by JoseFreitas » Tue Apr 01, 2008 10:15 am
I agree with you but would point out that, regardless of who planned what, the idiots who executed the deeds at Abu Ghraib were most likely giving in to their base, non-understood, non-examined instincts after being manipulated into doing so in ways of which they wouldn't have been fully conscious. They were the doings mostly of people who neither understood the workings or motivations of their minds, nor likely ever thought that those minds needed examining. They were in fact, really, the deeds of people who are sick (of course this doesn't excuse them, nor does it mean they shouldn't be prosecuted, punished etc...). But the truth is most people are sick in their minds (me included). The jailers at Abu Ghraib (the small fry certainly) were people with very disjointed minds. I am sure they could be loving fathers at the same time as they were rapists, torturers, good buddies to their friends, perhaps genuinely motivated churchgoers, smart, stupid and so on, all at the same time.
Hannibal is another creature entirely. He has no buttons to be pushed by any kind of mental manipulation. He is not like the tortioner at Abu Ghraib who has all the neurotic problems of his life as buttons that clever manipulators could use against him without him ever understanding what was going on (as most of us are manipulatable, in fact). He understands himself entirely, and so all the decisions he makes are by personal choice, not due to instincts, unconscious biases and so on. As I said, I am somewhat convinced that a personality like his cannot exist truly.
You know that old Taoist lore, before it divides humanity into good guys and bad guys (which it does although it's not obvious at first glance) divides people into two kinds: "ren" or "man", and "renren", or "man-man", meaning "real human". In Taoism, Real Human is a code word for an awakened personality, entirely free from all conditioning and unconscious biases, capable of making informed decisions without outside influences coming into consideration. Hannibal in those terms would be a very rare example of a Real Human turned to evil. He would probably be seen as a failure, in the sense that Taoist philosophy argues (with much logic and reasoning to the rescue) that REALLY informed and free humans do not have motives for not being compassionate, but he would still be seen as a Real Human. The Abu Ghraib torturers would still remain at the "not really human in the absolute sense of the word, still sick and incomplete" kinda people. They would be deserving of pity (for many reasons, one of the primary ones being the fact they still have moral choices, and having taken those they took they've just set the clock back on achieving enlightenment by a few thousand years at least), even though they might have been considered also worthy of punishment.
This is not very far from the Buddhist view that humanity is essentially sick, and that medicine, in the form of meditation, compassionate training and the ability to examine things rationally is the only medicine.
And I agree that Hersh needs to either speak up or shut up. Otherwise he is just disinforming.
