistication of the free-tote-bag crowd. Here, I offer Exhibit A to my argument that intelligence and sophistication bear very little relationship to a thinker’s capacity to reach a coherent and defensible conclusion:
“I thought I was making music and stretching out a welcoming hand to the folks who might not have been believers of the regime under which they were living. I feel this way certainly about North Korea,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Besides, he added, “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw bricks, should they? Is our standing as a country — the United States — is our reputation all that clean when it comes to prisoners and the way they are treated? Have we set an example that should be emulated all over the world? If we can answer that question honestly, I think we can then stop being judgmental about the errors made by others.” [AP, Martin Steinberg]
Now here is one of Manhattan Island’s most cosmopolitan, sophisticated minds, and the man still can’t draw a moral distinction between a gas chamber and a fart in a crowded elevator. Does Loren Maazel have any idea of what this regime is doing to its own people? If Martin Steinberg has any idea, the secret is certainly safe with him and the vast majority of his colleagues.
‘I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,’ he said. ‘The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.’
Hyuk has drawn detailed diagrams of the gas chamber he saw. He said: ‘The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high_ [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.’
He explains how he had believed this treatment was justified. ‘At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault; that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country.
‘It would be a total lie for me to say I feel sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death. Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all.’ [The Guardian]
One woman told of being forced to assist injection-induced labours and then watching as a baby was suffocated with a wet towel in front of its mother.
Many former prisoners told of babies buried alive or left face down on the ground to die. They were told by guards this was to prevent the survival of half-Chinese babies. [BBC]
You’re free to defend Lorin Maazel without the slightest fear that it will land you in Camp 22. But don’t try it here unless you read this first. Then, be prepared to show me anything remotely comparable to it anywhere in the United States.
Not that I’ve ever wanted to be a psychologist, but I wish I could just know whether this fashionable type of moral retardation is caused by intellectual laziness, ordinary ignorance, emotional predispositions, daddy issues, or some other, completely different kind of derangement. What group in history has more consistently misread the malevolence of tyrants than the artistic intelligentsia? Maazel certainly isn’t the only example, and even occasional exceptions like Prokofiev and Shostakovitch had to be oppression’s direct objects to begin the grasp it (in Prokofiev’s case, he had to return to Stalin’s USSR first).
On at least this much, I hope we can agree: Maazel should stick to music.
Update: I was salivating for someone to make an argument of moral equivalence between Camp 22 and Gitmo. That’s certainly what Maazel was trying to imply, without saying it directly. Over at the Marmot’s Hole, you can see that “logic” on display in the comments section.
Fine, then. Let’s not make our judgments in a mathematical vacuum. According to the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, there are 200,000 people in North Korea’s concentration camps. In 2003, NBC estimated that the annual death rate in Camp 22 was approximately 20-25% per year due to starvation, severe torture, and murder. Former guards claim that entire families are gassed there to test chemical weapons for use on those of you who live in Seoul. No one is able to go there to verify any of this, of course, because Kim Jong Il has never allowed any foreign observer access and denies that the camps even exists. Most of the prisoners are there because they committed some thoughtcrime against the regime or are directly related to someone who did. The prisoners of North Korea’s concentration camps are what any civilized legal system would call “innocent.”
According to Global Security, as of December 28, 2007, there were 275 suspected terrorists being held in Gitmo. Detainees receive administrative hearings on the continuation of their detention, except when litigation on behalf of the detainees blocks those tribunals. Those found not to be dangerous are released unless their stays must be extended because (a) their own countries don’t want them either, and (b) we know that their own governments will torture them if we actually send them back. They get enough food to have an obesity problem, shelter, medical care, education in some cases, and Red Cross visits.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the per capita quotient of suffering in Gitmo is exactly equal to Camp 22, although all evidence is to the contrary. Let’s factor in the matter of innocence and say that it’s only twice as bad to indefinitely imprison a child whose mother complained about being hungry than it is to indefinitely imprison a mass-murdering terrorist. Finally, let’s exclude from our comparison the estimated 400,000 North Koreans believed to have already died in the camps.
Thus, you can quantify the calculus of that moral equivalence by dividing 275 by 200,000 X 2, or 400,000. By this calculus, a North Korean child prisoner detained indefinitely because his mother complained about being hungry is worth less than 0.07% of the indefinite detention of a would-be mass murderer. You are free to agree with that, and I’m free to doubt both your judgment and the sincerity of your outrage.
Of course, if you really want to hate the United States or George Bush desperately enough, no logic, reason, or calculus will ever persuade you otherwise. But if you’re going to talk about Camp 22 at all, you’re at least obligated to look at the photographs and listen to the eyewitnesses describe it.
