Two thumbs up

I have been feeling fairly depressed after reading a passage from Germaine Tillion's book L'Algérie en 1957 yesterday. If you don't know, Germaine Tillion was a French anthropologist and former concentration camp inmate who worked harder than just about anybody to inform the French about their misplaced sense of morality in regards to the Algerian War. In this passage she is, I think, trying to emotionally blackmail the French, using their vision of themselves as the inventors and progenitors of the Rights of Man (and of a strange paternalistic version of the Civilizing Mission). She writes (my own translation):

"You find yourselves, then - like everyone - left with these emotional reactions. For our 'conditioned reflexes' are - and I know that I speak for the majority of us - a passionate love for Justice, a quasi instinctive solidarity with the oppressed, prisoners, fugitives, but also a fidelity to our country when it is attacked and when it is in danger."

She seems to sum up the French moral position fairly well and hopes that people will once again revert back to their instincts in terms of their moral position. It is clear that many French behaved very badly during the Algerian War, but what I respect about their situation is that when evidence of torture and the regroupment camps in Algeria were exposed to the French public (through many clandestine sources), they actually did something about it and put enough pressure on the government that they eventually pulled out of Algeria. What depresses me about all this is that when Americans were confronted with Abu Ghraib and Blackwater, they brush it all off as 'necessary' or a single incident, condemning the lowest enlisted soldiers and refusing to interrogate the causes of the disease. Unfortunately I don't think that it would be possible for someone to call on Americans to rediscover their love for justice, and solidarity with the oppressed because I'm not sure it exists anymore, if it ever did. Individualism and nationalism have become our national morality, and it is very sad.

I was, however, quite encouraged when I found this article this morning in the Washington Post. Apparently Pete Stark is considered by many to be a raving lunatic without any class, and I have to admit I am appalled by previous things he has said, but I have to give him two thumbs up for saying out loud what a lot of us have been thinking for a long time: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/18/
Republicans are apparently very offended, but perhaps that's a good sign.

Okay I'm done venting and being political. I will go back to posting pretty pictures of Paris now.