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TechnoratiThe Oscar for Denial
And the winner is – The American People
Kate Winslet's Academy Award for Best Actress in The Reader surely disappointed and outraged Ron Rosenbaum. Amid the torrent of nonsense glutting U.S. media since the movie award nominations were announced, Rosenbaum's objections to The Reader were far more substantive and accusatory.
In his Slate column, Rosenbaum attacked the "essential metaphorical thrust" of the film, which he said aimed "to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in the Final Solution." Rosenbaum decried the notion of honoring "a film that asks us to empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer and intimates that ‘ordinary Germans' were ignorant of the extermination until after the war..."
Rosenbaum indicted "the Kate Winslet character's ‘illiteracy': She's a stand-in for the German people and their supposed inability to ‘read' the signs that mass murder was being done in their name, by their fellow citizens. To which one can only say: What a crock!"
In fact it is a crock, a willful misreading of The Reader to lump it in with a genre of films which exploit the Holocaust (e.g., Life is Beautiful, winner of several Academy Awards). Bernard Schlink, author of the novel on which the film of The Reader is based, told an interviewer in December: "It's definitely not a movie about the Holocaust. It's about a generation trying to come to terms with what they had to learn about their parents' generation."
But Rosenbaum's Shoah sensitivities are Manichean. He concedes nothing to the moral and emotional complexities within or between the characters, especially in the film's central relationship between Michael and Hanna.
Michael's passionate affair with the much-older Hanna at first uplifts his adolescence. But when, as a law student, he witnesses her murder trial, along with other former Nazi concentration camp guards, he is devastated. Michael believes that Hanna has admitted to writing a report about the death of 300 Jewish prisoners, trapped in a burning church, in order to avoid revealing her illiteracy.
Michael tells his law professor (Bruno Ganz) that he has knowledge relevant to the trial, perhaps in the defendant's favor. The older professor urges Michael to speak up: You don't want to be like us and do nothing do you? Here Ganz is referring to his own silent wartime generation. But Michael cannot bring himself to visit Hanna during her trial, even though he knows her illiteracy has probably condemned her to a far greater penalty than her equally - or perhaps surpassingly - guilty comrades.
The other guards have no moral sense. But they are rewarded for their lies and stonewalling, receiving much lighter sentences than Hanna, who simply blurts out the truth, takes the rap and ends up sentenced to life in prison. She admits to having no moral sense, and therefore must be the more strongly condemned. Does this really create undue sympathy for Hanna, as Rosenbaum suggests? At the end of the film, an escaped victim (Lena Olin) explicitly asks the adult Michael (Ralph Fiennes) if he thinks Hanna's illiteracy mitigates her guilt. And he says no.
As one of the law students in the film declares, the question is not who knew about the extermination of the Jews. There were hundreds of camps all over Europe. Everybody knew. "My parents, my teachers, everyone." The question is, what did they do about it? The answer is: Nothing. As the student says to the bemused Ganz: "The only question is why you didn't all just kill yourselves?"
Rosenbaum incorrectly accuses The Reader of claiming that most Germans were ignorant of the The Holocaust. The film's underlying assumption is far more damning: everybody knew, but nobody acted on that knowledge. Of course, as Samantha Power recounts in her Pulitzer-Prize winning study of genocide, A Problem From Hell, the United States was also well aware of Hitler's extermination of European Jewry before and during World War Two and also chose to do nothing.
Power's book is a shocking indictment of American neutrality in the face of evil, during the Holocaust and other systematic programs of genocide all around the world - in Turkey, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq and elsewhere - over the past hundred years. "The key question" writes Power, after presenting hundreds of pages of documented evidence, "... is: Why does the United States stand so idly by? The most common response is, ‘We didn't know.' This is not true."
"Because the savagery of genocide so defies our everyday experience, many of us failed to wrap our minds around it," Power's says. "Bystanders were thus able to retreat to the ‘twilight between knowing and not knowing.'" It was easier not to probe for certainty because uncertainty did not demand action. Power concludes that America failed to act against genocide not because the country lacked knowledge or influence but because it did not have the will to act. U.S. officials "were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital needed to stop it."
