People and societies don’t just wake up one morning to find they no longer recognize themselves. It’s a process. And we are in the process in this country of “defining deviancy down” in ways I never thought possible. We are legitimizing torture and indefinite detention — saying that we will only do this to the people who really deserve it. One cannot help but wonder what “really deserves it” will mean in the years to come as we fight our endless war against terror.
Sure, right now it’s just a bunch of foreigners and I guess we don’t feel foreigners are entitled to basic human rights. They must not be human — or at least not as human as “we” are. When you think about it, who knows who “we” are either? Right wingers make millions of dollars writing books about how liberals are godless, death-loving, traitors within. Many people who read those books probably believe these liberals are only one step away from being sub-human too —- they are, after all, godless traitors.
Or in the well-known words of Martin Niemöller:
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
How did we get to this pass, where we are debating techniques of torture rather than shunning it?