yes again, again

We often hear the lament “never again” repeated, but sadly, it appears that what people actually mean is “never again in the West”.

Since genocide was defined in international law after the Second World War, there have been five genocidal campaigns of which I am aware: Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi, Bosnia and now Sudan. And in only one of those five, Bosnia, has the West made a concerted effort stop the horror. I do not want to believe that the lack of Western intervention in the other four tragedies is rooted in racism, but reluctantly I have to conclude that there must be some subconscious racism involved.

I do believe it is subconscious because in most corners of the Western world, institutionalized racism has been largely eradicated. Certainly racism lives in the smaller hearts and smallest minds which comprise Western Civilization, but for the most part we have grown past the point were bigotry is accepted as normal within the bounds of the broader society.

But when one takes a closer look at the mass behavior of the West, I cannot exclude racism as a factor in society’s moral reckoning. Each of the five instances of genocide over the last half century were unspeakably horrible. Each of these blood drenched catastrophes implicitly demanded action by the West, but the one time we intervened in a significant way was when the victim’s faces were similar to our own.

I hope I am wrong about this, but I fear that I am not. I fear it in part because I too must search my own soul because of my own failure to speak out or act.

In a weak attempt to right old transgressions, I have taken the time to write my elected representatives to encourage action on the genocide presently taking place in Darfur. I hope you will consider taking the time as well. I admit that this action on my part is out of sync with my general proposition that the elected representatives do not care what you or I actually think. I have not changed my mind on that point, but I feel that in the face of this much death and destruction, I must say something: this blog entry and my undoubtedly futile missives to elected Federal officials are that something.

The situation in Darfur does deserve your and my attention. I have consciously chosen not to write on this subject previously because I am keenly aware that it is improbable we will act and people get more than a little bit weary of reading impassioned pleas for humanitarian causes with little hope of resolution. My attitude changed last night while watching Charlie Rose interviewing the creators of a new movie on the decline of Hitler. The phrase “never again” has pinged my brain incessantly since. You and I know that we should not have let this happen, but we have failed again.

If you want some motivation, a great starting place is Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed entitled The Secret Genocide Archive. A slight warning is in order as there are pictures there that might be disturbing to some though certainly not extreme by the standards of what is happening in Sudan. The short version is that while it is impossible to know the death toll, a plausible number would be on the order of 200,000 and rising. Unlike the merciful Christmas Tsunami, these oppressors torture and rape their victims before killing them.

Tragically, we have not even taken simple steps such as freezing assets in order to put pressure on these evil people.

I hope the attention some are attempting to bring to what is happening in Darfur makes a difference. We will never know how many lives might have been spared had the Allies acted after Kristallnacht rather than shamefully turning its head and letting events take their course. In Rwanda, scarcely even a decade ago, 800,000 people died when we remained silent. I’d rather not find out how many more African Sudanese will loose their lives if we choose to look the other way this time.

It would be nice to believe that our reason for inaction thus far is something relatively benign like ignorance and sloth. But while we deny our racism at an institutional level, it is perhaps still a diffuse element of our national policy. Witness the reaction in my corner of the West, America, to people of Arab descent in the post 9-11 era. The hostility toward Arab Americans stunned even me because Muslim fundamentalism knows no ethnic boundaries. It is hard not to be reminded that during the Second World War, here in the Land of the Free we locked up Japanese-Americans, but not those of German descent.

Racism is often cast about glibly in our culture and I do not suggest it as a contributing cause cavalierly. After all, 200,000 Muslims were killed in Bosnia so acting on a catastrophe of that magnitude which is in relatively close proximity for Europeans is understandable. While making an unqualified accusation of racism is not justified, the facts are still hard to ignore: In Africa we have had far more death and suffering, yet we do nothing.

If anyone wants to make the case for inaction, I’d love to have it explained to me.

homeland offense

Americans realized long before its repeal in December, 1933 that Prohibition had created new and far more dangerous problems than it could have ever been calculated to solve. As the few remaining Americans of the era of speakeasies would tell you, the impact on America was overwhelmingly negative. The affects of Prohibition were bad not simply because of the gangland violence but because of the artificial dichotomy that was created wherein otherwise “good citizens” were routinely flouting the law.

It was a hard lesson in governance, but America learned and moved on.

