Ben Sargent Is a National Treasure

Somebody just said, "Ben Sargent is a national treasure." They're right. Now who was it?

Comments

[lagarita]

Oh Oh Oh! I got it:

"...we can never lift the embargo on Cuba as long as that government is engaged in "

PROVIDING HEALTH CARE FOR THE CITIZENS OF CUBA!

[Henry]

hint: do a search on "sargent" and "national treasure" in your gmail account.

[arrow]

Is what we're doing really as bad as what Cuba does (as the comic implies)? We are torturing, wiretaping, etc. our enemies in a war. Cuba does the same to its domestic political opposition.

We torture our enemies because we are scared. This is not a good enough reason, of course. Nevertheless, it is an extreme case of overzealous national defense. Cuba's government's actions, on the other hand, are a case of overzealous grip on power.

I think that what we are doing is wrong and cowardly, and that there should be prosecutions and impeachments as a result. I still think Cuba's leadership is worse, and that the comic is a little too smug in implying moral equivalence.

[Lewis Carroll]

Arrow, I actually think the point is more of whether we're in a position to justifiably make moral judgments. Not that I don't agree with your sentiments 100% about the respective rationales for rights infringement. It's just that violating basic rights, even for *better* reasons still leaves one in a, shall we say, less than perfect position for judging others. YMMV

[Maynard Handley]

"We are torturing, wiretaping, etc. our enemies in a war. Cuba does the same to its domestic political opposition."

You know for a fact that they are "our enemies"? How exactly, given that they've not been tried, and that they were picked up randomly, apparently often as mistakes or turned in by enemies as revenge?
And how exactly do you define "a war"? What the US is engaged in right now hardly looks like what normal people call a war. If you are prepared to call any random struggle you like a war (which does seem to be a preferred US tactic, vide "War on Cancer, War on Poverty, War on Drugs", then who is to say that struggling against your domestic political opponents is not "a war". IMHO the vast bulk of what is going on in the "War on Terror" is occurring for no reason other than domestic politics, so I fail to see much distinction here.

[arrow]

Maynard Handley: You know for a fact that they are "our enemies"?...

Nope. I guess what I should have said is that we are torturing, wiretaping, etc. people we *think* are our enemies in what we *think* is a war. My larger point stands or falls separately from whether or not you agree with those "thoughts."

Maynard Handley: IMHO the vast bulk of what is going on in the "War on Terror" is occurring for no reason other than domestic politics

If you think that the torture, holding people indefinately without trial, etc. are being done for politics rather than out of a misguided attempt at security, you live in a sad world where thousands of our government and military officials are evil, and all the others are ignorant cowards. I prefer to believe that the lot are witless cowards acting out of fear. (This is what passes for optimism under President Bush.)

[arrow]

I mean the people doing the torturing and the rights-denying are witless cowards. There are lots of government and military people who have nothing to do with that stuff and are probably not witless cowards.

[dogfacegeorge]

"We are [wiretapping] our enemies in a war. Cuba does the same to its domestic political opposition."

Do you have any reason to believe that the Castro Admin is wiretapping its domestic political opposition?
Do you have any reason to believe that the Bush Admin is not wiretapping its domestic political opposition?

[Craig Nelson]

@ arrow

"We are torturing, wiretaping, etc. our enemies in a war. Cuba does the same to its domestic political opposition."

This is an argument that 1) the ends justify the means and 2) our ends are more pressing. Sorry, wrong on both counts. The first is a question of practical morality. This is the planet Earth, not the set of "24." For the second point, it would be quite unusual, to be polite, to believe terrorism threatens the existence of the US. Castro had every reason to be afraid for the existence of himself and his government.

Torture cannot be condoned -- whether in Havana or Guantanamo.

[arrow]

Craig,

I do not believe the ends justify the means. It's not that "our ends are more pressing." It's that our actions, while wrong, are more understandable. I'm saying we're guilty of the same crimes but should get a lighter sentence.

This is not "apologist for torture" stuff. What we are doing is wrong. We should stop. We should prosecute the highest level people we can prove are responsible for these actions. Nevertheless, I am saying that you cannot put every single instance of a government unjustifiably torturing someone on the exact same moral level. It is bullshit for people to say there is no meaningful moral distinction between the U.S.'s current actions and Cuba's keeping its entire society under the government's boot for 50 years. We are behaving badly out of fear. Castro put into place a system of government that does not allow independant thought or action by any of its citizens. We are moving in the wrong direction, but as of right now I'd say Castro's the bad guy of the two.

