Djelloul Marbrook

One of the scariest aspects of the controversy over how terror suspects should be treated is the Bush Administration’s insistence that this is a whole new ballgame the like of which the world has never seen. What hogwash!

Read the history of the Inquisition in Spain. The inquisitors of the Holy(?)Office swore up and down their torture of prisoners was to protect the state against Muslims and Jews intent on bringing it down. Their reign of fear engulfed not only the Muslims and Jews but Christians as well, because they convinced the Christians that they were committing patently un-Christian horrors in the name of saving the state.

Sound familiar?

More recently Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, in what has been called the nightmare decade was singing the same song: to protect us from Godless communism we had to suspend many of our traditional rights and processes in order to get at the truth. He ran his own inquisition until the courtly Joseph N. Welch stopped him cold on television, then a new medium. McCarthy’s tactic was the same as today’s White House—scare the American people into surrendering their cherished rights.

Does this sound like a whole new ballgame?

The rights and due processes we laid at the feet of the five o’clock shadow from Wisconsin merely enabled him and his stooges to persecute people who didn’t agree with his politics. What he sought, at the end of the day, was a country without politics, with only one view, only one voice, only one governance. And that, as Welch helped us to remember, was not what 4,435 Americans laid down their lives for in The Revolutionary War. No, they fought for the right to dissent, to disagree with one another, and to be respected in the process.

The White House argues that we’re suspending only the rights of foreign terrorists so that our own rights can remain intact. But that’s not the way it works. You can’t torture—the White House worms around this word—foreigners and at the same time maintain to all the world that you stand for individual rights, for decency and humane treatment of all.

I thought of our treatment of suspected terrorists as I read about Pope Benedict’s foofaraw. He had quoted a late Byzantine emperor bad-mouthing Islam, and then his spokesman claimed he was only putting things in historical perspective. If he had really been interested in historical perspective he might have mentioned that while the emperor was in high dudgeon about the Muslims the church’s Holy Office was pulling people apart on the rack, burning them at the stake, gouging their eyes, pulling out their fingernails, and God knows what else—in the name of state security and the survival of the church. It’s a wonder the church survived its own murderousness and hypocrisy.

How much history do we need to remember? Not so long ago Josef Goebbels convinced the German people that extraordinary security measures had to be taken because a worldwide Jewish conspiracy threatened the very existence of the German state. And if you believed that, he’d sell you Czechoslovakia. But millions of Germans did believe it. The result was not only the death of human rights in Germany but the near extermination of one of the races of man, indeed the very race that gave Christendom its savior, along with thousands of Roman Catholics, gypsies, and political dissenters.

So must we really relive all these horrors simply because the Bush Administration has sworn to us that this is a new ballgame? A new ballgame when our libraries are filled with books telling us there’s nothing new about it? A new ballgame when we know better? And if we really don’t know better, can we call ourselves the rightful heirs of our Founding Fathers, or must we go down (way down) in history as the Americans who could not find a way to honor Washington and Jefferson in the face of Osama bin Laden?