What's a little genocide among friends?

President Bush appeared on the South Lawn of the White House before the vote and implored the House not to take up the issue, only to have a majority of the committee disregard his warning at the end of the day, by a vote of 27 to 21.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/washington/11prexy.html?th&emc=th

“The issue” is whether to support a resolution condemning the Turkish genocide in Armenia during the First World War. Japanese rightists deny the Rape of Nanking, jingoist Americans hate it when we talk of slavery and the genocide of North American natives, there are holocaust deniers galore, and Argentina has taken more than twenty years to start putting right the wrongs of the 70s dictatorship. This is Turkey’s blind spot.

“Greater good” arguments are always powerful. Stalin killed a million Ukrainians for the allegedly greater good of farm collectivization and the priest, Christian von Wernich, found guilty yesterday for “crimes against humanity” in Argentina, stated that he was doing it all to defeat communism.

Bush’s argument has been used by Clinton and others. It’s not a republican stance, but a realist school stance. Realists make the claim daily that the good intentions of the left are naïve and seriously self-defeating. If we don’t fight the terrorists in [you name the place], we’ll have to fight them in our own back yard. Collateral damage? There is no free lunch.

Sure there is an argument to be made. Maybe saying shame shame to Turkey at this point is not good timing. They will get pissed and not rally behind us in Iraq. That’s Bush’s argument. He’s being a realist, you see.

But each time that line is taken and America comes down, as it does routinely with the Bush administration, on the side of the Jean Kirkpatricks and the Henry Kissingers, America slips a little deeper into the hypocritical mindset which prevails today, where we talk freedom but help take it away, talk self-determination, but work assiduously against it.

Pinochet, I once heard Kirkpatrick remark, was “muy amable.” Amiable perhaps, yes. But he also presided over a government in Chile which applied electricity to one’s gums and genitals. Kissinger suggested to the military junta in Argentina that they should hurry up and get this nasty business of torture over with because it could backfire. Well, too late Henry. History has caught up with you.

America, you are a dirty place these days. Habeas corpus gone. Geneva Convention gone. The Supreme Court which has just approved a law permitting the Americans to whisk bad guys off to countries where they face certain torture.

And now this dirty president of ours wants us to spit in the face of the victims of the Armenian genocide because he needs every bit of support from his rightist friends in his battle in Iraq.

But what's this? A little light shining through? Congress ignored his White House speech? They didn’t listen to him? They voted 27 to 21 in favor of the resolution?

The Foreign Relations Committee resolution is symbolic and non-binding.

But the American in me feels a little cleaner today than he did yesterday.

Christian von Wernich

Christian von Wernich is a big name here in Buenos Aires. People know him as the priest who participated in the torture and killing of a number of people during the Argentine military dictatorship of the 1970s.

The Roman Catholic Church runs the gamut politically between liberal progressive types, including the liberation theologists of Latin America and theologians like Hans Küng, to those on the extreme right, including the institutional Argentine church.

A military takeover on March 24, 1976 led to a reign of terror which ended only on December 10, 1983, with the debacle of the Malvinas/Falkland Islands war. Thanks to modern communications, the world remembers this time because of the images of the ‘mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’ who marched in front of the Pink House, Argentina’s White House, every Thursday at 3:30, demanding an accounting of their missing children. Officially that number is 9000, but human rights organizations, including the mothers – and now, grandmothers – put it at over 30,000. Suspected “enemies of the nation,” including teenage students, were kidnapped, held in clandestine locations where they were tortured, and ultimately thrown from planes and helicopters into the La Plata River, so there would be no record of what they experienced. The word in Spanish, “desaparecidos,” ultimately created a novelty in the English language, an intransitive past participle used as a noun – “The Disappeared.”

While this was going on, Pope John Paul II visited Argentina but refused to acknowledge all evidence of the tortures and executions, thus setting the tone which the Argentine church followed, enabling ultimately the line of defence taken by von Wernich that the real enemy of Christianity is communism, and, in the words of the realist school, any means of fighting communism was justified. Evidence is plain for anyone seeking it that people like Kissinger and Jean Kirkpatrick, to mention two fighters of communism at random, understood and supported the dictatorship nonetheless.

