Dear Americans,
it is horrifying to see that the lessons learned by mankind as a consequence of Hitler's Thousand Year Reich - which only lasted 12 years - have obviously been lost entirely 60 years after WW II.
Floating American KZs (Konzentrationslager) mark the point of utter moral squalidness after a never-ending sequence of shock and awe to the world public: the raid of Iraq, Abu Ghoraib, the tortured hooded men, Guantánamo, squatting men in red jumper suits, horrid and humiliating stories about the teatment of "insurgents", the kidnappings, etc.
Images that have now been chiseled into our collective memory since 2001.
My generation was raised in the firm belief that nothing, nobody would ever compare to Hitler and what he had done to the world. Hitler was to be unique, the ultimate singularity, forever - to belief this was almost like feeling safe in this world.
However, this belief has been shattered entirely by two terms of Bush, Cheney and Rice.
To witness the atrocities of the so-called "war against terrorism" happening in a censored ("embedded") environment, however, publicly retrievable by media and the internet - and thus inextinguishable from public memory - has shattered the belief in Hitler's singularity, at last.
If Bush, Cheney and Rice can lie any lie, can commit any crime, anywhere at anytime under the eyes of the public, elected by a people who claim to be free - and who are not oppressed or personally threatened by liquidation - even elected twice by the American people who claim to be free… then Hitler cannot be held as a singularity any longer.
This means: the Third Reich can happen anywhere, anytime - no matter under what regime or form of government. And there is no limit to barbarity whatsoever to happen right in the midst of us all. With all of us as ignorants, spectators, or "Willige Helfer" (willing helpers).
May God or Allah help us if s/he exists.
Best wishes from Germany.

"What kind of monsters have we, the United States of America become?"

Are you kidding me ? is it really that hard to let go of that warm "great american" feeling ? You haven't become, you've always been. Starting with "good indian is a dead indian", moving on to those damn mexico and canada(they sure had some nerve keeping your land from you) and so on and so on... but dont feel bad - every empire is like that. those lil blips on your radar are just means for a better lifestyle for you and they r invisible and easily replaceable...

and do you know of a single war where US played nice even ? maybe WWII(no need to go into detail here, is there?) Maybe Desert Storm where 40,000+ of iraqi soldiers were gunned down on the road in one day... one can go on and on about this stuff...

And nothing short of millions of angry citizens descending on the capital and making their voices heard and staying there until the dictators resign wont change anything. If serbians and georgians could do this, so can you !!! hehehe, just kidding...

Perhaps some special prisoners have been taken to the USS Peleliu and the USS Bataan, but they are not prison ships. I served on ship similar to those two, and they are "amphibious assault" ships that carry troops and helicopters. They are expensive highly specialized warships.

what will it take to get the ameerkan populace to stand up in rage and take back this country? Maybe if you take away their cable tv, NASCAR and SUVs(by fuel price proxy possibly, naa, I don't think that will do it either..

satr9prodxns June 3rd, 2008 10:38 am

Nice quote from Orwell. Boy what a visionary. A visionary movie would be Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."

america is in some respects unique in terms of the western civilisations..in that it is large enough and powerfull enough to go it's own way...no one in europe is under any illusion as the attitude america has towards us..america views the other western democracys with blanket contempt..there is no need to get overly excited about this as Great Britain had exactly the same attitude towards the rest of the world at the peak of it's power and empire...of course Great Britain no longer exists..

the rub of this is hugely exagerated IMO by the shere size of the USA as a state and as a continent in it's own right..where-as great britain was a relatively small land mass relying on extended commonwealth and empire for it's power the usa is virtualy a small planet ...it can't be held against the population of the usa that they often consider the rest of the world as some-thing remote alien and even illusory...given the USA's highly driven patriotism and self belief (constantly re-inforced by every day rituals and media intervention)..the rest of the western democracys simply don't have these rituals..you live where you live..of all the european democracys probably France has the strongest sense of national identity (which is probably interesting by itself perhaps..)
what the heck am i warbling on about?
well it's this...none of this would matter if this was the year 1808 or even possibly the year 1908..all the western democracys have left a trail of injustice in their wakes..but it's the year 2008....it's the century of global problems requiring global soloutions...the dropping of borders not only economicaly but philosphicaly and politicaly also..in fact lets face it the issues are planetary and species wide and be done with it once and for all..

