Think Progress quotes Andrew Sullivan:
Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I’m not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn’t-somehow-torture - “enhanced interrogation techniques” - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.
And a video of waterboarding.
6 comments:
The video is effective... not subtle, but effective.
David Neiwert has written more than once that fascism evolves differently in each country in which it arises. There is no reason to expect that Bush is Hitler, behaves like Hitler or has Hitler's motivations, just because Bush and Cheney are driving us headlong toward a uniquely American form of fascism.
That said, such a form of government always, in all places and times, sooner or later resorts to violence, including torture under whatever name, to impose its will on its people. That is indisputable. And here we are, among the people victimized, and there Cheney and Bush are, doing what Hitler did, however different the persons, the context and the motivations.
I still have such a hard time realizing we have 28% in this country willing to live in a fascist state. Where did they come from? Didn't they read their history?
Is it something in the human psyche that needs the daddy figure to lead them without so they don't have to think? How on earth could they think this kind of society would actually function as they imagine?
But then, they aren't thinking, are they? This is some deeply rooted need that makes people sell their minds and souls....
ellroon, it's not the willing 28 percent that astonishes me... it's the 28 percent here, in America, that astonishes me.
There are societies (e.g., Russia, though Bryan will probably upend my argument) in which strong, central rule is such a tradition over centuries that people find ways of manufacturing that sort of government even when given the opportunity to rule themselves. There are religious states (and no, I don't mean the result of deep meditation) such as Iran, in which large portions of the population don't merely tolerate the theocracy but actively support it.
But damn it, this is America. It is supposed to be bred into us, or at least inculcated in us from early childhood, that we do not tolerate tyranny. Why did those 28 percent simply not get the word? That is what troubles me. And they call themselves... under less dire circumstances, this would make me laugh... conservatives!
Maybe, Steve, we are astonished because we are of the generation that had parents coming out of WWII and the McCarthy era.
We saw the movies with heroic American cowboys/soldiers/heroes saving the day by being good, citing the Geneva Convention, refusing to torture, scorning the evil Indians/ Nazis/Japanese/convenient bad guys and their dastardly ways.
We read All Quiet on the Western Front, The Guns of August, Red Badge of Courage... and a whole host of others. We went through John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy: the assasinations, the space race, the Cold War. We knew we were better than the Soviets because we were an open society, they a secretive and closed one. We had the Peace Corps.
I'm ignoring all the shit we pulled with our foreign entanglements with Chile and the Philippines, Korea and Vietnam, etc. I'm talking about the American citizen's psyche.
So when did we get this lazy, pseudo-manly pretend soldier type who wants all the bravado and none of the danger? When did we get these wannabe Nazi types? Are they proof that the more you forget or don't teach, the more the people get to repeat the lessons already learned?
Obviously, they do not wish to learn any lessons. They already feel entitled to a glorious and brave ending where we save the world and it's totally endebted to us.....And we all get to wear totally cool uniforms.
ellroon, I engaged today in a polite debate with ReaganConservative (one of my regular commenters, emphatically not a troll, a GOPer who has come to distrust Bush) about Snow's expressed analogy between Iraq and the Koreas that left us all drop-jawed yesterday. I found that RC was himself young enough to have had no direct or parental connection with W.W. II, and hence no real understanding of Germany's Nazis and what they did.
Our educational task is tougher than at first I imagined: first we have to get younger folks to understand what happened; only then can we urge them to avoid it. American aversion to tyranny is not, after all, inborn.
My daughter's U.S. history teacher (10th grade) has them up to the end of the Cold War which means they've covered a lot of ground before the end of school. Luckily the teacher is young, enthusiastic and discreetly liberal. American History really is alive with her. Thank goodness for such teachers!
But even with inspired teachers, we need to bring back the excellent movies that emphasize American ideals. I've seen several WWII movies where the captured American soldier cites the Geneva Conventions and I think 'Bush made sure that won't work anymore'.
I've just had an idea.... off to post.
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