[tedb]

OK, so we're still slightly better than a Communist dictatorship. What a relief! Go, team!

[walkingtheline]

@arrow - why is it morally wrong for Cuba to torture a Cuban if it is morally acceptable for the United States to torture the same person? Why is it wrong for the United States to torture an American if Cuba could do so and remain in the right?

I find American notions of statehood and fellowship very disturbing sometimes.

[Maynard Handley]

arrow, your argument is predicated on the assumption that Castro's society is a haven of terror. Is this is fact true, as opposed to it being simply one more poorly run 3rd world country, just like so many others.

Exactly how many people have been tortured by Castro's regime? How many killed? How many imprisoned?
As opposed to that, how many are alive, because of the medical regime, that would be dead if they'd been born in a neighboring country.
How does the score in these regards compare with what the US has done directly in Iraq (whose bodycount is, I suspect vastly higher) and with what the US has had its friends do through the years, from the Shah's Iran to the good old days of being friends with Saddam Hussein, to the happy years when South Africa was a "bulwark against communism", as was Indonesia; how does it compare with Egypt today, not to mention Saudi Arabia?

Yes Castro was bad news for his economy --- no-one doubts that. Yes he as not a particularly enlightened political leader. But to treat him as the second coming of Stalin or Sadam Hussein seems to me strongly unwarranted. Heck, as far as I can tell, overall he's far ahead of South Africa's white governments, and may well be ahead of Israel.
Or, let's compare with someone similarly demonized, Hugo Chavez. Chavez is not especially liberal, and may not be especially democratic. But he's not the caricature painted by the American government and its nuttier friends; not even close. And given their insanity in this respect, I require more evidence regarding the evils of Castro than simply the assertion than that he's a "dictator" who won't allow an opposition to flourish.

[Craig Nelson]

@ arrow.

I agree with the beginning of your second paragraph, but not the reasoning that follows. Once it is said that there are different moral levels of unjustifiable torture, you are 1) arguing that the ends (ours versus Castro's) can at least partially justify (different moral levels of guilt) the means, and 2) introducing the notion that there might be "justifiable" torture. Some immoral acts deserve "thou shalt not." Americans are not an exceptional people. There should be no arguing based on ends or exceptionalism.

Similarly, in a nation of laws with an explicit Constitution and explicit laws on wiretapping, it is absolutely illegal to perform warrantless wiretapping.

[arrow]

Craig Nelson - I agree that there is no "justifiable" torture. If you believe that the U.S. is equally evil to all other nations who have ever tortured anyone (which is what your resistance to my stance implies) I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

walkingtheline - You say "why is it morally wrong for Cuba to torture a Cuban if it is morally acceptable for the United States to torture the same person?" This reveals that you didn't read my comments very carefully, because I maintain that it is not morally acceptable for the U.S. to torture people.

Maynard Handley - You say "how many are alive, because of the medical regime, that would be dead if they'd been born in a neighboring country." I think we can all agree that having good medical care is good. I am not saying that no rays of sunshine hit the earth under Castro's regime. Still though -- repressive government, jailing dissenters, etc. is not cool.

Overall:
All I'm trying to say is that the U.S. government of this era will not be remembered on par with the spanish inquisition or anything. Tedb said above: "we're still slightly better than a Communist dictatorship. What a relief! Go, team!" I think that accurately captures what a small point I'm making. Lewis Caroll above hit the nail on the head when he said "violating basic rights, even for *better* reasons still leaves one in a, shall we say, less than perfect position for judging others." True!

[Maynard Handley]

@arrow.

Since you are so convinced what the US is doing is acceptable, perhaps you can tell us exactly what it is that justifies the US behavior --- something beyond the empty phrase "War on Terror".
Let's recap:
(1) Osama bin Laden, along with pretty much every reputable terrorist expert, says that the problem is US interference in the Middle East.
(2) As if to prove bin Laden's point, the primary US' response to 9/11 was to use it as an excuse to invade Iraq, a country that, for all its faults, had not attacked the US then or earlier.

So what we have is
(1) Cuba defending itself against real (Bay of Pigs) and imaginary aggression, ie the quite real possibility that the country might be attacked and its government overthrown, if the US could somehow get the process in motion. Let's recall a long history of the US doing this sort of thing, from Guatemala, through Nicaragua, to the most recent, unsuccessful, attempt a few years ago to foment a "popular uprising" against Hugo Chavez.
compared with
(2) The US engaged in a war of choice, not necessity, because of its constant meddling in other countries, a meddling driven presumably by oil, but with this same US showing absolutely no interest in doing anything whatsoever to reduce its dependence on oil.

