A Pilgrim’s Digression

I have often written about the use of the straw man rhetorical tactic by right wing pundits eager to paint opponents as traitors. I don’t think it can be pointed out often enough how the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Neal Boortz, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter achieve rhetorical dominance over their philosophical opponents by misrepresenting and in some cases outright lying about what their opponents believe.

Nowhere has the straw man been used more stridently by members of the right-wing punditry than in their attempts to demonize members of their own party–Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner–for desiring detainees in the war on terror to be treated in accord with the Geneva Convention. In Ann Coulter’s words, treating captives in accord with principles of human dignity apparently means that John McCain wants terrorists to be “treated like Martha Stewart.” When did Senator McCain express this opinion concerning terrorists?

Never, of course. It’s all rhetorical with these people, you see. Facts don’t matter, just how good a rhetorical dig you can get in. Can you pithily and cuttingly express what you really wish the Senator believed? There you have your aphoristic slogan. Sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Rush Limbaugh, on his radio program, has been repeatedly charging John McCain with supporting an “Al Qaeda bill of rights,” and he has been playing one of his mock radio commercials in which a “terrorist” speaking gobbledygook that is supposed to be Arabic phones John McCain to complain of torture and to ask that he also be granted his second amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution.

Has John McCain ever said that detainees should be granted the rights of U.S. citizens under the Constitution? No, but never mind that. Isn’t it great how this comedian, who also wants us to believe he’s a serious news broadcaster and analyst, rhetorically punches John McCain’s lights out?

McCain has said that his desire to see detainees treated like traditional prisoners of war stems from his belief that if Americans abandon the Geneva Convention now, in future wars Americans may also be denied their rights and may be tortured. The key phrase there–and these are McCain’s words–are “in future wars.” No one expects that by treating terrorists like human beings that they will reciprocate in kind, when our troops are taken prisoner.

Yet this is exactly what Ann Coulter and others accuse McCain of believing. The Senator from Arizona is not that naive, Miss Coulter. He was tortured by North Vietnamese captors who did not uphold the Geneva Convention, or even basic moral precepts that no one needs codified in international law. Yet Coulter nonetheless insists that McCain believes that our current enemy (emphasis mine) will treat American prisoners better because we uphold the Geneva Convention.

The argument that because our enemy are “savages,” therefore our own “savage” behavior is justified or at least mitigated, is an argument as old as war itself. It is based on exactly the human weakness that Christians the world over have supposedly been called to struggle against: the desire for pure revenge, an eye for an eye. Christ did not say, “If your enemy strikes you, hit him back twice as hard.” Sorry, Republicans.

And as in any war, the rhetoric of those supporting the war is largely based on demonization of the enemy. Unfortunately, often such demonization is helped along by actual atrocities committed by the enemy, too. Beheadings are only the most gruesome way in which terrorists give Limbaugh his big scare stick with which to browbeat the American public. What conservatives don’t seem to understand is that by acting barbarously, we supply our enemy with rhetorical talking points, too. Haditha…is it so soon forgotten? Or Guantanamo bay…how can we talk about human rights abuses in Iran and Syria when we incarcerate hundreds without any kind of due process?
Yet today, Ann Coulter takes the demonization of the enemy farther than anyone I have ever heard. In a statement in her column titled Are Video Beheadings Covered by the Geneva Convention, Coulter writes, “But being nice to enemies is an idea that has never worked, no matter how many times liberals make us do it. It didn’t work with the Soviet Union, Imperial Japan, Hitler or the North Vietnamese – enemies notable for being more civilized than the Islamic savages we are at war with today.”

Note what she wrote there: Hitler was “more civilized” than the “Islamic savages” we are fighting today. The Japanese were “more civilized” than the “Islamic savages” we are fighting today. The Soviet Union–Joseph Stalin!–was “more civilized than the “Islamic savages” we face today. Ann Coulter must have an odd idea of what it means to be civilized, that’s all I can say.
Do we really have to tally the dead for Miss Coulter? Does someone need to refer her to some primary sources, say a book on the Rape of Nanking, so that she can better acquaint herself with the depth of Japanese depravity?

In recent months, as the war and its proponents have grown weaker and more frustrated by the day, it has become common for them to try to elevate their “noble” cause by comparing it to World War II. But the above comparison by Coulter is really an astounding bit of hyperbole on her part.

Furthermore, such hyperbole raises questions in the minds of thinking people who don’t blindly accept statements from pundits because what they say is funny or sounds brilliant.

If the “Islamic savages” are such a threat, why has the President not mobilized Americans for Total War? Why are the only ones sacrificing for the cause a few hundred thousand volunteers? Why not bring back the draft to more effectively deal with this menace?

Also, those of us who know a little something about history will have even more questions. Above, I mentioned the Rape of Nanking. I might also have mentioned the Bataan Death March, in which American prisoners were beaten to death and in some cases beheaded by Japanese soldiers simply because they tried to assuage their thirst with water from a ditch. Japanese soldiers were tried as war criminals for acts committed on the Death March. The Tokyo War Crimes trials brought justice to what at the time might have been called, in the style of our own day, the Japanese “Buddhist savages.”

Did Americans torture, beat, or behead Japanese “Buddhist savages” because they did it to our boys? Were Japanese “Buddhist savages” denied rights or otherwise treated unfairly? No. Despite their own personal bestialism, they were accorded basic human rights, including the right to defend themselves before a court of law.

To be sure, this angered some Americans. Pearl Harbor and Bataan were not distant historic occurrences, but fresh memories in 1946. Some people wanted Japan and its people treated every bit as brutally as they had treated us. The same is true of the Reconstruction period after the American Civil War. In 1865, there was a strong contingent of Americans who felt that Lincoln was too soft on the South. One of those people was his own Vice-President, Andrew Johnson, and we all know too well the effects of a retributive policy such as Johnson enacted following Lincoln’s assassination.

Just as people like Rush Limbaugh today complain that prisoners at Guantanamo are actually treated too well, in 1944 and 1945, people complained that German prisoners of war quartered in prison camps here in America were living in the lap of luxury.

The simple fact is, Miss Coulter and Mr. Limbaugh, Americans should not treat others as we are treated. We should treat others as we would want to be treated. That is the Golden Rule, after all.

When John McCain says that he worries about “what is going to happen to Americans who are taken prisoner in future wars,” I believe he is thinking about a potential war with Iran or Syria or North Korea. Or perhaps some nation as yet undetermined. Perhaps we can’t expect those countries to abide by basic tenets of human dignity, either, but we should not give them an excuse to torture and behead. In some ways, a few of our soldiers have already provided just such an excuse with Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and the rape and murder of a young Iraqi girl and her family in Mahmoudiyah.

The consequences of Americans behaving nearly as badly as our enemy are manifold and disastrous. We need to uphold some kind of standard of decency for ourselves and our soldiers, otherwise our cause is undermined both internally and outwardly. Morality is not relative to how other people behave. The excuse “All the other kids are doing it” is not allowable in most families. Why should we liberals have to explain that precept to supposed guardians of objective truth like Ann Coulter?