Now the United States faces a new moral crisis, the subversion of our own legal and moral values by high officials of our own government. We are, in this moment. as awash in complicity and willful denial as the principled middle-class denizens of the Third Reich. We are the Good Germans of the new millennium in Bush America because we knew about the illegal kidnappings and tortures, the self-serving legalisms that subverted the Geneva accords and papered over Constitutional lapses, the lies that led us into conquest and occupation. Starting well before the invasion of Iraq - which millions around the globe protested in unprecedented numbers before it occurred - we knew the "weapons of mass destruction" and Saddam's connections to al-Qaeda were bullshit excuses. But many millions of us tried to pretend that we really weren't sure.
In his Sunday column entitled: "What We Don't Know Will Hurt Us," Frank Rich remarked upon this "American reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago... Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable." Or as Bob Dylan put it, in the context of race relations a generation ago, "How many times must a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?"
We know, deep inside us we know, as the Germans who kept their heads down and tried to lead ‘normal' lives as genocide exploded all around them, in their name, by their own government, knew, that our government has committed terrible atrocities at home and abroad. If we do nothing to bring these crimes to light and their perpetrators to justice, then we are as guilty and worthy of moral condemnation as the war generation of silent Germans whom Ron Rosenbaum rightly abhors.
For Bernard Schlink, this knowledge, that his parents' generation denied, "makes me aware how thin the ice is on which we live." Schlink believed that German culture and institutions like courts, universities, churches, unions and political parties "all seemed so solid." And yet it all broke down, "relatively easily." In America too. Somehow we allowed our government to invade a country that had committed no aggression toward the United States. We allowed our government to declare an emergency in order to violate human rights of many thousands of individuals, to commit torture, to incarcerate people for years without trial or hearings of any kind. And today we continue the violence in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan. We continue to jail and abuse individuals without charges. And we all know it's wrong. And it's time to deal with it before our "land of the free" is irreparably compromised.
Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy has laid out The Case for a Truth Commission (Time, Feb 20). As Leahy says: "For much of this decade, we have read about and witnessed such abuses as the scandal at Abu Ghraib, the disclosure of torture memos and the revelations about the warrantless surveillance of Americans. We need to get to the bottom of what happened--and why--to make sure it never happens again... to find the truth....
"But to repair the damage of the past eight years and restore America's reputation and standing in the world, we should not simply turn the page without being able first to read it.... We need to get to the bottom of what went wrong after a dangerous and disastrous diversion from American law and values. The American people have a right to know what their government has done in their names."
It's not just our right. It's a fundamental need. German society is still - and may always be - in recovery, not just from the atrocities committed in its name, by its leaders, but from the silent acquiescence of the millions who lacked the will to speak up against what they knew was wrong. To sweep the crimes and excesses of the Bush-Cheney years under the rug would destroy the American soul. The world needs the American sense of justice now more than ever. But we forfeit our moral authority if we do not take responsibility for the crimes of the Bush-Cheney years. Karl Rove continues to flaunt congressional subpoenas to testify. He figures he can stonewall indefinitely, that there will be no day of reckoning for lawless U.S. officials. We must do everything in our power to prove him wrong.
41 Comments so far
Show AllThe real issue is whether the book by Slink and the film ever recognize that women SS guards of which there were over 3,000 were convicted as criminals after World War II because of their brutality of killing and torture in the concentration camps. They were educated with leadership courses by the nazi leadership of the SS(they were not illiterate). They had a choice and chose badly. At least two women SS guards were executed after trials for their murderous actions in 1946. Only one SS woman guard was exonerated after the war by inmates of concentration camps(she was the exception to the rule). Perhaps authors of fiction and directors of fictional films should issue a brief paragraph noting the historical record for readers and viewers of the current world, who have forgotten history and just see such stories as just another tale for entertainment. History does matter and the real victims were not the SS guards in this story.