In other words we have balanced one the one hand a truly mortal threat, vs on the other hand a far-from mortal issue, driven by a collection of *choices*. It's not clear to me at all how, given this, you somehow come to the conclusion that the myriad supposed crimes of Castro (crimes you have not listed even though I asked you for some concrete info) are unjustifiable whereas the very real crimes of the US (starting with the completely foreseeable deaths of 600,000 Iraqis) are justified --- by what exactly?

[Scott Martens]

Since we're on this topic anyway, let me ask a moral question that drags a lot of other historical judgements into this. Let's take as granted that torture, mass-murder, extrajudicial killings, extrajudicial and unaccountable wiretapping and censorship are wrong and unacceptable. Can we still establish a hierarchy of wrongness that would make committing unacceptable acts on grounds that at least bear some coherent relationship with acceptable political goals worse than those where the relationship is less coherent or where the political goals they are designed to support are less acceptable for independent reasons?

I'm asking this because this reopens a lot of logic concerning bad regimes and mass slaughters. If America's crimes at Guantanamo are merely "2nd degree" human rights violations because there is at least some coherent relationship between it and the acceptable political goal of suppressing terrorism, then presumably if one regards securing the Cuabn Revolution as an acceptable goal, and if Castro's repressive measures bear a comparable relationship to that goal, then one would have to assess them in the same terms. And of course, if one's principal argument against Castro's regime is that it commits human rights violations to secure itself, then this turns into a circular argument.

Preemptively invoking Godwin's law on myself, we could view the crimes of the Nazis as worse than those of other equally destructive acts because they bore less relationship to acceptible goals, or because of objections to fascism itself, independently of the acts undertaken in its support. We could say that what was uniquely awful about the Holocaust was that Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals would have been just as content as everyone else to support fascism if only the fascists hadn't made them into targets - so their slaughter was wronger than the mass slaughter of people who might have actually supported anti-fascist causes.

I think this approach is a bad idea, but it does seem to flow from every "yes, we do awful things but we're still not as bad as they are" argument. Even if the ends don't justify the means, do they abate their wrongness? This argument certainly has been invoked in defense of the Soviet Union and other communist regimes, and rejected by their opponents. It's also got a long history in arguments about colonialism. Does it become a good argument when invoked in America's favour?

[arrow]

Maynard Handley,

How can you say that I am "so convinced what the US is doing is acceptable?" Since I have said several times in several ways that what the US is doing is not acceptable, this shows me that you are clearly just trying to get my goat by arguing in bad faith.

Cuba's repressive government is not just a "temporary" state of affairs until all the outside threats go away. No free press, arresting the political opposition, controlling people's statements and actions, are all *inherent features* of communist rule, not grim necessities due to outside threats.

[arrow]

Scott Martens,

I agree that the "degrees of wrongness" idea is problematic, and it's hard to have it stand up under philosophical rigor. But I still go back to common sense--I am trying to avoid the following:

Q: Would it be better if all leaders acted like George Bush, or like Joseph Stalin?
A: Since both regimes commited more than zero evil acts, they are equal. Just flip a coin.

Castro is not Stalin, and there are some points to be made on why he has taken some actions he has taken. I guess I'm saying Castro is worse than Bush, better than Stalin. But first I would like to establish that there is something beyond "America is doing X, and therefore has zero moral standing in any comparison."

If we try to split all governments in history up into buckets labeled "good" and "bad," and doing what the U.S. is doing gets you into the "bad" bucket, is the "good" bucket empty? If so, is this a useful exercise?

[Luis Enrique]

oh I don't know Arrow, i think your argument for degrees of wrongness stands up pretty nicely under philosophical rigor.

[Craig Nelson]

@ arrow

I don't know how to make this any simpler. Torture is torture is torture and neither motive nor nationality justifies it either totally or partially. That is my view and it doesn't imply a belief that the "U.S. is equally evil to all other nations."

Questions of which country is more evil are silly and pointless. The proper moral stance is to end torture wherever it is found.

Scott Martens should be reread until you understand why he disfavors arguments that "the ends (partially} justify the means" and that American bad actions aren't really so bad because Americans are a good (exceptional) people

[Jon Kay]

Yeah, I like Sargent, too. Though not as much as Kelso. Yes, it's worth registering to read him (go to the Statesman columnists section), if you catch up on his back material a bit.

To me, bulk and degree of nastiness is what establishes a truly evil regime vs a piker in evil like Bush.