45 Responses
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For some two years now I have been trying to come up with a worthy counterpart analogy for those pseudo-intellectuals who “can’t draw the moral distinction between farting in a crowded elevator and running a systemic gas chamber.” I’ve not been successful. I’ve thought of the inability to distinguish between yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater (or someone talking on his cell phone) and a terrorist actually blowing the theater up, etc., but nothing that I can conjure up with my limited insight into the human heart or bowel movement comes close to Joshua’s eloquently raw analogy. Hats off to Joshua. As Henry Watson Fowler, the king of English usage, tells us, “Analogy is perhaps the basis of most human conclusions, its liability to error being compensated for by the frequency with which it is the only form of reasoning available.” Well, no error there, in Joshua’s analogy. Just brilliant–if blunt–understanding of the essence of the problem at hand.
The type of “moral retardation” that Joshua speaks of is so prevalent among so-called intellectuals, it’s patently nauseating. I’ve heard it all (maybe), from Bush is worse than Kim Jong Il because he is a war criminal to we have our own gulags in this country for African American men so we should think twice before we point the finger at others (Prof. Cumings), to Kim Jong Il is just misunderstood and paranoid, and since we are all so sophisticated we should all be cultural and moral relativists and try to understand North Korea from the North Korean perspective.
Laziness, solipsism, and even racism, I say. The presumption that the petty dictator merely reacts to our signs, whether conciliatory or hostile, and that the people of North Korea deserve no better than their cruel allotted fate. Offensive in the extreme, and an insult to basic common sense and human dignity. At least Maazel’s a musician. What excuse do the so-called Korea experts have?
Or even Gitmo!
Your point being?
Maazel is saying he is free to tolerate evil at its fruition (Kim’s regime),
in the same way Americans tolerate evil’s inception and incremental growth in America.
He is basically saying: “What’s the fuss, we are all accomplices to totalitarianism. Just go-along to get-along.â€
If Joshua was a true crusader, he would give equal time on his blog to the Halliburton “concentration camps†built and waiting for Americans in every US state. It’s easy research, but Joshua would rather sniff his nose in an Asian toilet.
No point, really. Just being a wiseass.
Actually, Jack, that’s not what he’s saying:
I’ll assume you needn’t for me to translate that, but on the off chance you do, he’s saying the West needs to be held to higher standards that those societies without “our tradition of respect for the individual.” He’s not talking about the “Halliburton ‘concentration camps’ built and waiting for Americans in every US state”… he’s simply parroting the multicultural line that we shouldn’t criticize, say, stoning women to death or publicly beheading homosexuals (which, I take it, we’ll be doing soon enough once those Halliburton gulags go online:)) and that we should instead try to understand Muslim cultures better.
Nice to meet you, Jack. I take it you’re out of your fucking mind, then?
What are you trying to say, Joshua? That the United States ISN’T on the verge of becoming the Handmaid’s Tale, paid for in full by (add right-wing buggyman here)?
Alrighty, then. Now that I’ve folded the venom-filled fangs back into roof of mouth, I should pack a bag. Chimpy McHalliburton’s cyberspies might have figured out that I’ve turned into a dissident.
Maybe if I reveal Jack’s IP under interrogation I can get sent to one of those country club concentration camps.
For those you who did not get an invitation to Pyongyang and especially a personal one from Kim Jong Il, there is a website you can go to get the full program for that night. its cheaper and its guilt-free. the best is the “Stars Spangled Banner” by none other than jimi hendrix himself (tahnks to youtube). nothing says freedom better than his guitar solo. don’t do this in North Korea. it will land you in a gulag. worse, it will get you killed. enjoy. the site is http://www.musicmustbefree.com
True, but could it be any worse than living in DC?
I’m afraid it’s true what JFK said about Southern efficiency and Northern charm. Of course, being from here, I’d be homesick anywhere.
Robert,
From my take: Maazel insinuates the Kim Regime actually is evil. He rationalizes his performance as a kind of charitable outreach to the “prisoners” within Kim’s regime. I think most people, however, realize he is engaging in radical chic. (slumming it with the Asian bad boys) Engaging in radical chic is a favorite adventure for artistic American elites in need of cocktail party conversation topics. Making a trip into the dark heart of Asia is such a fad these days. Once he gets back to America he anticipates a beautiful woman in cocktail dress with martini in hand asking him: ” Weren’t you scared being surrounded by all those Asian savages?” He would laugh and say: “Yes, I shit my pants when they started banging on all those drums … I thought I would be cooking in a pot for supper… by the way, I heard you divorced your husband.”