Frankly, I'm sick and tired of this 'Did the Germans know and, if so, how much?' After 60 years, it's just getting ridiculous.
And I'm not sure if the Germans share this guilt trip anywhere near as much as the West in general. Basically, the Germans knew that staying alive meant looking the other way - plain old-fashioned survival. Where's the guilt in that?
Japan has never been forced to rub its nose in its own guilt in the way Germany has, despite the horrors it inflicted on the Chinese and POWs, to name a few. Neither have we ever been particularly concerned with non-Jewish Holocaust guilt - the concentration camp deaths of the Poles, Gypsies, gays and left-wingers, nor the mass carnage the Germans inflicted on the Russians.
Neither do we ever seem to get off on anything like the same guilt trip when it comes to the infrastructure-destruction, starvation and mass murder of the German people under the WWII allied invasion. Neither do we ever seem to nurture any mass guilt complex about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Neither do we suffer any guilt about how 60 million people died to save Europe from fascism, only to have us hand over half of Europe to communism. Do we ever suffer any guilt that a negotiated peace might have been effected sooner than 1945 and saved tens of millions of lives - instead of holding out for unconditional surrender for both Germany and Japan?
Why is our obssession only with German guilt - and only then, with Jewish Holocaust German guilt? What is really driving it after all this time?
Samantha Power turned a blind eye to the genocides that the US was responsible for -- either directly or indirectly.
She should have called her book: The Problem from Hell - America and OTHER PEOPLE'S Genocides.
Just testing the comments out: http://commondreams.org
commondreams.org
Only 22% of evangelical Christians believe that torture is never justified, according to a recent Pew poll. This tells you all you need to know about these people and their ethics, which they apparently believe concerns only what other people do in bed.
So much for love thy neighbor....
What We Must Deny Becomes Our Dream of Terror
Children make some oblique choices
informed by a primitive will to eat,
to believe there is tomorrow
or that there is something they can do
to keep the father or the mother
inside a safe world of their kindest books
and out of the rages that descend from them
upon them like tornadoes from an Iowa sky:
the glass shatters and the faces of the children
if they live turn inward so far
nothing can dissuade them from forgetting
the blast of death that shook the tree of their world
until it split and the bees spun
into the honey of the broken yellow sky.
*
It is what we do to move on
across the river, along the long long beaches
to the new world
away from the swarms of locusts
when we ate the dogs
or sacrificed the neighbors. Of course
some of us were so stunned
we could not move
but then they placed us out on the ice
chanted a prayer or two
and continued to steal what meat they could
from the others even if they looked
and walked and laughed
just like us.
Starved like we would starve.
We had our excuses. We buried our young alive too.
No one is immune.
*
Still we like to retrace steps
of anothers' terror. We must jail someone, must
pull the nails clear of the beds to make it up
to our children's children's children
that they deserve this horror somehow
the roils of fire that plume up from a distant city
the museum that is ransacked and divided
the neighborhoods plundered of youth
and laughter and flooded with blood.
Still we have to excuse ourselves
somehow. Like a completion of the drama of the dream
when we can't run fast enough down the hall of doors
and we find the open eyes crawling with gnats and flies
and pushed into gaping holes the living
were forced to dig.
*
Where were you
when these graves were open? How far did you run
to stay away from the sargent that was, after all,
your brother and who pushed the poets
into the pits of piss and blood? When
did you tell the story? Did you?
*
They have done studies of the survivors of holocaust
who live long enough to become demented
and who increasingly cannot tell the difference
between the now and the what has been.
This happens in many with the various versions of Alzheimers
but in the camp survivor, the battlefield veteran,
the red cross worker, the loaders of trucks, of ovens,
of trains, of ambulances, survivors of chasms newly opened in the sand,
who have spent so much energy protecting their remembrances
from being remembered... many having used a variety of drugs and alcohol
to seal off the tombs of memory ...the demon dementia
brokers a deal with the past and steals the strength of
compartmentalization from those who have had to employ it most.
