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SPEAKING
FREELY
Morality for convenience's
sake
By Richard Thieme
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click here if you
are interested in contributing.
One way
a government mobilizes support for morally dubious
actions is to make those actions sound like the right
thing to do. Decisions made for other reasons entirely,
for reasons of strategy, say, or economic advantage, are
cloaked in religious rhetoric, and when our leaders
claim the moral high ground, we the people want to
believe them.
Recent caricatures show how Muslim
terrorists such as Osama bin Laden and Christian
crusaders such as George W Bush use nearly identical
rhetoric to justify their actions. Both abuse their
religious traditions to manipulate believers in those
traditions.
Those who worry about such things
are often pained because the desire to believe and
follow our leaders is twisted, that desire being
contradicted by obvious discrepancies in what our
leaders are doing rather than saying.
This gets
a person with a strong conscience into a real pickle.
The simple fact is, any person willing to act on the
convictions of a strong conscience is as much an enemy
of the state as an avowed terrorist because he will not
accept the designer lies of the state as the motivation
for its morally dubious actions.
Perhaps this is
illustrated best with a historical example. Let's use
Operation Paperclip.
The United States and its
Western European allies agreed after World War II to
deny immigration rights and work opportunities to Nazis
with scientific and technological expertise who were
more than trivially connected to the Third Reich. Those
who joined the party before 1933 or advanced in the SA
(Brown Shirts) or the SS or were identified by credible
witnesses as participating in atrocities were included
in that category.
Contradictions arose, however,
after the war. Denying German scientific expertise to
the Soviets and using it ourselves became primary
motivations for wanting those Germans here in the United
States, working for us. Over time the need for German
proficiency in aerospace design, lasers, and other
advanced research superseded moral concerns for what
they had done during the war.
Operation
Paperclip was the name of the project that assimilated
Nazi scientists into the US establishment by obscuring
their histories and short-circuiting efforts to bring
their true stories to light. The project was led by
officers in the United States Army. Although the program
officially ended in September 1947, those officers and
others carried out a conspiracy until the mid-'50s that
bypassed both law and presidential directive to keep
Paperclip going. Neither president Harry Truman nor
Dwight Eisenhower was informed that their instructions
were ignored, and if there is a lesson to be learned
from Operation Paperclip, it is that, as Elie Wiesel
said of the Holocaust, the world can get away with it.
Please note: Those who documented Operation
Paperclip are not "conspiracy theorists". They are
journalists and scholars who described a genuine
conspiracy.
Fast-forward 50 years.
When
Total Information Awareness - TIA, the effort to mine
and correlate vast amounts of data about Americans and
non-Americans alike, people here and people there -
became public knowledge, it was assailed for further
eroding civil liberties already undermined by the
Patriot Act, rights previously guaranteed by the US
constitution.
Asked about TIA, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld laughed at a press conference
and said, well then we'll change the name and do it
anyway.
Rumsfeld was just stating the obvious.
Data mining has long been an important area of research
for the intelligence establishment. The ability to
filter out irrelevant data and align the many signals
transmitted by our daily transactions into profiles with
predictive value has been pursued for a long time.
Rumsfeld was just saying, OK, if there's a problem with
the name, we'll change the name and do it secretly.
It's the combination, don't you see, of
eradicating rights guaranteed by the constitution such
as habeas corpus and modern technologies that
enable the national security state to know and
anticipate the tendencies of the souls of its citizenry,
all in the name of counter-terrorism, that makes us
nervous. This is not a "conspiracy theory". It is a
literal description of what the US leadership is and has
been doing for a long time.
Back in the early
days of Paperclip, when those with consciences and/or
memories of Nazi atrocities tried to stop the
steamroller, they were accused of being communist agents
or sympathizers or useful idiots who did not know they
were manipulated by the Communist Party.
Real
enemies during the Cold War became the justification for
labeling persons of conscience enemies too, a strategy
that was canny and intentional.
Today real
terrorists are the justification for targeting persons
of conscience as if they are enemies not only of America
but of the American Empire too.
"Even before
[September 11, 2001], US armed-services professionals
were engaged in operations in 150 countries a year,"
noted Robert Kaplan approvingly in the 2003 Pitcairn
Trust Lecture on World Affairs. "It is already a cliche
to say that by any historical standard the United States
is more an empire, especially a military one, than many
care to acknowledge."
Kaplan went on to advocate
the efficient use of covert action to overthrow regimes
and destabilize enemies of the empire. "The US had
550,000 troops in Vietnam but didn't accomplish much,"
he observed, contrasting that effort with the successful
appropriation of right-wing groups in El Salvador with
only 55 special-forces trainers on the ground.
That, he suggested, is the model for the future.
I discussed this with two neighbors recently on
a sunny lawn with late summer flowers in full bloom. One
said she was concerned for what had happened to the
America she knew. The other said she was too busy with
her job and taking care of children to do much about it.
Both felt helpless to do anything anyway, and that's the
intention.
Those feelings of helplessness are
typical, I would guess, but there was something else in
the conversation. "You'd better be careful," one warned.
"You're probably on the list."
Now, that's
relatively new. The belief that there is a list,
the belief that with technological advances we can be
tracked, databased and identified as enemies, the belief
that we are so tracked, that the information will be
used against us, that's new. Among middle-aged Midwest
conservative people, that's new.
Those beliefs,
intermittently reinforced by stories of police or the
Federal Bureau of Investigation questioning innocent
people for speaking aloud their objections to Empire,
are means of control of mainstream citizens who "want to
believe the American myth", as one put it, while
evidence accumulates that the high moral ground is one
more way to keep us acquiescent and compliant.
It was warm on the sunny lawn among those
flowers, yet soon enough, shorn of our real history,
shorn of constitutional rights, we'll be shivering like
sheep in the first chill breeze of autumn.
One
could do worse than revisit Paperclip and other
forgotten events, the real antecedents of our current
situation in the United States. One could do worse than
refuse to surrender to denial or design.
Richard Thieme
(rthieme@thiemeworks.com) speaks, writes and consults
on the human dimensions of life and work, the impact of
technology, and "life on the edge". He is a contributing
editor for Information Security magazine and has
published articles in Wired, Salon, Information
Security, CISO, Forbes, Secure Business Quarterly,
Village Voice, CounterPunch and others.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click here if you
are interested in contributing.
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