SYNDICATED COLUMN: We Have Met the Nazis, And They Are Us
CIA Atrocities Revealed to a National Shrug
Nazis. Americans are Nazis. We are Nazis.
Godwin's Law be damned—it's impossible to read the newly-released CIA report on the torture of Muslim prisoners without thinking of the Third Reich.
Sadism exists in every culture. A century ago, for example, Western adventurers who visited Tibet reported that the authorities in Lhasa, that supposed capital of pacifism, publicly gouged out criminals' eyes and yanked out their tongues. But Nazi atrocities were stylistically distinct from, say, the Turkish genocide of the Armenians or the Rwandan massacres of the early 1990s. German war crimes were characterized by methodical precision, the application of "rational" technology to increase efficiency, the veneer of legality and the perversion of medical science.
Nazi crimes were also marked by public indifference, which amounted to tacit support. Here and now, only 25 percent of Americans told the latest Pew Research poll that they believe torture is always wrong.
"The CIA's secret interrogation program operated under strict rules, and the rules were dictated from Washington with the painstaking, eye-glazing detail beloved by any bureaucracy," observed The New York Times. We have much in common with the Germans.
"In July 2002," the declassified report reveals, a CIA officer "reportedly used a 'pressure point' technique: with both of his hands on the detainee's neck, [he] manipulated his fingers to restrict the detainee's carotid artery." Another agent "watched his eyes to the point that the detainee would nod and start to pass out; then…shook the detainee to wake him. This process was repeated for a total of three applications on the detainee."
The CIA's rinse-lather-repeat approach to torture is reminiscent of Dr. Sigmund Rascher's experiments at Dachau and a parallel project conducted by the Japanese Imperial Army's infamous Unit 731 in occupied Manchuria in 1942-43. Rascher, who was tried for war crimes after World War II, froze or lashed detainees nearly to death, then revived them over and over. German and Japanese doctors developed detailed protocols governing the severity of exposure to which inmates could be subjected—protocols seized by U.S. occupation forces and turned over to the OSS, predecessor of the CIA.
So it was in the CIA's prisons at Guantánamo, Bagram, Diego Garcia, eastern Europe, Thailand and elsewhere.
(Or, to be more accurate, so it is. Bush publicly banned torture in 2006, but we know it was still going on as of 2007. Obama supposedly banned it again earlier this year, but then his CIA director Leon Panetta told Congress the agency reserves the right to keep doing it. Until the entire secret prison network is dismantled and every single prisoner released, it would be absurd to assume that torture is not continuing.)
Among the verbal treasures in the CIA papers is the "Water Dousing" section of the "Guidelines on Medical and Psychological Support to Detainee Rendition, Interrogation and Detention," which "allow for water to be applied using either a hose connected to tap water, or a bottle or similar container as the water source." Ah, the glorious war on terror. Detainees may be soaked in water as cold as 41 degrees Fahrenheit for as long as 20 minutes—no longer, no colder.
For the record, the CIA's medical expertise is about as reliable as its legal and moral sense. Forty-one degrees is bracingly cold; 41 was the temperature of the Hudson River was when US Airways Flight 1549 crashed into it earlier this year. (Remember the ice floes?) "Generally, a person can survive in 41-degree water for 10, 15 or 20 minutes," Dr. Christopher McStay, an emergency room physician at New York City's Bellevue Hospital told Scientific American magazine.
Like its Gestapo and SS antecedents, the CIA is highly bureaucratic. CIA employees were informed that "Advance Headquarters approval is required to use any physical pressures [against prisoners]." And those permissions came from the very top of the chain of command: the White House, which ordered the Office of Legal Counsel and other legal branches of the federal government to draft "CYA" memoranda. The memos, wrote Joshua L. Dratel in his introduction to "The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib," a compilation of memos authorizing torture of Muslim detainees reflect "a wholly result-oriented system in which policy makers start with an objective and work backward."
Also reminiscent of Nazism is the utter absence of firewalls that has come to characterize the behavior of top government officials. Totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany corrupt the judiciary by using the courts to carry out political policy. Beginning under Bush and now under Obama, judicial independence has been eradicated.
On August 28th The New York Times reported: "In July, Leon E. Panetta, the CIA director, tried to head off the investigation [of the CIA's torture program], administration officials said. He sent the CIA's top lawyer, Stephen W. Preston, to [the Department of] Justice to persuade aides to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to abandon any plans for an inquiry." There's a term for this: Obstruction of Justice. You're not supposed to try to influence the outcome of an investigation. It was count six of the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.
