Tag Archives: torture

Dystopia is a Jacuzzi You Never Want to Leave

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sacco header

 
Here’s my pitch for a dystopian novel. It takes place in Wealthy Powerful Nation (WPN), a country that is secretly spying on its citizens. In fact, those citizens life in a state of near-total surveillance and don’t realize it. Or, at least, won’t admit it to themselves.

You see, that’s the weird thing about Wealthy Powerful Nation, it’s a dystopia that doesn’t look like one, because it has a number of mechanisms in place that help hide how dystopic it really is. The citizens know on some level that the world is a terrible place, but they’re also living through a time of abundant good-to-great art and entertainment available at little-to-no cost. The people live in perpetual debt to make it seem like they have a stable, middle-class life. The country supposedly has freedom of speech, but corporations own most of the venues for that speech. Freedom of assembly is guaranteed, but the government can track its citizen’s locations at all times, can turn on the cameras on their electronic devices without them knowing it and record them, and can use very powerful computers to sift through the patterns of their actions to determine what they’ll do next. There’s very little oversight for the Government of WPN, and this system of surveillance has completely coopted industry and banking. Meanwhile, WPN is able to kill pretty much anyone in the world any time it wants, using an army of flying robots.

One man, let’s call him Ed, works for the surveillance state, but he has doubts. He believes that total surveillance impacts freedom, and so he steals a vast archive of information about the system of domestic espionage that WPN employs. He flies halfway around the world to reveal this information to a team of journalists and then skips town.

When the information is finally revealed, the world responds by mocking Ed on twitter for weeks for some stupid things he says about Vladimir Putin. Gradually, opinion polls come to agree with Ed, but nothing of any consequence changes.

Not a great story, is it? Not likely to be turned into a four part movie franchise starring Chris Hemsworth. There’s a couple of reasons why it’s a lousy story. The first is that, well, there’s not a lot of hope in it, and if there’s one thing that sets apart modern day dystopian narratives from their spiritual grandfather 1984, it’s the presence of hope. Hope that the State can be defeated, hope in the future, hope in progress, and, perhaps most important of all, hope in your fellow humans.

Looking at the United States today, it’s hard to see a lot of reasons for hope, largely because there’s been so little change, despite our current President’s use of both of those words for his election campaign. For you see, unlike the characters in most dystopias, we are not exactly victims. We have chosen our leadership, whose prosecution of a global war on terror remains largely popular, except for when it can be demonstrated to harm us directly.

Lucky for us, we outsource our harm as much as possible. The people we kill live half a world away, destroyed by flying robots piloted by children in a dark room nowhere near their quarry. Our all-volunteer army pulls so heavily from specific demographic groups that many of us can go about our lives without seeing any consequence of our war if we don’t want to.

And we don’t want to, do we? Looking the demon jackal that we have summoned with our war on terror dead in the eyes would be unbearable, paralyzing. Certainly, the torture report’s breaching of my own person walls of denial was for me, even though I already knew what was in it. So we ignore the demon jackal even while feeding it ever more of our humanity, willfully joining the only conspiracy that really matters, the one of ignorance and complicity.

These are desperate, hopeless times. Desperate, hopeless times call for desperate, hopeless art forms. Perhaps this is why Joe Sacco, who has made a name for himself as a comic book journalist specializing in war reportage has turned to satire, that most desperate and hopeless of art forms, in Bumf #1, his response to America in the age of perpetual war.

Satire has lost a lot of its luster now that it’s regularly used by racists to excuse impolitic things they’ve said on twitter, but satire has performed a unique and important function since the ancient Greeks. No other genre can get as close to unspeakable truths, because satire rides there on the wings of excessive bad taste—seriously, you have no idea how cleaned up most translations of Lysistrata are— exaggeration, humor and irony.

Enough preamble. Joe Sacco’s Bumf #1, his first fictional work in what feels like forever, is the most necessary comic of 2014. A nightmare that pulls from his roots in underground comix and the work of contemporaries like Michael DeForge and Jim Woodring, Bumf #1 is grappling with American hegemony in a way that serves as a stark reminder of the freedom and possibility that comics allows.

