Et Tu Barack? (part I)
David R. Hoffman
Pravda, Russia
April 8, 2009
The late Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is alleged to have said,
"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."
The late Nazi dictator Adolph Hitler, to rally support for the pending
Holocaust, is alleged to have rhetorically asked his followers,
"Who remembers now the extermination of the Armenians?"
While historians continue to debate whether Stalin or Hitler actually
uttered these words, the insights these quotations reveal about
the frailties of humankind are chillingly accurate, whether it’s
the human mind’s capacity to numb itself to tragedy or humanity’s
ubiquitous myopia.
In the not too distant past, most Americans got their news from
their daily newspaper. Such media, however, often had to deal with
spatial limitations, which compelled reporters to compartmentalize
newsworthy events into a few brief paragraphs, usually through the
use of statistics or similar numerical devices.
Unfortunately the cold logic of numbers was incapable of emotionally
conveying the magnitude of some of history’s most horrific events:
Hitler’s Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, the Khmer Rouge’s reign in
Cambodia, the Cultural Revolution in China, or the countless other
atrocities that occurred, and that continue to occur, throughout
the world.
As the cliche goes, "A picture is worth a thousand words," and
soon photographs and television arose to overcome the deficiencies
of the print media. But these new developments had deficiencies of
their own. While a picture or film can possess the capacity to shock,
repulse or outrage a person, the more this person sees that picture or
film the less impact it has. The human mind has an uncanny ability to
numb itself to repetitious stimuli, and while this may be a blessing,
especially to police officers, coroners, doctors or criminal law
attorneys, it can also be a curse.
When one looks at images of civilians killed or wounded in the wars
in Iraq or Afghanistan, of rape victims in the Congo, of refugees in
Darfur, of victims of oppression in Myanmar, or of the starving and
impoverished throughout the world, the outrage should feel the same,
regardless of whether it is the first time, or the thousandth time,
that one has seen these images.
But usually this is not the case; thus the deaths of millions become
a statistic.
This numbing effect is usually accompanied by a myopia that compels
people to look no further ahead, or backward, then is convenient at
the time; hence the world forgot "the extermination of the Armenians."
Sadly, what is convenient to forget often becomes inconvenient
to remember. This was the case when several members of the United
States Congress introduced an "Armenian Genocide Resolution" during
the dictatorship of George W. Bush. To appease his NATO allies,
Bush opposed this resolution.
What inspired my recollection of the Stalin and Hitler quotations
was a recent article by the Miami Herald’s Pulitzer Prize winning
columnist Leonard Pitts that discussed how the "revelations of the
Bush era excesses continue to drip like water upon the stone of public
conscience." Pitts compared the "fear and paranoia" of the Bush era
to the "red scare" that launched the witch-hunts of the McCarthy era,
and opined that America, just as it came to rue McCarthyism, will one
day rue the excesses of George W. Bush and his cabal of war criminals.
As I wrote in previous Pravda.Ru articles (Bush vs. Hitler and Axioms
of the World), history, especially American history, is analogous
to a pendulum that perpetually swings from overreaction to regret,
and back again. Before the McCarthy era witch-hunts there were
the Alien and Espionage Acts, which were used by the United States
government to destroy political organizations and imprison people who
were simply exercising their right to freedom of speech. Before that
came a hysteria generated by a newspaper magnate seeking to increase
profits and circulation, which eventually led to the Spanish-American
war–a lesson not lost on today’s corporate-controlled media that
sought to profit from the war in Iraq.
This hysteria was even present at America’s birth, when its second
president, John Adams, used draconian laws, known as the Alien and
Sedition Acts, to quash dissent and decimate the newly created Bill
of Rights.
If the past is an accurate barometer, then the cycles of history warn
us that all the ruing in the world will not prevent the ascendancy of
another American president as corrupt, as mendacious, as hypocritical,
as criminal, and as sadistic as George W. Bush.
The reason George W. Bush had no compunction about using torture,
rendition and illegal detention in an allegedly democratic nation
is because the right-wing, corporate-controlled media that packaged
him for public consumption are particularly adept at creating and
marketing "people without principles." PIMPS (Propagandists in Media
Positions), like Rush Limbaugh and the pseudo-journalists at the Fox
(Faux) News Network, have elevated this to a science. Their strategy
is simple–mindlessly defend the politicians you support and mindlessly
condemn the politicians you oppose.
Hence, throughout the Bush dictatorship, Limbaugh vilified people for
"not supporting the president." But now that Barack Obama holds this
office, Limbaugh, drug-addled hypocrite that he is, says he hopes
Obama’s economic policies will fail.
Right-wingers have also attempted to justify the Bush dictatorship’s
use of torture, and quest to destroy America’s constitutional form
of government, by claiming that these tactics prevented terrorism.
But diversion is not prevention. What became safety to those on
American soil became terrorism to Iraqi civilians and American troops
serving in that battle-scarred nation.
Bush apologists also claim he is not responsible for the failure to
prevent the September 11th, 2001 attacks, because he had only been
in office a little over seven months when they occurred. The blame,
they claim, falls on the previous president, Bill Clinton, who had
eight years to eliminate Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.
But, if this is the case, why are so many of these apologists now
criticizing Barack Obama’s efforts to repair the economic mess that
the Bush dictatorship, thanks to two fraudulent elections, had eight
years to repair?
Even so called legal "experts" like law professor John Yoo, who
worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the
Bush dictatorship, and Supreme Court "justice" Antonin Scalia have
defended the Bush dictatorship’s use of torture, rendition and illegal
detention. Yoo, as I discussed in my article When Self-Loathing Becomes
Law: Clarence Thomas Story (Part I), even claimed that the illegally
elected Bush had the authority to suspend the Bill of Rights and
imprison American citizens without legal due process or access to
the courts.
But while Yoo had the capacity to suggest policy, Scalia has the
power to create it. An alleged "pro-life Christian," and primary
architect of the Bush dictatorship’s coup of 2000, Scalia may be the
most ethically deprived and morally corrupt Supreme Court "justice"
in American history.
His support of the use of torture, as Leonard Pitts reported, is
based on the escapades of Jack Bauer, a fictional counterterrorism
expert on the television drama "24." In other words, the fundamental
rights and freedoms of every single person in the United States are
now in the hands of a man who believes a television program should
dictate how the constitution is interpreted. Undoubtedly hypocrites
like Antonin Scalia were the type of people Mahatma Gandhi had in mind
when he said, "I like your Christ, but not your Christians. They are
so unlike your Christ."
In his column, Pitts also pointed out that information gathered through
the use of torture is notoriously unreliable, because a person being
tortured will be inclined to say whatever the torturer wants to hear.
In support, he cited the case of Abu Zubaida, who was mistakenly
identified as a high-level al-Qaida operative. During the course of
being tortured, Abu Zubaida provided an abundance of information,
most of which proved to be false. Yet millions of tax dollars,
and thousands of man-hours, were wasted investigating Abu Zubaida’s
tortured induced "leads."
If Scalia, Yoo and other advocates of torture really want to know how
reliable torture is, they need only look at the "results" of former
Chicago police commander Jon Burge.
Burge commanded a unit that allegedly used torture to coerce
confessions from numerous criminal suspects, many of whom were later
discovered to be innocent. Before their exonerations, several of these
wrongfully convicted men spent years in prison, some on death row,
while Burge enjoyed retirement on a government pension.
In reality, torture can actually increase the chances of terrorism by
creating more terrorists. Families of torture victims are certain to
hate the government doing the torturing; therefore they can be more
receptive to the overtures of terrorist groups.