To Holder's credit, he has appointed a special prosecutor. To his discredit, the focus of the investigation is narrow: he will only go after officials who went beyond the Bush Administration's over-the-top torture directives (which allow, as seen above, freezing people to death). He does not plan to go after the worst criminals, who are the Bush Administration lawyers and officials, including Bush and Cheney themselves, who ordered the war crimes—much less those like Obama who are currently covering them up.
He should change his mind. While he's at it, he should throw Leon Panetta in jail.
Holder's brief currently involves just 20 cases, which include detainees who were murdered by the CIA. But even those will be tough to prosecute, reports The New York Times: "Evidence, witnesses and even the bodies of the victims of alleged abuses have not been found in all cases."
Because, you see, the bodies were burned and dumped.
They—the CIA—are Nazis for committing the crimes.
And we are Nazis for not giving a damn. Only a third of Americans told the April 27th CBS News/New York Times poll that there ought to be an investigation of Bush-era war crimes—and they don't care enough to march in the streets, much less break a few windows. So few of my columns on torture have been reprinted by American newspapers or websites that I seriously contemplated not bothering to write this one.
We have met the Nazis, and they are us.
(Ted Rall, President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, is author of the books "To Afghanistan and Back" and "Silk Road to Ruin.")
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
Nazis. Americans are Nazis. We are Nazis.
Godwin's Law be damned—it's impossible to read the newly-released CIA report on the torture of Muslim prisoners without thinking of the Third Reich.
Sadism exists in every culture. A century ago, for example, Western adventurers who visited Tibet reported that the authorities in Lhasa, that supposed capital of pacifism, publicly gouged out criminals' eyes and yanked out their tongues. But Nazi atrocities were stylistically distinct from, say, the Turkish genocide of the Armenians or the Rwandan massacres of the early 1990s. German war crimes were characterized by methodical precision, the application of "rational" technology to increase efficiency, the veneer of legality and the perversion of medical science.
Nazi crimes were also marked by public indifference, which amounted to tacit support. Here and now, only 25 percent of Americans told the latest Pew Research poll that they believe torture is always wrong.
"The CIA's secret interrogation program operated under strict rules, and the rules were dictated from Washington with the painstaking, eye-glazing detail beloved by any bureaucracy," observed The New York Times. We have much in common with the Germans.
"In July 2002," the declassified report reveals, a CIA officer "reportedly used a 'pressure point' technique: with both of his hands on the detainee's neck, [he] manipulated his fingers to restrict the detainee's carotid artery." Another agent "watched his eyes to the point that the detainee would nod and start to pass out; then…shook the detainee to wake him. This process was repeated for a total of three applications on the detainee."
The CIA's rinse-lather-repeat approach to torture is reminiscent of Dr. Sigmund Rascher's experiments at Dachau and a parallel project conducted by the Japanese Imperial Army's infamous Unit 731 in occupied Manchuria in 1942-43. Rascher, who was tried for war crimes after World War II, froze or lashed detainees nearly to death, then revived them over and over. German and Japanese doctors developed detailed protocols governing the severity of exposure to which inmates could be subjected—protocols seized by U.S. occupation forces and turned over to the OSS, predecessor of the CIA.
So it was in the CIA's prisons at Guantánamo, Bagram, Diego Garcia, eastern Europe, Thailand and elsewhere.
(Or, to be more accurate, so it is. Bush publicly banned torture in 2006, but we know it was still going on as of 2007. Obama supposedly banned it again earlier this year, but then his CIA director Leon Panetta told Congress the agency reserves the right to keep doing it. Until the entire secret prison network is dismantled and every single prisoner released, it would be absurd to assume that torture is not continuing.)
Among the verbal treasures in the CIA papers is the "Water Dousing" section of the "Guidelines on Medical and Psychological Support to Detainee Rendition, Interrogation and Detention," which "allow for water to be applied using either a hose connected to tap water, or a bottle or similar container as the water source." Ah, the glorious war on terror. Detainees may be soaked in water as cold as 41 degrees Fahrenheit for as long as 20 minutes—no longer, no colder.
For the record, the CIA's medical expertise is about as reliable as its legal and moral sense. Forty-one degrees is bracingly cold; 41 was the temperature of the Hudson River was when US Airways Flight 1549 crashed into it earlier this year. (Remember the ice floes?) "Generally, a person can survive in 41-degree water for 10, 15 or 20 minutes," Dr. Christopher McStay, an emergency room physician at New York City's Bellevue Hospital told Scientific American magazine.