Maazel knew his adventure legitimized Kim Jung Il in the sight of his adoring cult members.
Maazel tolerated evil and colluded by providing legitimization for Kim Jung Il. He is merely pointing out to Americans, that they shouldn’t get all high and mighty. Americans tolerate creeping totalitarianism in America just as much as Maazel tolerates the horrible results of North Korean totalitarianism. Maazel doesn’t want any morality around to condemn his fun. He destroys his moral oppositon by pointing out a very real truth concerning American finger-pointers.
That’s the essence of multi-culturalism: tolerating evil while feeling good about it.
Joshua and Maazel are, therefore, two peas in a pod. They tolerate their own evil while addicted to the exquisite pleasures of finger-pointing. It gets the spot light off their moral failure.
Clearly the good Maestro is befuddled. On the other hand, while the west doesn’t need to be held to higher standards than elsewhere, that that doesn’t mean places like Gitmo shouldn’t be condemned. Wrong is wrong, abeit in shades. The mistake the Maestro made was that he he made an equivalency. The differences between camp 22, for example, and Gitmo are stark. Americans, in light of this, IMHO, are quite justified in being critical.
On the other hand, refusing to even acknowledge that Gitmo is morally wrong is a pretty damning indictment on a person’s principles as well.
Not yet ready to make that leap Joshua?
…and not to be confused with this Jack, heh.
how is gitmo morally wrong????
its a facility that houses combatants and prisoners of war all of whom were picked up on the battlefield
haliburton concentration camps?????
good god you people are warped!
“True, but could it be any worse than living in DC?”
Said by someone living in SEOUL!
Boys,
Joshua sees no major problem with Gitmo. Gitmo represents the death of Habeus Corpus. The writ is the very foundation of Western justice. This right allows a prisoner to have an impartial judge determine if he is justifiably detained. If a government can drop people into a black hole, never to be seen again in the name of nation security. Then all other rights are neutralized.
Yet, Joshua has no qualms.
He can’t understand Gitmo’s precendent will eventually gas millions more families than Kim Jung Il could ever hope.
Is Joshua a minion of Satan?
No, our Joshua is the archetypal Forest Gump — a drooling retard who means well.
I hope.
Jack, I’m invoking Rule 5 against you. I can’t argue with your delusions about gulags being built in North Dakota any more than I can logically disprove the existence of the giant orange spiders in your closet or NSA microphones in your light fixtures. I’m glad they’re letting you have so much internet time where you are, but I can’t let the unmedicated insane take over my comments section. Sorry.
Hoju, I want you to tell me straight up — are you or are you not a sock puppet of Van Midd / Van Middleton?
Hoju, or whoever you are, I wish you’d have the courage to make Maazel’s argument directly instead of doing the same thing implicitly. You don’t have the balls to say that a lower standard should be applied to massive atrocities against, or the engineered starvation of, Asian men, women, and kids who are guilty of nothing more than familial relation to a suspected class enemy.
You must have to weave your dodges with great care when you’re all over the Internet telling us of the great times to be had in Pyongyang and thus abetting those very atrocities. Leni Riefenstahl eventually had to do a lot of strained explaining for “Olympia,” but at least Leni had going for her that she was (a) German, (b) famous, and (c) talented. I admit to being unmoved by the moral outrage of someone who abets atrocities that he acknowledges only when pressed and won’t even try to defend.
Clearly, compassion and consistency aren’t driving your interest in Gitmo. On a scale of 1 to 100, with Auschwitz being 100, Camp 22 is probably an 80, and the highest-security parts of Gitmo might rate a 5. By constantly changing the subject from 80 to 5, you’re really doing what Maazel is doing. Maazel is either honest or dumb enough to say it directly. You just throw the diversion out there because you know you can’t really make the argument.
Instead, you simply change the subject to a few hundred suspected terrorists in Gitmo — people who would have absolutely no qualms about killing millions of innocent American men, women, and kids. The Gitmo terrorists, includng some of the 9/11 plotters, are getting better treatment and medical care than common criminals in such despotic hell-holes as France and Japan. The physical malady most likely to afflict them is obesity. Yes, lowering the lot of them into wood-chippers might be a bit extreme for me, but I freely admit to having very little sympathy for people who wouldn’t hesitate to kill the people I love. And if you feel greater sympathy for Khalid Sheikh Muhammad that for a child who must starve so that Kim Jong Il can have nukes and kobe beef, ethics isn’t a field in which you speak with authority.
