In spite of an international outcry to spare his life and concerted efforts by many ordinary people both within this country and abroad, Troy Davis is dead. It is pointless now to write about Troy Davis the individual human being. He has been sent to that undiscovered country where neither friend nor foe can reach him. We must concern ourselves with what survives, what is left to us to contemplate for the future. The same question that confronted us before Davis’ execution confronts us still after it: what does the Troy Davis story tell us about ourselves? Plenty, if we care—or dare—to look unflinchingly and deeply enough. It’s mirror, mirror on the wall time.
For instance, consider the people who were all along the most clamorous in their calls for Davis’ execution: the MacPhail family. Were they present at the murder of Officer MacPhail? One presumes not. Were they unaware that seven out of nine witnesses of the crime have since recanted their testimony, some citing police coercion? Again, one presumes not. They must, on the contrary, have been fully aware of every nook and cranny, every twist and turn, every cul-de-sac and corkscrew bend, of the Davis case in its entirety. They must know that Davis’ guilt could not be established beyond reasonable doubt. They must have known that Davis offered, hours before his death, to take a polygraph test to substantiate his claim of innocence, which he steadfastly maintained throughout his long imprisonment and until the end of his life. Knowing all this, the MacPhail family still kept up their death-chant, proclaiming themselves unable to rest until Davis had, as it were, been put to rest too.
Why?
Would one not think that the family, having borne the pain of losing one of their own members, would be anxious that no other family should go through the same ordeal as had been visited on them? Would they not be eager to make assurance doubly sure, since a mistake would mean what it actually has meant—undeserved suffering and endless humiliation for yet another family? Should the healing that they claimed would come to them when Davis was put to death not have depended, above all, on overwhelming and conclusive evidence of his guilt, without which such healing would have been a worthless joke? In other words, reality and the knowledge of it should trump the thirst for indiscriminate vengeance, right?
Wrong. For the MacPhails, as for many other victims’ families all over this country, it is of much more importance to watch someone being punished for their family member’s death than to know conclusively whether or not that someone is the one who committed the murder. Evidently not, just anyone will do—but once some sort of connection has been established between the suspect and the crime, whether that connection is circumstantial evidence or proximity or cowed and coerced witnesses, the baying for blood can begin. It no longer matters then that the wretched man or woman arrested might be as innocent of the crime of which he or she is accused as someone a thousand miles away. We’ve got someone—and by God, once we’ve got ’em, we don’t mean to let ’em go again if we can help it.
Why, it might be asked, single out the MacPhails as particularly vindictive and set on vengeance? The answer is, of course, that they must not be thus singled out. The attitude taken by the MacPhails, that someone, even if not the right someone, must be made to pay for what happened to them, is fairly widespread throughout this country.
For example, assuming, for the sake of argument, that the official story about 9/11 is true (though, like the story of Troy Davis, the official version continues to challenge credulity, to say the least) how many Americans asked themselves what had prompted such an attack? It was taken for granted that the perpetrators were completely evil with no redemptive features, monsters of such irremediably vitiated outlooks that they carried out the murderous attack out of the blue, just to get their jollies, for the sheer hell of it. The whole thing occurred in a vacuum, with no before or after, devoid of any sort of cause, backstory, or context. Few people asked questions. It was almost un-American to ask questions. Nor was it a time for reflection; it was a time for flag-waving and general frothing at the mouth. We felt justified in rushing off to attack the people of Afghanistan—for let us not pretend for one moment that we have waged a brutal war against anybody but the Afghan people themselves for the last decade. We have killed and continue to kill many thousands of Afghans—several times more than were ever killed on 9/11, with which, in any case, the Afghan people had nothing to do. These people we have killed are so many Troy Davises. Heaps and heaps of Troy Davises.
Imagine, if you can, even though imagination when it involves putting oneself in other people’s shoes is so rare as to be practically un-American, a whole football stadium filled with Troy Davises. These bodies are not strapped to gurneys as Davis’s was, but have death come upon them in far more brutal and bloody form. Much of the time, they’re not even recognizable as bodies. You’d have to imagine the stadiums strewn with mangled limbs, bits of scalps with hair still sticking to them, yards of intestines, dismembered children, fecal matter bursting out of exploded bodies, the strong unforgettable smell of charred and smoking flesh. These are people we have held guilty and punished with unforgivable brutality because somebody, somewhere, made us suffer. We have been guilty not of vengeance, but of stark insanity—the very insanity that we think we found in the 9/11 “attackers.”
