NPR, 2009; Le Monde, 1956

So, having refused to be interviewed by Glenn Greenwald about her defense of NPR's avoidance of the use of the word "torture," NPR ombudsman Alicia C. Shepard did agree to go on an NPR show immediately before him. That way, it could be almost like an actual adult conversation but without, you know, any pesky conversing involved.

Shepard's defense of NPR's practices in her segment here is just mind-boggling -- so much so, in fact, that Kevin Drum assumed Glenn Greenwald was exaggerating when he paraphrased it. He was not. Here are Shepard's actual words, when pressed on why NPR had no problem referring to a journalist in Gambia being tortured:

...these were strictly tactics to torture him, to punish him, versus these in the United States in the way that it's used these are tactics used to get information.

Um, excuse me? It's not torture if it's used to "get information"? As Greenwald points out, even laying aside the glaring falsehood here re. the pristine purity of US motives for the use of torture, this is wrong, wrong, wrong. Torture is torture, regardless of motive. Does Shepard think the Gestapo wasn't torturing French Resistance members when they put them through excruciating pain -- beatings, kickings, whippings, electrical shock, burning, needles, etc., often ending in death -- in an attempt to glean information about their networks of fellow resisters? How about French use of torture during the Battle of Algiers, as part of a systematic effort to locate and destroy the Algerian National Liberation Front in the city? Hey, they were just using some "tactics" to "get information"!

I don't believe Shepard thinks that -- because it's just too absurd to countenance. What she really means, of course, is that it's not torture when we do it. This kind of blind, my-country-right-or-wrong "patriotism" was also present in France during the Algerian War, and it helped lead plenty of people -- including people who actually understood perfectly well what France was up to in Algeria -- to publicly deny that any torture was going on.

In my mind today, I've been putting that kind of logic, the logic that seeks by any means possible to deny wrongdoing by one's own country, next to that of the French historian of early Christianity Henri-Irénée Marrou, writing in Le Monde in 1956, before many people in France were talking about torture. Marrou's op-ed contribution was called "France, ma patrie" ("patrie" is a little tricky to translate -- it means homeland, fatherland, or simply country) and, in the name of his love of France, Marrou denounced the French use of torture in Algeria. Here's a rough translation of some of the piece:

I am neither a professional journalist nor a politician; I testify here as a simple citizen whose conscience torments him, and who notices that he is not the only one to feel this heavy discomfort, this worry, this anguish...

...[E]verywhere in Algeria -- it is denied by no one -- veritable laboratories of torture have been installed, with electric bathtubs and everything that is required, and this is a disgrace for the country of the French Revolution, and of the Dreyfus Affair: I cannot, without shuddering, think about the day when I was charged with representing the government of the Republic at an exposition organized by UNESCO at the Galliera museum, in honor of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. There was a whole display panel devoted to the abolition -- not, oh hypocrisy, the renewal -- of judicial torture.

....Yes, French grandeur is in peril. I speak to all those who like me, a professor, are educators; who, like me, have children and grandchildren: we must be able to speak to them without shame about Oradour [site of a WWII massacre] and about the Nuremberg trials. We must be able to reread in front of them the beautiful pages of our classics about love of country, about our France, 'patron and witness (and often martyr) for freedom in the world.' Yes, before we become further engaged in the infernal cycle of terrorism and reprisals, each one of us must hear from the deepest, most profound part of his heart the cry of our fathers: 'La patrie is in danger!'

And, by the way, when readers wrote in to protest publication of Marrou's piece, Le Monde editor-in-chief Hubert Beuve-Méry (whose son was actually fighting for the French in Algeria at that moment, and who was no great fan of the Algerian independence fighters) responded that patriotism "does not consist of imitating or adopting, even as reprisals, the practices that we condemn on the part of the adversary. And no more does it consist of carefully dissimulating that which, chez nous, might be blameworthy."

I think they say it pretty well. The America that I want to live in doesn't use torture. And that means it doesn't use torture, not "it calls torture by some other name."

More inconclusive stuff on pseudonyms

I've been working on getting back here to write (1) a more substantive post on France and Algeria and (2) continued reflections on pseudonymity online. But life keeps getting in the way these last few days, and -- wonder of wonders -- I'm actually managing to get some dissertation writing done, a phenomenon miraculous enough that I'm loathe to interrupt it for any reason.

So now just a short post to note that as the Publius-Whelan flap continued to play out, leading up to Whelan's surprising and laudable apology today (and Publius's characteristically gracious acceptance), some excellent, thought-provoking commentary on the issue of pseudonymity got put out there. Most helpful for me were posts that emphasized the category difference between pseudonymity and anonymity, and argued that a pseudonym, while it may serve as a shield, does at least produce a stable online "persona" who is thus subject to a certain kind of accountability and can be evaluated over time as reliable/unreliable/a real asshole/etc. I'm not entirely satisfied with this -- but then, as Matthew Yglesias points out, by that standard I probably shouldn't be entirely satisfied with the online persona of "Matthew Yglesias" either, without thoroughly investigating who the donors to the Center for American Progress Action Fund are, or ferreting around for possible ways he might be misrepresenting himself online.