Hitler, Stalin, and Mao managed to find excuses to kill and encamp large %ages of their populations. Hitler's plan was to kill ALL non-Germans found in the East.

I've always seen Castro as evil, but not in their league - there was no mass killing in Cuba. There's no freedom, and there have been quasi-mass tortures and imprisonments. But it's fair to say Castro seems to get into the nastiness less.

Moving down to the Bush league, here we find encampment and torture of relatively small numbers of people. Still evil, but less bulk involved.

[arrow]

Hmmmm... I now realize that my arguments are a bit incoherent, ending up with me sounding like I'm trying to say torture is okay sometimes.

Let's try this:
1) Each instance of torture, perpetrated by anyone, is unjustifiable. (This is debatable, but I will stipulate it here.)
2) Whether a regime is "on balance, evil" is related to how much torture you've done and under what circumstances. Doing any torture under any circumstances is a major mark against you.
3) The comic annoyed me because it seemed to be putting Cuba and the U.S. in the same league in terms of overall evilness, essentially using the "good nation" and "bad nation" buckets to sort the world out.
4)The Bush regime (despite moving us in the wrong direction) is less evil than Castro's, not because of American Exeptionalism, but because our record, as a whole, is better.

[Maynard Handley]

"4)The Bush regime (despite moving us in the wrong direction) is less evil than Castro's, not because of American Exeptionalism, but because our record, as a whole, is better."

Except that, goddammit, it is not. This is my whole point. US history is a long list of atrocities committed against others. Your sole saving principle appears to be that the Cuban government is bad because it does (*still* unspecified by you) bad things against its own citizens whereas the US does not do the same sorts of bad things against its own citizens. That may seem, to you, a US citizen, but to the rest of the world, which is not, it seems like a pretty minor issue. When it comes to total impact on the entire world, the Cuban contribution is basically positive (doctors scattered across the globe, and a substantial part in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa via Angola) while the US contribution has some pretty damn large negative aspects, nearly all of which are ignored by US society. I've already given many items on the list, there seems no point in repeating yet more.

[arrow]

Okay, I understand what you're saying now. If you had the power, would you trade Bush for Castro as leader of the US?

This business about the glory of Cuban medicine is lame. I'm glad that Cuba has a good medical care system; it seems to punch above its economic weight in medicine. Nevertheless, most of the good modern medicine (drugs, imaging technology, surgical techniques) was directly invented by, or is based on science invented by, people in rich capitalist countries in Europe, Asia, or (wait for it) the U.S.

Cuba's biggest virture seems to be that it was never powerfull enough to mess with the internal affairs of other countries too much. The U.S. could certainly stand to keep it's hands to itself a lot more. We tend to overreact when countries have the destruction of the U.S. way of life as a stated goal, even if there is no realistic threat of accomplishing that goal.

I think freedom of the press, association, assembly, and religion is the main thing the U.S. has going for it in terms of grand-scheme goodness. Cuba lacks all of these things. But, hey, they have lots of doctors!

[Maynard Handley]

Framing the issue as Castro vs Bush as leader of the US is misleading in that, to what extent do you assume that the rest of the US system stands still while these two are switched?

I think the reverse thought experiment, replacing Castro with Bush (and the rest of the Bush team like Cheney) as unconstrained leaders of Cuba is easier to imagine, and my honest opinion is, yes, Castro, for all his faults, was better for the world and better for Cuba than would be a Bush team unrestrained by the US system.

And, once *again*, you ignore my point about the world outside America. Your whole argument is veering ever closer to "It's great to be a citizen of the hegemony, and fcsk the rest of you". Are you surprised that this is an attitude that does not endear the US to those outside its borders?

[arrow]

I do not ignore your point about the world outside America. In asking if you would replace Bush with Castro I didn't think I had to say "would it be better for the world" because I observed that you already are thinking along those lines.

For most of the world's citizens, the U.S. foreign policy (and even the Bush regime) has a benign effect.

We are doing some things that are wrong. We make people trade with us even if they don't want to, we intervene in countries where drugs are grown, and we don't let people say they want to overthrow our government (punishing them before they have taken much action). All legitimate targets of criticism.

But if we are not restrained enough in our use of power, imagine what Castro (committed to fomenting communist revolution, not accountable to his people for the cost of foreign interventions, etc.) would do with it. Castro in charge of the U.S. would probably treat our neighbors like the Soviets treated eastern Europe. We need to do better, but if I lived in a country neighboring the U.S., I think I would take the current situation over living in soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia.

And why doesn't it matter how a government treats its own citizens?