[REGARDING CATHOLIC CHURCH OFFICIALLY ASSISTING NAZIS IN TRACKING AND COLLECTING JEWS]
Daniel Goldhagen

... Goldhagen also reminds us that not a single German Catholic was excommunicated before, during, or after the war, “after committing crimes as great as any in human history.”  This is really an extraordinary fact.  Throughout this period, the church continued to excommunicate theologians and scholars in droves for holding unorthodox views and to proscribe books by the hundreds, and yet not a single perpetrator of genocide – of whom there were countless examples – succeeded in furrowing Pope Pius XII’s censorious brow.

[Gives a recent example of Saudi Prince Abdullah trying to allow woman to drive and being forced to back down.]

            There is no doubt that out collusion with Muslim tyrants – in Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Iran, Egypt, and elsewhere – has been despicable.  We have done nothing to discourage the mistreatment and outright slaughter of tens of thousands of Muslims by their own regimes – regimes that, in many cases, we helped bring to power.  Our failure to support the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991, which we encouraged, surely ranks among the most unethical and consequential foreign policy blunders of recent decades.  But our culpability on this front must be bracketed by the understanding that were democracy to suddenly come to these countries, it would be little more than a gangplank to theocracy.  There does not seem to anything within the principles of Islam by which to resist the slide into sharia (Islamic law), while there is everything to encourage it.  This is a terrible truth that we have to face: the only thing that currently stands between us and the roiling oceans of Muslim unreason is a wall of tyranny and human rights abuses that we have helped to erect.  This situation must be remedied, but we cannot merely force Muslim dictators from power and open the polls.  It would be like opening the polls to the Christians of the fourteenth century.

[Paul Berman from a book on totalitarianism...]

What have we needed for these terrorists to prosper?  We have needed immense failures of political courage and imagination within the Muslim world.  We have needed an almost willful lack of curiosity about those failures by people in other parts of the world – the lack of curiosity that allowed us to suppose that totalitarianism had been defeated, even as totalitarianism was reaching a new zenith.  We have needed handsome doses of wishful thinking – the kind of simpleminded faith in a rational world that, in its inability to comprehend reality, sparked the totalitarian movements in the first place.... We have needed a provincial ignorance about intellectual currents in other parts of the world.  We have needed foolish resentments in Europe, and a foolish arrogance in America.  We have needed so many things!  But there has been no lack – every needed thing has been here in abundance.

[Short list of U.S. sins]
... start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusions with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to taste, and then top with our recent refusal to sign the Kyoto protocol for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves to the rulings of the International Criminal Court.  The result should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.

[footnote read J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999, 58.]

Consider the horrors that Americans perpetrated as recently as 1968, in My Lai:

Early in the morning the soldiers were landed in the village by helicopter.  Many were firing as they spread out, killing both people and animals.  There was no sign of the Vietcong battalion and no shot was fired on Charlie Company all day, but they carried on.  They burnt down every house.  They raped woman and girls and then killed them.  They stabbed some women in the vagina and disemboweled others, or cut off their hands or scalps.  Pregnant woman had there stomachs slashed open and were left to die.  There were gang rapes and killings by shooting or with bayonets.  There were mass executions.  Dozens of people at a time, including old men, women and children, were machined-gunned in a ditch.  In four hours nearly 500 villagers were killed.

We should, I think, look upon modern despotisms as hostage crises.  Kim Jong Il has 30 million hostages.  Saddam Hussein has twenty-five million.  The clerics in Iran have seventy million or more.  It does not matter that many hostages have been so brainwashed that they will fight their would-be liberators to the death.  They are held prisoner twice over – by tyranny and by their own ignorance.  The developed world must, somehow, come to their rescue.  Jonathon Glover seems right to suggest that we need “something along the lines of a strong and properly funded permanent UN force, together with clear criteria for intervention and an international court to authorize it.”  We can say it even more simply:  we need a world government.  How else will a war between the United States and China ever become as unlikely as a war between Texas and Vermont?  We are a very long way from even thinking about the possibility of a world government, to say nothing of creating one.  It would require a degree of economic, cultural, and moral integration that we may never achieve.  The diversity of our religious beliefs constitutes a primary obstacle here.  Given what most of us believe about God, it is at present unthinkable that human beings will ever identify themselves merely as human beings, disavowing all lesser affiliations,  World government does seem a long way off – so long that we may not survive the trip.