Now, you’re obviously not American, and I’d venture that you probably don’t have children, either. I ride the DC Metro every day. I have a family that I love very much, and since I want to see my kids grow up, attend college, graduate from Special Forces School, and punch pierced, spoiled, sandal-wearing hippies, well, we’re obviously coming at this from different perspectives. I have a direct and deeply personal interest in my country’s security. This is a spectator sport for you. Whatever you choose to believe isn’t happening in the parts of North Korea you don’t visit is obviously even less than that to you — an exercise in channel-switching, I posit.
So no, I have no moral problem with holding would-be mass murderers captive until such time as we’re fairly certain they won’t commit mass murder. I support exactly as much (let’s just say it) torture as is necessary to spare innocent life by disrupting their plans. Legally, I see the potential for that sort of thing to get out of control, so I believe in putting every terrorist we capture through an Article V tribunal and allowing torture only when a magistrate or the FISA court finds probable cause to believe that using it will save innocent lives.
What we see in Gitmo and the reaction to it are two historical firsts. Never in history has a small band of terrorists had the capacity to kill thousands of people in a distant country in a matter of minutes. The “international community” hasn’t grasped that changed circumstances compel changed legal frameworks, but since when has the “international community” responded to any real security challenge effectively? Our own society hasn’t fully grasped or reacted to it either. So many of us are so consciously trying to forget not just 9/11, but the darker possibilities it implies. We lose sight of the very fact that 9/11 really happened while guys like Jack are pulling gulag hallucinations out of bongs.
The other first is that in all of history, nations that took soldiers of belligents nations prisoner have always held them prisoner for the duration of the war. It would be lovely, I think we can agree, if AQ would simply declare the end of its campaign to kill American civilians and the Gitmo inmates would swear, hope-to-die, that they’d never plot or carry out another airline bombing, hijacking, suicide bombing, or elementary school massacre. Unenlightened as I must be, I fail to grasp why terrorists who violate the most fundamental rules of civilized humanity should be entitled to rights that we didn’t give captured German soldiers during World War II.
I’m uncomfortable with Gitmo, and was from the start, because I could not see an end. You would naturally presume we can’t keep them there forever though that is physically possible.
But, unlike everyone else I’ve heard or read criticizing the place, I strongly disagree with how they define those people…
They seem clearly to be defined as NOT POWs or other forms of combatants nor civilians. From reading the Geneva Conventions, I thought this type of fighters were clearly defined as falling outside the procedures defined for POWs and civilians.
Whatever the case, there is no way in hell they should be given the same rights and privledges as an American citizen in American courts. And a bigger point to me is —- few people, in the US or abroad, would have even considered doing that 50 years ago when the international laws were laid down…….the very same laws so many today trumpet as binding principles being violated. It’s just willful ignorance…
But what I wanted to say is that from early on, I thought the same as One Free Korea pointed out in the quote above:
We are in a different era now in this 21st century setting.
The world has changed a good bit in some key ways (speed of information, transportation, connectivity through the internet, the ability to move cash and weapons and things that do harm…) —- and our civil societies and the global community they are supposed to run ——- has failed to keep up.
50+ years ago, when the Geneva Conventions were laid down, the ability of terrorist organizations to fund, communicate, and coordinate activities on a global scale would have been unimaginable.
And nobody would have dreamed of considering the members of that group “soldiers” in an “army” deserving of common rights.
But the best we can seem to come up with today to handle these new circumstances seems to be to fight back and forth about whether they are POWs or not or that we should put them in a federal court with a jury of American peers, I guess, and sentence them as we would someone for manslaughter…..
It’s nuts….
If Joshua was a true crusader, he would give equal time on his blog to the Halliburton “concentration camps†built and waiting for Americans in every US state. It’s easy research, but Joshua would rather sniff his nose in an Asian toilet.
He can’t understand Gitmo’s precendent will eventually gas millions more families than Kim Jung Il could ever hope.
Jack the sock sure has livened up the discussion with his tin foil hat delusions.
Legally, I see the potential for that sort of thing to get out of control, so I believe in putting every terrorist we capture through an Article V tribunal and allowing torture only when a magistrate or the FISA court finds probable cause to believe that using it will save innocent lives.
But he’s not the only one with nutty ideas. “Probable cause to believe that using it (torture) will save lives” sounds chillingly like the premise of Minority Report.
Sonagi, Like it or not, we’re faced with a choice between waterboarding people and letting mass murder plots go forward. Now, if you believe that waterboarding is torture, don’t you see the benefit in having power that expansive at least checked by some kind of legal process of review?
Or would you just opt to let the plans go forward, in which case, where’s the due process for the victims of the next 9/11?
