Guilt is one of our most important and powerful emotions. It is the price we pay for doing things that go against our conscience and when the wrong is large the guilt can be long lasting and powerfully destructive. When guilt works properly, it warns us that an action we are contemplating which conflicts with our moral and ethical world view will exact a terrible price; the more terrible the act, the worse the guilt will be. In someone who is reasonably healthy psychologically, guilt helps us do what is right even when it may harm us in the short run. Thus, someone who injures or kills another person in a car accident will not flee the scene but will try to help, call the emergency services, and face the music.
Unfortunately, great guilt that is unbearable can also lead to more disturbed reactions and greater consequences. For example, if that same person who accidentally killed an innocent in a car accident had been drinking all night, he might convince himself (via rationalization) that since there is nothing to be done he might as well leave the scene; after all, why ruin his life, and the lives of his family, because of an accident. He wasn't that drunk, the accident wasn't his fault and there is no need to compound a tragedy.
For someone who has a functioning conscience, this doesn't work for long, and as time passes and their guilt becomes more troubling and crippling, they either must find a way to confess or the guilty wound will fester, causing them to unconsciously seek punishment and retribution.
I suspect we are seeing something of this process working itself out right in front of our eyes.
Michael Barone is one of our most level headed commentators; he is not prone to hyperbole, yet he asks a salient question:
Why do they hate us? No, I'm not talking about Islamofascist terrorists. We know why they hate us: because we have freedom of speech and freedom of religion, because we refuse to treat women as second-class citizens, because we do not kill homosexuals, because
No, the "they" I'm referring to are the editors of the New York Times. And do they hate us? Well, that may be stretching it. But at the least they have gotten into the habit of acting in reckless disregard of our safety.
He also hints at how self-defeating the Times' behavior has become:
Why do they hate us? Why does the Times print stories that put America more at risk of attack? They say that these surveillance programs are subject to abuse, but give no reason to believe that this concern is anything but theoretical. We have a press that is at war with an administration, while our country is at war against merciless enemies. The Times is acting like an adolescent kicking the shins of its parents, hoping to make them hurt while confident of remaining safe under their roof. But how safe will we remain when our protection depends on the Times?
There are many causes for the war being waged against the Administration by the left. The preening narcissism of so many leftist and leftish baby boomers, the anxiety over losing their power in an America where the MSM no longer has a monopoly on information and left wing academia finds their privileged position under stress, the overt anti-Americanism of a small part of the far left, but I would add an additional factor, the struggle with unconscious guilt.
The left has been viewing the Iraq War through the prism of Vietnam almost since it began. (Remember how when our troops took a breather during a sandstorm two weeks in, it was reported that we were bogged down in a quagmire?) It is worth looking at that prism, however, for what is not being seen.
The current narrative, as exemplified by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, now and then joined by the Wall Street Journal news desk, is that the government, having gone to war based on a lie (the Tonkin Gulf incident/missing WMD) is involved in a quagmire (50,000/2500 dead) and that our troops have been brutalized and dehumanized by their experiences and have been turned into killers by the military (My Lai/Haditha); in addition, it is up to the brave press and opposition to speak "truth to power" and reveal whenever possible the government's nefarious plans and evil devices (the Pentagon Papers & Watergate/NSA & the SWIFT program).
To this end, just as the Democratic Congress, after we had already pulled our troops out of Vietnam, cut off all funding to the "corrupt" South Vietnamese government (which suggests that more stories about corruption in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government should begin to appear in short order) they have also proposed abandoning the Iraqis to their fate.
This is where the Vietnamization of Iraq usually ends.
The New York Times, et al, always seem to conveniently forget that after we abandoned the South Vietnamese (and the Cambodians) to their fate at the hands of the more "moral and ethical freedom fighters" of the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge, almost 1,000,000 Vietnamese perished and almost 2,000,000 Cambodians were murdered in the killing fields; these were direct results of the American decision, fueled by the left's opposition to the war, to abandon our allies in Southeast Asia. This is rarely acknowledged by the left, yet it is a historical fact.
Even those who insist we need to exit Iraq as quickly as possible agree that if we leave, a full blown civil war will ensue (some say there is already a civil war which our presence mitigates); the sectarian violence will escalate, perhaps even to genocidal levels, and probably spread to include neighboring countries and their restive ethnic and religious sects. The death toll of innocents would almost certainly dwarf what is happening now. This suggests that leaving prematurely is a deeply amoral position.
The usual approach by the left, as personified by the Times handling of Walter Duranty, is to simply ignore left wing atrocities; out of sight, out of mind. If we don't see the tapes of the Russian diplomats being beheaded, the atrocity "doesn't count." This worked pretty well when the MSM was the only game in town. It doesn't work as well when there are alternate sources of information.
Furthermore, these techniques tend to work best when there exists a usable screen perception to cover up the horrors of the "freedom fighters." The My Lai Massacre was a genuine war crime and a genuine atrocity. It horrified Americans and helped delegitimize the war effort. Abu Graib might have been vile and distasteful, but it was not an atrocity that reached the level of a My Lai, or that was the equivalent of the torture/murder of American soldiers by people who know what the word torture means. We do not yet know what happened in Haditha but it clearly, even at a worst case, was an order of magnitude less significant than My Lai.
The problem with using screen perceptions to cover real horrors, is that when the screens are transparent, the horrors from the other side show through.
The left is trapped with two difficult choices. They can choose to address their own complicity in the deaths of so many Southeast Asians so many years ago, a time when their nostalgic look back sees themselves at the height of their powers, and make the vow not to be so complicit ever again. Or they can double their bet, keep reaching for atrocities, quagmire, and rationalizations for retreat and abandonment, and marginalize themselves further with each passing day. One approach would cause terrible pain and anguish; recognizing one's own complicity in terrible crimes, even when unintended, can be extraordinarily painful. It is even more so when one's self esteem depends on the fiction that you are more moral and ethical, more caring, than your opponents. The alternative is less likely to lead to despair, but ultimately, is extremely self-destructive.
The New York Times, to take one glaring example, is seeing its share price in free fall. They are also increasingly risking prosecution for publishing military secrets. You can see the progression: when they published the NSA leaks, they had many public officials and legal experts willing to argue the NSA program was not legal (though it hadn't yet been tested in the courts); with the most recent leaks of secret information, the Times themselves admit that the program is not illegal. More than anything this shows their desperation and willingness to risk disaster in order to maintain their view that they are re-fighting the "good fight" against creeping fascism and imperialism that they once "won" in Southeast Asia, now repeated in Iraq.
Unfortunately for the Times, et al, the war front includes our homeland and they no longer can control the frame of the debate.
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