Apr-May 97

Crime Beat

The Pardonable Rottenness of the Pure in Heart

The prototypical figure is Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry," the tough good cop who solved the hard case with "bad" methods. The underlying message is that the end justified the means. Instead of being presented as an opportunistic hypocrite, Dirty Harry is portrayed as a victim-a soiled but redeemable servant of goodness and civic necessity. Heinrich Himmler strikes the same note in his remarkable words to the administrators of his Death Camps:

Most of you know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck it out, and at the same time-apart from exceptions caused by human weakness-to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written... We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people to destroy this people (the Jews) who wanted to destroy us.

Sentiments of an equal piety-and a similar power to nauseate-can be heard in any squad room from Pretoria to Beijing to New York after Dirty Harry has completed an especially bloody piece of dirty business.

Many of us who read Himmler's words when they were first revealed, shortly after the end of World War II, were certainly nauseated. The sight and smell of the bodies in the concentration camps was still too vivid. We had not yet drunk enough beer with enough denazified nazis; we had not met people who could caress their wives and children with the same touch, with the same hand they had used to pull the trigger on the wives and children of others. We had not yet encountered Adolf Eichmann and the "banality of evil."

But since those days the mass murders which so revolted us have become commonplace. The spectacle of civil servants, in and out of uniform, efficiently supervising the torture, the killing and the "disappearing" of large numbers of their fellow citizens no longer shocks. After all, our own allies in South and Central America have done it: we have seen our own leaders shake hands with them. Our government has funded the manuals and supplied the instructors who teach them the newest tricks. But we do not call these friends of ours "murderers" because if they are murderers, then so are we-and God would never be on the side of murderers.

But, how do we know that? Simple: just take a look at our enemies-the real enemies of the good people. It is their wickedness that has made us good: so good that we can even do exactly what they do and escape censure. An evil that is done to eradicate a greater evil is no longer a blamable evil; it is a necessary evil, and by that single annealing, it is washed clean. From the beginning of the human world that has been the cop-out, and these days we hear it everywhere.

Just yesterday the hard-line communist rulers of China executed nonviolent student protestors on the grounds that the students, with the connivance of capitalist powers, were trying to destroy the State. A few years ago the right-wing military rulers of Argentina ordered the torture and "disappearing" of thousands of citizens. Their excuse was that they were rooting out communist terrorists. But long after the opposition had totally collapsed, they continued their terror. At first the new targets were limited to suspected "supporters" of the defeated oppositionists. The next targets were suspected friends of these supporters. Then it was any one who was critical of what the death squads were doing. Finally, it was any one whom anyone in the apparatus simply wanted to get rid of, for any reason, including personal reasons.

A police state must continually justify itself by claiming that the "good citizens" are being menaced by savage and remorseless enemies. They must be successfully accused of using more detestable methods than the police are using, so that the police methods always look "better" by comparison. The trick is always to put the victim in a worse light than you so that you shine in comparison. If the trick succeeds, the "good citizens" may be terrified enough to look at the police tactics as "necessary evils." When the good citizens finally discover that they themselves are the ultimate targets, it is usually too late: the thugs they have unleashed for the purpose of protecting them are now too powerful to control.

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