Jane Galt - Anatomy of Evil
From a New Yorker article on De-Baathification:
I asked Alusi what Baathism had meant to him as a young man. "It was like magic," he said. "The Baath Party gave us the opportunity to do something important." One of the opportunitites enjoyed by young Baathists was access to power. Under Saddam, the Party was melded with the secret police and the state intelligence organisation. Membership was a requirement for many government jobs, and Baathists were required to inform on their neighbours, their co-workers, and one another. During one of Saddam's hallmark purges in 1979, several ministers were handed weapons and ordered to kill colleagues whom Saddam had just declared to be "traitors".
One of the steps in teh appeals processs for former Baathists was attendance at a thirty-day de-Baathification course . . . I attended a graduation ceremony in a seminar room in Baghdad University, where a hundred or so middle-aged men and women, most of them professors and doctors, sat expectantly. Alusi walked in with a half-dozen bodyguards. He took the microphone, smiled, and began to talk in a rambling fashion about how the United States had liberated Iraqis, how the Coalition was on a par with the alliance against Hitler, and how Iraq now depended upon the good will of the U.S.
Men from Alusi's office began taping posters to the wall behind the stage. The posters showed decayed bodies and skeletons piled in unearthed mass graves, and they elicited muffled exclamations from the audience. A man raised his hand. "Why are you putting up those posters?" he asked. "Everyone here was forced to join the Baath Party. We didn't have anything to do with those crimes."
"These are the bodies of Iraqis," Alusi replied. "Why shouldn't we look at them?"
A man called out, "Mr. Alusi, I feel frightened when I see these pictures. Many people may not distinguish between the criminals who did these things and innocent people like us."
"The Iraqi people are not idiots," Alusi replied. "I know there are good citizens among you, but we cannot close the files, because the files are full of crimes. The problem is for those who committed crimes. What shall I do, put away the posters, omit the truth? No, we cannot. If we omit this, we omit our history."
The man smiled politedly but didn't say anything. Alusi stood up, and the people in the room filed over to officials sitting at tables to obtain their de-Baathification certificates.
Later, Alusi told me that he had meant to be provocative. "There is a duality in Baathists," he said. "You can find a Baathist who is a killer, but at home, with his family, he's completely normal. It's like they split their day into two twelve-hour blocks. When people say about someone I know to be a Baathist criminal, 'No, he's a good neighbor!' I believe them. The Baath Party is like the Nazi Party, or like the Mafia. If you meet them, they are simpatico. And this is why it's very difficult for us to do our work, which is to change--really change--Iraqi society."
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