![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Fascism: A Warning by Madeleine Albright
This came out in 2018 while Trump was in the White House. Apparently Albright was planning to write it anyway; the 2016 election gave it extra urgency, but it was a message she already felt a lot of people in US politics needed to hear. Looking at what the Republicans have been up to in their horrible orange mascot's absence, she wasn't wrong.
The subtitle sums up the thrust of the book: it's a warning, not a history, though it uses history to make its point. Albright starts by summarising (at a very high level) how Mussolini and Hitler built their political platforms and how their careers unfolded as a result. Each subsequent chapter gives a similarly brisk overview of a regime that borrowed (or still borrows) from that playbook to seize and maintain power - the Soviets, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, North Korea - structured carefully to evoke parallels with anti-democratic stirrings in America. The final chapters address the US directly, making the case that the erosion of trust in US institutions of democracy leaves fertile soil in which Fascism could all too easily flourish.
Albright is obviously a big believer in American exceptionalism. She's candid about her country's flawed human rights record, but rejects with vitriol the idea that it should preclude them from taking a global leadership role. In her view, the most dangerous long-term consequence of America's fuckups is that they've supplied ammunition for the ideological guns of authoritarians around the world. Bowing to accusations of hypocrisy would be cowardice. Instead, America must reckon with its own failings while continuing to take other nations to task for theirs. She's a scarily persuasive writer - I guess they didn't make her Secretary of State for nothing - and the whole thing has left me feeling a bit morally seasick, the way I always do when my awareness of how much we need America runs up against how bitterly I wish we didn't.
None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture by Joshua E. S. Phillips
This guy, in a different way, is also quite into his American exceptionalism; it's taken me two attempts to finish the book, because the constant refrain of 'How could Americans do this? Americans! You know, The Good Guys!' drove me up the wall when I first tried a few months ago. That aside, it's a compassionate and insightful book that explores the impact of America's Middle East torture program on soldiers: the cultural factors that encouraged them to torture, and the profound psychological damage it caused them on returning home.
I was especially interested in Phillips' discussion of how media portrayals of interrogations influenced the actual behaviour of intelligence workers on the ground. This is a topic that's become poison in fandom thanks to widespread exploitation by arseholes who just want to win fights about their blorbos, but the complex two-way exchange between our real-world values and the stories we choose to tell strikes me as something that it would be really nice as creators to be able to have some good-faith conversations about. Phillips identifies a noticeable shift post-9/11 in popular US media about national security and law enforcement, where yesterday's more or less straightforward villain became today's gritty, hands-on hero who does what needs to be done. A number of the guards and interrogators he spoke to admitted to drawing inspiration from shows and movies they'd watched that portrayed harsh interrogation tactics as badass and effective. Many of them were inexperienced - either new to the job and poorly trained or pulled into the prison environment from career paths unrelated to intelligence - and claimed they were using fiction to fill the gaps where expert guidance and leadership were lacking. At the same time, more experienced intelligence workers reported being met with hostility when they raised concerns about the unsafe, illegal and ineffective practices that this fiction inspired. No one wanted to hear it. The worst harm wasn't done by people copying specific techniques they'd seen on screen, but by absorbing the underlying view of intelligence work: that it's about toughness and dominance, not rapport-building and cultural sensitivity. If the experts weren't peddling trade secrets on how to more effectively break a prisoner's will, their voices weren't welcome.
Phillips talked a lot about the show 24, which is all about counterintelligence, and which I've never seen. But the myth of torture's effectiveness shows up in so many places - and why wouldn't it? Ticking time bombs make for much more exciting stories than slow, meticulous adherence to due process. The trope has become so ubiquitous that I doubt a lot of creators even see themselves as making a statement. I'm reminded of a scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier where Cap acquires world-saving intel by subjecting a prisoner to mock execution. The film's whole theme is the evil of intelligence agencies that sacrifice freedom and human rights in the name of security. Cap's brief stint as a torturer isn't analysed or remarked on in any way - the scene is there purely to move the plot along.
The book starts with Phillips investigating the tragic death of one young soldier-turned-torturer - by suicide or passive self-destruction, it isn't clear - and it ends with one of his major sources meeting the same fate. A lot of soldiers who were involved in detainee abuse seem to have experienced a bubble-bursting effect when they came home: the brutalising, insular environments of their Iraq postings had numbed them to the horror of what they were doing, but reentry into their civilian communities brought it all rushing back. And it was almost impossible to get help processing what had happened, due to both the Army's vested interest in silencing them and their own fear of recriminations.
