Posted by
Ms. Brenne Meyro on Friday, June 29, 2007 7:46:14 PM
To: BRENNE
From: Poster No. 3
My portion of our "collective" sense of humor sees nothing humorous about Manson, Guantanamo, or this "humorous and innocuous wisecrack."
Do you really see no connection? Do you, really? Manson used his influence to cause a number of bloody, heinous murders; he was arrested and tried. During this trial his culpability was proven beyond reasonable doubt in open court, and he received a sentence generally perceived as reasonable and customary. This is what President Bush refers to as "tha rule a' law." The Guantanamo prisoners (I will not call them "detainees") may or may not have committed crimes--we do not know. If they are ever given hearings, it does not appear that this will be in open court; nor does it appear that these "courts" will afford trial and evidentiary rules commonly held to be reasonable and customary. In other words, they are subject to the will of their captors--and the will of those captors include denial of legal rights and basic human rights: confinement in isolation, repeated and systematic insult to Islam, repeated interrogation that even the most reasonable person would call cruel and unusual, torture. Is this the new “rule a’law”? You really do not see this connection?
Perhaps another example would help. From 1932 to 1942 Albert Speer worked as a architect and enjoyed a close personal relationship with Adolph Hitler. In 1942 he became Minister of Armaments for the Third Reich; in this position, he used forced labor to return the Nazi war industry to productivity. After the war, he was “detained,” but not indefinitely and not without human or legal rights—he was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. He served these twenty years in a prison—allowed communication with family and lawyers (and publishers), not subjected to insult or interrogation, not tortured—and was released at the end of that sentence. Certainly, Speer was subject to the will of his captors. And just as certainly, that was a civilized will which recognized that accused persons (and guilty persons) can and should be afforded basic human rights—even when, I dare say, especially when, the acts of which they are accused served to deny those right to others. Do you see that connection?
Rez was in the right to call to account the person who made the insensitive “humorous” remark. I applaud that action and the response of the one other person who spoke out. It seems to me that this is not a matter of humor, misplaced or otherwise. Nor is it a matter of who likes whom (good god! Are we in the third grade, here?). If we learn nothing else as graduate students, ought we not to learn at least that events in our history are connected, that they do have meaning, and that we need to pay attention to the nuisances of those meanings? And, ought we not also to learn to think before we speak and to expect to be called to account for the implications of what we say?