- The following is a quote from David D. Perlmutter, a
historian of war and media at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge:
-
- "The torture pictures are absolutely irrelevant,"
said Perlmutter, the author of "Visions of War: Picturing Warfare
from the Stone Age to the Cyberage."
-
- "Americans care about American soldiers, and only
journalistic and political and academic elites fret about pictures of collateral
damage," he said. "... If you start talking to the public, you'll
find people sympathizing with the soldiers."
-
- Dr. Perlmutter has not personally signed the Geneva Conventions,
of course. Apparently he has never even heard of them. His wonderful indifference
to torture, when applied to other people, merely indicates a spectacular
degree of personal callousness. One cannot imagine he would remain so entirely
unmoved by human suffering if he found his own body at the receiving end
of the electrodes.
-
- His very strange idea is that supporting our soldiers
must mean remaining indifferent to anything that individuals might conceivably
perpetrate, however monstrous. According to this bizarre logic, he wouldn't
be disturbed if his closest colleagues were discovered to be serial murderers.
We won't suppose they actually are. But still, one does wonder just how
he managed to become a vociferous exponent of the rights of torturers.
-
- In any case, he makes it very clear that he believes
he is speaking for Americans when he casually dismisses the reality of
the most repugnant of acts, vigorously repudiated by every civilized nation
and person on earth. According to Dr. Perlmutter, the American public
does not give a damn about its own soldiers indulging in psychopathic behavior.
He states that only the "elites" bother about such unimportant
"collateral damage" as criminally humiliated, ravaged and murdered
human beings. He is a self-appointed spokesman for the concept that even
the most despicable crime somehow becomes excusable if the person who does
it is wearing your team uniform. But it is not very wise to naively trumpet
being the proud possessor of such a markedly underdeveloped moral sense.
By doing so, he only reveals that no redeeming spirit of reason has ever
so much as breathed on the savage ego of Dr. Perlmutter.
-
- Aggressively promoting the unrepentant sentiments of
sadism, Dr. Perlmutter presumes that the average American has kicked over
all traces of civilization, and the totality of Judeo-Christian and all
other moral history. His words more than imply that Americans care nothing
at all for the basic message of any religion or spiritual practice. The
picture he presents is of a nation of individuals with no relation to God
whatsoever, or even to common human standards of acceptable behavior. Such
an astonishing distortion tells us a great deal about Dr. Perlmutter, but
nothing about us. One must conclude that he believes we all must accept
extremes of savagery only because he himself enthusiastically embraces
these qualities. Perhaps Dr. Perlmutter has reincarnated in our time and
place directly from the rigors of the Cretaceous, and has not had time
yet to discover an ethically viable mindset for the 21st Century. Or perhaps
he is just what he appears to be: an ardent, sincerely vicious throwback,
willfully recapitulating some long-lost geological moment between crawling
out of the sea and putting on a necktie.
-
- A reasonable response to the rapacious brutality of Dr.
Perlmutter's remarks might be a pang of compassion for his humiliating
evolutionary predicament. After all, the lack of even a rudimentary conscience
in this day and age is a stunning deficiency to boast about in public.
But at least in this sorry spectacle we are presented with yet another
excellent reminder of what the human race is up against- everywhere on
Earth, without exception. The belligerent bellows that serve as the news
of our times arise from a multitude of outwardly warring psyches. But the
only differences among them are found in the superficialities of costumes,
social position, and language. The passionately backward are all kindred
spirits under the skin, no matter what their origin, sense of identity,
or species of belief system. They are all thriving on the same intoxicating
fumes of ancient hatred and separatism, emanating from identical antediluvian
miasmas. The task of the long-suffering conscious element in humanity is
clear: to resolutely drain the primordial psychological swamps wherever
they are found. The worst aspects of the human subconscious have to be
dredged up into the light of day, where they can undergo the merciful process
of mummification in the open air. Because the terrifying alternative is
that these absolutely irrelevant embodiments of the lowest forms of human
life might otherwise eventually succeed in reducing our entire world to
the utter desolation of their natural habitat.
-
- * * *
- Original MSNBC article of April 30, 2004,
- http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4855930/>http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4855930/
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