[Update: Jack isn’t the sock, he’s the batshit crazy one, so his comments go straight to moderation. Hoju Saram and Van Midd are the same person. Granted, it didn’t take much clicking around for me to figure it out, but I’d like an explanation. This isn’t an offense on the same scale as Nora / Kushibo, who actually set up two completely different pseudonymous blogs, but it’s smarmy to pretend to be two different people at one site, especially to retread and amplify the same arguments that “VanMidd” has already made here, and to which I’ve already responded. I believe “VanMidd” has also commented at Richardson’s site as well.]
Do you have specific examples of real mass terrorist plots that were discovered and stopped with information gained through torture?
Didn’t you see the link in my last comment?
At least you call waterboarding torture as opposed to “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The former CIA agent provided a prisoner’s name but vaguely described his information as having thwarted dozens of plots. There is a trade-off between the public’s right to know and the need for secrecy. This trade-off requires trust of government institutions, and frankly, Joshua, my trust of the current administration and the agencies that serve it is very low. I cannot countenance legally sanctioned torture because one former CIA agent says that waterboarding one man yielded information about planned attacks.
I cannot countenance the possibility that some temporary discomfort for a few evil men could ever outweigh the horrible deaths of thousands of innocents. Our Constitution and legal system aren’t suicide pacts. You say you don’t trust the government that much. That is precisely why its power should be controlled in circumstances so extraordinary that the government’s agents could not morally refuse to exercise it.
So you think waterboarding is “temporary discomfort”? Tell ya what, Joshua. Since we don’t live too far from each other, why don’t you come out to my place and we’ll do a little “enhanced interrogation” roleplay. You can get into my bathtub (fully clothed, of course) and I’ll turn on the faucet over your face for a couple of minutes. Then you can tell me whether having water poured down your nose and mouth feels like “temporary discomfort.”
Hmmmm. Let me ask my wife about that. Meanwhile, tell me how you’re going to explain to the orphaned children from the next 9/11 that waterboarding might prevent. When it’s a stark choice between Abu Zubayah suffering or succeeding, I see no moral choice other than that he should suffer so others do not.
hoju_saram, vanmidd, call me what you want. My full name is Van Middleton, you can find my blog at
http://www.ghosttreemedia.com.
Photos of DPRK here: http://www.ghosttreemedia.com/?page_id=24
I’ve commented here before, and I’ve also commented on Richardson’s site, not unkindly. Got nothing to hide on that count. Using different names was not an intentional ploy, so no need to get paranoid.
I wish you’d have the courage to make Maazel’s argument directly instead of doing the same thing implicitly. You don’t have the balls to say that a lower standard should be applied to massive atrocities against, or the engineered starvation of, Asian men, women, and kids who are guilty of nothing more than familial relation to a suspected class enemy.
I don’t have the balls, or I don’t believe that? Talk about straw men. Stop telling me what I think, and encouraging me to write about it. Instead, read what I write and take it on face value.
…you’re all over the Internet telling us of the great times to be had in Pyongyang and thus abetting those very atrocities.
I’ve written some light-hearted things, but that doesn’t mean I’m “abetting attrocities”, surely? You can’t be serious all the time. My overall impression of the place was hardly glowing, after all:
http://www.ghosttreemedia.com/?paged=2
Feel free to read it if you want to know what I think, instead of assuming what you want.
This is a spectator sport for you.
No it’s not. Amoung other projects, I have a documentary in the pipeline about a North Korean who escaped from the DPRK gulags. It’s going to be grim, and I’m hoping it will help raise awareness of the issue in the west and in the ROK. I’ve already contacted Helping Hands, and I’ll be back in korea in April to get it moving.
Whatever you choose to believe isn’t happening in the parts of North Korea you don’t visit is obviously even less than that to you
What the fuck do you know about what believe or don’t believe, other than what I’ve told you? Try sticking to what I’ve said, instead of making shit up. Makes things easier, since you don’t end up talking at your own invention.
Do I feel the need to apologise for visiting the country? Absolutely not. My theory is that all and any contact that North Koreans have with westerners is a good thing. Engagement is good thing. I don’t think the DPRK can change for the good from within, by itself, at least not without an apoplectic bloodbath, which might include Seoul. My position is almost exactly the same as Andre Lankov’s. And that includes Kaesung.
Unlike you, I also believe in justice and immutable law, in having unwavering principles, in habeas corpus. I don’t believe in torture, in any shape or form, for any reason, whether it be en masse in camp 22, on a handul of “enemy combatants” in Gitmo, or on martians on Mars. That includes waterboarding, solitary confinement without trail for 5 years + etc.
At the end of a day I think you’re an unabashed hypocrite. Doesn’t seem to matter how many times I agree that the differences and scale is huge, you still think that using techniques systematized by the Spanish Inquisition and preferred by such upstanding groups as the Kmher Rouge is perfectly acceptable for official use by your own gov.
