Evanston, Ill.
ONE MUST have either a keen sense of irony or an utter lack of it to stage a teach-in in 2004. Painfully but unsurprisingly it was the latter on display last week at Northwestern University, where a sundry collection of appallingly uninformed academics gathered to confirm to one another and to the predictable collection of about 100 of the earnest young and the bored old that the torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. forces is very, very bad.
The highlight of the June 1 event was a shrieking performance by W.J.T. Mitchell, a professor at the University of Chicago and editor of Critical Inquiry, a quarterly journal of pretentiousness. Looking as if he’d staggered all the way up to Evanston from a Hyde Park soup kitchen, Mitchell offered a slideshow of photographs which, he claimed with a knowing leer, “were taken by contractors. These show what’s really been going on in Iraqi prisons.” He then proceeded to show a slide of four disgusting pictures supposedly depicting the rape of Iraqi women by American soldiers.
To anyone who truly practices critical inquiry, it should have been obvious that the women in the photos were Westerners, and the uniforms about as close to regulation as Mitchell’s own disheveled ensemble. The photos, in fact, are fakes known to have originated with a Los Angeles-based pornographer. Mitchell, however, trembled with righteous indignation.
That no one in the room pointed out that these were notorious and widely distributed fakes should perhaps not have been surprising. What was advertised as an apolitical discussion of a grave issue was assumed by attendees and participants alike to be a bash-Bush session; truth and falsehood, for the most part, were not on the agenda.
The event started with four religious sorts discussing the language of morality. They agreed that all religious traditions teach that torture is bad, and seemed to agree that the president’s use of the term “evil” to describe 9/11 was responsible for Abu Ghraib. This set the tone.
After the religionists came an English professor who talked about the poetry of witness, denounced America’s “more than 100 imperialist wars,” chastised the nation for not having invaded Yugoslavia, South Africa, or Rwanda, and dubiously asserted that President Bush “called the present war a crusade against Muslims.” A sensitive young woman felt moved to say, “How happy I am that there is this forum.” The poet nodded solemnly.
An anthropologist talked at length about Michel Foucault and said “profound” a lot. Then came a woman who showed slides of familiar war images accompanied by a recitation of President Bush’s sliding poll numbers and a communications professor who lamented the decline in the quality of American propaganda.
The next two presentations, drawing as they did on genuine experience and expertise, were glaringly out of place. First Scott Portman and Marianne Joyce, who work with refugees and victims of torture, eloquently described the effects and consequences of torture. Portman, a former worker in Kurdistan, told the audience of the notoriety of Abu Ghraib under the Baath and said of the present scandal, “I can think of nothing other than demolition of shrines in Najaf and Karbala that would have a more deleterious effect” on Iraqi opinion.
Following them was Captain Dan Moore of Northwestern’s ROTC program. Describing Abu Ghraib as “a moral Chernobyl,” he explained that we are presently in a moral conflict, not a war of attrition or maneuver, and tried to make the skeptical crowd understand how disastrous the scandal is within the framework of American military discipline. This was a hard sell to make to people who believe everything the military does is a crime. Moore was asked how exactly it was possible to be antiwar and pro-military. His lack of exasperation was admirable.
But the spirit of the event was better captured by the interlude between these serious presentations. A grinning emcee distributed door prizes. I won a deck of “55 Most Wanted Hawks” playing cards (the aces are Karl Rove, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney).
After Moore, there were another dozen speeches–mostly drivel along the lines described above. Two speakers rose above the occasion: Douglas Cassel, a law professor specializing in human rights, made an eloquent case for an independent investigation into civilian culpability for Abu Ghraib, and Gene Stoltzfus of Christian Peacemakers described the chaos he had met in trying to deal with the coalition’s detention system while in Iraq.
In short, those with experience and knowledge of human rights work and the war in Iraq, who unfortunately were few and far between, understood the gravity of what was being discussed; the rest saw it as another arrow in the anti-Bush quiver. Much indignation was expressed over Senator James Inhofe’s comment that he was “outraged by the outrage.” Given the low level of seriousness and knowledge on display from professors collectively charged with the education of thousands of young people, one was tempted to conclude that had Inhofe been commenting on the Northwestern teach-in, his remark would have been amply justified.
Tim Marchman writes regularly for the New York Sun and is an editor at NewPartisan.com.