We would pick these poor souls off the floor
again and again. many still could not tell us exactly
what they saw... how their gruesome pasts became the present all over.
Baths were the worse, or being naked
or lying down, too much like death
or at least the kinds they witnessed and lived beyond
somehow.
And they would scream sometimes
because they were still there.
by Bob Vance
Ephraim -
I agree that "Investigations preliminary to prosecutions are the only way to salvage this pathetic nation's soul."
But I thought that is exactly what John Conyers and Patrick Leahy are talking about doing - developing the facts in a public forum by using Congressional subpoena power and grants of testimonial immunity, in order that the ordinary federal grand jury process could then take over once the whistleblowers had aired the dirty laundry.
What's written in the final report is of little consequence (although there certainly are areas in which followup legislative reform would be valuable).
What matters is creating a forum so that the facts can come out. Then stand back, and let the Justice Department do its job. That's how you restore the rule of law, and send the message loud and clear that high government policy making officials (and their lawyer enablers) do not stand beyond the reach of the criminal law's long arm.
Bill from Saginaw
Representative government is not the solution. Representative government is the problem.
The alternatives are anarchy, direct democracy, and dictatorship...
I think the corporatists would prefer the latter, but would settle on Anarchy before giving up the keys to the kingdom to the people in a direct democracy...
Speaking of American denial - just caught this headline:
"Stocks up on Bernanke's report that recession will end this year."
As opposed to...
"George Soros said on Friday (2-20-09) the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, adding that there is yet no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis."
Hey - look over there - someone in a designer dress is holding an Oscar...
McEnteer is dead on right, until he gets to the part about Leahy's plea for a "truth commission." As others have said already, such a commission only papers over the crimes, and is in any case intended for third world countries without functioning democracies (OK, on that count we qualify) and without judicial systems that have any real authority.
Leahy's cop-out for such a meaningless gesture is an admission that the US's judiciary and democratic facade no longer have any power over a renegade executive branch. Once we "get it all out in the open" we are perfectly free to forget the whole thing, just so long as we "don't let it happen again." This would be like apprehending the worst serial killer ever, getting him to admit his evil deeds and then letting him go free, proclaiming all's well, we won't let THAT happen again. Well, in fact that's exactly what it is.
If we're not going to prosecute Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld or any of the rest of the junta, why bother us with a pointless truth commission? We already know the truth. It's Leahy's and his spinless colleagues' fault that they still pretend they don't know. Investigations preliminary to prosecutions are the only way to salvage this pathetic nation's soul. But neither Leahy nor Obama want anything to do with that. So we'll remain a rogue state, shunned by all the civilized world, for good reason.
While we're on the subject, liberals and progressives seem to be largely in a state of denial about Republican election theft.
In discussions of Republican skullduggery, this most important topic gets left out almost all of the time. Given the implications for progressives and liberals, this is understandable. If we acknowledge election theft, we acknowledge that America is in a state of civil war. This in turn would require that we regard Republicans--not just as a bunch of fat pedophiles, Nazi wannabees, and incompetent traitors--but as mortal enemies.
Pretty hairy stuff for a bunch of meek lefties.
This is also something to consider the next time you hear a progressive kvetching about the "cowardly Democrats" in Congress. What about the incredible cowardice of being too meek to call out our opponents for cheating? Who's afraid of Republicans now?
That's our sad situation. In a nation with a pulse, Republicans and Democrats would be fighting in the streets right. Don't bother to deny it.
It's pathetic to see you agitating for a Leftie - Rightie civil war. Republican rank and file doesn't vote for election fraud, they vote for small government, low taxes, and no foreign entanglements (whether they get these things is another matter.) The real battle in this country is between the Soviet regime of "economists" and "experts" who have led us to perdition, and the average blue collar Joe. Whether Joe votes Dem or Repub is hardly the issue.
