|
by Peter A. Belmont / 2010-04-19
© 2010 Peter Belmont
| |
I identify three great evils which I believe also to be “all too human”. Each involves an information-distorting component (cover up, failure to educate, propaganda) and each involves a failure of leadership (failures of honest teaching, preference for the “easy political way” without regard for consequent costs, failures of corrective action).
Mankind must deal with such evils in part by realizing and struggling the “all too human” elements in human behavior which make up the underlying evil but, more important, by realizing and struggling with the (also) “all-too-human” failures of leadership which might have prevented or minimized the playing out of these underlying evils.
It is my view that leaders—although human, and although often afflicted with the deformations of character which give us politicians when what we need is statesmen—are responsible for what their societies do and should shoulder that responsibility rather than shuffle it off.
I have not included one of the twentieth century’s greatest evils—the Holocaust—in my list not because I do not regard it as an evil, and not because I do not regard genocide as “all too human”, but, rather, because the Holocaust was unconcealed, did not involve a cover up, and was a “success” rather than a failure of Nazi leadership and its “up front” genocidal policy.
|
|
I regard the on-rushing global warming catastrophe as by far the greatest “all-too-human” evil mankind has caused (and, in the US at least, so far refused to face). I measure the “size” of catastrophes by the number of lives lost or ruined. In my estimation, human inaction on global warming has by that measure already, and will in future, far and away overwhelm the far smaller numbers of lives ruined by the Catholic Church’s child-sexual-abuse scourge and the (presumably) larger but still small-by-comparison devastation of Palestinian lives by Israel’s now 62-year-old deliberate, unnecessary, and apparently intended-to-be-permanent extinguishing of the possibility of normal lives (human lives lived with human rights and national rights) for the Palestinian people.
I choose the Church’s problem, the Israeli problem, and the climate problem as exemplars of “all-too-human” problems not because they are of the same “size” but because the social mechanisms involved appear to me to be similar. It is to these social mechanisms that I direct my readers’ attention.
By way of personal disclosure, I should say: [1] I have no personal experience of child-sexual-abuse; [2] I have experienced the Palestinian catastrophe (the “Nakba” and what has happened since 1948) at second hand through my 24-year marriage (1967-1991) to a Palestinian-American woman who educated me, and through much reading and discussion since she died; and [3] I have experienced the present (2010) effects of global warming directly by visits in recent years to the Colorado Rockies where many mountain forests are dying precipitately due to the drought- and warmer-winter-mediated explosion of the tree-killing pine bark beetle population—and where the St. Mary’s glacier has all but disappeared in recent years.
Warning: most of my references are to wikipedia, and its articles are known to change from time to time. do your own research if you are so minded.
The Catholic Church’s Child-Sexual-Abuse Evil
In general, men (and women) are subject to sexual urges and are moved to seek relief from such urges through sexual contacts with other people. Not all men (or women) act on these urges with “other people” outside of marriage. Sometimes these “other people” are children. Such urges and such actions are part of the human condition which is commodious enough to contain many variations, all “only too human” even if more or less disapproved. Priests are human and are subject to these urges. Some of them, despite their vows of celibacy and continence, act on them. A few act on them with children.
I do not know the history of the official Church view of such contacts. Marriage and sexual activity for priests and bishops was allowed in the early Church. See here and here. Sexual activity is surely a priestly sin today, but whether that sin has always been treated as a serious one or not I do not know. Since marriage and sexual activity was once permitted, it would seem that the Church’s rule against them is not grounded in Christ’s teachings but rather in some sort of prudential reasoning which, without violence to Christ’s teachings, could be reversed if the balance of prudential considerations were seen to have changed. As I am not a Catholic, I shall go no further with that or other sexual and gender hot potatoes.
It seems likely that the Church knew of priestly sexual activity involving children (what today is called “child sexual abuse”) over the last 1000-2000 years from the personal knowledge of priestly confessors if in no other way. Sexual activity is part of the human condition and the Church should know about it, even if it does not approve of it, as it knows of other “sins”. Whether in the more or less distant past it disapproved strongly or tended to “wink” at it is beyond my knowledge. (Whether society at large regarded it as a serious sin or winked at it is another question, also beyond my knowledge. Human rights in general, human rights for the poor, and the rights of children may, for all I know, be a rather recent concern.) The shift from priestly “use” of children to priestly “abuse” may not be a behavioral change at all but rather a change in social attitudes.
