John Derbyshire:
By way of consolation, everyone who commented agrees with me that the Abu Ghraib horseplay does not rise to the level of "torture," nor even to the level of routine arduous-training exercises in the U.S. armed forces, and the stupendous fuss raised by the media & congressional bedwetters is at least as big a scandal as the prisoner abuses themselves.
Now, I recognize that Derbyshire is getting old, and may require certain kinds of "horseplay" to get it up, but it doesn't take a genius to understand that what may constitute a fun night at home for him, his wife, some smoked turkey, and some genital shock treatment attains a more sinister and in fact criminal quality when practiced upon prisoners by their jailers.
One also has to wonder what inspired Derbyshire to entitle his post De Profundis (Latin for Out of the Depths, referring the first lines of Psalm 29, known as the psalm of souls trapped in purgatory), which is best known as the title of Oscar Wilde's sublimely tragic letter of reproach to his former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, inspired during Wilde's two-year jail sentence for sodomy, a sentence that a bigot like Derbyshire would undoubtedly have approved of, and probably wishes were still enforced. Of course, Derbyshire is writing from entirely different depths than the exceedingly brilliant (and now deservingly celebrated) Wilde: the depths of depravity.
It would be easy enough to dismiss Derbyshire's effluvia as yet another example of what I have termed the Derbyshire Effect (whereby the editors of a magazine feature the writings of a decrepit old bigot in order to make the work of the rest of the staff look somewhat more reasonable by comparison), but a few entries down we get Jonah Goldberg surrendering any claim to morality or decency:
I was expecting to hear from someone that we should be outraged by the "sexual tactics" at Gitmo. A few folks offered some arguments about how maybe we should be troubled. But not much outrage. One reader argued that we should be bothered by any attempt to separate a man from his God. How would you feel, he asked, if American soldiers were forced to witness a crucifix being desecrated or a Torah being destroyed? I thought this was interesting, but really not very persuasive. I'd gladly settle for that sort of treatment over beheadings.
...I'm not a close student of the history of intelligence gathering, but it seems to me that the use of sex to extract information -- in all sorts of way wasn't invented in Gitmo and that nothing of the sort happened under, say, Eisenhower's command. Prudishness and squeamishness is not automatic cause for concluding that the people involved are dishonorable. Again, I can't say I love that we're doing this. But it doesn't seem like something to bang my fist about either.
I'd like to take Goldberg's poor syntax here as an indication that he was blogging while drunk, and thus might be excused for the fascist drool contained within, but unfortunately, like much of the U.S. conservative press, he's been slipping down this slope for a long time. He'd gladly settle for religious desecration over beheading? So would I! How clever! So now, I guess, we're using al Qaeda as our moral compass, and anything short of beheading is A-OK? Regarding the use of sexual torture to obtain information, the best this self-appointed defender of civilization can do is admit that he doesn't "love that we're doing this." How very decent of you, Jonah. Bravo, bravo.
The American Right is decreasingly a place that any decent, moral person can call his or her political home. I'm not a Chicken Little when it comes to the onset of American fascism, though I do see disturbing portents here and there, the ever-more repugnant discourse at National Review being a perfect example. If and when fascism does come to the U.S., it will be carried aloft by such people as Derbyshire and Goldberg, who will insist at every step that, though they don't "love it," this and this and this simply must be done to preserve our American way of life.
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