It’s also, to put it mildly, unsubtle. The first two-page spread in the book features Bumf’s narrator telling us that after the Garden of Eden, “There’s been a serious fuck-up,” while surrounded by prostitutes, a woman smacking her child, a man having his brains blown out, a homeless man sitting in front of a garbage can with a human leg sticking out of it, a man hanging himself and the twin towers being hit by planes. Then we’re off to World War II to firebomb some Jerrys and WWI to stroll naked through the trenches while millions of young men die, before seguing into a present day White House where President Barack Obama (drawn as Richard Nixon) attends a meeting in a situation room like something out of Hieronymous Bosch:
 

sacco situation room

 
Fiction, then, isn’t Bumf’s only departure from Sacco’s previous major works (the brilliant Footntoes in Gaza, Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde). In leaving the world of comics journalism, he’s also left behind realism entirely. Bumf #1 is a nightmare peopled by a set of symbolic characters pulled from the collective unconscious. First, there’s our narrator, a scummy, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, bestubbled human face on the body of tweety-bird. Then there’s Colonel Singo-Jingo, fat, British, and monocled, standing up for the old-fashioned values that the 37 million deaths in World War I couldn’t shake. There’s our eventual protagonist, Nixon/Obama. General Custer makes a cameo appearance. Finally, there’s Joe Sacco himself, hired to be the official propagandist of American Empire, composing a story that’s “boy meets girl meets the State.”

These various threads cohere as the United States opens a new “black site” in the form of a portal to a planet in the Andromeda Galaxy, where neither the rules of physics, the ten commandments, nor the Geneva conventions apply:
 

sacco andromeda dimension

 
Once in Andromeda, everyone dons hoods, water-boards a few detainees, gets their kicks through drone warfare, and falls in some form of love. The nightmare becomes inescapable, the “black site” an infinite hellscape filled with demon jackals, unsuitable for human life. It is what the novelist and critic Charles Baxter has called a “wonderland,” a place where the character’s fugitive subjectivity has been made manifest in the world surrounding them. Or, as Baxter describes the wonderlands of HP Lovecraft, the environments become “inhospitable interiors, either simple or elaborate, [that] feel like private prisons disturbed by lunatic geometry. Their spaces present vistas of grief-stricken vastness, combined with a steadfast inanimate hostility to any human endeavor. They cannot be a home to anybody. Any effort at domesticity within them would be laughable. No one would want to be there.”

Yet, Sacco points out again and again, we do want to be there. He’s first recruited to join the war effort on the edges of a giant Jacuzzi. Gazing upon it, he remarks, “Wow. The press room sure has changed since I was last here. … this Jacuzzi of yours is serious business.”

“It’s not my Jacuzzi,” the chain-smoking tweety bird replies. “Think of it as the people’s Jacuzzi. Getting in?”

Complicity, in other words, is part of what Sacco’s after here. Bumf #1 essays our collective loss of humanity through the prosecution of an endless war against a series of ever-changing Kaisers stretching back to WWI. In one panel, Sacco recreates the infamous “Saigon Execution” photo, adding a WWI-era German helmet to Nguyen Van Lem’s head. “Killing the enemy is never enough,” Colonel Singo-Jingo intones, “We’d been killing them for years.” (His solution to this problem is rape, by the way, which is never quite shown in Bumf’s one act of tasteful restraint).
 

sacco kaiser photo

 
This complicity is vast and all encompassing in Bumf. Religion, art, the legal system, love, all are powerless to resist the temptation of power and obedience. What sets Bumf #1 apart from other dystopian nightmares that the characters all want to be there. Whereas other dystopian narratives often revolve around either an epiphanic moment (Brazil) or an already existing discontent that finally finds a venue (The Hunger Games), in Bumf #1, the various characters discover an acceptance of their dehumanized, alien world. A torture victim falls in love with her torturer after he enrolls her in a sensible mobile plan. Sacco comes to enjoy the power and prestige of being the official State Graphic Novelist. Nixon/Obama realizes he’s the Messiah. Gradually, torturer and tortured alike don hoods and lose their clothes. By the final few panels, they are an anonymous collective mass of victor and victim, Sacco’s glasses the only distinguishing feature amidst the hairy bellies and sagging breasts. There’s no hope for us at any point in Bumf #1, which is part of why its humor is so savage, and, while it often adopts the structure of the short gag comic, the jokes are likely to stick in your throat. There’s no escape from the bed we’ve made. All that remains is to lie in it. Getting in?

