Lawlessness: Dealing With the Past -- and Present

Cliff Levy at The New York Times has a long, well-written account of a local historican in the Siberian city of Tomsk. The historian -- Boris Trenin -- was rooting around in the earth in an area called Kashtak, and found two skulls with bullet holes. Others found human bones there. Trenin sought to investigate whether this meant that Kashtak was a site for a Stalin-era mass grave, but he cannot get access to state archives.

Trenin has encountered the tension between Russians who seek to air the past in order to make clear the values of the present, and those, such as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who think that such efforts can be abused by those wishing to beat up on the country. Levy quotes Putin at a meeting last year:

We do have bleak chapters in our history; just look at events starting from 1937. And we should not forget these moments in our past. But other countries have also known their bleak and terrible moments. In any event, we have never used nuclear weapons against civilians, and we have never dumped chemicals on thousands of kilometers of land or dropped more bombs on a tiny country than were dropped during the entire Second World War, as was the case in Vietnam.

What's missing from Levy's piece is a contextual, broadening paragraph on the same phenomenon elsewhere: It's common around the world for countries and peoples to have problems dealing with the nightmares of their past -- and present. This is not a Soviet story, but a global one.

In the must-read cover story of this month's Harper's magazine, New York lawyer Scott Horton continues his long, penetrating examination of America's own hestitation at self-examination (subscription required as of now. If anyone has seen the entire text on line, please let me know).

Horton, whom I met when I lived in Tashkent and have known for some 13 years, is no zealot. He is wholly fact-driven, with a penetrating intelligence and an impatience with those who use ideology to explain away abuse of power. In Horton's view, while prior periods of U.S. history have seen official criminality such as Richard Nixon's, "no prior administration has been so systematically or so brazenly lawless."

He argues that the Bush years must undergo legal examination. I asked him why. In an email exchange, he replied:

Americans have something of an aversion to the past. "Get over it" is the refrain. But as Orwell says, we are the prisoners of our past--both as individuals and collectively as a society. And Chekhov had the same idea in that amazing passage of act ii of the Cherry Orchard, "Ведь так ясно, чтобы начать жить в настоящем, надо сначала искупить наше прошлое, покончить с ним, а искупить его можно только страданием, только необычайным, непрерывным трудом." (For it’s so clear that in order to begin to live in the present we must first redeem the past, and that can only be done by suffering, by strenuous, uninterrupted labor.) So it may be painful, but if we want to move forward, we have to labor in that garden of the past, form attitudes, draw consequences. But it's about the future, ultimately.

For a recorded interview with Horton, here is Glenn Greenwald talking with him at Salon.