I mentioned in the previous entry that I don’t think modern Americans have the same self-image of nobility that previous generations did. According to David Kurtz over at Talking Points Memo, we don’t have as much courage, either. Here are some numbers for you to consider the next time you see one of those over-the-top political attack ads trying to convince you there is no alternative to maintaining our own American gulag at Guantanamo:

Number of Gitmo detainees that the GOP hopes to keep off mainland U.S. soil with its “Keep Terrorists Out Of America Act”: roughly 250.

 

Number of Axis POWs detained in camps on the U.S. mainland at the end of WWII: roughly 425,000.

Axis POWs. That would be Nazi and Japanese soldiers captured abroad and shipped here, to our soil, to sit out the war inside American borders. Well-trained, fully indoctrinated fascists who would’ve loved to slit American throats for their Fuhrer and their Emperor. And yet we managed to keep them locked up, didn’t we?

I’ve got a prison only a couple miles from my house, and I’m sure it’s full of serial killers, gangsters, rapists, murderers, white supremacists, and paranoid militia types, but I’ve never lost one wink of sleep because of it. So why is the thought of 250 suspected terrorists — suspected, mind you, still not proven in many cases — locked down inside a mainland military prison or even a civilian Supermax facility so scary? We’ve already got terrorists locked up in our mainland prisons. The Blind Shiek and Timothy McVeigh come immediately to mind. (Okay, McVeigh is dead, but you see my point.)

Al Qaeda is not composed of immortal, superpowered, super-intelligent boogeymen, and behaving as if it is only gives them power over us. I, for one, am sick of being scared, or, more accurately, of politicians and talk-radio personalities telling me I ought to be. Gitmo is a PR disaster and must be closed if America is to regain the moral high ground in our struggles. If you’re that worried about the Gitmo detainees causing trouble, just turn them out with the regular prison population. I’m sure all those gangsters and militia types I mentioned earlier will be happy to keep an eye on them for us…

Of all the objectionable things that emerged from the presidency of George W. Bush — and it’s a long list, in my opinion — nothing has troubled me more than the issue of torture.

I’m troubled by the fact that it happened at all, of course, that our military and civilian intelligence people drowned and abused and tormented prisoners until (in some cases) they literally lost their minds. But what really disturbs me about this whole thing is how few of my fellow Americans seem to care.

Even now, when it has become blindingly apparent that the torturers were not soldiers who lost control in the heat of battle but were actually acting on orders from the White House itself, when it’s been revealed that the White House had a cadre of lawyers — including, I’m sad to say, a number of guys with connections to my home state — writing memos and briefs to justify decisions the administration knew were legally questionable, even after all that, there are still people who would defend the Bush “interrogation” policies. The news media still can’t bring itself to use the word “torture” on any kind of regular basis, preferring instead Orwellian weasel words that were coined by the freaking Nazis. And many pundits are brazenly parsing whether certain techniques constitute actual torture or merely “harsh treatment.” (Here’s a clue: if we would call it torture when it’s done to one of our people, then it’s freakin’ torture, people!) Hell, some people are trying dodge the legal and moral questions altogether and debate only whether waterboarding actually works, as if efficacy is the only consideration when it comes to this stuff.

You know what, though? It doesn’t matter if it works, not in my book. Because it’s wrong. Because we’re supposed to be better people than those who would destroy us. We used to believe we were. But that appears to have changed in recent years.

I like to think — to hope — that this apparent shift is due merely to ignorance, that people simply don’t realize the techniques used in Abu Ghraib and CIA “black sites” were effectively ripped off from the Soviets and the communist Chinese. (I don’t know about you, but I find it immensely unsettling to think our people have done the same things we used to condemn the KGB for.) But honestly, I’m not so sure. In my more cynical moments, I find myself thinking, sadly, that a lot of people out there are perfectly okay with subjecting other people to horrendous inhumanities because they think torturing people somehow avenges 9/11, or because they’re racist, or maybe because they’d rather feel “safe” than accept the risk and effort of living up to our nation’s ideals. Well, maybe those people do feel safer knowing that we’re beating the hell out of people with Arabic-sounding names. Not me, though. Because I worry about what it does to us, to our very souls.

Kevin Drum said essentially the same thing last week, and his words have been echoing in my mind ever since:

I don’t care about the Geneva Conventions or U.S. law. I don’t care about the difference between torture and “harsh treatment.” I don’t care about the difference between uniformed combatants and terrorists. I don’t care whether it “works.” I oppose torture regardless of the current state of the law; I oppose even moderate abuse of helpless detainees; I oppose abuse of criminal suspects and religious heretics as much as I oppose it during wartime; and I oppose it even if it produces useful information.

 

The whole point of civilization is as much moral advancement as it is physical and technological advancement. But that moral progress comes slowly and very, very tenuously. In the United States alone, it took centuries to decide that slavery was evil, that children shouldn’t be allowed to work 12-hour days on power looms, and that police shouldn’t be allowed to beat confessions out of suspects.

 

On other things there’s no consensus yet. Like it or not, we still make war, and so does the rest of the world. But at least until recently, there was a consensus that torture is wrong. Full stop. It was the practice of tyrants and barbarians. But like all moral progress, the consensus on torture is tenuous, and the only way to hold on to it — the only way to expand it — is by insisting absolutely and without exception that we not allow ourselves to backslide. Human nature being what it is — savage, vengeful, and tribal — the temptations are just too great. Small exceptions will inevitably grow into big ones, big ones into routine ones, and the progress of centuries is undone in an eyeblink.

The eye is in the midst of blinking, people. What will we see when the lid rises again?