Instead, you simply change the subject to a few hundred suspected terrorists in Gitmo — people who would have absolutely no qualms about killing millions of innocent American men, women, and kids.
It wasn’t me who “changed the subject”. The subject was originally brought up you, in a post a long while back, in which you went out of your way to praise gitmo, and is now the subject of Maazi’s spiel, which I read at the Hole, along with your other comments. Which is why its at the centre of this argument. For the record, as I’ve said before, I think Gitmo is by far the lesser evil.
But you don’t think it’s wrong at all. Putting someone in a 2×4 cell for 5 years, with periods of up to a year without sunlight, without trial, no worries.
This, no problem.
That’s why you’re in no position to cast moral aspertions.
As for the rest of the garbage you’ve been spouting:
“[A]ll us lefties are scoob smoking hippies on welfare ….“ Good on you for admitting it, and I’d gladly return the favor by recommending a decent barber and springing for bus fare to the day labor center or the nearest Home Depot. It’s going to be a long road, VanMidd, but we’ll be here for you when you decide to take that first step.]
and
…since I want to see my kids grow up, attend college, graduate from Special Forces School, and punch pierced, spoiled, sandal-wearing hippies, well, we’re obviously coming at this from different perspectives…
Well, I suppose we are.
Temporary discomfort?
It’s interesting, because I would have to say “yes” to Sonagi’s question.
It is my understanding that the government has occasionally used waterboarding to train our own operatives.
I guess we could say electric shock is also temporary discomfort. (I’ve been tazered myself for training).
And for some reason, my mind revolts more at the prospect of hooking a prisoner to an electric outlet than causing them to believe they are drowning. But then again, shock therapy was used to treat mental illness for a long time too……
On the question of having stopped terrorist attacks – does it have to be specific attacks?
Because it would seem obvious that information from top people leading to an expansive attack on the terror network would obviously help prevent future attacks.
usinkorea,
Then your government is keeping good company. As I already mentioned, the Inquisition used it, the Kmher Rouge used it, Japanese Kempeitai used it (and were put on trial and executed for it by the US ~ they were also the guys who experimented on humans, btw), the Gestapo used it, just to mention a few.
From here: When you hog-tie a human being, tilt him head down, stuff a rag in his mouth and over his nostrils and pour water onto the rag slowly and steadily to the point where his lungs fill with water and he’s suffocating and drowning, that is torture.
Four decades ago in the field in Vietnam, I saw a suspected Viet Cong waterboarded by South Vietnamese Army troops. The American Army advisers who were attached to the Vietnamese unit turned their backs and walked away before the torture began. It was then a Vietnamese affair and something they couldn’t be associated with.
The victim was taken to the edge of death. His body was wracked with spasms as he fought for air. The soldier holding the five-gallon kerosene tin filled with muddy water from a nearby stream kept pouring it slowly onto the rag, and the victim desperately sucking for even a little air kept inhaling that water instead.
It seemed to go on forever. Did the suspect talk? I’m sure he did. I’m sure he told his torturers whatever he thought they wanted to hear, whether it was true or not. But I didn’t see the end of it because one of the American advisers came to me and told me I had to leave; that I couldn’t watch this interrogation, if that’s what it was, any longer.
That adviser knew that water torture was torture; he knew that it was outlawed by the Geneva Convention; he knew that he couldn’t be a part to it; and he knew that he didn’t want me to witness such brutality.
But our good host thinks some temporary discomfort for a few evil men is ok.
Nevermind that he’s clueless about whether or not these guys are guilty or innocent, since he doesn’t think they deserve a trial, either. Innocent until proven guilty? Bah. And this from a guy who claims legal training.
My point stands, until Joshua can reconcile his own stone-age principles vis-a-ve the law and the treatment of other human beings, he’s in no position to cast moral aspertions about anyone.
Hoju Saram, First, a ground rule: if you post as any other identity but “Hoju Saram” here again, I’ll delete your comment and put you in the moderation cue. Most bloggers would not have extended you the courtesy of a warning, and in any event, we’ve already heard your one and only thought –“Gitmo!” — enough to get your point, such as it is.
From what you choose to emphasize and ingnore, we can see that in the mind of Van Middleton, 275 obese terrorists are a cri de coeur, while 200,000 gulag inmates and 400,000 buried victims are unworthy of mention. That’s the logical equivalent of trying to fend off a hurricane with a cocktail umbrella. Not once have you ever offered a serious discussion or condemnation of their suffering; you can only try to change the subject or fling red herrings. Perhaps knowing, as you should, your own small part in maintaining the atrocities in North Korea, you find such diversions comforting. It’s one thing to be an ordinary fool, but you’re an evil fool.