My own take on this issue arises from the Anglo/American civil law notion of “fiduciary responsibility.” A fiduciary is a person who, by virtue of his office, profession, or social position is deemed to be automatically trustworthy and—because deemed trustworthy—is saddled with sterner moral and legal responsibilities of fair and faithful behavior toward those persons to whom he owes the “fiduciary” duty than any non-fiduciary would be. In law, the fiduciary is not supposed to “take advantage” of the person to whom he owes the duty. In my view, when the Church appoints someone as a priest, and tells the world that he has sworn to be celibate and continent, and places him in charge of the moral teaching of his parishioners, they make of him a “fiduciary” and he should be held to a higher standard than other people are held. Whereas “caveat emptor” may be the general rule intended to generate a healthy scepticism in interactions between people, parishioners should be able without “caveat” to regard their priest as trustworthy because of his appointment as their priest. This implies a duty (another and greater “fiduciary duty”) on the part of the Bishops, Archbishops, and Pope to make sure that such implicit trust is reasonably well founded. In this duty, it appears that the Catholic hierarchy has repeatedly, perhaps systematically, failed.
It does seem that the Church has not disclosed allegations of “child sexual abuse” as soon as it might but, rather, has engaged in the (again, “all too human”) enterprise known as “cover up.” It also does not appear that the Church hierarchy has exercised its leadership responsibility to teach, to investigate, and to correct. Our (or my) anger about this scandal is far less directed at the erring priests (possibly slaves to a passion they could not control) than toward the leadership who (in my imagination at least) are thoughtful, rational, moral, and responsible men (in the Catholic Church, all men, for better or worse), but who have not acted as I would hope. The scandal suggests that I am not alone.
I choose to mention this scandal in my list of three “all too human” evils because the underlying evil (illicit sexual conduct, abuse of powerless children) is surely “all too human” (so that the Church as an institution should have been on guard) and because there was silence, secrecy, cover up rather than open discussion (which might have led to an earlier and more positive resolution) and because there was a clear failure of leadership which, apparently, balancing the costs of scandalous revealing of evil against the costs of continuing the evil, chose to continue the evil.
Israel’s Abuse of the Palestinian People
Around 1900, the Jews, especially of Poland and Russia, began to suppose that there might be relief for Jews from the sometimes deadly and always unpleasant anti-Semitism of their Christian neighbors through the creation of a nation state for the Jews, a “Jewish State.” Although those who thought this way and acted on the thought were largely non-religious, they recalled the Jewish prayer “next year in Jerusalem” and decided that the Jewish State would have to be situated in the Holy Land. In 1917, Britain, then a major colonial power, being then on the verge of capturing Palestine (the Holy Land) from the Ottoman Empire late in the First World War, promised the Jewish people a “national home” in Palestine. The Jews, not surprisingly, interpreted this vaguely worded promise to be a promise of a Jewish State. They called on Jews to immigrate to Palestine, saying by way of bumper-sticker-like slogan, Palestine is a “land without people for a people without a land”, thereby ignoring the fact that Palestine was about as densely settled with Arabs (the people we now call Palestinians) as the agricultural and other practices and technologies of the time, and local political considerations, would permit.
After WWI and until 1948, Britain ruled Palestine not as a typical colonial power but rather, under the British Mandate of the League of Nations, as a trustee, a caretaker charged with ruling Palestine only until the people became ready for self-government, something regarded as likely to occur sooner rather than later.
If the Arabs of Palestine (largely Christians and Muslims) did not initially regard themselves as a people, they soon began to do so as Jewish intentions toward the creation of a Jewish exclusivist state in (or of) Palestine became clear. The Palestinians were frightened by and angry at the Jewish state-creating project and against the apparent British support for that project and responded with the Arab revolt (1936-1939), a largely peaceful “revolt” which began as a general strike, a “revolt” which was harshly put down by the British. At about the same time, the inter-communal tensions (between Arabs and Jews) led the Jews to push forward their state building activities. However, the Second world War intervened and the Palestinian Jews put state building on a back burner until Hitler was defeated. In 1945, massive Jewish terrorism directed against the British erupted aimed at making the British decide the cost of maintaining the Mandate was more than it was worth. Indeed, both Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, later prime ministers of Israel, were branded “terrorists” by Britain. This terrorism was successful and in 1947 the British “gave up” and turned the Palestine question over to the United Nations, promising to withdraw its troops in May of 1948. In late 1947, the General Assembly passed a non-binding recommendation that the Arabs and Jews of Palestine agree to divide the territory up into two states, one for the Arabs and one for the Jews. The Jews, acting through their spokesmen, the Jewish Agency, accepted this proposal, but the Arabs rejected it as unfair to turn 55% of Palestine over to the Jews who by then constituted only 1/3 of the people of Palestine.
At this point the Palestinian Jews had a choice to make—whether or not to push forward with their state-building project in the face of Arab rejection. Apparently that decision had long been made in advance, for there is no report of any discussion. War broke out. Terrorism was used by the Jews, especially the massacre of most of the population of an inoffensive Arab village, Deir Yassin. Perhaps the Arabs used something that might be called terrorism, but the war was vastly unbalanced, the Arabs having little of modern arms and its leaders having been removed during the Arab Revolt, but the Jewish Agency had used the time since 1936 to build up a secret army which was soon in the field against the Palestinian people, who had no army.
