Tainted Legacy: 9-11 and the Ruins of Human Rights »

Have human rights as we once understood them become obsolete since 9-11? Aren’t new methods needed to combat the apocalyptic violence of al-Qaeda? Shouldn’t we sacrifice some rights to make us all safer? And if we can kill a combatant in battle, why shouldn’t we torture them if it will save lives? William Schulz, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, examines these and other fundamental questions through the prism of our new consciousness about terrorism in this provocative new book. It questions America’s own ambivalent record—its tainted legacy—and addresses recent human rights violations: the imprisonment without charge of non-citizens and the violation of the Geneva Convention at Guantanamo Bay. Schulz writes, “One of Osama bin Laden’s goals is to destroy the solidarity of the international community and undermine the norms and standards that have sustained that community since the end of World War II. The great irony of the post-9/11 world is that, when it comes to human rights, the United States has been doing his work for him.”

Publishers Weekly

Lifton brings his unique psychiatric and psychohistorical perspective to the heated issues of the war on terror and America in a unipolar world. Lifton defines superpower syndrome as an aberrant "national mind-set... that takes on a sense of omnipotence, of unique standing in the world that grants it the right to hold sway over all other nations." He examines parallels with other instances of apocalyptic nations, which he has explored in groundbreaking works about Hiroshima (Death in Life), the Holocaust (The Nazi Doctors), the Vietnam War (Home from the War) and global terrorism (Destroying the World to Save It). Bush's war on terror can be seen as apocalyptic, Lifton says, because of its call for an amorphous battle unlimited in time or space and encompassing the absolute eradication of evil. The perceived threat of group annihilation leads apocalyptics to "merge with God in the claim to ownership of death," asserting the right to "murderous purification" and to decide who lives and who dies. The U.S. response to Nazi violence was similarly apocalyptic, in Lifton's analysis, a battle "for global salvation through the flames of destruction," such as the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima. The latter in turn fed into the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult in Japan in the 1990s. Similarly, the Bush response is "part of an ongoing dynamic in which the American apocalyptic interacts, almost to the point of collusion, with the Islamic apocalyptic"-an escalation that, Lifton believes, "has in it the potential seeds of world destruction." Yet escalation isn't inevitable, and with guarded hope, Lifton provides a complex yet clearly articulated roadmap to national self-reflection rather than international destruction. (Nov. 15) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.