And unlike the accusers of Troy Davis, our accusers have no shadow of doubt as to our responsibility for what’s happening to them. We carry out our killings quite openly—a few scattered claims of “ collateral damage” or calling somebody an “insurgent” seems to provide all the protection from public censure that we need. But then we are speaking of the U.S. public, which knows, or can find out easily enough, for the fact is no closely guarded secret, that the U.S. is now at war in half a dozen countries. But the U.S. public is also apparently wedded to the idea that somehow these countries brought it on themselves. Or, if they did not exactly do so, at least the intentions of the U.S. are good—which astonishing idea, though it would not mitigate the crime of an individual killer in the eyes of any North American, somehow not only excuses our international crimes, but even makes virtues of them.
But the rest of the world is incapable of the collective detachment from reality, that twilight zone in which a large part of the U.S. public seems content to dwell. To the world outside the U.S., the chain of events is clear: the U.S. will and often does attack any poor and poorly armed country that is of strategical importance, rich in resources, defiant of U.S. diktat, or any combination of the above. Non-Americans are unable to lull themselves with bedtime stories of a Miss Mary Poppins U.S.A., out to set the whole world to rights and motivated by pure, endearing altruism. They see us for what we are—not caregivers, but butchers and proud of it, or at least oblivious enough for the butchery to continue apace.
We have seen the outrage and hunger for vengeance of the MacPhail family, no matter how misdirected. Can we possible imagine what feelings our actions, so widespread across the world, and so long sustained, have aroused by now in the hearts of people affected by them? Wherever we have supported dictatorships, waged proxy wars, dropped bombs, sent missiles?
Oh, but, don’t blame the people, goes the familiar argument. The people have nothing to do with what is being done in their name. It’s the government that acts against the wishes of the public. This is a pretty, and pretty consoling argument—for Americans. As far as it goes. But does it really go very far?
On the just elapsed tenth anniversary of September 11, flags flew from homes all over the U.S. in remembrance of the victims. There were moments of silence in their memory. How many moments of silence have been observed for the 1.5 million dead (a statistic, I know) in Iraq as a result of the U.S. invasion, the tens of thousands dead in Afghanistan, the dead in Pakistan, in Libya, in Vietnam, in Chile, in Kosovo, in each of the numerous countries blasted by U.S. aggression, overt or unacknowledged? Where is the grief and outrage at these deaths? Where are the cries for revenge? The “never forgets”? Where is even the curiosity, the will to ask a simple question—is it possible, in all these situations, that we were the good guys, every single time, and that, every single time, it was somebody else’s fault—all the fault of those damned uncivilized furriners?
Has it become obvious by now that we attribute very different behaviour to non-Americans wronged by U.S action than we ourselves feel, even when in our case the culprit is far from conclusively identified? Has it become clear that we wish to act like MacPhails, but that we expect the rest of the world to act like Troy Davises—accept being battered bloody with the passivity born of despair? And that we are arrogant and callous enough to take their attempts at resisting, at fighting back, as entirely unprovoked aggression, a crime perpetrated against our innocent and virtuous selves? Why do you hate us when we’re trying to help you?
We feel the proper response of the native public to our murderous invasions should be shouts of adoration. We cannot, for the life of us, see that anyone, anywhere, could have reason to hate us. In the face of ever-growing mountains of evidence to the contrary, we continue to believe the best, and falsest, of ourselves. We hope, or rather we insist, that others do the same—but powerful as we are, capable though we still are of reducing nations too weak to resist us, we are not capable of pulling the wool over the eyes of those to whom we have brought depleted uranium, unmanned drones, carpet bombs, pre-dawn raids, hoods over faces, extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, and torture—all unmistakably marked “with the compliments of the United States.” We can expect the world to roll over for us, and perhaps it will do so—for as long as the weak must suffer what they must. After that, we may have to encounter some unpleasant surprises. Surprises, that is, to us. Not to anyone who is not an American. Especially not to poor and predominantly non-white countries. They have known all along.
Surprise one: What we suffer to happen to others in our name will eventually happen to us. The chickens, as Malclom X so presciently pointed out, will come home to roost. We are living in a fool’s paradise if we believe that the same capitalist-imperialist nexus that controls the rest of the world at gun and bomb point will not end up taking over our lives as well. Such a takeover is already on its way. Healthcare, education, Social Security, safety nets of all kinds are being decimated. The economy is in a deep depression—since we’re being honest, let’s toss out the euphemisms “recession” and “jobless recovery” with the contempt they deserve. Millions of Americans are unemployed or under-employed. Continuing to hide our heads in the sand in order that we may better ignore the plight of our non-American fellow human beings will only postpone the inevitable day that we must suffer the same fate in its entirety.