But keep agitating for poor people to kill other poor people, you fucking tool.
I would argue that while Germany lost WWII... Fascism/corporatism won...
Prior to WWII, Union Steel Co (Prescott Bush) Merriman, Brown Bros, and others funded the rise of the brown shirts, and were selling war machine parts to Hitler until congress passed the "trading w/ the Enemy" act, yet they continued by other means...
At the end of WWII, Merriman, Walker, Bush, and other Bonesmen created the CIA out of the OSS to further US hegemony...
and started Operation Gladio (stay-behind spooks to conduct false flag terrorist operations to blame it on the Communists)...
& Project Paperclip ( bringing tens of thousands of Nazi scientists and military strategists to the USA, and given aliases & jobs...
The Nazi scientists continued their human and animal experiments for the DOD, NIH, and the CIA for mind control like MKUltra...
The CIA clandestine operations continued to rig elections, murder, and terrorize dozens of other nations over the last 60 years...
The continued privatization and outsourcing of our military, security, and intelligence operations is as fascist/corporatist as it gets...
Now we have a monstrous MIC, & Military Contractors like CACI & Dyncorp running guns, drugs, & sex slaves w our tax dollars...
We have privatiized the profits and socialized the costs of doing business, and externalizing the destruction of cultures & nature...
Now we have military bases and CIA Black sites around the world to torture innocent folks into confessions,
while CIA assets like OBL and the Al Queida are trained and funded by the CIA to do their false flag operations in Afghanistan (zbig), Bosnia (operation cyclone), Sudan, 911, Iraq, and now in Pakistan...
Halliburton gets a no-bid contract to build concentration camps all over the USA, complete with guard towers and crematoria...
Most Good Americans know nothing of this, despite the ICE roundups of illegal seasonal migrant workers en mass into cattle trucks,
And entire families are separated for days and weeks, denied medicine while being processed at these camps before loading them on planes for a trip back to Mexico...
We are one more false flag attack away from declaration of Martial Law and mass scale round up of dissidents for the FEMA camps.
This is the Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein) and The End of America (Naomi Wolf)...
Aren't we all in denial in our participation in all sorts of crimes? How many can say that they do not know that our society is destroying the ecology of the planet, yet we mainly all keep on supporting the same institutions that are responsible? We say that we like our America pretty much as is and so on... Then later we will say we didn't know? You bet!
No! We are not all in denial! Hundreds of people I have walked the streets with during demonstration after demonstration are not in denial - ignored, yes - reviled for their perspectives, yes - but definitely not in denial.
Yes, many of us are in the opposite of denial.
We have heavy hearts due to the horror and crime we have witnessed. Some of us directly and personally, some of us through self-education (books, documentaries, visits to other countries) about a wide variety of intractable social issues.
We feel a keen sense of responsibility to do something.
An obsession, even.
We have trouble sleeping, at times we feel numb, then we work our asses off organizing, protesting, negotiating, with much of that work taking place so far behind the scenes that it is nearly invisible.
Oh, no, I agree, we are NOT in denial!!
The goddamned USer slugs are in denial about USAtrocities for the last two hundred years!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There will always be those who will use and abuse, based upon their own greed, fear, sickness, etc. and whom we will later blame for what happened...yet in truth, while the miscreant few are responsible for their actions, the millions of people who let them get away with it - the masses - are, in the final analysis, more to blame, if blame is being passed out. How many members of Congress are there? How many Presidents or Vice Presidents? How many bankers, etc, etc? And yet how many citizens are there who are so willing to act like total (choose your expletive)s as to let them get away with their misdeeds in the first place? Aye, how many citizens 'prefer' to let the few leaders do whatever they do rather than stop them and thus interrupt our own 'lifestyles' or potentially put our personal security in harm's way? The American people are to blame and the American people must now accept the responsibility and bear the burden of these calamities, along with the greater harm that has now come due to our pathetic silent complicity. The majority of all Americans should be deeply, deeply ashamed. More importantly, the majority of Americans must change themselves deep inside.