(Note: I'm sidestepping here the whole issue of "outing" someone else, which everyone and their brother -- including, now Whelan himself -- seems to agree is just tacky and destructive. I'm more interested in the Q of whether someone -- me, say -- should be blogging under a pseudonym in the first place.)

Other posts I thought were useful besides the one from Yglesias: from a general perspective, Julian Sanchez , EotAW, and hilzoy; on the specific problem of blogging from within academia (and the even more specific problem of blogging from within academia as a woman), there's some interesting stuff up in the archives from the early years of Bitch Ph.D. And all of it leaves me....nowhere.

The Pseudonym Issue

So today Ed Whelan outed Obsidian Wings blogger "publius" as John Blevins, an assistant prof at South Texas College of Law. Publius is obviously pretty damn upset, but is taking it with class. Here's his explanation of why he chose not to blog under his own name:

As I told Ed (to no avail), I have blogged under a pseudonym largely for private and professional reasons. Professionally, I’ve heard that pre-tenure blogging (particularly on politics) can cause problems. And before that, I was a lawyer with real clients. I also believe that the classroom should be as nonpolitical as possible – and I don’t want conservative students to feel uncomfortable before they take a single class based on my posts. So I don’t tell them about this blog. Also, I write and research on telecom policy – and I consider blogging and academic research separate endeavors. This, frankly, is a hobby.
Privately, I don’t write under my own name for family reasons. I’m from a conservative Southern family – and there are certain family members who I’d prefer not to know about this blog (thanks Ed). Also, I have family members who are well known in my home state who have had political jobs with Republicans, and I don’t want my posts to jeopardize anything for them (thanks again).
All of these things I would have told Ed, if he had asked. Instead, I told him that I have family and professional reasons for not publishing under my own name, and he wrote back and called me an “idiot” and a “coward.”


As someone in academia, I am deeply sympathetic to this reasoning. The part about teaching is particularly important to me -- I've had fabulous experiences working with conservative students, and the idea that they might avoid taking classes with me because of my blog kills me. Now, I don't have a hard-core, Stanley-Fish-style "no politics in the classroom" kind of ideology about this stuff, and I would imagine that most students probably end a semester with me able to hazard a pretty good guess about some of my positions. And as an intellectual matter I define "the political" very broadly, so I can't really imagine how one would run a "politics-free" history seminar. There is no entirely neutral, universally unsuspect way to talk about the French Revolution, or the Algerian War, or the American sixties, or all the other stuff I teach about. But I believe that there is a way to run a classroom in a spirit of openness and profound respect for reasoned, well-articulated difference of opinion, and to avoid imposing one's own political beliefs on students. I worry about the ways that blogging about contemporary politics (which is not what I teach about) might make it more difficult to create that climate of shared inquiry and mutual respect. What if students who know coming in to a class that they disagree with me about prosecution for America's use of torture in the Bush years thereby become less likely to fully engage with the portions of the class devoted to torture in Algeria? What if they steer clear of taking my classes at all?

I do think that there are ways to tackle these concerns besides pseudonymity. (Beyond what one can do in the classroom, one thing that strikes me as important is to write a blog that forcefully defends its positions but nevertheless remains open to dialogue, respectful of genuine adversaries, and responsive to reasoned criticism. ) But I think that for a lot of academics -- and especially doctoral students or people without tenure, who have to avoid pissing off not only their students but also their advisors, hiring committees, tenure committees, etc. -- blogging pseudonymously will sometimes be the best option. This is especially true because blogging is just not designed to be a "careful" art -- you don't triple-check your citations, then stick it in a drawer for a week to get a chance to look at it with "fresh eyes," then check them again. You just write and post. I think this is a healthy thing -- it feels great to work on developing a more spontaneous and free-flowing, less tortured relationship to writing. But, look, for people trained to be extreeemely careful and conscientious about detail, like historians, it's also pretty scary. Doing it under a pseudonym at least relieves some of the haunting sense that what you're writing might end up in your tenure file, and lets you click "post." (I don't think, by the way, this means the blogosphere turns into a place where academics are relieved of responsibility for getting the facts right and being thoughtful about what they say -- in fact for most of us, after x years of Ph.D. programs and training in academic writing, being careless about that kind of stuff in any forum is basically unthinkable. Even under a pseudonym, we're still going to be insanely conscientious. We just might be slightly less neurotic about mistakes or overstatements or personal revelations somehow ruining our lives, and thus more willing to blog in the first place.)

So those are, I think, some compelling reasons for the pseudonym option being open. They're the reasons I'm doing this sort of semi-open-identity thing here myself (although anyone with google and twenty seconds could probably work out who I am), and haven't yet decided if I'm going to tell people I know about this blog. And yet, at least for myself, I'm ambivalent about it. I was disgusted by Jeff Rosen's gossippy smear piece about Sonia Sotamayor before her nomination, and I thought Glenn Greenwald's takedown of it (and lots of other blogger criticism of Rosen that followed) was dead on. So what's the difference between Rosen's use of anonymous sources and pseudonymous blogging? My gut feeling is that there is one, but -- especially given the trenchant nature of Greenwald's critique of the "professional reasons" excuse for allowing sources to retain their anonymity -- I'm having trouble articulating it. One to sleep on, I suppose. I'll return to this.