Salman Rushdie: Daggers in the Heart of Liberty

Salman Rushdie, in the Toronto Star (6-21-05):

What is a "fact?" In an age beset by bitter disputes about reality, the word itself, and its close relative "truth," become embattled. "Let the facts speak for themselves," historians, politicians and columnists like to say, but facts do not speak — they must be interpreted and spoken for. And then, , what is observed is altered by the observer's presence. Facts shift, depending on who is interpreting them.

In war, as Aeschylus said nearly 3,000 years ago, truth is the first casualty. Solid, reliable facts and objective truths, always hard to define, become more elusive in times of heightened conflict. The "war on terror" is a new sort of conflict, but truth is certainly embattled and the facts themselves are under heavy fire from all sides, and are daily receiving near-fatal wounds.

For example, l'affaire Gitmo. In May, an Amnesty International report brands the American internment camp at Guantanamo Bay "the gulag of our time," provoking a furious response by the Bush administration, and, soon enough, Amnesty backs down...

...Conservative American bias, which helps to establish what we might call "conservative facts," goes something like this: There's a war on, and these detainees are our sworn and mortal enemies. Why so much fuss about the treatment of men whose allies actually decapitate their prisoners?...

...And liberal American bias, which helps to establish "liberal facts," might go something like this: The Bush administration's disregard for the human rights of its Gitmo and Abu Ghraib prisoners is an echo of its disregard for civil liberties back home. The two battles are the same battle, and it may be a more important battle to win than the invisible war against the fanatics.

Meanwhile, the view from outside America — which helps to create what one might call "non-American facts," facts interpreted through a mounting cynicism about the "truth" — is that the U.S. has been giving itself too many good reviews lately, excusing its soldiers from any blame in the matter of the March 4 shooting of the Italian secret service agent Nicola Calipari who was escorting the freed Italian hostage Giuliana Sgrena to safety, and excusing all but a few, relatively low-ranking "rotten apples" for the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, and finding that only two of five incidents of Qur'anic desecration at Gitmo were deliberate — even though one of the "accidents" took place when a guard urinated near an air vent behind which an inmate was sleeping, and how accidental does that sound?

I have some sympathy with all three "biases." Self-investigation followed by self-exoneration is never convincing. However, it's hard to work up genuine sympathy for a failure of niceties toward people who would never consider upholding such niceties in return — to stick up for the human rights of people who despise the idea of human rights.

And yet the growing evidence of ugly behaviour by American military personnel is distressing in the extreme, not because of the injury to the detainees, but because of the injury to ourselves, to our identity as free and moral people living "under law," to our sense of what we stand for and who we are. That identity is, or should be, something that conservatives and liberals should both be determined to defend...

...There are lines of Marti's that are relevant here.

"Anyone who offends against the sacred freedom of our adversaries is reprehensible, and the more so if he or she does it in the name of freedom," Marti wrote. "There is no forgiveness for acts of hatred. Daggers thrust in the name of liberty are thrust into liberty's heart."

Marti's words, his "truths," allow us — indeed encourage us — to judge attacks by fanatics harshly. But even as we judge others, we should look in the mirror and say the words again.