This came out in 2018 while Trump was in the White House. Apparently Albright was planning to write it anyway; the 2016 election gave it extra urgency, but it was a message she already felt a lot of people in US politics needed to hear. Looking at what the Republicans have been up to in their horrible orange mascot's absence, she wasn't wrong.
The subtitle sums up the thrust of the book: it's a warning, not a history, though it uses history to make its point. Albright starts by summarising (at a very high level) how Mussolini and Hitler built their political platforms and how their careers unfolded as a result. Each subsequent chapter gives a similarly brisk overview of a regime that borrowed (or still borrows) from that playbook to seize and maintain power - the Soviets, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, North Korea - structured carefully to evoke parallels with anti-democratic stirrings in America. The final chapters address the US directly, making the case that the erosion of trust in US institutions of democracy leaves fertile soil in which Fascism could all too easily flourish.
Albright is obviously a big believer in American exceptionalism. She's candid about her country's flawed human rights record, but rejects with vitriol the idea that it should preclude them from taking a global leadership role. In her view, the most dangerous long-term consequence of America's fuckups is that they've supplied ammunition for the ideological guns of authoritarians around the world. Bowing to accusations of hypocrisy would be cowardice. Instead, America must reckon with its own failings while continuing to take other nations to task for theirs. She's a scarily persuasive writer - I guess they didn't make her Secretary of State for nothing - and the whole thing has left me feeling a bit morally seasick, the way I always do when my awareness of how much we need America runs up against how bitterly I wish we didn't.
None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture by Joshua E. S. Phillips
This guy, in a different way, is also quite into his American exceptionalism; it's taken me two attempts to finish the book, because the constant refrain of 'How could Americans do this? Americans! You know, The Good Guys!' drove me up the wall when I first tried a few months ago. That aside, it's a compassionate and insightful book that explores the impact of America's Middle East torture program on soldiers: the cultural factors that encouraged them to torture, and the profound psychological damage it caused them on returning home.
I was especially interested in Phillips' discussion of how media portrayals of interrogations influenced the actual behaviour of intelligence workers on the ground. This is a topic that's become poison in fandom thanks to widespread exploitation by arseholes who just want to win fights about their blorbos, but the complex two-way exchange between our real-world values and the stories we choose to tell strikes me as something that it would be really nice as creators to be able to have some good-faith conversations about. Phillips identifies a noticeable shift post-9/11 in popular US media about national security and law enforcement, where yesterday's more or less straightforward villain became today's gritty, hands-on hero who does what needs to be done. A number of the guards and interrogators he spoke to admitted to drawing inspiration from shows and movies they'd watched that portrayed harsh interrogation tactics as badass and effective. Many of them were inexperienced - either new to the job and poorly trained or pulled into the prison environment from career paths unrelated to intelligence - and claimed they were using fiction to fill the gaps where expert guidance and leadership were lacking. At the same time, more experienced intelligence workers reported being met with hostility when they raised concerns about the unsafe, illegal and ineffective practices that this fiction inspired. No one wanted to hear it. The worst harm wasn't done by people copying specific techniques they'd seen on screen, but by absorbing the underlying view of intelligence work: that it's about toughness and dominance, not rapport-building and cultural sensitivity. If the experts weren't peddling trade secrets on how to more effectively break a prisoner's will, their voices weren't welcome.
Phillips talked a lot about the show 24, which is all about counterintelligence, and which I've never seen. But the myth of torture's effectiveness shows up in so many places - and why wouldn't it? Ticking time bombs make for much more exciting stories than slow, meticulous adherence to due process. The trope has become so ubiquitous that I doubt a lot of creators even see themselves as making a statement. I'm reminded of a scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier where Cap acquires world-saving intel by subjecting a prisoner to mock execution. The film's whole theme is the evil of intelligence agencies that sacrifice freedom and human rights in the name of security. Cap's brief stint as a torturer isn't analysed or remarked on in any way - the scene is there purely to move the plot along.
The book starts with Phillips investigating the tragic death of one young soldier-turned-torturer - by suicide or passive self-destruction, it isn't clear - and it ends with one of his major sources meeting the same fate. A lot of soldiers who were involved in detainee abuse seem to have experienced a bubble-bursting effect when they came home: the brutalising, insular environments of their Iraq postings had numbed them to the horror of what they were doing, but reentry into their civilian communities brought it all rushing back. And it was almost impossible to get help processing what had happened, due to both the Army's vested interest in silencing them and their own fear of recriminations.