What's that great line by V in "V For Vendetta", in one of his broadcast speeches?
"Who's to blame? Well, there are certainly those who are more responsible than others . . . and they will be held accountable. But again, truth be told . . . if you're looking for the guilty . . . you need only look into a mirror."
"To sweep the crimes and excesses of the Bush-Cheney years under the rug would destroy the American soul." As James McEnteer's essay illustrates, good films can be a useful springboard for speaking about the unspeakable.
Last night, Sundance channel broadcast "FTA", a documentary consisting entirely of clips from a "political vaudeville" show featuring Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Holly Near and others that was taken on a road tour of the Pacific rim in 1971 in support of the antiwar resistance taking place inside the US military. Although not nearly as fine or polished a piece of movie making as "The Reader", the "FTA" nostalgia trip back to the Vietnam peace movement era drives a similar point home.
Didn't this country in fact sweep the crimes and excesses of the LBJ-Nixon years under the rug? Other than Lt. William Calley, name me one person held legally, morally, or politically accountable for the myriad atrocities that were committed.
About 3 million southeast Asians died as a result of America's military and paramilitary CIA actions, along with over 50,000 US troops. Vietnam, too, was based upon official government lies, hysterically packaged for public consumption - lies that many people instantly spoke out against. In the aftermath of America's hypocritical withdrawal from Vietnam, the Church Committee eventually functioned much like a Truth Commission. And yes, a few domestic half-measure reforms were undertaken to rein back the military/industrial/national security complex, so that hopefully such bloody folly would never, ever happen again.
Yet many of the chief apologists for that whole shameful, turbulent genocidal decade of the 60's and early 70's - Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Powell, George W himself - crawled out and clawed their way into power within the federal executive branch, positioning themselves perfectly to capitalize upon the aftermath of 9/11. Thus, southern Asia was re-invaded and re-occupied, in a second massive American war of aggression utilizing both soldiers and spies, launched on the Bush/Cheney watch amidst a great flourish of revisionist history about the utility of American hi tech military might.
If the ultimate, lofty goal really is to restore America's lost soul, then let us not be content with half measures this second time around.
Bill from Saginaw
Bill from Saginaw February 24th, 2009 12:03 pm writes: "If the ultimate, lofty goal really is to restore America's lost soul, then let us not be content with half measures this second time around."
When I worked for the government we went through a reorganization. Someone commented that you had to be organized before you could get reorganized.
I would say the same thing about 'restoring America's lost soul.' We never had a soul to begin with (starting with Columbus's conquest of the Americas).
I say, let us start instilling a soul based on ethics, human rights for all, and plain common decency.
Oh yeah, there is no money in that. The reason we have millionaire and billionaires is because of the indecency and injustice.
Where is the Department of Peace that Kucinich mentioned? Where are Nader's programs being considered by Obama?
I would agree with your idea that the USA has no soul to find in the first place; that ALL of the skeletons must be emptied out of the closet and, like the Germans and Japanese, sow the skeletons into school ciricculum so they are constantly revisited. But the overpowering myth of American Exceptionalism keeps good people in the USA from doing just that as the soulless majority is indoctrinated into worshiping that myth.
The fundamental problem with the Nuremburg Trials is that no US, UK, ANZAC, or other allied soldier/politico was tried for the very massive crimes comitted by the allies, and contemporary allied leaders knew very well they should also be in the dock if the meaning of the affair was to be justice. The UNSC veto for the 5 permanent members is a byproduct of that mindset and prevents justice from being done while failing to prevent gross injustice--like the US invasion of Iraq.
In 1881, a very brave woman--Helen Hunt Jackson--published A Century of Dishonor, and failure to solve the problems she described led to the publication of A Second Century of Dishonor. And there's Chomsky's Year 501: The Conquest Continues, and Solomon's Killing Our Own. And there are many more such works that portray the dramatic lack of soul the USA displays--often wantonly. Most of it was all premeditated.
