Filed under: das vaterland, my bad!, why i oughta | Tags: das vaterland, my bad!, why i oughta
Last week, I sat in on an English class that discussed this image:
Since I introduced myself in the class’s first minute (“Hey, dudes! I’m an AMERICAN!! You gotta love me”), my presence for the following 44 minutes was—uncomfortable. Their discussion: the American Dream. And: dehumanization and torture. I felt a range of emotions: guilty, defensive, amused, on-edge. Since this was my second pre-teaching week, I was supposed to just sit and observe. But, as an American representative, was I obligated to speak? Do you owe any sort of chiming-in duty just because you’re a citizen of a nation that has committed egregious crimes? As an American, do I represent those crimes?
But, let’s brainstorm for a bit: what other nation has famously committed dehumanizing acts and torture in the name of the state? And so, I wondered how Germans today discussed the Third Reich. I know that they teach it in school. But I get two senses: one: that after sixty years, they feel appropriately distanced from the sentiments that inflicted those crimes; and, two: they lament by casting their gaze out, by being the first to criticize other nations guilty of human rights abuses. They show that, though they can do wrong, anyone can do wrong, too. Which, weirdly, is how I felt staring at the projected image of the Statue of…. I wanted to be like, Hey, and how does this relate to your past, huh, huh? And I also wanted to point out that, though the prison guards effaced the prisoner’s humanity by obscuring his face, the profligation of this image has dehumanized this man as well, turning him into a symbol of abuse. That image is a human being, and we don’t know his name, and this whole discussion of what he symbolizes continues to dehumanize him. And, while I thought of all of this, I wondered why I felt so guilty for acts I didn’t commit—surely a sentiment many Germans felt in the post-war years.
And so, I just stayed quiet. In my chair, in the corner. I pretended that my silence excluded me from the discussion, from the blame. I’m been having nightmares about Abu Ghraib ever since.
