[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]
A question of perpetual fascination for sociologists and political scientists is the transformation of Germany in the 1930’s into a foaming, unstable violent Republic of unchecked militarism. How could industrialized Germany, soaked in modern science with such a glorified history of intellectualism and the arts, turn its people into such killing monsters?
A double shock of wartime loss and the Depression, leading to mass rejection of conventional norms and adoption of a brutally effective authoritarian regime that accomplished goals and fed resentments. Coupled with a dismaying human tendency to not recognize gradual distortion, little steps of creep mounted and mounted on the Germans until they became unrecognizable killing freaks, Mozart and Wagner always on the radio in the long September evenings.
9/11 is not the shock with a necessary history of distortion to transform the United States into a rolling machine of military destruction over continents, but it was immediately exploited to start two wars, neither of which we have yet ended. As a country and a people of course we know the Nazis will not someday win the House, but the history of Germany should always make us acutely aware that shock always has the potential for creep distortion, it’s easily possible to make ourselves unrecognizable from merely 20 years before and be clueless about it.
Legality, morality and gross stupidity aside what always alarms me most about Guantanamo Bay is the ho-hum acceptance of the horrifying, we used not to torture now we do, oh well, we will force-feed innocent men on hunger strike after years in plastic shackled torture and then sue to keep the video hidden, it's simply necessary after 9/11.
Yet somehow we are to keep our minds clear and chins high as a good people of the earth and its politics? Somehow we can be caring for our children and our elderly while being so simultaneously brutal? Heh, human nature and the reality of the world simply do not work that way, if we allow one area of behavior to seriously degrade it will of course inevitably affect other outcomes.
16 years ago Bill Clinton was proudly proclaiming a new American century of peace and prosperity, yet here in 2015 because of continuing Obama militarism and rabidly freak Republican opposition we are at war in at least 3 countries yet unable to recover adequately from a devastating depression, we have endless money for war but none to get our people working again.
That is not normal, it is cruel and sick, holy mother of Jesus the elderly and children beg on the streets of Silicon Valley, something I have never seen in this previous 51 years of American life but the missiles must fly, oh well, that’s just our normal now. When you torture in horrifying ways at Guantanamo it’s a lot easier to accept brutal behavior toward your own people.
Another huge alarming element of creep was ushered in by the President himself last week, we have a new war now that’s not with a country or even a name agreed upon—ISIL or ISIS, whatever—that no one had heard of a year ago.
I’m grateful to Laurence Lewis and Marcy Wheeler for so cogently and rationally explaining the utter legal and political disaster this represents, the dismaying flaccidity of morality and political principle. It’s such a fuckup of monumental proportions I was unable to rationally approach it and I urge anyone to read them both, but for purposes here the element of creep is relevant.
Secretly we have been in a drone war with Pakistan for at least 6 years with a horrific civilian death toll. We are still at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, there are always excuses to stay. Now we have a new war hell without any country or borders, no end in sight.
We can handle it, that’s just the way we live now. What utter claptrap, since the beginning of the century we have been transformed into a fanatically militaristic society now in 4 wars, I can easily see a scenario in the next 5 years where something totally unforeseen threatens the Gulf oil supply in a smashing screaming crisis as a direct result of US wars that really leads to a call-up of American forces.
No drones or Tomahawks for this, every available Marine and Army division is frantically flown and shipped in War #5 that spins totally out control simply because war and violence became a normal way of life for American policy, but this time there’s 25,000 dead and wounded in 2 weeks. Such a long, long way from the proud and peaceful Bill Clinton of only 20 years ago, but it creeped on us.