Temporary discomfort?
It’s interesting, because I would have to say “yes†to Sonagi’s question.
It is my understanding that the government has occasionally used waterboarding to train our own operatives.
In this morning’s Washington Post is an Op-Ed Why It Was Called ‘Water Torture’ by former Navy flight crew member Richard Mezo, who endured waterboarding in a training exercise. He wrote, “Pulling out my fingernails or even cutting off a finger would have been preferable. At least if someone had attacked my hands, I would have had to simply tolerate pain. But drowning is another matter.” He goes on to note that while he knew he would not be killed, “…my body sensed and reacted to the danger it was in.” He then describes how his body lurched up to stop the drowning while two men were trying to hold him down.
In one his comments either here or at the Marmot’s, Joshua correctly called waterboarding “torture.” Where we disagree is whether this or any other form of torture should be permissible.
Because it would seem obvious that information from top people leading to an expansive attack on the terror network would obviously help prevent future attacks.
Al-Qaeda or any other terrorist network will react and make alternate plans any time a high-ranking person is captured, for they cannot assume that person won’t talk. In other words, the very act of catching operatives is effective in halting plans. John McCain has spoken out very clearly against torture as not only inhumane but ineffective as the intel is not reliable.
“Fend off a hurricane with a cocktail umbrella?” Never could quite figure out what those colorful cocktail umbrellas were good for, other than as a reminder of one too many drink consumed. Now I know.
Hoju Gentleman follows in the long tradition of Euro-Americans going to East Asia in the sincere belief that they are, if not outright missionaries, then at least agents of change, no matter how miniscule or non-existent their cultural impact on the native society. Some good can unwittingly arise out of the encounter, be it the kind impression from a safe distance of an American pedophile giving away candy forged on a Chinese peasant boy who grows up disbelieving all Americans to be evil, or the illustration of the term “useful idiot,” whether reinforced by European and American journalists in Yenan who found in the Chinese Communist leadership rural nostalgia and saw nothing but “democratic peasant idealism” and “Jeffersonian egalitarianism,” or by the messianic Mr Maazel who I assume intends to plant in his North Korean audience the seeds of musical creativity and artistic freedom. I wonder how much Kim Jong Il is charging the NY Phil for admission.
How people choose to spend their money is none of my business, but paying the world’s most brutal dictatorship out of curiosity and weaving fantastic tales about the “perhaps ultimately authoritarian but basically well-meaning” communist regime is not my idea of money well spent. Much rather stick to my immoral materialistic impulses and take guilty pleasure in purchasing the latest designer shoes that I don’t need. That way I’ll only be fattening up some rich capitalist white guy sitting on a beach sipping on his mai tai imagining himself a hero able to achieve great feats like planting the seeds of freedom in a slave state or fending off a hurricane with his mounting column of cocktail umbrellas, instead of feeding that very slave state in real life that goes on starving, torturing, and killing millions of innocent men, women, and children.
As I noted above and you have failed to address, the actual laws people like you are basing your argument on don’t seem to exist. The Geneva Conventions spell out in detail who is – and who is not – a legal military combatant or government agent. Those who play by the rules are thus given rights and priviledges also spelled out in the rules. Those who do not — are clearly said to fall outside those rights and priviledges.
When the Geneva Conventions were written down, Islamic terrorists, and the Viet Cong for that matter, were clearly NOT the groups the authors were giving rights.
Until you address that issue — the sacred cry of “law” you keep throwing out is nothing more than a smoke screen.
As for Sonagi’s quote, it really only adds to my previous thinking and point: we’ve used it as a training method.
Why?
I would say a reasonable guess is that it was considered different from pulling out fingernails or burning people with red hot coals or beating them senseless. (and unlike what hoju states – it simulated drowning – not applied drowning only to pull back)
It would seem obvious the method was deemed good enough to expose our own men to an area of ill treatment they could expect upon capture —- but also —- a method that was not so horrific it should have never even been considered for use — again — on our own people…
In short, they deemed it useful but not excessive for use —– on our own people.
So, I have a hard time lining up with people who want me to equate its use on irregular, illegal fighters with gas chambers in Nazi Germany and concentration camps in North Korea.
People want me to believe we are in the same line as Hitler or Kim Jong Il because we used on Islamic terrorists a method we use to train our own soldiers and operatives???
And worst of all —- really —– worst of all —— I have a feeling a good number of the waterboarding-is-torture champions would be singing a different tune if we had only used the method in the Clinton years.
