Bush Isn't Stalin. Why Would He Want to Be?
Today's Washington Post Outlook section has an interesting piece by Vladimir Bukovsky entitled "Torture's Long Shadow" that begins:
One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. "But, Comrade Stalin," stammered Beria, "five suspects have already confessed to stealing it." This joke, whispered among those who trusted each other when I was a kid in Moscow in the 1950s, is perhaps the best contribution I can make to the current argument in Washington about legislation banning torture and inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists captured abroad.
We aren't Stalin's Soviet Russia, and I can't think of many people, especially the Republicans, who would suggest that is something to which we want to aspire. So let's step back a moment and look at where our government is looking for its inspiration. The founding fathers - Washington, Jefferson, Madison, or repressive and fatally flawed police states?
One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. "But, Comrade Stalin," stammered Beria, "five suspects have already confessed to stealing it." This joke, whispered among those who trusted each other when I was a kid in Moscow in the 1950s, is perhaps the best contribution I can make to the current argument in Washington about legislation banning torture and inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists captured abroad.
We aren't Stalin's Soviet Russia, and I can't think of many people, especially the Republicans, who would suggest that is something to which we want to aspire. So let's step back a moment and look at where our government is looking for its inspiration. The founding fathers - Washington, Jefferson, Madison, or repressive and fatally flawed police states?
posted by Anonymous at 10:10 AM
2 Comments:
you've put your finger on a strange paradox in the republican ranks. they profess to be against anything the "Communists" stand for(and some people don't know that the Communists per se are no more), yet consistently exhibit a lot of the same tendencies that their enemies do: they love censorship, they practice reverse intolerance(comms against religion, repubconservs against non-believers), they love using force against other nations, they don't like non-members of the ruling group. they also have no self-awareness, no ability to see themselves from without so they can't perceive these things in themselves.
as far as the current administration and its practices are concerned, i think they are chipping away at the foundations of this democracy, the one thing that separates us from places like russia and mexico: the rule of law. when you play fast and loose with the truth, when you break key civil liberties laws even knowing that you can get permission for surveillance through legal and agreed-upon means, when you show no regard for international laws and standards--that is, when you launch pre-emptive war on flimsy grounds--you can't claim to be anything but lawless. as a veteran of trying to get things done in Certain Other Places, i don't even want to think about a lawless america.
so what are we going to do about these people? this congress will never impeach them. can we neutralize them somehow?
I'm kinda hoping they just gradually die off in the grand scheme of the circle of life and are replaced by rational humans.
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