War Crimes

I just got back from seeing Taxi to the Dark Side, and if I had any doubt that this administration was guilty of war crimes, those doubts have been eliminated. Of course, it only takes his implicit admission to such by quietly trying to pardon himself in 2006 of any crimes connected with the torture and mistreatment of U.S. detainees, or that, on a more recent note, the CIA, DoD and other agencies are getting in more trouble over the destruction of hundreds of hours of videotapes documenting harsh interrogations in 2005 to tell me that they're guilty.

What is more outrageous than this is that the American people could not care enough to prosecute them for such heinous crimes.

The New York Times has two frequent Op-Ed Columnists: William Kristol, leading neoconservative intellectual and founder and editor of conservative periodical The Weekly Standard; and David Brooks, a self-proclaimed conservative in the tradition of William F. Buckly, Jr. So to all you who call the NYT a bastion of liberalism: HA!

The NYT is a politically moderate, capitalist newspaper. I find it frighteningly ironic that the blow-hard propaganda artists on Fox "News" Network call themselves balanced because they have some half-twit like Colmes on as their token liberal and then at the same time call the NYT, which has leading conservative intellectuals as columnists, a liberal paper (spoken as though "liberal" was the quality of Satan that makes him so). Makes you wonder how far to the right the Fox blow-hards have to be to call "liberal" a paper that includes Kristol or Brooks three days a week, doesn't it?

On March 6th, a story appeared on the BBC website regarding the German military's unease about using the Iron Cross as a medal of honor. It strikes as particularly odd that the German military, who used the Iron cross well before the Nazi's co-opted it, would still nonetheless be unwilling to reclaim it for use considering we in the USA have no problem putting it on our vehicles or on our clothing, like the company West Coast Choppers likes to do.

Is the American public that ignorant of history not to be concerned about such cavalier use of such a problematic symbol? In the case of WCC, it's part of a band image of "toughness" and fearless that is related to fear and aggression -- qualities looked upon as superior by the SS. Am I the only one who sees this? My in-laws and I walked into a high-end clothing store once and saw jeans with an iron cross on each back pocket. So this is not just WCC.

So we Americans are either stereotypically historically ignorant or we are OK with the implicit racism in using this symbol. Either way, I'm very concerned.

In the context of protest management and non-lethal weaponry:

"There have been several studies that have shown that the militarization of the police doesn't just include the technology transfer and the tactics and the training, it's actually the personnel themselves are being largely drawn from the military. So people are bringing their experiences of occupation back from Iraq into your local neighborhood; and so a lot of that same mentality of seeing the public as a kind of enemy, as opposed to a citizen whose rights must to be protected, is being transfered in both formal and informal ways into civilian policing." - From The Invisible War

Feel like being looked at as an enemy combatant by merely exercising your right to peacefully assemble? Well, you might not have a choice in the matter. Now we have a militarized police force that is more likely to inflict harm on people because "non-lethal weaponry" makes it seem more acceptable. People are still killed by tasers, and they blinded and paralyzed by bean bags. Yet they are regularly used in protests to merely assert power, without provocation. When the political rhetoric makes protesters "terrorist lovers" and former Iraq soldiers, who were trained to see civilians as potential terrorists, begin to constitute more and more of the police force, it does not take much for the police to become by action and constitution a second military, whose members are much more psychologically capable of and ready to use unnecessary force against the American citizenry.

Slowly, the frog boils…

I have recently gone back to Hannah Arendt's 1958 work _The Human Condition_. This is a book that I would strongly recommend to anyone who is sympathetic to criticisms that modernity has brought us little more than alienation and consumerism. Someone who is sympathetic to much of Marx's criticisms, Arendt is also strongly critical of him, lumping him together with Adam Smith and saying they are both to blame for the "socialized man" and the glorification of labor. By glorifying labor -- either as the means of aggregating wealth or as the means of producing for all -- and by turning "public" into something that merely indicates the administration of things, we have been robbed of one our most fundamental liberties: the ability to speak and to act and to bring newness into the world, or, for that matter, to have a world at all. All become mere consumables to be manufactures and destroyed, and all of our labor power is directed at this cycle of futility. We thus let whiter away the space in which we are able to be political people -- people who have the freedom to engage with others as equals.

The argument is too nuanced for me to lay out here. A brief summary of the work can be found on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Nonetheless, take this as a strong recommendation for anyone who is not sympathetic to capitalism.

Who would I be talking about if I spoke of a certain political leader who mastered propaganda in order to dupe his own government and people of his country, who used the mechanism of democratic governance to actively destroy it by centralizing more and more power in his hands, who invoking a hidden Enemy in order to achieve his ends, and who used a clandestine organization to surveil, abduct, interrogate, and in terrorize not only these alleged hidden enemies but also citizens of his own country?

Stalin?

Hitler?


This, two days ago from the New York Times:

President Bush on Saturday further cemented his legacy of fighting for strong executive powers, using his veto to shut down a Congressional effort to limit the Central Intelligence's latitude to subject terrorism suspects to harsh interrogation techniques.

Add in a bit of Iraq WMD's, PATRIOT ACT, FISA modifications and more, and you've got one hell of a case for the slow progression towards tyranny. I remember being told once that if you put a frog in water and slowly turn the heat up, it won't attempt an escape, because the change happens so slowly it doesn't notice what's happening. It's not true of frogs, but the anecdote still has something to say to us. It starts by targeting people radically "other." Then people a little less radically "other". Then political dissidents become "enemy combatants"… You see where this heads if the logic is played out? It started with the tazing of Andrew Meyer, who was tazered for just asking Al Gore some questions.