Word: ordering
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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That is undoubtedly part of it. "The price of eternal vigilance," says Marshall McLuhan, "is indifference." In the same way, the cost of constant excitement, of a persistent and violent rearrangement of one's sense of order, results in surfeit. The mind is overcome by a kind of compassion fatigue. The events of the '60s have profoundly disturbed the American sense of reality. The longest war in the nation's history, with the American combat dead and wounded last week passing 300,000, seems at once horribly strange and grimly familiar. All too accustomed to daily deaths...
...world wars changed all that. The Nurnberg Trial of 22 Nazi leaders after World War II revived one of the great tenets of Western thought: that a higher law sometimes requires men to give their primary allegiance to humanity rather than the State. Although the Nazi defendants pleaded "state orders," 19 were convicted and ten were hanged. To skeptics, Nurnberg proved mainly that losing a war had become a crime under international law. Nevertheless, the supremacy of civilized rules of behavior was enunciated in a U.N. report: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government...
What if a U.S. soldier is actually ordered to commit an atrocity? According to the U.S. Manual for Courts-Martial, he is justified in not following an order if "a man of ordinary sense and understanding would know it to be illegal." The trouble is that such echoes of Nürnberg are drowned out by every drill sergeant's most basic lesson-instant obedience. Under military law, in fact, a man who refuses to follow an order is presumed guilty of this offense until he proves that the order was illegal at his subsequent court-martial. Disobedience...
...defense of "superior orders" has been unsuccessful in some cases that involve grave crimes. In 1954, an Army review board affirmed the murder conviction of an enlisted man who had shot a Korean to death while guarding an airfield. The guard claimed that he had been ordered to fire on anyone who did not heed his order to halt, and his lawyer said that this made him, in effect, an automaton without criminal intent. The review board rejected the argument...
...late, however, Washington has come to life with a special Nixonian flavor. Spiro Agnew has become a walking oratorical event, exhaling sulphurous prose on behalf of the Great Silent Majority. Attorney General John Mitchell's dour podsnappery as Southern strategist and antidissenter cheers the forces of law and order and dismays liberals. Mitchell himself has remained as invisible as before. But his wife Martha has emerged as one of the dominant figures on the Washington scene, and her tart tongue has enlivened a lot of cocktail parties (see box, page...