“We are not Iraqis or Afghans or Kosovars or Vietnamese,” we have said to ourselves, “so when they came for them, it had nothing to do with us.” But the truth is that we are Iraqis and Afghans and Kosovars and Vietnamese, and we are putting off that realization until it is too late.
Am I claiming that people of other nations are possessed of intrinsically higher natures than Americans? Not in the least. People in power anywhere behave with much the same callousness and arrogance to those upon whose rights they trample. I am trying to point out, on the contrary, that we are no different from anyone else anywhere else with regard to basic human rights. We are not exceptional because we are Americans, even though so many of us secretly believe we are. Moreover, we still enjoy the privilege of being the citizens of the world’s biggest international state terrorist. With that identity comes responsibility—to know, and to care about, what is being done in our name, to whom, and to what extent. We still consume three-fourths of the world’s resources with one-quarter of its population. Ignorance is no longer an excuse, especially the sort of willful, self-serving ignorance—actually little better than lies—with which we have so far cocooned ourselves from the cries of those our nation has tormented.
If we are to speak the truth for once, this is the message that Troy Davis, his family, and by extension all African-Americans have received from the dominant white majority in this country as a result of Davis’ execution: “Here’s a big old-fashioned FUCK YOU to the African-American people in this nation. Fuck you, you will die at OUR will; fuck you, even if you’re innocent; fuck you, we’ve emasculated you; fuck you, you’re nothing, you’re no-one; you’re dirt; you’re vermin; fuck you, we will do what we want; we will even get half-black people to support us; we’vegot the power; we will piss in your face and you will call it honey and you will stay fucked. Kapish? Yeah? Okay. Glad we got that sorted out.”
And it is the same message that countries all over the world have received equally unambiguously and continue to receive from the United States, from our people who have only this excuse to offer for having allowed the looting and killing to go on for so long:
We didn’t know.
If, by some wild happenstance, the true murderer of Officer MacPhail is ever apprehended, one can imagine the above to be the response of his family. Can one imagine the response in turn of the Davis family to such an excuse? “Precisely; you didn’t know. But, pardon us—did you really want to know?”
We didn’t know. Our excuse to the heaps of slaughtered we have piled up across the world.
What do you suppose their families’ response will be?
Well?
Pubali Ray Chaudhuri is an Associate Editor of Intrepid Report.
RSS
After Troy Davis: The questions about us remain
Posted on September 28, 2011 by Pubali Ray Chaudhuri
In spite of an international outcry to spare his life and concerted efforts by many ordinary people both within this country and abroad, Troy Davis is dead. It is pointless now to write about Troy Davis the individual human being. He has been sent to that undiscovered country where neither friend nor foe can reach him. We must concern ourselves with what survives, what is left to us to contemplate for the future. The same question that confronted us before Davis’ execution confronts us still after it: what does the Troy Davis story tell us about ourselves? Plenty, if we care—or dare—to look unflinchingly and deeply enough. It’s mirror, mirror on the wall time.
For instance, consider the people who were all along the most clamorous in their calls for Davis’ execution: the MacPhail family. Were they present at the murder of Officer MacPhail? One presumes not. Were they unaware that seven out of nine witnesses of the crime have since recanted their testimony, some citing police coercion? Again, one presumes not. They must, on the contrary, have been fully aware of every nook and cranny, every twist and turn, every cul-de-sac and corkscrew bend, of the Davis case in its entirety. They must know that Davis’ guilt could not be established beyond reasonable doubt. They must have known that Davis offered, hours before his death, to take a polygraph test to substantiate his claim of innocence, which he steadfastly maintained throughout his long imprisonment and until the end of his life. Knowing all this, the MacPhail family still kept up their death-chant, proclaiming themselves unable to rest until Davis had, as it were, been put to rest too.
Why?
Would one not think that the family, having borne the pain of losing one of their own members, would be anxious that no other family should go through the same ordeal as had been visited on them? Would they not be eager to make assurance doubly sure, since a mistake would mean what it actually has meant—undeserved suffering and endless humiliation for yet another family? Should the healing that they claimed would come to them when Davis was put to death not have depended, above all, on overwhelming and conclusive evidence of his guilt, without which such healing would have been a worthless joke? In other words, reality and the knowledge of it should trump the thirst for indiscriminate vengeance, right?
Wrong. For the MacPhails, as for many other victims’ families all over this country, it is of much more importance to watch someone being punished for their family member’s death than to know conclusively whether or not that someone is the one who committed the murder. Evidently not, just anyone will do—but once some sort of connection has been established between the suspect and the crime, whether that connection is circumstantial evidence or proximity or cowed and coerced witnesses, the baying for blood can begin. It no longer matters then that the wretched man or woman arrested might be as innocent of the crime of which he or she is accused as someone a thousand miles away. We’ve got someone—and by God, once we’ve got ’em, we don’t mean to let ’em go again if we can help it.