so whilst the european democracys are resigning them selves to the inevitability of the situation and grasping the benifits and feeling the pains of an every growing european union...the usa is struggling to come to terms with the loss of national identity neccessary for genuine global politics
any nation that places such incredibly high value on it's national identity cannot hold such view without at the same time holding all other nations in low regard...even perhaps seeing the eurpoean union as a extremely threating insitution (in spite of the obviuos fact that the EU is in effect mimicking the structure of the US in some regards in order to function)

the USA is comprised af many states each of which must subvert it's individual identity to the whole in order to function succesfully

so the example and experience is there..

any number of things are possible...if this were 1808
in 2008 the options are limited
because again the issues are planetary and species wide
if the USA had continued it's space exploration program and colonised the moon and mars then without any doubt what so ever the situation would be entirely different for inumerable reasons..

The media are not pointing out that extraordinary rendition was started by Bill Clinton. While better than Bush, Clinton was assuredly neither a progressive nor a human rights advocate. Military recruitment of minors and execution of juvenile and mentally retarded offenders, landmines, cluster bombs, interference at the UN to prevent intervention to stop the Rwanda genocide, destruction of Sudan's main pharmaceutical plant, forcing debilitating concessions on the International Criminal Court and then refusing to sign, betraying gays by signing DOMA and DADT, inter alia, are Clinton's human rights legacy.

Whatever next, Blackwater pressgangs?

All of these outrages predate Bush. The CIA also used such torture chambers for Chile's young activists… and then they disappeared.

But, Bush has become the convenient scapegoat for policies that are decades and more old. And English involvement has been consistent.

But, once again we have England leading the charge against a Nazi empire. Last time it was German (headed by Hitler, a man appointed to play his role by Wilhelm, grandson of Queen Victoria) and this time it is American.

Strange, in most of the CIA capers with which I am personally familiar, there was always an English bloke in charge.

But, the media can do whatever it wants with public opinion. So now the Americans are the Nazis (true) but they are still only a facet of the Empire, a potentially expendable one it seems.

It appears to me that we have indeed built our own prison! Is there no-one left to challenge the wards? Time passes, America sleeps. How can we wake from this nightmare?
Perhaps when the knock is heard on our own door?
Maybe when THEY start taking what we hold dear will we wake to action, before our baby cries as they drag him/her in the fashion of our imagined enemy?
Perhaps after writing in this very blog we are all charged with conspiracy to over through the present regime; can we take action after we hear that knock on our door?
Access to government has been denied to us for many years, not so much by the government, but by the corporations than have controlled it.
Canceling the corporation's campaign financing (the purchasing of our political leaders) is essential in retaking our country; the money flow from them to influence the legislators must cease to exist, it would be a good start!

Ditto CWB47. After five years of literally begging the people in my town to join a few of us to resist soon and definitely, I have seen that few believe there is anything which will be effective.....Call it apathy, but I am beginning to see it as a natural result of the continuing disillusionment in the entire modern "western" culture we inhabit. Do not expect the wealthy peoples to rise up and squash dictatorial insanity...it has already arrived and few noticed. NO, it will require those nations which still have a capability long lost in the consumerist world...call it "conscience".....to somehow unite and show the usurpers just how out of whack we have all become....Om Shanti........

What is probably the most frightening aspect of todays' fascist move at world domination is that it is more plausible and likely to be successful today than ever before. Even as recently as Hitler's attempt, the world was a much "bigger" one and there was, ultimately, a unified resistance. Today, thanks largely to the efforts of America in obstructing any movement toward global cooperation, no such unified force exists.
The Soviet Union had another superpower with which to contend. It was beaten by America at its own game of clandestine intervention in the affairs of other nations.
America now stands alone in the superpower category and shows no signs of willingness to share the status with anyone else again. Given the incredible explosion of technology and the rampant expansion of corporatism and global privatization it is very nearly too late to stop the world dictatorship looming just ahead.
Only a united effort by all other nations will suffice to bring America's aggression to a halt.

