There is a famous quote by Herman Goering, Nazi Reichmarshall and Luftwaffe Chief, from the Nuremberg trials that has been making the rounds a lot lately because of Iraq:
Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.
When we saw this again the other day it got us to thinking. Goering didn’t say this to boast about some fiendishly clever and diabolical artifice thought up by Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, during the war. He said it because it amazed him that something so obviously transparent has always worked throughout the centuries. That , in turn, got us to thinking about that other great transparency, the guardian and champion of all systems of authority, that last line of defense, the bad apple.
Our lack of imagination condemns us to refer to the synergism molded by our economic, legal and political institutions as simply “the system.†It should be redundant to point out that this synergism, or any synergism for that matter, is greater than the sum of its parts. But understanding the total implications of that very point, that the system trumps all (greater than ANY and ALL of its parts), should be as clear to everyone as how easy it is to choreograph a frightened national flock to be in cloven-hoofed lockstep with the drumbeat of war. It seems that to many it is just that clear, that is, not clear at all.
Understanding the rules of the system and then playing by those rules are how those in authority came to be in authority. The number one rule of this system is to protect “the system.†Authority figures have a vested interest in not having the rules changed. The system must be protected above all else. If any person or any lesser institution than the system itself endangers the system, that person or institution, that “bad apple,†must go.
Examples of this abound in our adult lives.
The first involved the assassination of JFK. A cottage industry has grown around the conspiracy theories and the inadequacies of the Warren Report. In 1999, just after the 35th anniversary of the assassination, CBS conducted a poll which revealed only one in ten Americans believing Oswald acted alone. Of those having an opinion, 85% believed that the Warren Commission was part of a government cover-up. The government version is that this maverick, this bad-apple lone nut was solely responsible for the assassination. This version absolves authorities in the system from not having been able to prevent it (after all, how can the fevered brain of a deranged loner be infiltrated) and any government agencies or individuals who may have participated.
Result: The political part of the system has been protected.
My Lai. On March 16, 1968, Charlie Company, led by platoon leader Lieutenant William Calley, bayoneted, shot and grenaded to death some 500 unarmed old men, women and children at My Lai 4 in Quang Ngai Province in Viet Nam. After several failed cover-up attempts by the military, Lieutenant Calley became the only individual tried and found guilty of this massacre. At the end of a thirteen day court martial this bad apple was confined at hard labor for the length of his natural life. President Nixon had already set the stage earlier by proclaiming My Lai an unfortunate “aberration†and “an isolated incident.†We now know, as the Vietnamese even today are wont to say, “There were many My Lais.â€
In a Gallup poll conducted in April of 1971, 84% of those having an opinion felt the soldiers were only following orders from their higher-ups and that Calley was a scapegoat. Calley was quickly removed from the stockade and placed under house arrest and shortly thereafter was paroled. The only individual ever “brought to justice†for this atrocity “paid his debt†in a mere three years. Here the public was wise to the bad apple routine, and even though My Lai is credited by many as the beginning of the end of the war, the military itself seems to have emerged barely scathed even though it was involved in cover-ups and scapegoating. Unfortunately, the people’s outrage concerning the military’s patsy process went little beyond simple recognition.
Result: The military part of the system has been protected.
Watergate. The Nixon resignation over Watergate has often been hailed as proof that the system works and that no one is above the law. Others, including ourselves, see it as proof that if it comes down to you or the system, you gotta go, no matter who you are.
Result: The political part of the system has been protected.
The O.J. Simpson trial. On October 3, 1995 O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of murdering his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ron Goldman. What was most surprising was the reaction from conservative commentators on cable TV. The same talking heads who were savaging Simpson throughout the trial were now the ones calling for calm and proclaiming that the system works even (maybe especially) in the face of the massive outrage of an incensed public. A common sentiment during polling interviews was “The trial was a joke and has exposed the gaping holes in the American Legal System.†This, of course, was not permitted to devolve to its logical conclusion: the existing legal system must be demonstrated to be “not perfect, but better than anything else out there.â€
Our legal system provides very nicely for those at the top. Except for tort reform, which has as its goal to make corporations suit-proof, the system as is works very nicely, thank you. A civil trial came to the rescue and saved the legal system from this bad apple jury.