Why, it might be asked, single out the MacPhails as particularly vindictive and set on vengeance? The answer is, of course, that they must not be thus singled out. The attitude taken by the MacPhails, that someone, even if not the right someone, must be made to pay for what happened to them, is fairly widespread throughout this country.
For example, assuming, for the sake of argument, that the official story about 9/11 is true (though, like the story of Troy Davis, the official version continues to challenge credulity, to say the least) how many Americans asked themselves what had prompted such an attack? It was taken for granted that the perpetrators were completely evil with no redemptive features, monsters of such irremediably vitiated outlooks that they carried out the murderous attack out of the blue, just to get their jollies, for the sheer hell of it. The whole thing occurred in a vacuum, with no before or after, devoid of any sort of cause, backstory, or context. Few people asked questions. It was almost un-American to ask questions. Nor was it a time for reflection; it was a time for flag-waving and general frothing at the mouth. We felt justified in rushing off to attack the people of Afghanistan—for let us not pretend for one moment that we have waged a brutal war against anybody but the Afghan people themselves for the last decade. We have killed and continue to kill many thousands of Afghans—several times more than were ever killed on 9/11, with which, in any case, the Afghan people had nothing to do. These people we have killed are so many Troy Davises. Heaps and heaps of Troy Davises.
Imagine, if you can, even though imagination when it involves putting oneself in other people’s shoes is so rare as to be practically un-American, a whole football stadium filled with Troy Davises. These bodies are not strapped to gurneys as Davis’s was, but have death come upon them in far more brutal and bloody form. Much of the time, they’re not even recognizable as bodies. You’d have to imagine the stadiums strewn with mangled limbs, bits of scalps with hair still sticking to them, yards of intestines, dismembered children, fecal matter bursting out of exploded bodies, the strong unforgettable smell of charred and smoking flesh. These are people we have held guilty and punished with unforgivable brutality because somebody, somewhere, made us suffer. We have been guilty not of vengeance, but of stark insanity—the very insanity that we think we found in the 9/11 “attackers.”
And unlike the accusers of Troy Davis, our accusers have no shadow of doubt as to our responsibility for what’s happening to them. We carry out our killings quite openly—a few scattered claims of “ collateral damage” or calling somebody an “insurgent” seems to provide all the protection from public censure that we need. But then we are speaking of the U.S. public, which knows, or can find out easily enough, for the fact is no closely guarded secret, that the U.S. is now at war in half a dozen countries. But the U.S. public is also apparently wedded to the idea that somehow these countries brought it on themselves. Or, if they did not exactly do so, at least the intentions of the U.S. are good—which astonishing idea, though it would not mitigate the crime of an individual killer in the eyes of any North American, somehow not only excuses our international crimes, but even makes virtues of them.
But the rest of the world is incapable of the collective detachment from reality, that twilight zone in which a large part of the U.S. public seems content to dwell. To the world outside the U.S., the chain of events is clear: the U.S. will and often does attack any poor and poorly armed country that is of strategical importance, rich in resources, defiant of U.S. diktat, or any combination of the above. Non-Americans are unable to lull themselves with bedtime stories of a Miss Mary Poppins U.S.A., out to set the whole world to rights and motivated by pure, endearing altruism. They see us for what we are—not caregivers, but butchers and proud of it, or at least oblivious enough for the butchery to continue apace.
We have seen the outrage and hunger for vengeance of the MacPhail family, no matter how misdirected. Can we possible imagine what feelings our actions, so widespread across the world, and so long sustained, have aroused by now in the hearts of people affected by them? Wherever we have supported dictatorships, waged proxy wars, dropped bombs, sent missiles?
Oh, but, don’t blame the people, goes the familiar argument. The people have nothing to do with what is being done in their name. It’s the government that acts against the wishes of the public. This is a pretty, and pretty consoling argument—for Americans. As far as it goes. But does it really go very far?
On the just elapsed tenth anniversary of September 11, flags flew from homes all over the U.S. in remembrance of the victims. There were moments of silence in their memory. How many moments of silence have been observed for the 1.5 million dead (a statistic, I know) in Iraq as a result of the U.S. invasion, the tens of thousands dead in Afghanistan, the dead in Pakistan, in Libya, in Vietnam, in Chile, in Kosovo, in each of the numerous countries blasted by U.S. aggression, overt or unacknowledged? Where is the grief and outrage at these deaths? Where are the cries for revenge? The “never forgets”? Where is even the curiosity, the will to ask a simple question—is it possible, in all these situations, that we were the good guys, every single time, and that, every single time, it was somebody else’s fault—all the fault of those damned uncivilized furriners?
