The Nation: The Torture Administration

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933 and proceeded to carry out their savagery, many in the outside world asked how this could have happened in the land of Goethe and Beethoven. Would the people of other societies as readily accept tyranny? Sinclair Lewis, in 1935, imagined Americans turning to dictatorship under the pressures of economic distress in the Depression. He called his novel, ironically, It Can't Happen Here.

Hannah Arendt and many others have stripped us, since then, of confidence that people will resist evil in times of fear. When Serbs and Rwandan Hutus were told that they were threatened, they slaughtered their neighbors. Lately Philip Roth was plausible enough when he imagined anti-Semitism surging after an isolationist America elected Charles Lindbergh as President in 1940.

But it still comes as a shock to discover that American leaders will open the way for the torture of prisoners, that lawyers will invent justifications for it, that the President of the United States will strenuously resist legislation prohibiting cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners--and that much of the American public will be indifferent to what is being done in its name.

The pictures from Abu Ghraib, first shown to the public on April 28, 2004, evoked a powerful reaction. Americans were outraged when they saw grinning US soldiers tormenting Iraqi prisoners. But it was seeing the mistreatment that produced the outrage, or so we must now conclude. Since then the Bush Administration and its lawyers have prevented the release of any more photographs or videotapes. And the public has not reacted similarly to the disclosure, without pictures, of worse actions, including murder.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20051226lewis

Thanks, DP!

said by Mark shields tonight on Jim lehrer News Hour (paraphase)

.....But it still comes as a shock to discover that American leaders will open the way for the torture of prisoners, that lawyers will invent justifications for it, that the President of the United States will strenuously resist legislation prohibiting cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners--and that much of the American public will be indifferent to what is being done in its name.

for many - but some are complicit. There are plenty of people out there who, like Tammy Bruce and that viperous cohort, think the "bad guys" deserve whatever they get, that they deserve torture, that they and even their families should be blasted to pieces - in revenge, to discourage others, to ensure that the baby snakes do not grow up to be serpents in their own right. Whatever. The right can draw on the sort of visceral hatred that drives people to witness executions and take trophies from the dead. And that is what most torture victims are - trophies. Symbols of revenge. Warnings to others. These evil acts spring not from reason but from hysteria and paranoia and all the dark places of the human soul that Bush tapped in his response to 9/11, and can still count on to support him. Notice that despite the increased level of scrutiny and protest, the regime has not changed its policies. If anything it has becomes more blatant and barefaced in carrying them out. It knows its wellsprings of loathing and vengeful longing for the blood of "enemies" to be spilled are still there to be drawn from. We are truly looking into the heart of darkness.

but I hadn't seen anything by him recently until you posted this.