Here let me pause to remark that seizing land by force of arms, and terrorism against civilian populations is “all too human” and has been known in all recorded history. Read the Old Testament. Read Thucycides’s History of the Peloponnesian Wars. Consider, for that matter, Hitler’s unprovoked attack (to gain living room) against most of the nations of Europe. Until the amazing exercise of ex-post-facto law-giving of the post WWII Nuremberg trials, which entirely surprised the German Generals by declaring aggressive warfare a crime, making war to seize territory was perfectly OK legally and (I suppose) morally, the normal sport of kings.
That is to say that aggressive warfare was not officially declared to be an “evil” or a “crime” until 1945. On the other hand, the nations which had experienced the First World War had hoped it would be a “war to end all war”, showing that aggressive war had already been considered an evil for 30 years even if it had not yet been legislated as a crime.
The effort of the Jews of Palestine to carve a country for the Jews out of Palestine (or, as they seemed to intend to do, to evict the Palestinian Arabs from all of Palestine and keep it all for themselves) was thus imagined and planned at a time when such warfare, if already an “evil”, was not officially a “crime” but was carried out (in 1947-50) well after the rules had changed and aggressive warfare had become a crime.
In 1945 the UN had been created and the nations had decided to outlaw aggressive war: To maintain international peace and security, to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace; Art. 1 UN Charter 4. All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.; 6. The Organization shall ensure that states which are not Members of the United Nations act in accordance with these Principles so far as may be necessary for the maintenance of international peace and security. Art 2. UN Charter.
The War of 1948 by which Israel was created and by which 85% of the Palestinians from post-1948 Israel had been expelled and refused readmission was “all too human”, reflecting a Jewish desire for their own state (not a universal Jewish desire, by the way, but fiercely held by the Jews of Palestine) and reflecting a desire by those Jews for a state almost wholly Jewish in population, something not proposed by the UN in 1947. The expulsion of the Arabs was universally seen (outside Israel) as an “evil”, and the UN GA immediately called for the return of the Arabs to their homes in Israel if they would live there peaceably. Such a resolution was voted every year by teh UN for many years, to no avail. Israel persisted against the whole world in refusing to allow a “Palestinian Return”. Another “evil”.
To shorten history a bit, in 1967 another Arab-Israeli war was fought in 1967 and Israel captured all the parts of Mandatory Palestine which had escaped it in 1948, namely, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. Almost immediately, Israel began to build settlements for Jewish Israelis within occupied territories )West Bank and East Jerusalem and Gaza). Today (2010) about 550,000 Israeli Jews live in the occupied territories in settlements served by highways which only Israeli Jews are allowed to use, mostly surrounded by a wall (“separation wall” to Israel, or “apartheid wall” to Palestinians) which greatly inconveniences Palestinians in their daily lives.
The UN Security Council has resolved (in a law-giving capacity) that building settlements in occupied territories and settling settlers in them both violate international law. So has the International Court of Justice which declared, on July 9, 2004, that Israel’s wall in the occupied territories is illegal and must be removed (and all nations have a duty to see that it is removed) and that the settlements are illegal. See here.
Another and very great evil. Another “all too human” evil, the completing of the great land-grab commenced in 1945 (or 1936) or whenever the Jewish project of terrorist expulsion of (first) the British and (later) the Palestinians was commenced.
Secrecy, cover up, and failure of leadership
But where has there been cover up and failure of leadership? Certainly Israel has been above board about most of its actions? Well, no. Israel never admitted that it intended to expel the Palestinian Arabs and always claimed, untruly, that the Palestinians left of their own accord in order to further the war aims of the neighboring Arab Countries which attacked Israel after Britain left and the Israeli State was declared. That was a big lie not exposed by any Israeli until the publication of “Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949” by Benny Morris. Much of the killing, the torture, the imprisonment without trial, the demolition of Palestinian housing, the destruction of olive groves by Israel has been done quietly, rather as if Israel was as avid to maintain secrecy about it as it also was to continue doing it.
As to secrecy, it should be mentioned that the US mainstream media has acted, as to all this, very much as an arm of the Israeli censorship apparatus, managing to keep most Americans uninformed of matters fairly well known elsewhere in the world. Israelis know these things, Palestinians know them, even Europeans know them, but Americans (who rule the roost) do not know them. (Gaza has changed if not the general secrecy then the level of US knowledge somewhat.)
Evil upon evil, shrouded in secrecy. The recent case of Anat Kam, an Israeli soldier who copied secret papers revealing that the Israeli military was assassinting Palestinians in violation of an Israeli Supreme Court Order (never mind international law, which Israel routinely violates) is another example of crimes being committed but with an attempt to keep them secret.