JJPeter,

I couldn't agree with you more. 911 was a false flag pre-planned attack by Cheney and the neo-cons, to launch the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The billions of dollars these sick defense industry bastards made--and are still making--on this entire brain-fuck is unprecedentedly sick and disgusting.

...I just can't believe how incredibly fucked up the U.S. government has become under the Bush/Cheney fascists.

I really don't think the USA can recover, or get back to when it was half-way decent, say 50 years ago--when there was an inkling of democracy and some human decency among many occupying top U.S. government positions. The long term gutting and damage by Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, and Bush/Cheney has so seriously fucked things over--barring some miraculous event to get us back on the right course.

The U.S. government of today is run like a private for-profit corporation by a bunch of greedy CEOs....it's an empty shell of it's former self :( No democracy, honor, or decency left! MBAs do NOT make good public administrators! A nation is NOT a corporation!

...and so it goes: NOW we read about 'floating prisons' full of Iraqis or Afghanis who had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and little more. Fucking unbelievable, what Bush/Cheney have gotten away with. It's so bizarre...like what do they expect to get out of these people? What will a bunch of Arabs caught fighting the U.S. invasion of their countries confess to that is of any value to anybody? They're all dirt poor Arabs. And to think Cheney and team planned this all out years in advance. Sick, twisted fucks.

I cannot think of any people LESS AMERICAN than Bush, Cheney, and Addington.

I'm hoping Vincent Bugliosi's book "The Prosecution of GW Bush (and Cheney too!) for Murder" brings about a miracle: to see these fuckers behind bars for life (or the death penalty). Out of the thousands of excellent attorneys in the USA today, surely there are a handful with the guts, moral rectitude, and drive to nail these fuckers Bush/Cheney with a watertight case. It may come 6 months from now, or it may come many years from now like with Pinochet...but justice shall be served....

A civilized people don't do this.

What kind of monsters have we, the United States of America become? In a few weeks, I travel with family to the Mediterranean, for a 10 day cruise in anything but, a prison ship. In a sense I feel ashamed to go and enjoy the good life, knowing what is being done in our name.

Having thought 911 was an inside job, perpetuated by Dick Cheney and the bushCON regime, I often wonder if all of this torturing and rendition stuff isn't for the perverted pleasure of these sick bastards. What would be the ultimate confession they could extract? That it wasn't Islamic fanatics who flew those planes? But was instead the ultimate betrayal by the PNAC group to this country. A false flag event, years in the planning, pulled off to be the Pearl Harbor like attack of the 21st century, in order to launch their American Imperialistic agenda on the Middle East?

Such sure knowledge would be the confession that would lead to certain death for the confessor, and a lifeless trip to the bottom of the sea.

That dark secret is what must haunt these people, or at least I hope they wake up at night, hearing the screams of their fellow human beings, on fire, broken by falling concrete or torn apart by a roadside bomb. God I hope that is true.

Not in MY NAME

perhaps Hitler will get his thousand year reich after all...seems to me that when a regime is defeated in war the victors absorb that regimes ideas begin to feel justified in enacting those self same ideas them selves..perhaps becoming confused into believing that having defeated the regime they have "innoculated" the ideas...i dread to imagine what stae the world might get into once the geneticly "enhanced" humanity buisness gets up and rolling...BIG GENETICS INC may well come up with stuff that would make the Nazi's blush

after all that will be almost entirely motivated by money big buisness and corporations will be in charge both developing the tech and administering it's use...to basicaly create the master race...(what else could it be called)

and what happens to the rest of us one wonders?

what happens indeed...will those unenhanced humans be stripped one by one of their rights?..considered as mere chattel to disposed of in anyway that benifits the majority..kept on prison ships perhaps as pawns in the never ending war on terror...the real terror of course is to wake up in a world that has gone stark raving mad and can't tell progress from self destruction

Ironic, isn't it, that the U.S. would use a ship named "Bataan", as in the Bataan Death March, for imprisonment.

"And in the general hardening of outlook that set in … practices which had been long abandoned … — imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the deportation of whole populations — not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive."

george orwell
1984