Based on a True Story: Thinking About Talking About Watching “Zero Dark Thirty”

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(1)  Even before you see the movie it seems like you’ve seen it. This isn’t only because Mark Boal’s screenplay is so sparse—under 10,000 words, apparently—that almost all of its memorable lines and moments are in the previews, largely in chronological order. No. Before you’ve seen Zero Dark Thirty, it’s likely that you already have some knowledge of and feelings about the film, thanks to a wide-ranging debate about whether or not ZD30 endorses torture.

(2)   “As a moral statement, Zero Dark Thirty is borderline fascistic. As a piece of cinema, it’s phenomenally gripping — an unholy masterwork. The first masterstroke is the first thing you see — or, rather, don’t see. Under a black screen, the sounds of 9/11 build: a hubbub of confusion, reports of a plane hitting the World Trade Center, and then, most terribly, the voice of a woman crying out to a 911 operator who tries vainly to assure her she’ll be okay. She won’t be. That prologue looks like restraint — there are no sensationalistic images — but it’s cruel: The recordings are genuine. You want revenge so much it hurts, but you’ll have to live with the pain because the ­sonovabitch bastard Muslims who killed that poor woman are elusive, and when you catch them they won’t talk. The next scene, a brutal interrogation at a CIA “black site,” is unpleasant but not unwelcome. To paraphrase Dick Cheney, you sometimes have to go to the dark side, and the big, bearded Dan (Jason Clarke) has made the trip…” – David Edelstein, New York.

(3)  “Portrayal is not endorsement.” – Kathryn Bigelow, director of Zero Dark Thirty.

(4)  Kathryn Bigelow didn’t actually say that. She said something similar to it and I summarized it. I conflated her words into other words, to make her argument simpler and clearer. I’m actually owning up to that here. The creators of Zero Dark Thirty, Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow, do not do the same with their film. Instead, it begins with a title card saying that it’s Based On A True Story.  “Just like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre!” I thought to myself.

(5)  We live in a time inundated with “true” stories that are also “good” stories. Many of these stories turn out to not be true in the sense of factually accurate, even as their creators will claim that they are true in the sense of “getting to an emotional/personal/spiritual/political/etc. reality.”  Ultimately, true can have a lot of meanings.  So, it turns out, can good.

(6)  Right after the title card, the film cuts to a black screen with audio of real phone calls from inside the towers on 9/11. Whatever emotional purpose this serves—I was in New York on 9/11, and was so horrified by this sequence I nearly left the theater—there’s a signaling purpose here. This Is Real, the phone calls attest.  This Happened. In a way, the phone call sequence abrogates the hedging of “based on a true story.” It sets up a tacit contract that we’re getting at something close to the truth. This was only reinforced by the misguided and self-important pre-release decision on Boal and Bigelow’s part to portray the movie as somehow a just-the-facts-ma’am depiction of the hunt for Bin Laden derived from their exclusive “journalistic” access to people involved.

(7)  I should probably just note here that several characters in ZD30, including its protagonist, are composites. In other words, they don’t exist and stand in for groups of people.  This is in line with other Based On A True Story narratives, but also worth noting.

(8)  It seems in ZD30’s case that the multiplex and not the newspaper is going to be the first draft of history. Many more people have already seen Zero Dark Thirty than will ever read Mark Bowden’s The Finish, an actual-nonfiction prose account of the same story. Does this increase the film’s obligation to get the facts right? Or is its higher obligation to be a compelling work of quality cinematic entertainment? Or art, for that matter? Without the pre-release interview blitz on Bigelow and Boal’s part, would this obligation have changed? What, in other words, is the value of the truth here?

(9)Creative Nonfiction, the genre of writing I largely work in, is an odd beast, engaging with complementary, occasionally competing, systems of worth.  On one level, there’s the aesthetic worth of a particular work, and on the other there’s its truth value. The truth is a difficult beast. The work we create is both enhanced and restricted by it. Audiences and readers are far more forgiving of narrative structure issues (for example) in true stories because they are true, because on some level we recognize that fictional narratives are able to “cheat” in order to satisfy us. Works with a high level of truth value can often get away with being on some level aesthetically unsatisfying, while works that are exquisitely crafted are often able to elide some of the problems of the truth, be they gaps in memory, or conflicting accounts, or a baggy structure, or what have you. Part of what is at work with Zero Dark Thrity’s first five minutes and with Boal and Bigelow’s publicity tour is an attempt to sell you on the work’s truth value prior to your having any experience of its aesthetic one.