Or at least, America had moved on until enough time had past that the lessons could be largely forgotten. It is truly amazing to read the Prohibition era stories and see how thoroughly relevant they still seem. The story of the young man determined to end the rum running on the road in front of his house, thwarted by a wise father who took his gun and admonished him to stay out of other people’s business, sounds eerily similar to the stories I hear from the inner city. Not similar in detail obviously: that was a simpler and much different era. Rather, I speak of the similarity of how prohibition set in motion powerful forces with which ordinary people dare not trifle. The similarity of parents who wish to keep their children away both from danger and the dangerous. If you just stay out of the way it seems, the dangerous will most likely leave you alone.

But the dangerous do affect each of us whether we try to stay out of the way or not. The War on Drugs has extracted a price that while hard to precisely total in dollars, is much easier to discern in intangible ways. It can be measured in resources diverted from homeland defense, lives wasted in jail cells, insecurity while simply going to your car at the grocery store, and liberties squandered due to the tactical and strategic exigencies of a phony war.

One may not be able to hang a price tag on these things, but the price is dear none the less.

According to information from the White House, about half of all prisoners in US jails are incarcerated because of the War on Drugs. You have to dig to sort all of that out, but it is worth your time if you doubt the number. Using the White House data, by my rough calculations approximately $18 billion is spent each year to keep these prisoners behind bars. Compare this to the President’s 2005 budget figure for the Department of Homeland Defense of $34 billion (which interestingly includes $6 billion for the Coast Guard, one of the prime players in drug interdiction). I’ll leave it for a person with time to spare to come up with a more thorough accounting, but it is clear that once you add in other expenses, which include a vast array of law enforcement activity from Federal down to local entities and large expenditures in other branches of the military who have been partially co-opted, that we are spending at least as much on the War on Drugs as we are on Homeland Defense.

Eventually we may all be seeking illicit drugs to help us cope with our muddled national priorities.

In my mind, however, the ridiculous expense in financial and human capital of the War on Drugs is not itself a sound argument for the legalization of controlled substances. There are some things that must be illegal if society is to function and what the content of the law is should not be determined simply by what yields a net profit. The exorbitant cost instead should give urgency to the need to commit to drug legalization not because it is a pragmatic good, but because it is the right thing to do.

While legalization is, I am convinced, the morally and legally correct choice, if I am to be totally honest, I must tell you that I truly hate illicit drugs. My personal opposition is, in part, because of moral obligations imposed by my faith, and in part out of my ordinary human fallacy of fearing being out of control. Alcohol, in my view, however, is like liberalism and conservativism: it is OK if consumed in moderation. For me personally, the difference between the two is that moderate alcohol consumption does not lead to inebriation.

But I understand well that others disagree with me on the acceptability of alcohol consumption: the “intellectual” heirs of Billy Sunday are the stock from which I was raised. I know that there are those who would gleefully rob me of my right to enjoy my pint of stout and this is why the principals of Natural Rights are so crucial to building a free society.

When one is certain that they have a clear understanding that particular behaviors are destructive, it is only natural to want to intercede on behalf of the unwitting. But, unlike the majority of Americans, I really do believe in Liberty. As I have said before, I stand for human rights without regard to one’s personal viability, color of skin, religious creed, level of intelligence or unrepentant sinfulness. Free people must have the liberty to make choices that you or I might deem unwise or immoral.

The temperance tyrants sometimes argue back that it is not about controlling the behavior of others, it is about the cost to society of addiction and dangerous behavior under the influence. But I follow the facts where they lead me and not where I wish them to lead, and the obvious fact is that forty years of the War on Drugs has done absolutely nothing to curtail their use or reduce the impact of addictive behavior on society. The reality is that we currently have locked up over 3% of adults and by my conservative estimate annually spend the equivalent of the Gross Domestic Product of Paraguay and yet the cost of drugs continues to decline and the use of drugs is unabated.

The greatest expense borne by Americans in the prosecution of the drug war is the cost in human life and livelihood. Lives which are squandered by poor kids muling or dealing to try to make it in the world no matter what the cost of living in the shadows. Lives of non-combatants who are caught in the real and virtual cross-fire. Livelihood which is squandered by the rising tide of property crimes committed by addicted people seeking money for their next high. Then there is what is perhaps the largest line item on the expense ledger: the lost opportunity to deal with real and pressing issues.

All of this insanity is juxtaposed on the established fact that treatment has been proven far more effective than incarceration. Even the Drug War champions in the White House admit this. It is time to act on reason and end the insanity which is the War on Drugs. Time to give Freedom a chance here in the Home of the Brave.

It is way past time to put a priority on mending broken lives rather than building more jails.