Waking thoughts: Omar Khadr versus Nietzsche's master morality

Congratulations to Omar Khadr.

There's a strange dynamic going on with the powerful - more easily observed in a country slightly south of us, but also present here in Canada, where, threatened by changes in the world, the ruling classes are clinging all the more fervently to the reigns of power, and behaving in increasingly neurotic and destructive ways, resenting anything that could destabilize their regimes.

Witness, for a recent local example, the last days of Christy Clark's Premiership, as she flailingly tried to bribe the public with promises of all the money she could throw at them, while attempting to manipulate the mechanisms of power so she could remain Premier a few weeks longer. She wanted to drink from the cup to the last drop, wasn't going to let it go without a fight, because, clearly, being Premier gave her access to perks she knew she wouldn't have otherwise. I'm not corrupt, wealthy, or connected enough to know exactly what those perks might have been but she sure wasn't wanting to cling to power because of a humble, self-sacrificing determination to continue serving the people of BC.

The whole thing makes me think of Nietzsche - poor old mad Nietzsche, with his absurd mustache, crippling migraines, and somewhat pathetic desire to see himself as an aristocrat. He was, in a way, brilliant - positing that master morality and slave morality are very different things; except that in his desire to be part of the elite, his analysis skews master morality - which he conceives, more or less, as the overflowing abundance, creativity, and generosity of those who experience power and wish to express the joy it brings - to the positive, while slave morality (the weak's desire to protect themselves by positing institutions that keep the rich, or even others among the poor, from doing harm to them) is seen as something craven, contemptible and (Nietzsche would shudder with disdain) Christian.

Alas, democracy is the stuff of slave morality. We live in a slave morality world. Our laws and public institutions are all about the weak protecting themselves, which is why they're so often at odds with the whims of the wealthy and powerful. You can find examples in anything from courts repeatedly knocking down Trump's travel ban to the idiot caught speeding his Ferrari over the Lion's Gate bridge the other day, whose driver's license was rightly taken away for a longer-than-usual time. Our laws and institutions are often specifically designed to keep those who have wealth and power from abusing it - which is as it should be, because the Trumps of the world can do a great deal of damage if left unchecked. Even the jackass in the Ferrari stood to do more harm than some skid ripping off your car or stealing your CDs or whatnot.

What Nietzsche misses wholesale in his analysis - as far as I've seen, anyhow - is that master morality often contains within it a neurotic, destructive, and ugly side: the need for the wealthy to protect their wealth from any perceived threat. Like an animal standing over his kill, looking around nervously between bites to make sure no other, bigger animals are coming to take it away, the wealthy KNOW they've got it good, know that they have access to privileges that they could, if things go wrong, lose. That's why they fight to keep their position: they know its ephemeral, know its unusual, know its exceptional; but they LIKE it. So while the "slaves" of the world - I count myself - push for laws and institutions which will protect us and ensure public safety, the rich will try to impose a different set of laws, which shore up their power base and make it less vulnerable.

One of the things they have to defend against, one of the things that makes the "masters" particularly vulnerable, is their own excess. Nothing is as threatening to the powerful as being caught in the wrong, since it is being wrong about things that most often leads to punishment - like being stripped of your powers and sent to bed without supper (or deprived of your driver's license for a maddeningly long period of time).

So when the rulers of a nation are threatened by (perhaps deranged but nonetheless influential) populist/ nationalist movements dangerously close to their oil supply - one of the key sources of their wealth - the wealthy might start wars, create special prisons, dispense with due process, and start torturing people in the name of protecting their position. All of these things are transparently bad ideas, which anyone more likely to end up in such a prison than to find themselves running it will realize quite quickly. But once you've got these institutions in place - once you are transparently IN THE WRONG about how the world should be run, as America has been since the institution of Guantanamo Bay,  your grip on power becomes all the more precarious. To admit that you are wrong, to even be honest about what you've been doing, is dangerous. You have to lie about it, have to disguise it, because if you are caught in the wrong, well... you're screwed.

There isn't anything much wronger in this world than imprisoning and torturing a child.

If you've been disagreeing with me on any of this, stop and read that sentence again. Let it sink in, past whatever you've heard on Fox News, past whatever spin you've seen put on this story by the Harper administration (or even the Globe and Mail). Omar Khadr, when captured, was a child,  a victim of his parents' extremism. He was deprived of any semblance of due process, sent to a place where he was tortured for years and from which he doubtlessly feared he would never return. (If you're in any way unclear about any of this, there's an excellent documentary called You Don't LIke the Truth: Four Days Inside Guantanamo that will hopefully change your mind; it's very educational and contains actual footage from Khadr's detention, taken from security camera footage; every Canadian should see it). If he indeed threw a grenade that killed a medic, it was in the context of defending his family from a siege of their compound, which a fifteen year old with jihadi parents was in no position to understand or resist; more importantly, the fact that he confessed to having done so, as a precondition on his ever being allowed to leave Gitmo, is no more meaningful than the condition placed on the West Memphis Three of having to admit to the crimes for which they'd been wrongly imprisoned as a precondition on ever being allowed to walk free. It's an ass-covering move, part of a propaganda war, akin to the "criminal record" Khadr has found waiting for him in Canada, which makes bizarre references to things like a "criminal youth court" in Guantanamo Bay. Excuse me? Such moves are nothing more (and nothing less) than evidence of a sort of forward-thinking mendacity on the part of the powerful, since they give sympathetic, right-leaning journalists tools to spin public opinion, allowing them to describe Khadr as a confessed war criminal in their editorials, where they, like Nietzsche, can suck up to the people they're hoping to curry favour with. Seems like horseshit to me, and likely to you, too - everyone I know on Facebook seems to be on the same page about Khadr, at least - but there are a lot of ill-informed people in the world these days, acting on very partial information, believing and doing some very confused things.

In fact, what really offends me in all this, almost as much as the fact that the Canadian government under Harper stood by and let it all happen, is that Khadr should be described by his Gitmo tribunal as a war criminal. It's an insult to language, common sense, and decency. While the invasion of Afghanistan in which Khadr was captured may not have been a war crime - unlike, say, the invasion of Iraq, by the same administration - the use of torture and enhanced interrogation, the suspension of due process - indefinite detention without trial or recourse to the rule of law - in an institution like Guantanamo Bay (still up and running, despite all of Obama's gum-flapping, with at least 41 detainees there) is surely that. Worse, subjecting a child to torture in such an institution - for both the Canadian and American government to disregard Khadr's rights as they did - is a further war crime. It is perversity in the extreme to call Khadr a war criminal; he is the victim of a war crime.

It is the start of justice for Khadr to receive money in compensation. As a friend on Facebook has rightly pointed out - a friend who has apparently since deleted her post, so I'll refrain from naming her - this isn't just about Khadr, either: it's about the failure of law in Canada, and a symbolic appeasement to all who might be concerned that such a thing could happen, who realize that if our institutions fail us, we too might be subject to such treatment.

The masters aren't done with their neurotic, evil flailings; but the compensation given to Khadr for his treatment - like the identical amount previously given another Canadian, Maher Arar - is a step in the right direction.

Congratulations, Omar Khadr. (And welcome back to Canada and to freedom).