The American people love the television show "24." The show implicitly absolves us of war crimes committed in our name because "we gotta get the terrorists, and fast!" Too many Americans believe torture really produces information vital to combatting the terrorists. Sorry to say, but we are a culture of Good Germans, doing what we have to do, however immoral, because it is somehow a matter of life or death for us. Sure, a truth commission would be a whitewash commission, but a lot of us citizens who are uneasy with our consciences would welcome one. The citizenry would feel absolved themselves.
Are you kidding? The Oscar for Denial goes to Slumdog Millionaire. All the street rats in Mumbai now believe they're going to win a million on television, because of a crap movie written and directed by a British Raj. This movie represents the worst of upper-class condescending and post-colonial racism, and a complete refusal to face reality as it is.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of
patriots and tyrants. ....Thomas Jefferson
Commission?..Hell no!...Prosecution! The evidence is irrefutable. Wake up America...come to your senses!
Horsefeathers.
Well Thomas, do you know where a Horse's Feathers are located on the horse?
The term "horse feathers" is a 19th century equivalent of the 20th's "Bullshit"---
The American People are a criminal nation from the begining, and the "denial" they have collectively participated in goes all the way back to the beginning.
And people "just like you" are the "deniers'-----the enablers---and willing participants. (Indeed, you seem to be proud of it and express it often in your postings).
As each day passes, it appears that there is no doubt that the USA's only reason for existence will have been to serve as a "horrible, negative example for the future"-----
They NEED folks just like you to accomplish that mission-----so---------
"Keep up the good work"-----
"No sweat GI, pay Friday".
Answer to the question: Horse Feathers are the 'slang' term given to the 'vestigial hair' growing from the 'fetlock' of the Horse's (or all Equine) feet. They drag in the mud, and fecal matter, and have little known function, other than to debunk the creationists of America who deny evolution----and are waiting for a God they cannot prove exists---to rescue them from the mess they have made of their planet, their lives, and their children's, children's, children's lives and the lives of countless innocents the world over from their beginning. For my people, as well as the African slaves they brought with them from Europe-- and even at this very moment.
Just one example: the "collateral damage" in Iraq alone has exceeded the total deaths from 9/11--several times over--innocent life there must be cheaper than innocent life in America. How would Thomas Moore justify that duplicity?
Good luck America, you really need it.
i haven't seen the reader, but have heard similar criticisms.
the idea that there is some "original justice" that the u.s. needs to return to in order to restore its lost moral integrity is nonsense. nazism was a concentration of attitudes of the West toward "the lesser breeds." jews in the u.s. and england were terrified of speaking about the horrors of nazism b/c they feared the camps might be set up here. sympathy for nazism among western elites ran very high for at least half of hitler's tenure. until hitler's expansion threatened their own imperial standings, they mostly either admired or ignored hitler's policies.
the connection b/n hitlerism and current u.s. actions is of course totally valid. but, after the genocide of the natives, after slavery, jim crow, etc., after vietnam (hell, after the mexican-american war, civil war, spanish-american war, etc., etc., etc.), do we really have to delude ourselves that we've fallen from some lofty height?
Livy had it right: Romulus always kills Remus to found the state/empire.
(and right, jethro t.: truth commissions? is this author joking?)
It's impossible to disconnect the rise of the Nazis with the rise of the CP in Germany. Even the use of a red backdrop for the black swastika was a way of invoking revolutionary sentiment while emptying it of content, replacing it instead with a mixture of nostalgia for German empires of the past & adding curious new poisons of programmatic eugenics & mystical racism. While the communists could only present one thing -- a threat to the entire capitalist order -- the Nazis both positioned themselves (falsely) as anticapitalist, but also offered a range of enthusiasms, not all of which in themselves were toxic, but in combination, fatal.
"Nazism was a concentration of attitudes of the West toward "the lesser breeds.""
