Last night, the third and fourth episodes of 24 aired on FOX. What will be discussed contains spoilers for the series up to this point, so anyone not interested in learning them should refrain from reading further.
I hold the following to be true: every individual human has at least one inalienable right (the right to his or her own life). I also think there are logically derivative rights that follow from this primary (such as the right to one's physical possessions) and if those rights are violated, those responsible have committed a moral crime, no matter who they are or why they did what they did. The only way to violate one's right is to initiate force against him or to coerce him to do something. Those criminals owe the victim compensation of some sort to right their wrong. How that gets worked out is between the criminal(s) and their victim(s).
I see no problem or contradiction in following this to the obvious conclusions. I don't think it requires much deliberation to see why I'd condemn a man who murders* and men who murder, because the number of rights violators perpetrating the crime is not relevant to the magnitude of the individual crimes for which they are responsible. It shouldn't be too hard to regard as despicable the act of attacking someone and then claiming you were authorized or justified to do this because a majority of the country said it was OK. Furthermore, I think it is unnecessary and monstrous to steal from someone because that theft will serve the lives and welfare of others.
So it should come as no shock that after watching episodes 403 and 404, I have come to despair of the ideological situation of both sides. Just as in today, the innocents in the background and on the front stage are surrounded by people who are criminal in act, nature, and belief.
On one side, we have the clearly evil acts and intentions of the terrorists. At this point, it seems they are led by Navi Araz, played by Nestor Serrano. Navi is apparently married to Dina Araz (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and they have a son, Behrooz Araz (Jonathan Ahdout). They are all aware and part of a larger terrorist plot (in 24, there's always a larger plot!) and have been prepared to murder anyone who gets in their way if that person presents a threat to their mission.
Behrooz likes a young American girl named Debbie Pendleton (Leighton Meester) and she likes him back. However, she wants to know why he's been acting so weird lately and during a task his father asked him to accomplish, she sees Behrooz when he drops off a briefcase at a remote underground bunker. His parents learn of this and his mother calls her over to their home under the pretense of coming to an understanding about her son's relationship. Dina asks her son to shoot his friend, but when he attempts to save her, it doesn't matter. Dina didn't trust her son in the first place and poisoned a drink she made for Debbie, who consumes it and collapses, either dead or incapacitated, while she is led out of the living room by Behrooz. He, of course, is now deeply confused about the situation and only hesitantly gives back the gun to his mother. She calls him a disgrace.
Araz, meanwhile, is directing crimes of his own. He's involved with the bombing of a passenger train, the theft of the aforementioned briefcase from a passenger onboard, the kidnapping of James Heller (William Devane), the United States Secretary of Defense, his daughter Audrey Raines (Kim Raver), and the murder of several Secret Service agents (yep, the they protect the SecDef). Araz is also the one who gave the order to torture, murder, and kidnap programmers who discovered evidence of the Internet angle to his plan.
On the other side, we have Jack Bauer assaulting a Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) guard in order to interrogate just-captured known terrorist Thomas Sherak/Jann Bolek who Bauer thinks is involved not only with the train bombing but with a bigger plan. When Sherak doesn't answer when Bauer asks what his primary objective is, Jack shoots him in the leg and then asks the question again while aiming the gun at his other leg. The prisoner promptly spills his guts and says SecDef Heller is the real target. This enrages CTU head Erin Driscoll (Alberta Watson) and the chief of Field Operations, Ronnie Lobell (Shawn Doyle), but Driscoll temporarily reinstates Bauer over the objections of Lobell because he will be useful in tracking the SecDef's kidnappers and the other terrorists.
On the watch and under the orders of Driscoll, the only witness to the kidnapping of the Secretary of Defense Heller is his son, Richard (Logan Marshall-Green). He has been brought in for questioning and is outraged that he's being treated like a criminal and demands an end to his interrogation, which starts off with tough questions and forced detainment. His outrage is quickly joined with fright as the lead interrogator, Curtis Manning (Roger Cross), begins sensory deprivation and overload. This was after he talked Driscoll out of her order to inject Richard with drugs to get him to speak. After being informed he'd just experienced a half hour of this technique, Richard realizes his fate. His screaming at this point was worse than the screaming as the needle came close to his veins a minute prior.
