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Under Threat
Sep. 29th, 2006 04:35 pm♠
A lot of good discussion and despair has been expressed over legislation allowing coercive interrogation, also known as torture, and the suspension of habeas corpus when it comes to terrorism suspects, not to mention the broader issues of the Iraq War. More people are losing faith in America's direction. In one debate, Monk offered this:
When it came to the Red scare with all the political hearings, such as those of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the marginalizing of people suspected of communist sympathy, George Kennan, a leading diplomat and foreign-policy analyst at the time, lost his political faith, as quoted form Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974:
A lot of people seem to be feeling that way now. In the face of an existential threat, Americans seem to give way to the most reactionary and toughest voices. And, of course, in even earlier epochs in American history, we have shown our weaker and base instincts. Who can forget the internment of the Japanese during World War II? And even Abraham Lincoln controversially suspended habeas corpus in prosecuting the Civil War.
Hindsight has shown that these controversial measures were perhaps not needed, but one supposes that you can never be too sure at the time. When it comes to security issues when under threat, more tends to sound better then less. The grand hope is that America will continue to show its resiliency in moderating its reactionary responses.
xXx
A lot of good discussion and despair has been expressed over legislation allowing coercive interrogation, also known as torture, and the suspension of habeas corpus when it comes to terrorism suspects, not to mention the broader issues of the Iraq War. More people are losing faith in America's direction. In one debate, Monk offered this:
We are uncertain about a serious threat. Americans react aggressively. I'm reading about the Red Scare of the 40s and 50s, and in the face of the communist threat, the government also reacted intrusively and questionably. But as we rebounded from that, so are we likely to better modulate our response here when we feel more secure about what we are facing and what to do about it.
When it came to the Red scare with all the political hearings, such as those of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the marginalizing of people suspected of communist sympathy, George Kennan, a leading diplomat and foreign-policy analyst at the time, lost his political faith, as quoted form Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974:
What the phenomenon of McCarthyism did... was to implant in my consciousness a lasting doubt as to the adequacy of our political system... a political system and a public opinion, it seemed to me, that could be so easily disoriented by this sort of challenge in one epoch would be no less vulnerable to similar ones in another. I could never recapture, after these experiences of the 1940s and 1950s, quite the same faith in the American system of government and in traditional American outlook that I had had, despite all the discouragements of official life, before that time.
A lot of people seem to be feeling that way now. In the face of an existential threat, Americans seem to give way to the most reactionary and toughest voices. And, of course, in even earlier epochs in American history, we have shown our weaker and base instincts. Who can forget the internment of the Japanese during World War II? And even Abraham Lincoln controversially suspended habeas corpus in prosecuting the Civil War.
Hindsight has shown that these controversial measures were perhaps not needed, but one supposes that you can never be too sure at the time. When it comes to security issues when under threat, more tends to sound better then less. The grand hope is that America will continue to show its resiliency in moderating its reactionary responses.
