BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Friday, July 02, 2004
THE BEAST WITHIN. A few
years ago - quite a few years ago, actually - Ted Koppel traveled to
Cambodia for an incredible moment: the trial of Pol
Pot, one of the great
monsters of the 20th century. For two nights, Nightline showed
Pol Pot being tried for his crimes against humanity.
Thought to have been responsible
for the deaths of more than a million of his fellow Cambodians, Pol
Pot was every bit as evil as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, lacking only the
means to project his horrors beyond the borders of his own
country.
The trial, as I recall, was
something of a farce, aimed more at getting his fellow mass murderers
off the hook than at bringing Pol Pot to justice. Still, seeing him
being brought to account, no matter how cynically, should have made a
far greater impression than it did. But in the hyper-fast media cycle
of 1990s America, so-called big stories - some of which weren't very
big at all - began to blend together. O.J. equals Princess Diana
equals Monica equals Pol Pot. It's only gotten worse
since.
I was thinking about Pol Pot last
night as I watched the arraignment of Saddam What an amazing thing to
see this evil man, the cause of so much misery and torture and death,
brought into an Iraqi courtroom to hear the particulars of his evil
read against him.
He looked good, didn't
he?
I'm sure Hannah Arendt's phrase
"the
banality of evil," which
she used to describe Adolf Eichmann, will be bandied about quite a
lot in the days and months ahead. I'm not sure if it applies. Perhaps
to the flunkies who were led in after Saddam, corrupt, amoral little
men like Tariq Aziz.
But to Saddam himself? Saddam isn't
Eichmann. He's Hitler. Watching him snarl and snap on television, he
didn't strike me as a bureaucrat dispensing death and torture like
another might dispense rice and road improvements. No, this was the
monster himself, and you could see it, see the evil, as he lectured
the judge. Other than the gassing of the Kurds, he didn't even bother
to deny anything, going so far as to say the Kuwaitis deserved
it.
John Burns's article
in today's New York Times is literary bordering on
magisterial, and thus is what you should make sure you
read.
But do we understand what's going
on? Do we realize that this is a historic moment? Or will this blow
by us, to replaced by another update from the Scott Peterson trial as
soon as the novelty begins to wear off?
MORE ON MOORE. Media Log has
such diligent readers. D.S. found the link to the Michael Moore quote
that Joe Scarborough and Christopher Hitchens were kicking
around on Wednesday.
Here
are the offending comments:
There is a lot of talk
amongst Bush's opponents that we should turn this war over to the
United Nations. Why should the other countries of this world,
countries who tried to talk us out of this folly, now have to
clean up our mess? I oppose the U.N. or anyone else risking the
lives of their citizens to extract us from our debacle. I'm sorry,
but the majority of Americans supported this war once it began
and, sadly, that majority must now sacrifice their children until
enough blood has been let that maybe - just maybe - God and the
Iraqi people will forgive us in the end.
The transcript
of Wednesday's Scarborough Country is now online.
This is much ado about not much,
but it's MSNBC, so I'm being redundant. On the one hand, Moore is
considerably to Media Log's left; though I think the war in Iraq was
misguided, I can't imagine how anyone couldn't at least wish that it
leads to a decent, stable new order in that country.
But the way I read Moore's piece,
he's simply asserting that it's not going to happen, whereas
Scarborough and Hitchens seem to accuse him of hoping that
it's not going to happen. Two different things.
And how can anyone argue that
French and German troops should lose their lives for our mistake?
Mind you, I don't want to see anyone lose his or her life in
Iraq. But this is our mistake, not theirs. Which, I think, is Moore's point.
posted at 11:49 AM |
1 comments
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1 Comments:
It is indeed glorious to see Saddam Hussein in court, although I would have prefered the old fire-in-the-spider-hole approach.
But speaking of the Scott Petersons of the media whirlwind, as is so often the case with Moore's bizarre rants, it's hard to know what his point really is. Suffice it to say that he likes talking like some Fallujah Emirate Taliban wannabe. Soon his talking point will be that if there had been some Arab Jihadists on the 9/11 planes, instead of those pasty white guys, the Zionist plot would have been stopped in its tracks.
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