Result: The legal part of the system has been protected.
The Saving and Loan Scandal. Ronald Reagan signed the Garn-St. Germain Act in October of 1982. That set the stage for the S&L scandal, the largest theft in the history of the world. The deregulation that Reagan championed eased restrictions so much that S&L owners could actually lend themselves money. It sometimes took over seven years to close failing S&L’s by his administration. When S&L owners who stole millions went to jail, their sentences were typically one-fifth that of the average bank robber. The government bail out will cost the taxpayers around $1.4 trillion dollars when it is over (that is one million, four hundred thousand million dollars). With the money lost from the S&L scandals, the government could have provided prenatal care for every American child for the next 2,300 years or purchased 5 million average homes. The really criminal part of this on the part of the Reagan White House is if they had stepped in and bailed out the S&L’s in 1986 instead of delaying until after the 1988 elections, the cost might have been only $20 billion. The abbreviated sentences meted out to the few bad apples who were prosecuted must have satisfied the American people in that the “greatest theft in the history of the world†is rarely mentioned these days.
Result: the system has been protected.
Tobacco lawsuits. Juries across the country have started to hold the cigarette industry responsible for the misery and death caused by its products. Heretofore, tobacco companies have used two ploys: wearing down their opponents and employing the legal defense of “contributory negligence.” This defense stalled lawsuits by plaintiffs who were assumed to have had some measure of responsibility for their medical condition. State laws and legal precedents are now allowing plaintiffs to hold manufacturers more responsible for their products and many jurisdictions have eliminated “contributory negligence” altogether as a defense argument.
Why is this happening now and not before? We maintain that with the mountain of scientific evidence accumulating concerning the deadly effects of tobacco, the system, including the courts and the lawmakers, can no longer afford to protect this lumbering and clumsy dinosaur. They would like to continue receiving its political contributions, but their value as political contributors is being outweighed by their liabilities. Tobacco companies are not bigger than the system. Once their crimes are apparent to all they must go down. If nothing is done, the system is threatened. The system must not protect this bad apple industry. We know those who fight big tobacco don’t think they’re doing it to protect the system. They’re right, they’re not—it’s just why they’re succeeding now.
Result: The entire system is being protected.
Corporate corruption. Capitalism is a system that encourages us to kick the hell out of our competition before it kicks the hell out of us. Its ruthlessness and insensitivity have always been major components in its formula for “success.†But it is a system that has lately been demanding such short-term results (as in “what have you done for me this quarterâ€) that “succeeding any way you can†seems to have gained a kind of respectability. The American version of capitalism has the inmates controlling the institution, with those who are supposed to be the controlled funding the elections, writing the laws and employing the regulators (once out of office). These “controllers†have become, as Arianna Huffington states in Pigs at the Trough, “little more than obedient lapdogs, unwilling to bite the corporate hand that feeds them.†“WorldCom, Enron, Adelphia, Tyco, AOL, Xerox, Merrill Lynch, and the other scandals†are “not just a few bad apples,†but “are only the tip of the corruption iceberg.†“They are manifestations of a megatrend in corporate leadership—the rise of a callous and avaricious mind-set that is wildly out of whack with the core values of the average American.†Once the bad apples have been ousted (usually not by the government and not before great damage has been done) they are prosecuted publicly and vigorously, proving the system works and that if you’re an evil-doing bad apple you will get busted.
Result: The system is being protected.
Abu Ghraib. When Carole Coleman, RTE Washington correspondent, asked President Bush about Abu Ghraib he chided her not to judge America by its few bad apples. Never mind that the documentation concerning American military torture and abuse of prisoners is long and ugly. But, no matter, the punishment of a few enlisted soldiers and maybe even a general should satisfy us that the beauty of our system is that the bad apples always lose. We will most likely be satisfied that Abu Ghraib does not represent the actions of the American military in a way that the singling out of Lieutenant Calley failed to satisfy the American public of that very point more than three decades ago. The conditioners have learned.
