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06/11/2004: Andy Greeley....
has some interesting comments in the Chicago Sun-Times today: Is U.S. like Germany of the '30s?
Can this model be useful to understand how contemporary America is engaged in a criminally unjust war that has turned much of the world against it, a war in which torture and murder have become routine? Has the combination of the World Trade Center attack and a president who believes his instructions come from God unleashed the dark side of the American heritage?
What is this dark side? I would suggest that it is the mix of Calvinist religious righteousness and ''my-country-right-or-wrong'' patriotism that dominated our treatment of blacks and American Indians for most of the country's history. It revealed itself in the American history of imperialism in Mexico and after the Spanish-American War in the Philippines. The ''manifest destiny'' of America was to do whatever it wanted to do, because it was strong and virtuous and chosen by God.
Today many Americans celebrate a ''strong'' leader who, like Woodrow Wilson, never wavers, never apologizes, never admits a mistake, never changes his mind, a leader with a firm ''Christian'' faith in his own righteousness. These Americans are delighted that he ignores the rest of the world and punishes the World Trade Center terrorism in Iraq. Mr. Bush is our kind of guy.
He is not another Hitler. Yet there is a certain parallelism. They have in common a demagogic appeal to the worst side of a country's heritage in a crisis. Bush is doubtless sincere in his vision of what is best for America. So too was Hitler. The crew around the president -- Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Karl Rove, the ''neo-cons'' like Paul Wolfowitz -- are not as crazy perhaps as Himmler and Goering and Goebbels. Yet like them, they are practitioners of the Big Lie -- weapons of mass destruction, Iraq democracy, only a few ''bad apples.''
Hitler's war was quantitatively different from the Iraq war, but qualitatively both were foolish, self-destructive and criminally unjust. This is a time of great peril in American history because a phony patriotism and an America-worshipping religion threaten the authentic American genius of tolerance and respect for other people.
Len on 06.11.04 @ 10:16 PM CST
Replies: 2 comments
on Saturday, June 12th, 2004 at 2:25 PM CST, mike hollihan said
Len, I would point out that Bush *has* apologised to Iraqis for the abuses of Abu Ghraib, twice now. It just wasn't at the high-profile news conference, so it didn't get reported all that much.
on Saturday, June 12th, 2004 at 4:32 PM CST, Len Cleavelin said
I know of one report that he'd apologized to King Abdullah of Jordan in a private meeting with him; I'm not aware of a second apology but I won't insist that's wrong, obviously if it wasn't reported that much I may not have heard it....
But the fact that such apologies *weren't* at the high profile news conferences is showing how the administration is bungling the propaganda war (remember my post on the Citizen Smash article you referred me to a week or two ago). I'll give him credit if he really did apologize, but it ain't doing us any good if it isn't getting reported everywhere, and I don't think the SCLM could possibly suppress such a story if the administration gets it out correctly. And they can do it if they *really* want to; they've demonstrated that in the past.
Damn, what's the point of occupying the bulliest pulpit in the world if you don't blast your message out with as many decibels at your disposal? :-)