Perhaps the West will be able to facilitate a transformation of the Muslin worlds by applying outside pressure.  It will not be enough, however, for the United States and a few European countries to take a hard line while the rest of Europe and Asia sell advanced weaponry and “dual-use” nuclear reactors to all comers.  To achieve the necessary economic leverage, so that we stand a chance of waging this war of ideas by peaceful means, the development of alternative energy technologies should become the new Manhattan Project.  There are, needless to say, sufficient economic and environmental justifications for doing this, but there are political ones as well.  If oil were to become worthless, the dysfunction of the most prominent Muslim societies would suddenly grow as conspicuous as the sun.  Muslims might then come to see the wisdom of moderating their thinking on a wide variety of subjects.  Otherwise, we will be obliged to protect our interests in the world with force – continually.  In this case, it seems all but certain that our newspapers will begin to read more and like the book of Revelation.  

Many members of the U.S. government currently view their professional responsibilities in religious terms.  Consider the case of Roy Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.  Finding himself confronted by the sixth-highest murder rate in the nation, Justice Moore thought it expedient to install a two-and-a–half-ton monument of the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the state courthouse in Montgomery.  Almost no one disputes that this was a violation of the spirit (if not the letter) of the “establishment” clause pf the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  When a federal court ordered Justice Moore to remove the monument, he refused.  Not wanting to have an obvious hand in actually separating church and state, the U.S. Congress amended an appropriations bill to ensure that federal funds could not be used for the monument’s removal.  Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose sole business is to enforce the nation’s laws, maintained a pious silence all the while.  This was not surprising, given that when he does speak, he is in the habit of saying things like “We are a nation called to defend freedom – freedom is not the grant of any government or document, but is our endowment from God.”  According to a Gallup poll, Ashcroft and the Congress were on firm ground as far as the American people were concerned, because 76 percent of those polled objected to the removal of the monument.  One wonders whether Moore, Ashcroft, the U.S. Congress, and three-quarters of the American people would like to see the punishments for breaking these hallowed commandments also specified in marble and placed in our nation’s courts.  What, after all, is the punishment for taking the Lord’s name in vain?  It happens to be death (Leviticus 24:16).  What is the punishment for working on the Sabbath?  Also death (Exodus 31:15).  What is the punishment for cursing one’s father or mother?  Death again (Exodus 21:17).  What is the punishment for adultery?  You’re catching on (Leviticus 20:10).  While the commandments themselves are difficult to remember (especially since chapters 20 and 34 of Exodus provide us with incompatible lists), the penalty for breaking them is simplicity itself.

            The fact that people are being prosecuted and imprisoned for using marijuana, while alcohol remains a staple commodity, is surely the reductio ad absurdum of any notion that our drug laws are designed to keep people from harming themselves or others. (24 footnote below)  Alcohol is by any measure the more dangerous substance, It has no approved medical use, and its lethal dose is rather easily achieved.  Its role in causing automobile accidents is beyond dispute.  The manner in which alcohol; relieved people of their inhibitions contributes to human violence, personal injury, unplanned pregnancy, and the spread of sexual disease.  Alcohol is also well known to be addictive.  When consumed in large quantities over many years, it can lead to devastating neurological impairments, to cirrhosis of the liver, and to death.  In the United States alone, more than 100,000 people annually die from its use.  It is also more toxic to developing fetus than any other drug of abuse.  (Indeed, “crack babies” appear to have been really suffering from fetal-alcohol syndrome.) (reference)  None of these charges can be leveled at marijuana.  As a drug, marijuana is nearly unique in having several medical applications and no known lethal dosage.  While adverse reactions to drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen account for an estimated 7,600 deaths (and 76,000 hospitalizations) each year in the United States alone, marijuana kills no one. (drug war facts)  Its role as a “gateway drug” now seems less plausible than ever (and it was never plausible).  In fact, nearly everything human beings do – driving cars, flying planes, hitting golf balls – is more dangerous than smoking marijuana in the privacy of one’s own home.  Anyone who would seriously attempt to argue that marijuana is worthy of prohibition because of the risk it poses to human beings will find that the powers of the human brain are simply insufficient for the job.