Later on, Bauer takes a gas station convenience store and several people hostage in order to track a man (Kalil Hasan, played by Anil Kumar) among the hostages who killed Lobell as Hasan abducted Andrew Paige (Lukas Haas), the surviving programmer who discovered the Internet attack code. In the course of this, Bauer strikes the store's owner in the face when he calls for help over the radio of a police officer captured after the rest of the hostages were detained.
This was after Hasan assaults Paige repeatedly in order to learn what he knows about the operation. Once he's convinced Paige has given up what he knows, he passes along Araz's order to his cronies to kill Paige. Paige is a cock of the hammer away from murder when Bauer, after having CTU agent Chloe O'Brien (Mary Lynn Rajskub) plead with him to save her friend, shoots both henchmen in the chest, killing them. For not a mere moment does it look like Bauer is about the leave Paige to his death so Bauer can run off to continue tracking Hasan, hopefully back to wherever SecDef Heller's holding place is. This deeply upsets O'Brien who later tells Bauer she lost trust and faith in him.
Leaving aside for the moment the fact that I think no government can exist without violating someone's rights and about half the characters are under the pay and direction of the United States government, we have here a serious array of abuses. We have, in essence, "private sector" criminals and "public sector" criminals. Terrorists who have tortured, kidnapped, and killed in order to accomplish their goals are on the loose. Government agents who have tortured, kidnapped, and killed (Bauer executed his boss Ryan Chappell during the previous season in order to forestall a terrorist attack) are on the loose.
I cannot view the Arazes and their accomplices and a significant number of CTU's personnel in anything other than negative light. They saw individuals as means to an end and treated them as such. This is merely the beginning of the fourth season and I fully expect more bad things to happen to more innocents. Granted, some of the people who experienced rights violations were not innocent of crimes themselves. But like I said that is an issue to be dealt with between the aggressor and victim; should the victim be dead or incapacitated, a representative should take his place.
If we are to disregard the justifications of terrorists when they murder, steal, and injure because no one should do those things, we ought to also disregard the justification for those acts when committed by agents or representatives of the government.
I was disgusted when Bauer did some interrogating of his own in previous seasons, but the scenes with Heller's son Richard really repulsed me. Quite appropriate in regards to current events, I consider those scenes as scenes of torture. Richard's pleas to decency and moral justice were ignored by his government. Its agents explained he was going to give up everything he knew about his father's abduction or else. I saw it different only in detail from the scenes of torture involving Paige and Hasan.
Why do I call this a "libertarian nightmare"? Because as I conceive of it, libertarianism explicitly rejects the collectivist morality of putting society above the individual and the initiation of force against non-aggressors. Both lead to the abuses outlined above, both are everywhere in today's world, and both dog honest libertarians at every turn.
It would be a nightmare to be a bystander and get caught up in these plots and whether the bystander acknowledges it or not, the roots of the nightmare start in the libertarian objections to those plots.
Unfortunately, even for those libertarians who are not also anarchists like myself, that nightmare is becoming more and more of a reality right her, right now, some in the form of
If this be pessimism, I do not flinch from it. Better to see reality for what it is than for what you wish it to be.
*
"Murder" in the context of this discussion is the deliberate killing of at least one human being who has not presented a demonstrable and serious threat to the life and liberty of the killer or who has actually violated the rights of the killer, who in response acts in self-defense.
UPDATE 8:25am
Like last time, Jim Henley has observations on the series worth reading, though this time they are mostly confined to criticisms of the plot and what happened. That kind of post would take a lot of my time, but I still love the show.
UPDATE 2/8/2005 11:35am
The Jack Bauer Power Hour
UPDATE 2/22/2005 11:25am
When Bosses Attack
UPDATED 3/28/2005 10:40pm
Inner Outrage; The Enslavement of Behrooz Araz.
UPDATED 4/18/2005 11:04pm
The Total Erosion of the Fourth Wall and The 24 Embrace of Contemporary Politics
UPDATED 5/2/2005 10:58pm
Humanity Revealed in FOX's 24
UPDATED 5/17/2005 2:07pm
Quickie '24' Blog Items with an Emphasis on Richard Heller
UPDATED 3/13/2006 9:47am
My Take on FOX's '24' Ethics
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Any one who lives in this world is taking their chances.
