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.