Result: The military part of the system has again been protected.
Corruption in the Criminal Justice System. In the history of the American police, there have been hundreds of scandals involving various kinds of corrupt activities, ranging from beat cops taking payoffs from small-time hoods, to the cops participating in Tammany Hall politics in the late 19th century to modern variations involving payoffs in drugs and prostitution, not to mention cops charged with abusing suspects. The case of Rodney King was the most blatant of these and, as usual, a few abusive cops were arrested and although the criminal trial resulted in an acquittal, they were eventually found guilty of violating King’s civil rights. It is likewise with the prison system, especially with recent scandals in California, where a few abusive guards got caught and were made examples of. The overall subculture of the police and prison guards includes looking the other way when “one of their own†gets caught and this remains well under the radar screen, even though a few “bad apples†get busted as proof that the system is working.
Result: The justice system has been protected.
Fahrenheit/911. One of the most recent examples of bad-appleism has come from an unlikely source. Michael Moore’s documentary is accurate enough as far as what it says.
Its failing is in what it does not say and what it implies. There is no mention of Democratic involvement, save for their passivity, in any of the injustices consuming America. Clinton’s support for the ten-year murderous sanctions that killed more than a million Iraqis, including 5,000 children a month, goes unmentioned (his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright even told us it was worth it) as well as our complicity in Israeli atrocities. One gets the impression that if we just get rid of this evil bad-apple administration America will be on its way to past glories that never were. Every indication, however, is that a Kerry administration will be business as usual.
Result: The inherent goodness of America, except for bad apples, is reinforced.
One of the authors (Kurelic) had a grandmother years ago who was fond of repeating the ancient wisdom about the one holding the ladder being as guilty as the one stealing the apples. It is we, the American people, who are holding the ladder. We are the enablers. We are letting our leaders build up resentment and hatred for America around the world in the pursuit of greed and power.
All our leaders have to do is to frighten us or tell us what we want to hear. What we most want to hear is that we’re a nation of incredibly generous good guys. We are neither. Most of the rest of the world hates us for a reason. Maybe they don’t get the pictures of our soldiers handing out candy bars and playing soccer in the streets with Iraqi kids. They instead get pictures, pictures that are not shown in America, of the mayhem we have visited around the world, most recently in the Middle East.
As far as the generosity part of it goes, a 1999 story in the Christian Science Monitor is typical of actual research into our “generosity.†“While the US provided large amounts of military aid to countries deemed strategically important, others noted that the US ranked low among developed nations in the amount of humanitarian aid it provided poorer countries. “We are the stingiest nation of all,†former President Jimmy Carter has said on numerous occasions. We ranked dead last in 2003 in a list of 22 countries as to the percentage of our GNP that goes to foreign aid. Most of the aid we did give went to Israel and Egypt in the form of military equipment credits. Simply put, we are not a generous nation.
All this will continue as long as we keep holding the ladder. Our problems do not come from bad apples. A lot about America and its “system†is rotten to the core. Until we’re mature enough to hear what we don’t want to hear, nothing can change. A good start will be to show our outrage the next time we are exposed to a version of the bad apple shuffle. In America the bad apple shuffle is legitimate stuff. To the rest of the world it is a kind of sad comedy routine.
Randall G. Shelden is Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. He is the author and co-author of several books on crime and criminal justice, including Controlling the Dangerous Classes: a Critical Introduction to the History of Criminal Justice, Criminal Justice in America: a Critical View, Girls, Delinquency and Juvenile Justice and Youth Gangs in American Society. His web site is: http://www.sheldensays.com.
Jerry Kurelic is a freelance writer living in Las Vegas currently writing a book called Our Indispensable Delusions: Why We Can’t Handle the Truth.
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