[many references from drug war facts ]

            The consequences of our irrationality on this front are so egregious that they bear closer examination.  Each year, over 1.5 million men and women are arrested in the United States because of our drug laws.  At this moment, somewhere on the order of 400,000 men and women languish in U.S. prisons for nonviolent drug offenses.  One million others are currently on probation.  More people are imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses in the United States than are incarcerated, for any reason, in all of Western Europe (which has a larger population).  The cost of these efforts, at the federal level alone, is nearly $20 billion dollars annually.  The total cost of our drug laws – when one factors in the expense to state and local governments and the tax revenue lost by our failure to regulate the sale of drugs – could easily be in excess of $100 billion dollars each year.  Our war on drugs consumes an estimated 50 percent of the trial time of our courts and the full-time energies of over 400,000 police officers. These are resources that might otherwise be used to fight violent crimes and terrorism.

            In historical terms, there was every reason to expect that such a policy of prohibition would fail.  It is well known, for instance, that the experiment with prohibition of alcohol in the United States did little more than precipitate a terrible comedy of increased drinking, organized crime, and police corruption.  What is not generally remembered is that Prohibition was an explicitly religious exercise, being the joint product of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the pious lobbying of certain Protestant missionary societies.

            The problem with prohibition of any desirable commodity is money.  The United Nations values the drug trade at $400 billion a year.  This exceeds the annual budget for the U.S. Department of Defense.  If this figure is correct, the trade in illegal drugs constitutes 8 percent of all international commerce (while the sale of textiles makes up 7.5 percent and motor vehicles just 5.3 percent). (35 – www.lindesmith.org)  And yet, prohibition itself is what makes the manufacture and sale of drugs so extraordinarily profitable.  Those who earn there living in this way enjoy a 5,000 to 20,000 percent return on their investment, tax-free.  Every relevant indicator of the drug trades – rates of drug use and interdiction, estimates of production, the purity of drugs on the street, etc. – shows that the government can do nothing to stop it as long as such profit exists (indeed, these profits are highly corrupting of law enforcement in any case).  The crimes of the addict, to finance the stratospheric cost of his lifestyle, and the crimes of the dealer, to protect both his territory and his goods, are likewise the result of prohibition. (36 footnote below)  A final irony, which seems good enough to be the work of Satan himself, is that the market we have created by our drug laws has become a steady source of revenue for terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Shining Path, and others.  [supporting link – not from Sam Harris: drug policy and terrorism]

            Even if we acknowledge that stopping drug use is a justifiable social goal, how does the financial cost of our war on drugs appear in light of the other challenges we face?  Consider that it would require only a onetime expenditure of $2 billion to secure our commercial seaports against smuggled nuclear weapons.  At present we have allocated a mere $93 million for this purpose. (footnote link)   How will our prohibition of marijuana use look (this comes at the cost of $4 billion annually) if a new sun ever dawns over the port of Los Angeles?  Or consider that the U.S. government can afford to spend only $2.3 billion each year on reconstruction of Afghanistan.  The Taliban and Al Qaeda are now regrouping.  Warlords rule the countryside beyond the city limits of Kabul.  Which is more important to us, reclaiming this part of the world for the forces of civilization or keeping cancer patients in Berkeley from relieving their nausea with marijuana?  Our present use of government funds suggests an uncanny skewing – we might even say derangement – of our national priorities.  Such a bizarre allocation of resources is sure to keep Afghanistan in ruins for years to come.  It will also leave Afghan farmers with no alternative but to grow opium.  Happily for them, our drug laws still render this a highly profitable enterprise.

            Anyone who believes that God is watching us from beyond the stars will feel that punishing peaceful men and women for their private pleasure is perfectly reasonable.  We are now in the twenty-first century.  Perhaps we should have better reasons for depriving our neighbors of their liberty at gunpoint.  Given the magnitude of the real problems that confront us – terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the spread of infectious disease, failing infrastructure, lack of adequate funds for education and health care, etc. – our war on sin is so outrageously unwise as to almost defy rational comment.  How have we grown so blind to our deeper interests?  And how have we manages to enact such policies with so little substantive debate?

36 footnote pg 259 of book

When was the last time someone was killed over a tobacco or alcohol deal gone awry?  We can be confident that the same normalcy would be achieved if drugs were regulated by the government.  At the inception of the modern “war on drugs,” the economist Milton Friedman observed that “legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement.”  He then invited the reader to “conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order” (Friedman, “Prohibition and Drugs,” Newsweek May 1, 1972).  What was true then remains true after three decades of pious misrule; the criminality associated with the drug trade is the inescapable consequence of our drug laws themselves.