(10)Were it not for this, I do not believe the debate over the use of torture in the film would be occurring. Were the film about a CIA agent pursuing, say, Homeland’s Abu Nazir, with a 9/11-like terrorist attack in the first shot, I don’t think anyone would care, not really. More importantly, they wouldn’t be so sure that they were so sure about the film’s stance towards torture, as ZD30 isn’t nearly as cut and dry as everyone seems to be pretending it is.

(11)The case against torture—one I find persuasive, to be clear—rests on two arguments: morality and effectiveness.  Simply put: Torture is wrong and it doesn’t work. These aren’t completely separate. While we’re all fond of the expression the ends don’t justify the means, the truth of the matter is we often make decisions about morality and ethics based on whether or not a specific end is worth a specific mean. So one of the reasons why torture is wrong is because it doesn’t work. The ends—shoddy intel, innocent people destroyed, the dehumanizing effect on the torturer, the cost to our moral standing etc.—aren’t worth whatever crumbs we’d get from torturing people. It’s helpful then to think about Zero Dark Thirty in terms of both of these standards. Does it portray torture as effective? And how does it portray it morally?

(12) The answer to the first question is complicated, but I believe that the movie has its thumb on the scale in favor of torture’s effectiveness.

(13) ZD30  is divided into roughly two halves, one about the CIA’s failure to find Bin Laden, and one about its success. The torture takes place entirely during the “failure” half of the film, and there are many moments in this half where it’s made at least tacitly clear that the CIA isn’t getting anywhere with torturing people.  Also, the one piece of important intel—the name of Bin Laden’s courier—comes as the direct result not of torture but rather from an old interrogation room bluff: Jessica Chastain’s Maya and Jason Clarke’s Dan convince a detainee that he has already helped them and he gives them the name.

(14) It’s easy to point to this and say “see, the film is showing that old school law enforcement tactics work and torture doesn’t,” and, indeed, some have. The problem is that this bluff only works because the detainee has been waterboarded, starved, sleep deprived, beaten, walked around like a dog and shoved in a small wooden box until his short-term memory has disintegrated, allowing them to convince him that he has forgotten helping them. Later on, Maya interrogates a different detainee who says without prompting, “I don’t want to be tortured anymore, I’ll tell you whatever you want.” He provides no useful information, but he provides the next moment of narrative satisfaction to the audience, by intoning the ominous line “he is one of the disappeared ones.” Torture is thus narratively effective in the film regardless of how effective it is as an intel-gathering tool.

(15) Oh yeah, there’s also the glaring fact that torture did not, in real life, get us the name of the courier.

(16) “‘The film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Laden,’ acting CIA Director Mike Morell wrote in a letter to employees in December. ‘That impression is false.’ The Senate intelligence committee, which last month completed a 6,000-page report on the CIA interrogation program based on its examination of 6 million pages of CIA records, was more definitive: ‘The CIA did not first learn about the existence of the UBL courier from CIA detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques. Nor did the CIA discover the courier’s identity from CIA detainees subjected to coercive techniques.’ Yet in their film, Bigelow and Boal depict the exact opposite.” – Adam Serwer, Mother Jones.

(17) “Torture may be morally wrong, and it may not be the best way to obtain information from detainees, but it played a role in America’s messy, decade-long pursuit of Osama bin Laden, and Zero Dark Thirty is right to portray that fact.” – Mark Bowden.

(18)  The film also contains many moments where characters go to bat for the efficacy of torture and not one moment in which anyone repudiates it.  This would be excusable by the dictates of realism (it’s doubtful CIA torturers would sit around talking about how it doesn’t work) were it not for the film’s inclusion of a scene where Mark Strong’s “George” argues that torture works to Stephen Dillane’s “National Security Advisor”—a guy who is fairly clearly based at least in part on White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, by reputation the most argumentative man alive—and NSA/Rahm doesn’t argue about it.

(19) Regardless of its view on torture’s effectiveness, there is the question of ZD30’s take on the morality of torture. And it is here that the movie is at its most troubling, if most interesting. For Zero Dark Thirty has absolutely no moral perspective on torture.  It’s an essentially amoral film.  It’s not immoral. It’s view towards torture is not, say, 24’s, where it always works and is always awesome and the people who get tortured deserve it. Nor is it, say, Man on Fire where torture is the hilariously over the top and necessary path that Denzel Washington must take to find Dakota Fanning.