Has it become obvious by now that we attribute very different behaviour to non-Americans wronged by U.S action than we ourselves feel, even when in our case the culprit is far from conclusively identified? Has it become clear that we wish to act like MacPhails, but that we expect the rest of the world to act like Troy Davises—accept being battered bloody with the passivity born of despair? And that we are arrogant and callous enough to take their attempts at resisting, at fighting back, as entirely unprovoked aggression, a crime perpetrated against our innocent and virtuous selves? Why do you hate us when we’re trying to help you?
We feel the proper response of the native public to our murderous invasions should be shouts of adoration. We cannot, for the life of us, see that anyone, anywhere, could have reason to hate us. In the face of ever-growing mountains of evidence to the contrary, we continue to believe the best, and falsest, of ourselves. We hope, or rather we insist, that others do the same—but powerful as we are, capable though we still are of reducing nations too weak to resist us, we are not capable of pulling the wool over the eyes of those to whom we have brought depleted uranium, unmanned drones, carpet bombs, pre-dawn raids, hoods over faces, extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, and torture—all unmistakably marked “with the compliments of the United States.” We can expect the world to roll over for us, and perhaps it will do so—for as long as the weak must suffer what they must. After that, we may have to encounter some unpleasant surprises. Surprises, that is, to us. Not to anyone who is not an American. Especially not to poor and predominantly non-white countries. They have known all along.
Surprise one: What we suffer to happen to others in our name will eventually happen to us. The chickens, as Malclom X so presciently pointed out, will come home to roost. We are living in a fool’s paradise if we believe that the same capitalist-imperialist nexus that controls the rest of the world at gun and bomb point will not end up taking over our lives as well. Such a takeover is already on its way. Healthcare, education, Social Security, safety nets of all kinds are being decimated. The economy is in a deep depression—since we’re being honest, let’s toss out the euphemisms “recession” and “jobless recovery” with the contempt they deserve. Millions of Americans are unemployed or under-employed. Continuing to hide our heads in the sand in order that we may better ignore the plight of our non-American fellow human beings will only postpone the inevitable day that we must suffer the same fate in its entirety.
“We are not Iraqis or Afghans or Kosovars or Vietnamese,” we have said to ourselves, “so when they came for them, it had nothing to do with us.” But the truth is that we are Iraqis and Afghans and Kosovars and Vietnamese, and we are putting off that realization until it is too late.
Am I claiming that people of other nations are possessed of intrinsically higher natures than Americans? Not in the least. People in power anywhere behave with much the same callousness and arrogance to those upon whose rights they trample. I am trying to point out, on the contrary, that we are no different from anyone else anywhere else with regard to basic human rights. We are not exceptional because we are Americans, even though so many of us secretly believe we are. Moreover, we still enjoy the privilege of being the citizens of the world’s biggest international state terrorist. With that identity comes responsibility—to know, and to care about, what is being done in our name, to whom, and to what extent. We still consume three-fourths of the world’s resources with one-quarter of its population. Ignorance is no longer an excuse, especially the sort of willful, self-serving ignorance—actually little better than lies—with which we have so far cocooned ourselves from the cries of those our nation has tormented.
If we are to speak the truth for once, this is the message that Troy Davis, his family, and by extension all African-Americans have received from the dominant white majority in this country as a result of Davis’ execution: “Here’s a big old-fashioned FUCK YOU to the African-American people in this nation. Fuck you, you will die at OUR will; fuck you, even if you’re innocent; fuck you, we’ve emasculated you; fuck you, you’re nothing, you’re no-one; you’re dirt; you’re vermin; fuck you, we will do what we want; we will even get half-black people to support us; we’ve got the power; we will piss in your face and you will call it honey and you will stay fucked. Kapish? Yeah? Okay. Glad we got that sorted out.”
And it is the same message that countries all over the world have received equally unambiguously and continue to receive from the United States, from our people who have only this excuse to offer for having allowed the looting and killing to go on for so long:
We didn’t know.
If, by some wild happenstance, the true murderer of Officer MacPhail is ever apprehended, one can imagine the above to be the response of his family. Can one imagine the response in turn of the Davis family to such an excuse? “Precisely; you didn’t know. But, pardon us—did you really want to know?”
We didn’t know. Our excuse to the heaps of slaughtered we have piled up across the world.
What do you suppose their families’ response will be?
Well?
Pubali Ray Chaudhuri is an Associate Editor of Intrepid Report.