It is all about suffering (read the Budda).
What is wanted then is the perfect system to alliviate all unnecessary suffering.
What is available is only choices between better and worse.
--==--
Believe it or not I was a Libertarian once. Secty/Treas of our local group for 3 years.
Then a couple of things happened. Our local group was no where to be found at the wedding of one of its strongest supporters. You see he was going to jail for selling six pounds of pot.
Then came 9/11. Just as the second plane was headed for the tower I said to my first mate. This means war. And so it has.
Now if the miscreats were down the street the Libs would know what to do. When they hide behind borders (which any rational thinker can see are fictions - useful [in some cases] fictions - but fictions none the less) what is the Lib answer. Simple - no chasing those who make war on us if they hide behind borders and are not tthe government.
So you have let a useful fiction get in the way of justice. If the country in question protects the miscreants rather than extradites them what can be done other than war to get at the criminals?
The world is a messy place. Emotions are as much a part of it as reason. The Libs understand reason. Emotion has no place in their universe. Thus they do not connect with better than 99.5% of the population. The Greens are smarter than that. They get more votes too.
When you figure out how to keep the struggle to be the alpha male from turing to violence in the 4/5ths of the world that still practices that method of power transfer let me know. You will have invented the key to ending war.
Good luck
Posted by: M. Simon on January 12, 2005 06:13 AMMr. Simon, I'm atheist so you'll have to direct your appeals to Buddhism elsewhere. I don't think "it is all about suffering." Quite the contrary.
Since any system will be in the hands of humans and since all humans are fallible, no system will be perfect. The goal isn't utopia, though the descriptions of it may give that impression. I also disagree that our choices are those two you mentioned. Even though we are fallible, we are also capable of doing proper things and we are also capable of doing The Right Thing. The difficulty is figuring out the principles behind it.
You'll have to start discriminating between two types of libertarians, Sir. The first type is statist and wants a limited government with a monopoly on the use of force. The second type is anarchist and wants the actions of free individuals (you and I) in a market to provide for everything we want or need. I am of the second type, so the fiction you talk about doesn't pose a problem to my desired solution: let those individuals who have been wronged take on those who have wronged them. Should they want to form, literally, a posse and hunt the terrorist down, fine. If they want to stage a public information campaign and deny the terrorists funding through persuasion and emotional pressure, fine. I don't think political borders matter and I don't think they should get in the way of justice. Those entities protecting terrorists are on their side and therefore on the side of the aggressors. I see no problem with going after them, assuming the "going after" means limiting one's objective to apprehending or killing the aggressors.
Please don't patronize me with this "world is a messy place, emotions taint opinions, your goal won't come into practice because it isn't politically acceptable" stuff. I hear it all the time and I consider it a dodge. It isn't my duty (nor yours) to prevent violence unless we take it upon ourselves and offer such a service. Individuals are responsible for their actions and individuals have the mental and physical ability to defend their values and their rights. It is up to them to make the fundamental choice to stand up for themselves. Whether they decide to have a relatively peaceful government or your garden-variety kleptocracy is of little concern to me provided they don't decide to send some of their kleptocrats my way.
Best of luck back to you.
Posted by: Drizz on January 12, 2005 08:32 AMSlip up there, Drizz: Buddhism is an atheistic sort of "religion".
Posted by: Erik on January 12, 2005 08:59 AMErik, my skinny pedantic friend, the extent of my knowledge about Buddhism is thin and what is there is very incomplete. But, as a religion, it must have a spiritual/supernatural element to it's core and it is that I reject as an atheist.
But thanks for the warning. I don't want hordes of monks politely explaining my mistakes in convoluted language.
Posted by: Drizz on January 12, 2005 01:43 PMI don't disagree with you: the show has become a libertarian nightmare, as has American reality. But I think 24 doesn't highlight this - instead it nurtures the web of fear that has been established over the past years. See here: http://www.davids-world.com/archives/2005/01/jacks_back_with.html
Posted by: David Reitter on January 13, 2005 04:06 PM