Take It As Red

Thanks to Jeralyn at TalkLeft
for this:

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - U.S. special forces accused of abusing prisoners in Iraq threatened Defense Intelligence Agency personnel who saw the mistreatment, according to U.S. government memos released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The special forces also monitored e-mails sent by defense personnel and ordered them "not to talk to anyone" in the United States about what they saw, said one memo written by the Defense Intelligence Agency chief, who complained to his Pentagon bosses about the harassment.


Where does one begin to describe the utter moral degeneracy of America? I'm risking sounding like one of those strident America-haters here. Do I care? No. I'm past caring whether Americans are insulted by the rest of the world telling the truth. Sorry guys, I'm not going to collude in your national self-deception.

I used to love and admire America - I spent a long time living there, I like the people, my children have US passports. But there's no denying that the country itself is becoming a fascist one party state, and Americans themselves the 21st century equivalent of the Good German, except that this time round they have no excuse. Those Germans who fell in line with National Socialist policies in the nineteen-thirties at least had the excuse that they had little access to real information: there was no internet then, no cellphones, no multichannel cable or digital TV, no satellite phones or radio; now the information is there if you want it.

And that's the problem - they don't want it. The US, collectively, just does not want to look in the mirror and be forced to face what it has become. That would mean admitting to itself that their much vaunted constitution is just another piece of paper and their supposed love of freedom and democracy is just spouting empty words; words that were once powerful but that have been shorn of meaning by two corrupt elections, the gutting of the justice system and the politicisation of the military and of the security apparatus. Where's the outrage, for example, over the Bush maladministration's hiring of two former KGB Colonels
as consultants for an internal passport system?

What's happening in the US is prefigured wonderfully in Sebastian Haffner's
biographical books. Haffner relates just how the Nazis gained and kept power, with the blind unknowing collaboration of ordinary Germans. He shows how fascism can creep up by increments, until, one day, you look around and realise that this isn't your country anymore and all your neighbours are alien to you. Then you start worrying about the 3am knock on your door.

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