OK, secrecy, but where is the failure of leadership?
I place the failure of leadership squarely with the US. It is the US which has repeatedly vetoed UN SC resolutions which would have called attention to Israeli violations of international law and Palestinian human rights. The US has, in effect, granted Israel and its leaders and military immunity from prosecution for violations of international law and thereby granted these people impunity (that is they cannot easily be punished). All this could change, and some countries (especially after the late 2008—early 2009 bloodbath in Gaza) have been talking about bring Israeli leaders and military men to justice, but nothing has yet come of it. The US has lately even appeared ready to torpedo the Goldstone Report, the UN’s report on Israeli (and Hamas) war crimes during that bloodbath.
The US has never taken any concrete step to prevent Israel from doing any of the things it has been doing (which I enumerated above), has never attempted to force Israel to allow return of Palestinians to their (long since destroyed or stolen) homes in Israel, has never taken any concrete step to stop the building of settlements or the settling of Israeli Jews in occupied territories. The US’s constant talk about a “peace process” has made the very words a joke, since Israel has clearly been quite satisfied by the one-state, undemocratic, apartheid-style arrangement which it now presides over, and has no intention to negotiate away any advantage which it now holds.
So, the failure of leadership by the US has been palpable, has itself been “all too human” given the power of the pro-Israel Lobby in the US, which has made slaves (in effect) of the entire Congress, which which any president must deal. It has not been secret (although it may well be—who could know?—that the exercise of pro-Israeli power in the US has depended on threats and “deals” not publicly known). President Obama has recently shown a tendency to want to do more about all this than his predecessors ever did, and seems not to want to act as a prisoner of the Israelis or of their agents in the Congress, but it has been an uphill fight and he has not shown how he will prevail over the Lobby and its agent the Congress. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has, in essence, spit in his face 9on the issue of merely freezing, not of removing, settlements) and
President Obama has come close to calling that spit “rain”.
In summary, the creation and subsequent exploits of Israel have been based upon and have involved evils and crimes, all or many “all too human”, have involved secrecy, and have been aided and abetted by the US, whose failure of leadership has permitted all or most of this to happen, and whose failure of leadership shows no signs of overcoming the effectiveness of the Pro-Israel Lobby, a sort of fifth column in the US different from other large and well funded lobbies (such as big banks, big health insurance, big pharmaceuticals, big arms manufactures, big agriculture, big oil and coal, etc.) only in serving and effectively enslaving the US by a foreign country.
Global Warming
Global Warming (“GW”) is fairly well known today.
The effects predicted from GW include submerging of low-lying coastal areas, even erasing some island countries entirely, due to melting polar ice. They include the deaths of forests, already happening, due to overly warm winters in which eggs of pine bark beetles stay alive over-winter and are enabled to destroy the forests. They include worse storms, and they involve changes in rainfall and snowfall (and snow melt rate) which may greatly upset world farming.
The predicted effects are evils.
The behaviors which are bring all this upon us are “all too human”, namely, people continuing to burn fossil fuels and use fossil fuels to produce pesticides and fertilizers needed for today’s large-scale factory farming.
The informational/secrecy component is complex. Certainly there is much talk about GW, but also (at least within the US) there is much scepticism and disbelief and a great deal of media support for this scepticism. Just as the pro-Israel Lobby is largely successful in controlling what Americans see, hear, and read about Israel, the anti-GW forces (presumably oil and coal companies seeking to protect profits, possibly overzealous religious groups who don’t like to see humankind described as doing “evil”) are doing a good job keep Americans confused about the truths of GW.
The lack of leadership speaks for itself. Especially in the US, industry and media pressure has kept the US from taking any sort of concrete steps to lower our use of fossil fuels. There is no recognition whatever that our use of such fuels really must be cut to zero (due to the enormous amount of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere). President Obama has even been quoted recently as saying that the “threat” of an Iranian nuclear capacity is a larger threat than GW is.
On this one, the “all too human” desire to burn fossil fuels to the last drop rather than stop earlier and possibly fend off the evil of the worst of GW effects (in favor of experiencing merely the not-quite-worst effects if we stop sooner) is leading the US (and hence the world) deeper and deeper into the path of no return, and there is apparently no leadership to stop this process.
Summary
We are all human and all given to doing whatever is “all too human” regardless (often) of the evil we do when we do so. Our leaders should steer us into greener pastures and nearer stiller waters, but all too often they don’t. Perhaps we have the leaders we deserve. Our media and leaders often make secrets of information which—if widely known—might have some prospect of exciting corrective passions among the people in whatever sort of democracy we (and others) still have after the ill-effects of the moneyed lobbies (on media and Congress both) are considered.
Good luck to us all.
|
