Truth
Here’s an elegantly-put provocative thought which I happen to agree with:
The United States government has always engaged in war crimes and human rights violations. What’s different this decade is that, under the leadership of a terrible president, our elites have become vociferous advocates of the goodness and rightness of war crimes and human rights violations.
As Mr. Henley suggests, this newfound frankness is all to the bad. I’ve come to appreciate in the past eight years how important duplicitousness in foreign policy talk actually is.
Discuss.
It’s an interesting (if almost entirely ahistorical) thought. I guess the followup question is this: are you fine with “war crimes and human rights violations” so long as they’re done in your name secretly? Out of sight, out of mind?
And if you’re not okay with it…then what’s the difference?
To be quite honest, I’m not sure. I can tell you, though, that reading the Jane Mayer book, I was struck with just how wrong and upside down everything seemed. It wasn’t moral outrage that cried out in me; it was more of a sorrowful head-shaking, as if to say “This is what we’ve been up to?”
Kennelly and I have talked about this before, and I expect him to chime in at some point. I’m fairly agnostic and unsentimental, so Dan always likes confronting me with rationalist arguments for morality. I think he’ll argue that imposing moral strictures on our actions, absolute moral strictures, is a way of ensuring the best possible outcomes, because people are weak and stupid and they need absolute dicta in order to not screw things up.
By the end of his post, I think Henley is making some kind of cynical argument about soft power. The bit I excerpted, however, resonated for me in some different way, the same way I felt reading the Mayer book.
Have you seen Liberty Valance yet or am I gonna have to lend you a copy?