Quote:
Originally Posted by taxwonk
I'm not so much pushing back on your view that we can and should be better than that, as I am arguing that right now, that view is losing and too many of the people we count on to support it are willing to throw it away in the name of security.
And what, pray tell, makes us better than any totalitarian state the minute we start setting our values aside? If we adopt the tactics of the evildoers, we cease to be different in the one way that matters to the person on the other end of the wire. The jolt doesn't hurt any less. It doesn't leave you any less scared every day that it might happen again. It does still leave you doing little else but figuring out to keep it from happening again. Because you really don't want it to happen again.
As long as we have one single sanctioned act of that kind of conduct, how are we better? Isn't America's true exceptionalism the fact that we alone view our rights to due process and fair play as organic to us as individuals? And if that is the touchstone of what makes us "different," what happens when we cease to be different?
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In a sense, it isn't a fair comparison. Al Qaeda isn't a country and those who are part of it self-select for that, so there is a far less broad range of views, and a far more coherent ideology.
And that ideology is evil incarnate. I truly, seriously, mean that. Routine, intentional slaughter of civilians, for the purpose of slaughtering civilians. A medieval treatment of women. Torture and beheading of people simply for being westerners.
I will maintain that we as a nation are better than they, in part simply because we aspire to more. I say this without having any illusion as to the evil that has been done by and at the direction of Americans for many, many years.
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