Thank you! You're the first person other than myself who I've heard express that idea...that Nazism and Hitler were merely the logical extension of Western attitudes at the time. Read speeches, history, etc. of the early 20th century prior to WW2 and you'll see just how anti-semitic people were, at all levels of government and in the churches.
And since then you can see how hard various groups have worked to paint Hitler/Nazism as some kind of anomaly...to cover up the fact that he/it was really no different from themselves and their ideologies.
Actually, the Kaiser wrote that his motivation for war with Serbia and Russia was in order to solve the issue of who was to be master in Europe once and for all time. In other words, WW1 was a race war from the POV--and pen--of its main architect: "The last battle between Teutons and Slavs" with "the Anglo-Saxons on the side of the Slavs and Gauls." "No further conference can smooth this over, for it is not a question of high politics, but one of *race* ... for what is at issue is whether the Germanic race is to be or not to be in Europe (emphasis in original. Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War, pps 32-33, 1967 translation, paperback edition). And there's quite a bit more to show that "Hitlerian thought" was certainly foreshadowed by Kaiser Wilhelm II and his advisors and reflected in elite German opinon at the time (about 1906 onward). However, nowhere is there mention of the Jews--None. The Slavs are the race to be defeated primarilly, but their Gallic associates are in for it second. The British will eventually see the light and come around to our thinking (paraphrased from the above source). So when Hindenberg annoints Hitler as Chancellor, he is providing a new Wilhelm with the keys knowing he is going to follow his old boss's program.
We did not take responsibility for Korea, Vietnam or the first oil war.
Why should the American people be disturbed from their sleep?
Do we really need a truth commission, Senator Leahy?
We---at least a large and growing number of us---already know the truth: that Congress wrote Bush the Lesser a blank check to wage two wars of aggression, in violation of the Nuremberg Principles and our own Constitution, and continues to this day to fund them.
This is the Original Sin, and a war crime beyond any reasonable doubt.
Torture, renditions, warrantless wiretapping and the rest of the dismal litany all follow from your cowardly votes in favor of the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF).
Were you all so afraid of what some flaming Nazi gasbag on the radio might say, that you could ignore the expressed wishes of millions of your constituents as well as more than 60 years of precedent?
And now you're complicit, with the blood of more than a million on your hands. Do you think a truth commission will absolve you?
Of COURSE we need a "Truth Commission"!
How else can the Ruling Class demonstrate its illusory commitment to the Rule of Law?
A Truth Commission is an act-- in every sense of the word-- of Public Safety; it's the equivalent of welding a manhole cover over the Truth and Memory Sewer!
· Yr Obd't Servant
Ayuh. These 'commissions' serve an important function by allowing the ruling elite to slam the door on any further discussion or investigation into [Kennedy ... 9/11 ... fill in blank].
If convened, it should more properly be called a "Truth Omission".
The main problem with a truth commission, is it is made up of the untruthful ones! Orwellian doublespeak at its best!
odoco
Zinn and Chomsky have often spoken about the rigged 'truth commissions' of the past. They are meant to do nothing more than quell the disquietude of the masses, put them back into their moral and intellectual slumber, then resume the same policies - time and time again - that will need to be 'investigated' time and time again.
Nope folks - truth commissions are bullshit. Prosecutions at the highest levels are the only legal device that can now salvage what is left of this country. that is why grassroots organizing is now more important than ever. Educate the people, bring them together, run progressive candidates in all primaries - at least then the masses would be subject to an alternative vision for this class-ridden, class-dominated monster we now call a society.
I agree entirely.
Truth Commission = whitewash
Bush Administration = neoNazi war criminals
NUREMBERG II 2009
Arrest, prosecute, convict, execute, cremate, & scatter the ashes.
Uncle Ho - refreshed to find your spirit still exists. How different would Vietnam's history have been if the US had not intervened in 1954, when the CIA itself predicted that Ho Chi Minh would have won a nation-wide election by at least 80% - AND THAT WAS OUR PREDICTION!!!! So much for democracy, huh?