Sometimes Fascists Seem So Polite

Alan writes about last week’s column, “The Normalization of Horror”:

Are you actually suggesting that the current US policy of capturing armed guerilla fighters and holding them as Prisoners of War is the same thing as the Nazi policy of exterminating captured unarmed civilians? I do not possibly think I can explain to you how offensive this is to me, as a Jew, an American and as a former US Army officer.

Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? We’re NOT holding them as POWs. Remember? Bush says the Geneva Conventions don’t apply to Afghan prisoners. In Iraq, he said that they did but undermined that statement by endorsing the notorious “torture memo” written by Alberto Gonzales. The fact that Gonzales is about to become Bush’s attorney general tells you how Bush felt about his work.

The vast majority of Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and INS gulag inmates were not armed when captured. They were sold to the US by Afghan warlords for a fee. Most are simply someone’s political or personal enemy in the Middle East. According to the US government itself, only about 35 out of thousands and thousands of Muslim detainees held any leadership position in a terrorist organization.

US policy toward Afghan and Iraqi civilians is officially the same as the Nazis in their occupied territories: we don’t. In practice, there is a difference: Nazis were engaged in a systematic program of ethnic cleansing. The United States, on the other hand, drops bombs on civilian targets without care or concern for those living there. The end result is the same: lots of innocent people end up dead who would otherwise still be alive had we never come along. How a “Jew, an American and a former Army officer” could endorse the neofascist Bush Administration is a mystery.

Because I support the decision to fight against Islamic Fascism, you are trying to tell me that I am like a German who went ahead enjoyed life while my Government perpetrated genocide. You are trying to equate President Bush to Hitler and therefore the US Military to the SS and the Gestapo and therefore people like me to a German citizen who happily supported Nazi atrocities.

Lay off the Hitchens. There is no such thing as “Islamic Fascism.” There is radical Islam, of course.

I’m not trying to equate anything. George W. Bush equated himself to Hitler when he seized power in an illegal coup d’état and locked up his political enemies into concentration camps (definition: “A camp where civilians, enemy aliens, political prisoners, and sometimes prisoners of war are detained and confined, typically under harsh conditions”). The US military equated itself to the SS when it began breaking into innocent civilians’ homes during the dead of night and carried off fathers while their wives and children screamed. And we all live like good Germans every day of this wretched post-2000 nightmare that looks like America but is nothing of the sort. If anything, we’re worse than the Germans because we know what’s going on, yet choose not to do anything about it. or worse–like Alan–even make excuses for the neofascists in charge.

Well I suggest that it is people like you, who would rather stand back and do nothing that strengthened Hitler and allowed the Third Reich more time to operate. The Nazi’s did not stop what they were doing because they had a sudden change of heart. The Nazis were defeated militarily. They were destroyed, not persuaded to rethink what they were doing. The Nazi’s were destroyed by the American Military and I am grateful, not ashamed for that.

If Alan had read my work since 9/11, he would know that “doing nothing” has never been my prescription. We should have avenged 9/11, brought the perps to justice and taken steps to make America safer. It is George W. Bush and his neofascists who have done nothing…nothing positive, anyway. One thing is certain: if Bush had been president in 1939, he would have joined the Axis. Hitler was his kind of man, and the Nazis were his sort of peeps.

I believe that I owe my freedom and safety to the people who were and are willing to fight against tyranny. The very least I think we, as people who do not have to go to war ourselves could do, is not send enemy fighters back to the battlefield where they can resume killing U.S. Military personnel. If you think sending Taliban fighters back to Afghanistan to kill more Americans is OK, I would suggest that you are trying to destroy, rather than protect the United States.

Don’t forget, Alan: Taliban fighters weren’t in Afghanistan to kill Americans. They LIVE there. We don’t. If US troops want to avoid attacks in Afghanistan from Afghan resistance fighters, they should leave as most Afghans want them to do.