President Obama told troops serving in Afghanistan and Iraq that they are like “Santa in fatigues.” Coming one week after the Senate torture report, and in the middle of a ferocious drone war that kills scores more civilians than the targets of assassination, it’s doubtful that they are viewed as benignly overseas.
Santa in Fatigues
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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I completely concur with Mr Rall’s essay on torture and all his cartoons against it. Sadly, a very large minority, or possibly a majority, of Americans have very different ideas. After the outgoing majority of the current Senate voted to release a heavily redacted report giving some of the gruesome details and ineffectiveness of the EIT and calling them torture, a large minority voted to keep the report secret, and said that the EIT was not torture, but was legal, absolutely necessary, and saved many lives.
It should be obvious that torture is ALWAYS wrong and ineffective. And yet a very large number of Americans believe otherwise.
In old Westerns, there were bad guys and good guys. When a bad guy shot someone, it was murder. When a good guy shot a bad guy, it was justice. When the Japanese applied the Chinese Water Torture to the American military, that was a capital crime, and the Japanese who subjected Americans to it were hanged. When the US does the exact same thing, it’s the Chinese Water Interrogation, not torture, a legal and essential technique to keep Americans safe, and the Americans who do it are ‘brave?’ ‘heroes’ to whom we must be grateful.
And so I end up at Plato’s Republic. Socrates won the debate with his prescriptive definition of justice. But Thrasymachus went with the strictly descriptive definition: the strongest will define justice as whatever they do, and this is the definition we all have to live with. Which segues to the Anti-American Manifesto: The Anti-American Manifesto argues that we should all work to overthrow the current US leadership, but, after buying and reading the book, I still don’t see any way to do that.
Only someone stronger than the US can stop the US leadership from imposing its twisted version of ‘justice’ on the world, and there isn’t anyone stronger than the US.
The problem is that our gov’t and its erected offishals refuse to be responsible for their actions and keep feeding us crap and whooey – and the mainstream media follows this path too! The American people are so fatigued and apathetic towards one revelation after another that they simply don’t respond much (if they ever really did much?) Eyes glazed from the violence and excrement that are constantly thrown in their face, they’ve simply become numb to it, covering their eyes, ears and mouths with a veneer of awesomeness.
Not «Santa in fatigues», Ted, as Mr Obama wrongly claimed, but fatigued Santas, which may explain why they get their rocks off by torturing captives and urinating or defecating on the bodies of deceased enemies. After all, living in a hostile environment is not easy, in particular when the option of simply leaving seems to be the only thing that’s not «on the table»….
Henri
PS : «michaelwme», who obviously is so well-educated that he can lecture us on Sokrates and Thrasymachos, seems to be either unaware that the so-called «Chinese Water Torture» has nothing to do with China, but rather appearss to have originated in Europe – or at least was first documented here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_water_torture) – or finds this fact irrelevant. But then again, for some the temptation to couple the word «China» with the word «torture» is irresistible – it’s not OUR fault ; we were corrupted by the OTHER….