Memorial
Day 2014: Just Following Orders
May 26, 2014 by
Large-scale evil requires surrender of autonomy, coercion by a
central authority and a willingness to follow orders.
There is evil, and then there’s organized evil. This is a
memorial outside the village where my brother lives in the south of France. It
is a typical village, quite small, perhaps a few hundred residents. The
memorial commemorates three young French civilians who were taken out and shot
by Nazi soldiers, either for “crimes” of resistance or perhaps as a “lesson” to
the restive civilian populace.
The German soldiers who pulled
the triggers were of course “just following orders.”
Evil must be resisted, corralled, vanquished. Interestingly,
people don’t need to be forced by a central authority to resist evil, though
their efforts will prove more successful if they band together and submit to a
competent authority of their own choosing. This is the basis of the “good war”
or “just war.”
But to be part of large-scale organized evil, people need to
surrender their autonomy under threat, and be ordered by a central authority.
This is the origin of the Nuremberg Defense: I was only following
lawful, Superior Orders when I murdered those French civilians. The soldiers
who followed the orders would have been punished had they
refused; coercion is always the backbone of central authority.
Hannah Arendt wrote about the Great Evil, Nazi Germany, and “The
Final Solution” of death camps in Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The Nazi machine spewed
plentiful opportunities to practice the banality of evil, and the death camps were
simply one division of the daily grind of pressing one’s palms on evil and
passing it on to the next “good German.”
The routine killing of civilians went on day after day; it was the
“day job” of the occupying troops.
Those inside the central authority know, of course, but very few
are telling, because the see-saw is just so imbalanced in a system which
depends on lies and the distortion of truth to continue its domination.
Truth-tellers will lose their prestigious positions, their
generous salaries and the acceptance of their peers, and perhaps their
lives. In exchange for this sacrifice, the truth-teller receives only the
glowing, ephemeral shards of his/her integrity: in the current zeitgeist, that
literally has no value. The machine will grind on without them, impervious to
the tiny pricks of truth; the machinery of propaganda, artifice, misdirection
and misrepresentation is well-oiled and masterful in the reach and scope of its
operation.
In this context, it is worth watching The Most
Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg was only one of
thousands of “good Americans” doing their job in a war machine built entirely
on lies and propaganda. He was one of a handful of citizens out of those
thousands, or tens of thousands, who was willing to trade his career for his
integrity and conscience.
The Vietnam War was “sold” to the public as a “just and necessary
war” that they had “chosen” via their elected representatives. But it was
all lies, propaganda and coercion, crowned by the profound cowardice of an
elected leadership unwilling to risk the loss of perquisites and power.
Ellsberg had given excerpts of The Pentagon Papers, the secret and
oh-so-dangerous unvarnished truth about America’s involvement in Vietnam, to
various members of Congress; all but one did nothing. Only Rep. Pete McCloskey (R) thought the American people deserved
the truth. (McCloskey is a decorated U.S. Marine Corps veteran of combat
during the Korean War, recipient of the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, and two
awards of the Purple Heart. He published Truth and
Untruth – Political Deceit in America in 1972.)
Perhaps the American people would have chosen to sacrifice their
youth and treasure on what it had concluded was a “just and necessary” in
Vietnam, but it never got the chance to learn the truth which was the necessary
foundation of any such decision.
That’s how the banality of evil works. When truth becomes too
dangerous to the Status Quo, it must be strangled every day, by tens of
thousands of people, and its limp corpse hidden away.
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