Mind The Gap: According to our Prime Minister: "There's quite a wide definition of ethics." To which we can only reply: "And it's getting wider!"
RON SUSKIND is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist,
best known for his reporting of the Global War on Terror (GWOT). It was while
covering GWOT for The Wall Street Journal
that Mr Suskind first encountered the ethics of self-created reality.
All wars do violence to human sensibilities, but the war
which began on 11 September 2001 was destined to set new benchmarks. Dark
practices such as torture, collective punishment, and extra-judicial killings:
extreme sanctions which, from the moment of its birth, the United States had
proudly and emphatically renounced; suddenly became accepted elements of
American state-craft. In order to live with these acts (for which no ethical
justifications are available) American military, diplomatic and bureaucratic
personnel were forced to devise a whole new way of looking at and explaining
the world.
Ron Suskind was the first to report it.
“In the summer of 2002,”, he
recalls, “after I had written an article in Esquire
that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director,
Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the
White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I
didn’t fully comprehend – but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the
Bush presidency.
“The aide said that guys like me
were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people
who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible
reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and
empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’
he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.
And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act
again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how
things will sort out. We’re history’s actors
. . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.”
It is difficult to overstate the
importance of this reported conversation. Not only because its content spoke to
the very dark heart of the Bush presidency, but also because it constituted
much of the “discernible reality” of contemporary politics – including our own.
In essence, what the Bush Administration
official was saying to Mr Suskind was that the exercise of raw executive power,
by virtue of its self-evident effects, removes any need for ethical
justification. If the United States invades Iraq, then that is the reality the
world must face. Questions about its ethics are simply irrelevant. As the 9/11
hijackers demonstrated: if the deed is big enough, it explains and vindicates
itself.
Our ethical structures are simply
too fragile to contain, or judge, such acts. Like the spider’s web which
ensnares small creatures, but whose fragile threads are powerless to hinder
larger prey, the “reality-based community” can only “judiciously” report and
study – but never stop – what the “Empire” does. As President Richard Nixon
notoriously observed to David Frost: “Well, when the President does it, that
means that it is not illegal.” Or, in the language of the Roman Emperors: Necessitas non habet legem: Necessity
knows no law.
Fish, it is said, rot from the head
down. If the most powerful men and women in the most powerful nation on earth
were now free to embrace torture and murder with impunity, then how likely was
it that those occupying the next steps of the social hierarchy would repudiate
these new, self-justifying, realities of executive power? If the President of
the United States could now condemn an American citizen to death without trial,
what was there to prevent Wall Street looting the American treasury? Or fat
Germans beggaring emaciated Greeks?
And, if the exercise of naked power
now requires no justification, should we local representatives of the
“reality-based community” really be surprised to learn that the rights of film
technicians and actors can be cancelled at the urging of an accommodating prime
minister? Or that, by building a convention centre, a casino owner can secure a
revision of the gambling laws? Or that an “anonymously” funded politician can
ride off, Scot-free, into the political badlands on the ass that is New
Zealand’s local electoral law?
No. Not when, as our own self-created
little emperor says: “There’s quite a wide definition of ethics.”
This
essay was originally published by The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The
Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru
Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 May 2012.
