ET TU BARACK?

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 cliché 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.

If the use of torture is not enough to criminally condemn the Bush dictatorship, it can be coupled with the injustice of detention without charge or trial. Just a few weeks ago, Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who once served as chief-of-staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, revealed that many of the detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay are innocent, which means they have suffered years of abuse and deprivation for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I had hoped, with Obama’s election, that the “audacity of hope” would bring with it a “plethora of principle,” that it would not be politics as usual, that the United States would apologize for the excesses of the Bush dictatorship, compensate those victimized by it, and criminally punish those responsible for advocating and/or engaging in acts of torture, rendition or illegal detention. But during his recent tour of Europe, Obama seemed content to assert that the world should look forward, not backward.

In a complex world there are few absolutes, and clearly politicians need to be able to adjust their principles to meet certain situations. But this doesn’t mean they should lose sight of them. Principles serve as a shoreline, letting leaders know exactly where they are. As long as they can see the shore, they are not too far from safety. But if they lose sight of that shoreline, they, and the nations they lead, become aimlessly adrift, going wherever the currents of fear and hysteria take them.

Obama should realize that “looking forward, not backward” is what made Hitler and Stalin believe they could get away with murder. “Looking forward, not backward” also causes people to forget or ignore the injustices and excesses of the past. And, as the saying goes, “those who forget the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them.”

Once upon a time there were two evil men. Both gained power through fraudulent elections. Both saw religious and ethnic groups as threats to national security. Both became dictators.

They presided over corrupt and lawless regimes. They blatantly lied to their citizens. They detained people without charge or trial. They used torture to allegedly gain “information.” They surrounded themselves with likeminded tyrants. They illegally invaded sovereign nations to enrich their cronies and plunder natural resources.

For these crimes Saddam Hussein was executed. For these crimes George W. Bush gives speeches in Canada and has a library named after him.

The truth is that all torturers convince themselves there is a “reason” why they must engage in torture. Some even use word games to rationalize their deeds. Bush, for example, so narrowly defined the word “torture” that one of his nominees for Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, refused to call “waterboarding”—a device used to simulate drowning—a torture technique.

Dante Alighieri wrote that the lowest circles of hell are reserved for those who try to justify their sins. If that be so, then all the machinations in the world won’t insulate those who engaged in torture, who advocated it, or who looked the other way when they had the power to stop it, prevent it,
or punish those who practiced it.

In a past Pravda.Ru article, The Devil Protects His Own (Parts I and II), I named ten principled people who, in their quest for a better world, died violent and premature deaths. I also named ten unprincipled people whose lust for power caused them to exploit, abuse, torture and even murder their fellow human beings. None of these ten were punished, and
all lived to a ripe old age.

I concluded this article by saying: “The mortal world is the devil’s domain, and the devil will always protect his own. Eternity, however, belongs to God. And it is within this realm of Eternity that true justice can be found.”

Logic would seem to dictate that the universe seeks a balance—that those who do good will eventually be rewarded, and that those who do evil will eventually be punished.

But, as revelations about the crimes of the Bush dictatorship continue to emerge, I must confess that I have begun to doubt my words.

I do not doubt that the devil protects his own. There is too much evidence that supports this grim reality. But as long as evil is the primary motivating force in the world, I do wonder if true justice can ever be found, or even if it exists.

And as long as the George W. Bushes, Dick Cheneys, Karl Roves, Donald Rumsfelds, Alberto Gonzaleses, Condoleezza Rices, John Yoos, Rush Limbaughs, Antonin Scalias and others of their ilk walk freely upon the earth, these doubts will continue to linger.

David R. Hoffman, Legal Editor of Pravda.Ru