When we watch a televised confession in which an American soldier confesses to all sorts of crimes against some Muslim this or that, we take it for granted that the man is in fear for his life and we discount what he says automatically (if our judgment is unimpaired). We are also a bit bemused by the thought that anyone would take this nonsense seriously. Yet there seem to be cases, ever more common, in which we accept the very same thing within our own Western shores. There are three that come to mind immediately: the forced apology, the forced remorse, and the forced sensitivity training.
The public apology is today nothing more than a test of strength. Can we force a CEO of a company to apologize for doing something he obviously thought (and still thinks) was the rational thing to do? He clearly has had no reason to change his mind, but he equally clearly has been given reason to say publicly that he has. The apology, if it comes, is insincere, but a change of heart was never the objective; the objective was to force a public humiliation. Essentially, the apology has become the component of a ritualistic contest, a battle of wills, a test of strength.
This is clearly what is happening in the Obama vs Crowley incident. Crowley sensed that he had a better hand than Obama and announced, in a kind of pre-emptive strike, that HE, for one, was NOT going to apologize. The question then became whether or not Obama could be made to do it. Of course, Obama couldn't bring himself to do that, for more reasons than can be mentioned here. But that doesn't matter, Crowley has won the exchange. The bottom line is this: Obama was the one who should have apologized (by the ritual rules), he didn't, and now he's just a weasely bad sport. He lost, he just doesn't have the grace to admit it.
The other example is that of "expressing remorse." It is one of the questions that parole bodies consider in making their decisions. Does the prisoner express remorse? It should be clear to anyone not ideologically brain-damaged that very few criminals actually FEEL remorse, so the questions is really only whether the prisoner can be sufficiently humiliated by expressing feelings he does not have for the sake of getting out. What the parole board is really asking is whether the prisoner can be forced to grovel for his freedom.
And, of course, the forced "sensitivity training" is nothing other than public humiliation and the imposition of power. It comes directly out of the Orwellian play book, out of the Stalinesque use of psychiatric institutions, and it is one of the most dramatic examples of a western democracy sliding into the speech control of something like Lenin's Russia or the Jacobins of the French Revolution.
There are other instances also in which people are made to say things that they don't believe.
There is a wonderful Seinfeld episode in which whenever a character refers to homosexuality, he quickly follows it with the phrase "not that there's anything wrong with it!"
This is an amusing case of applying the weasely legal disclaimer attached to almost everything these days to daily conversation. Just as you can market something dangerous or unpopular by carefully marking it as such, so you can say many things considered bad, as long as you cover yourself with the appropriate disclaimer.
This technique is transparently being applied to criticisms of the American Black President. Politicians and pundits, ever the crafty and cautious lot, now regularly cover their criticisms of Obama with obligatory conventional phrases of admiration: "he is, of course, brilliant, but," "he is, of course, an enormously talented [politician, speaker, orator, charismatic personality, etc.]". They realize that they are dealing with a very large population of people who suspect that other races do not really have as much respect for them as a group as they would like. And so we see a ubiquitous conventional genuflection: he is so wonderful, they are so wonderful, blah blah blah. It is a case of political realities forcing a universal game of let's pretend.
All of this can be entertaining in a dismal kind of way, except that it is ultimately seriously damaging to a democratic republic to systematically teach the public untruths, and this is certainly being done within the Western democracies. It is being done by the politicians, who shun the truth as a vampire does garlic or the cross, by the historians, who have been left-wing cult members since the early 20th century, and by the creators and marketers of popular cheap entertainement (advertisers and movie/televisions producers), who do it for the profit motive.
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