(20) In Zero Dark Thirty, torture is simply shown, generally in a filmic style we associate with “objectivity”: no underscoring, documentary-like cutting and camera movement, few POV shots, etc.  Much has been made of a few quick shots of Maya wincing, folding her arms, or otherwise seeming to disapprove of the interrogation she’s seeing. Yet, given that we later learn that in these first scenes she is at most 22 years old, and given that eventually she embraces torture, these moments can also be read as the squeamishness of the Rookie Cop who is about to become the Lone Crusader Who Works To Buck The System, Jimmy McNulty with better bone structure.

(21) Does Zero Dark Thirty have some kind of obligation—moral, political, ethical—to take a stance on torture, to be a “good” story in a moral sense? How would we treat a mainstream Oscar-nominated thriller that treated the Holocaust or slavery in a similarly “objective” and amoral way? Or a film that did the same with rape?  Why doesn’t torture, a very recent part of our history that is still being debated, belong in this group?

(22) Ultimately, these questions are far more interesting than the film itself, which may be why the debate over torture has obscured discussion of the actual film. The script, alas, is a clunker, filled with tin-eared lines, containing characters that lack even one dimension, and riddled with clichés, while the acting—particularly the dialect work from the film’s many British actors—is deeply uneven.

(23) Despite this, the film has a power, thanks in part to Kathryn Bigelow. Zero Dark Thirty is expertly, even brilliantly, directed. Each sequence in it is riveting in its construction as Bigelow uses her keen sense of color, light and rhythm to pull the audience through the film’s decade-long story.  Its second source of power is, of course, that it is true. Or rather true-ish. Or truthy. From the moment those phone calls start in, you can’t help but think that everything they’re showing you really happened, even when a part of you screams that it didn’t. This is Zero Dark Thirty’s trick, and it’s a good one. It can justify its weaknesses through claiming a level of access to the people involved in the story that you the viewer will never, can never, have, while also changing things when necessary for the sake of being a good story. The end result is something neither particularly true nor particularly good that somehow feels like both. And if feeling is a kind of truth, maybe, at the end of the day, it is both of these things.

Obama Is No Khrushchev

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Prosecuting former administrations for crimes divides us from our friends, encourages our enemies, and distracts us from the pressing and difficult business of governance. As one high-ranking government official said of a liberal reformer bent on raking up the crimes of the past, “He’s just handing the sword to others, helping the tigers harm us.”

As the poetic idiom suggests, the high-ranking government official was not Dick Cheney — it was Chairman Mao. And the liberal reformer in question was not Glenn Greenwald; it was Khrushchev.

I recently read William Taubman’s massive biography Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, and the book was on my mind as I paged through Glenn Greenwald’s new volume With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. The parallels are fairly obvious. Greenwald argues that American elites have effectively and deliberately placed themselves above the law. Illegal activity by the wealthy or powerful — Nixon Watergate crimes; Reagan Iran-contra crimes; Bush-era illegal wiretapping and torture; Wall Street malfeasance which led to the financial collapse — is not so much ignored as deliberately sanctified. Democrats, Republicans, and the press corps all agree that prosecuting the powerful would be divisive and hurt America. Therefore, as Obama has often said, “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

Mao, obviously, felt the same way about Stalin. So, for that matter, did many in the Soviet hierarchy. These people weren’t idiots; they had good reason not to want to expose the extent of Stalin’s crimes. Communism had many enemies, both internal and external. For those enemies open discussion of the hideous mass killings of the Stalin era would be a propaganda coup. Moreover, Stalin’s heirs were all implicated in his atrocities. Mao in China was, of course, wading through shoals of decaying bodies, and was using Stalin’s personality cult as a blueprint for his own. The Russian elite was more directly involved; all had, at Stalin’s behest, consigned innocent people to death; all had failed to speak out to protect the innocent. Khrushchev, who succeeded Stalin, had certainly signed death lists.

Yet, despite his own culpability, Khrushchev denounced his predecessor. Taubman in his biography calls this denunciation, delivered in a four hour speech, “the bravest and most reckless thing [Khrushchev] ever did.” It was certainly a braver thing, by many orders of magnitude, than any public act committed by Barack Obama, or by George W. Bush, or, for that matter by Clinton or even the sainted Reagan. We tend to think of Soviet rulers as absolute dictators who can govern with impunity, but the truth is that Khrushchev’s position at the top of the hierarchy was by no means entirely secure, and his decision to out Stalin’s crimes was a major political gamble. Taubman describes the reaction to Khrushchev’s speech, delivered in secret to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956.