In Latin America, with its history of political corruption, including military dictatorships supported by virtually all modern U.S. presidents with the exception of Jimmy Carter, it is not surprising that many young people should find marxism attractive. Nor is it surprising that at least some in the institutional church, like von Wernich, would believe killing and torturing these deluded youth, as they would see them, is a necessary evil. Von Wernich is quoted as actually saying at one point that sin can be overcome by pain.

The question here is how far up this all goes. John Paul II would not have approved of torture, one assumes, but his silence over the ruthlessness of the fight against communism (if indeed that is a fair description of what was going on) stands in contrast to his outspoken criticism of similar brutality behind the Iron Curtain. And his nuncio, Pio Larghi, was seen routinely in public with the leaders of the dictatorship.

For now, though, the court, which is finishing up his deliberations today in La Plata, capital of Buenos Aires Province, is quick to insist this is not a trial of the catholic church, but of one of its priests.

Maybe not. But this priest, once found out, was whisked off by the church to a provincial parish in Chile and given a new name.

Keep tuned for details. Channel 7 in Buenos Aires is carrying the trial live. Something tells me the Papal Nuncio, who lives across the street from me at the moment, will be watching.

Me too.

Rumsfeld's Day in Court

I have been reading around in the commentary on the news that Rumsfeld has been hired as “Distinguished Visiting Fellow” at the Hoover Institution. And about how the decision has provoked a protest involving some 3000 signatures, including 300 by Stanford faculty. And about how this, in turn, has led to the usual crapola charges of insincerity and hypocrisy on the left. The left only approves of free speech, says one of the commentators, when it is one of their own speaking. When it comes to conservatives, they aren`t having any.

Well, bullshit. This is not a free speech issue. Rumsfeld is free to pay for his next summer house delivering as many lectures around the country as he can get fools to pay for, telling those willing to pay how he made the world safe for democracy. Nobody is shutting him up. They’re saying that giving this sinister man the label “distinguished visiting fellow” dishonors the school. And it does.

The guy is right up there with Kissinger as war-criminal material. I know he has to be found guilty in a court of law for the label to be legitimately applied. OK, so let’s bring him to justice – and Kissinger too, while we're at it.

I know, I know. You don’t bring Americans to justice in international courts. We’re too powerful. We don’t have to go to court. We get Nobel Prizes for our international efforts – Kissinger did, remember – even though it’s no secret Kissinger gave the go-ahead to the Argentine dictatorship in the 70s. And to Pinochet. For starters.

If you listen to what people in Argentina and Chile have to say about Kissinger, people who know first hand what it is like to have a terrorist government supported by the U.S. steal your children, rape them, electrify their genitals, gums and eyelids and then drop them from airplanes into the sea, listen close, and you will look at things differently.

Whether enablers are in the same league as those actually applying the electricity is a tough ethical call. And Rumsfeld can still hide behind the excuse that he really believed, as did Cheney, the Iraqis would welcome us with flowers and not see us as invaders. But have you heard an "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it? I didn't intend for all you people to die waiting for electricity to come on in the hospital, for the police to protect you from rapists and thugs. I didn't mean for you to have to run to Syria and Jordan, really I didn't...."

Maybe he's not really war criminal material, as Kissinger is. I'll wait for argument. I know it will come.

But distinguished?

Hell, no.

Note the power of the United States to determine who labels and who gets labeled. Rumsfeld is not a terrorist, because the terror he brought to the lives of millions of Iraqis isn’t defined by us as terrorism. It’s defined as bringing democracy to the world. Torture of obsessively enraged Islamists isn't as bad as torture of communist kids. Removal of habeas corpus isn't as bad as a knock at the door at midnight.

Really? Who's calling the shots on this? Could we have some judicial clarification here?

Note, by the way, that it is not just angry leftist bloggers making the case for Rumsfeld’s appointment. John Bunzel, a Democrat, and former President of San Jose State makes the case today in the Sacramento Bee. http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/.html

He argues that Condaleeza Rice is going to be similarly protested when she returns to teach at Stanford. Well, how about we cross that bridge when we come to it? It is possible she and Colin Powell and a whole host of other members of the Bush Administration can make the case they are not in the same camp as those who tricked the nation into war. We’ll have to see. Bunzel should not be lumping these people together. Everybody should get their day in court.

But isn't that the whole point? Let’s bring the man to court.

Not to Hoover Tower.