(I don’t count Sonagi among that number, based on having read her over the years. But I do get that feeling in general when hearing about this in the press and listening to a lot of the mainstream, everyday citizen critics on this issue)
I forgot…..Just disrupting the current conditions for the terrorist groups and gaining information on the members of the groups and likely locations is effective information in thwarting their efforts. Even if the groups move to rearrange things and relocate leadership, we gain more information about how they operate and who the leaders are and we force them to spend time and energy and resources getting set up elsewhere. That prevents attacks…
They get a bunch of the money not from the individual tourists but from South Korean chaebol for something like franchise rights. The Hyundai deals from the start were a way for the South Korean government to funnel money to the North. That is how North Korea could get useful cash while Hyundai lost millions and millions on the projects.
Sorry, mate; too busy washing my hair today and drying it tomorrow to respond to your queries! But send me some long-stem roses and chocolate by Valentine’s Day, or, at the latest, by the Dear Leader’s birthday this Saturday, and I’ll think about it!
How’s that for my “ignorance on the subject of engagement”? Sound all too familiar?
🙂
I’ll take a stab at Euro-American….
It reminds me of my own thoughts about the way intellectual and pseudo-intellectual Americans can’t figure out how to think and feel without reference to how they think and feel in France.
For example — a perfect example —- the war in Iraq and the War on Terror —- the Euro-Americans, along with their old world brethren, redefined the word “unilateral” to mean — anything France and Germany do not agree with.
The dozen+ other European nations (and others) that went along with us don’t count, because Paris was pissed.
(Never mind any idea that perhaps Chirac and France’s long standing ties to Iraq and other Middle Eastern nations where American business is hampered, if not prohibited, might have been one of the reasons for France’s obstructionism. Only America can have blood on its hands for oil — or for supporting regimes like the one in South Korea before the 1990s. No. When France cozies up to dictators, or South Korea for that matter, it is called diplomacy and a good thing…)
From Foucault to Derrida to the talking heads in Le Monde or other Euro-centric social outlets, a certain segment of American intellectuals are groomed in higher education (and intellectual culture) to stick their heads up France’s ass….
usinkorea, I didn’t go to mt Kumgansan, I went via an agent to pyongyang, and on from there. I also got a breakdown of where the money i paid went. after everything was accounted for (beijing-based western agency, flights, food, train, hotel, etc etc), very little was left to Mokran, which is basically the agency in charge of tourism in the DPRK. The amount of money that then went through Mokran to the regime itself can’t have been very much at all. We paid a tip to our guides in euros, and that money was filtered through their extended families in Pyongyang to buy ncessities (luxuries for most north koreans). All of that fed a low blackmarket capitalist system, of the the sort that grew in the old USSR prior to it collapsing. I know this, because the payment was kept below board. I actually bought some stuff for my guide from the hotel shops (a mother of three) because she couldn’t do it herself, at least not regularly. I bought nappies, soap, toothpaste and a few other necessities for her extended family. I also saw photos of her children and some of her family in her house. Although she was amoung the most well off in the north, she was living in what I would describe as abject poverty.
I have no qualms whatsover in giving her money. In fact, whilst i would have prefered much more to have given it to someone outside the capital, preferrably in the camps, I couldn’t.
We did gave out items such as chocolate to kids in Kaesung, cigarettes to soliders in punmujon. I doubt Kim Jung Il got a kickback from that, but Joshua may disagree.
Whatever I did it was miniscule in the grand scale of things, but I think that the net result was more good than harm. If the DPRK would allow it, I’d just as soon see a million other tourists like me go there, notwithstanding the money that would inevitably find its way into the coffers of the regime.
I think that with help from China, there can be gradual systematic reform in the DPRK, and that tourism plays a part in that. There were only a handful of western tourists in Pyongyang, but there were thousands of Chinese, and according to our hosts, the number is growing every year. The best possible scenario, in my opinion, is a transition to a market economy with a soft landing, something that has looked more and more possible since 2002.
The alternative (no tourism, no engagement) could result in an internal coup, but more likely it would end in a bloodbath, with the most brutal successor a likely candidate for new top dog, and the gates shut as firmly as ever. Think Pol Pot.
I was referring to your last general question about tourism dollars overall. The South Korean government has certainly used tourism as a means to prop up the regime.
Also, the bloodbath has been happening for some time.
Detente advocates need to admit to themselves (and everyone else) that what they want to do is keep the massacre among the North Koreans alone and at a slower pace than will come IF the regime decides to take out as many people as possible if it were to collapse.
3,000,000 North Koreans starved to death in the 1990s as we kept the regime alive….