Many in the audience were unreconstructed Stalinists; those who had denounced former colleagues and clambered over their corpses suddenly feared for their own heads. Others, who had secretly hated Stalin, couldn’t believe his successor was joining their ranks. As the KGB chief-to-be Vladimir Semichastny remembered it, the speech was at first met with “a deathly silence; you could hear a bug fly by.” When the noise started, it was a tense, muffled hum. Zakhar Glukhov, Khrushchev’s successor in Petrovo-Marinksky near Donetsk, felt “anxious and joyous at the same time” and marveled at how Khrushchev “could have brought himself to say such things before such an audience. ” Dimitri Goriunov, the chief editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda, took five nitroglycerin pills for a weak heart. “We didn’t look each other in the eye as we came down from the balcony,” recalled Aleksandr Yakovlev, then a minor functionary for the Central Committee Propaganda Department and later Gorbachev’s partner in perestroika, “whether from shame or shock or from the simple unexpectedness of it, I don’t know.” As the delegates left the hall, all Yakovlev heard them uttering was “Da-a, da-a, da-a” as if compressing all the intense, conflicting emotions they felt in the single, safe word, “yes.”

Of course, George W. Bush is not Stalin. Stalin caused the death of millions, and ordered I don’t know how many innocents tortured to death (thousands? tens of thousands?). Bush’s aggressive (and therefore, by international law, illegal) war in Iraq killed only in the low hundreds of thousands according to most estimates. Greenwald says the torture Bush authorized probably resulted in the deaths of at most 100 people. Similarly, the Obama administration and its Democratic allies have much less to lose by exposing their predecessors than did Stalin’s followers. As Greenwald points out, Democratic muckety-mucks like Nancy Pelosi and Jay Rockefeller were informed of Bush torture tactics and illegal wiretapping, which makes them complicit under the law. But they weren’t murderers like Khrushchev, and they haven’t just lived through a political bloodletting like the purges. If worse came to worse, they would only get jail time, not execution following a quick show trial.

These comparisons, though, do not necessarily redound to the credit of our political class. Khrushchev exposed Stalin-era crimes even though he had much more to lose by doing so than Obama has to lose in exposing Bush’s. Even in terms of national security, Khrushchev was in a significantly more precarious position. The U.S. has al-Qaeda to worry about; the Soviet Union had the U.S.— and, many, many other enemies, all much more credible as existential threats than Osama bin Laden could ever hope to be even in his most megalomaniacal wet dreams.

In fact, Khrushchev’s deStalinization damaged the Soviet Union in the short term, and arguably destroyed it in the long. The secret speech, which was at Khrushchev’s insistence duly publicized, sent shock waves through Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe. The Hungarian Revolution — which Khrushchev ruthlessly and bloodily crushed — was inspired in large part by the revelations of the true horror of Stalin’s reign. Khrushchev’s speech also alienated Mao, separating the USSR from one of its most important allies. Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinist rhetoric was used against him when he was forced from power in 1964, with one colleague declaring, “Instead of the Stalin cult, we have the cult of Khrushchev.” Even after Khrushchev himself was gone, his reforms continued to undermine the government and philosophy to which he had devoted his life. In the late 1980s, Khrushchev’s deStalinization became the blueprint for Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, which ultimately caused the Soviet system itself to buckle.

So Obama and Mao aren’t wrong. Looking backwards can turn you into a pillar of salt. Exposing the crimes of the powerful really can delegitimize a government, and holding past rulers accountable really can have devastating consequences. To have faith in the rule of law, as Greenwald does and (vacillatingly, but nonetheless) as Khrushchev did, is to have faith in the system. It is to believe that democracy (or in Khrushchev’s case, socialism) is strong enough and vital enough to withstand the light of truth.

As it turned out, Soviet Communism wasn’t strong enough to withstand that light. Maybe our government isn’t either — in which case, the sooner we find that out, the better. Khrushchev’s deStalinization resulted in much misery for both himself and the country. But I don’t think anyone doubts it was the right thing to do.

Not that Khrushchev was a saint. On the contrary, he was a boorish, overbearing, often cruel man, with blood on his hands up to his elbows. But if we’re going to toss out the rule of law and model ourselves on tyrants, better him, by far, than Mao or Stalin.
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This first ran on Splice Today.