Like its Gestapo and SS antecedents, the CIA is highly bureaucratic. CIA employees were informed that "Advance Headquarters approval is required to use any physical pressures [against prisoners]." And those permissions came from the very top of the chain of command: the White House, which ordered the Office of Legal Counsel and other legal branches of the federal government to draft "CYA" memoranda. The memos, wrote Joshua L. Dratel in his introduction to "The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib," a compilation of memos authorizing torture of Muslim detainees reflect "a wholly result-oriented system in which policy makers start with an objective and work backward."
Also reminiscent of Nazism is the utter absence of firewalls that has come to characterize the behavior of top government officials. Totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany corrupt the judiciary by using the courts to carry out political policy. Beginning under Bush and now under Obama, judicial independence has been eradicated.
On August 28th The New York Times reported: "In July, Leon E. Panetta, the CIA director, tried to head off the investigation [of the CIA's torture program], administration officials said. He sent the CIA's top lawyer, Stephen W. Preston, to [the Department of] Justice to persuade aides to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to abandon any plans for an inquiry." There's a term for this: Obstruction of Justice. You're not supposed to try to influence the outcome of an investigation. It was count six of the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.
To Holder's credit, he has appointed a special prosecutor. To his discredit, the focus of the investigation is narrow: he will only go after officials who went beyond the Bush Administration's over-the-top torture directives (which allow, as seen above, freezing people to death). He does not plan to go after the worst criminals, who are the Bush Administration lawyers and officials, including Bush and Cheney themselves, who ordered the war crimes—much less those like Obama who are currently covering them up.
He should change his mind. While he's at it, he should throw Leon Panetta in jail.
Holder's brief currently involves just 20 cases, which include detainees who were murdered by the CIA. But even those will be tough to prosecute, reports The New York Times: "Evidence, witnesses and even the bodies of the victims of alleged abuses have not been found in all cases."
Because, you see, the bodies were burned and dumped.
They—the CIA—are Nazis for committing the crimes.
And we are Nazis for not giving a damn. Only a third of Americans told the April 27th CBS News/New York Times poll that there ought to be an investigation of Bush-era war crimes—and they don't care enough to march in the streets, much less break a few windows. So few of my columns on torture have been reprinted by American newspapers or websites that I seriously contemplated not bothering to write this one.
We have met the Nazis, and they are us.
(Ted Rall, President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, is author of the books "To Afghanistan and Back" and "Silk Road to Ruin.")
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
Labels: Torture
posted by Ted Rall at
3:17 PM
49 Comments:
What future do you want?? The one in Star Trek or the one in Starship Troopers??
Amen, brother Ted.
Ted,
See this one made me chuckle again. How many people and nations attempted to kill Hitler? How many people within the Nazi infrastructure attempted to stop the Gestapo and the SD? Most had the conviction to fight against it, people in power, most were murdered. As a lot of recently released transcripts have shown the Nazis weren't so feeble minded.
Why does this make me chuckle? Simply because now if there is any opposition against Obama, then you are automatically a racist. So doing anything against Obama makes you a bona fide racist because he is our first black President. Or does someone have to believe everything you do before they can be 'qualified' to oppose Obama?
What will happen to the American torture machine? Nothing, it'll chug along undisturbed. Americans don't have the spine like the Germans did. Ask the the Werewolves who were massacred.
Will you please stop calling all of us Nazis? I don't know about you, but there's not much I can do about what the fucking CIA does on the other side of the world. I voted against Bush twice. I denounce the current regime often in whatever fora will have me. I appreciate what you do with your bullhorn, but c'mon. Lighten up on your audience every once in awhile.
Oh, also: the CIA torturing Muslims on foreign bases and the Nazis rounding up everybody they didn't like and killing them en masse? Not the same. Related, maybe, but not the same.
Really? I'm a Nazi because I understand that given the way the world works, there is simply NO way to hold Bush and Cheney responsible for the war crimes they authorized?
You want me on your side? You want me to hit the streets for this (instead of for health care, where hitting the streets is way more likely to get me the outcome I want)? Convince me that we can get Bush and Cheney on this, and I will.
But you're gonna have to convince me it can be done with cold, hard, facts-just calling me a Nazi(for wanting to put my efforts in something that stands a chanace of happening)ain't gonna cut it.
AmeriKKKa is no more. That, beyond even the human rights abuses, is the worst crime committed. Note, I will use the term "AmeriKKKa" because there's no swastika in the extended symbols text library, at least I can't find it. Some call people who use the term "AmeriKKKa" stupid, well I would rather use the term "Annexia", but no one would get the ref.
AmeriKKKa was meant to be a country of "Ideals". We were never a utopia, never an ideal society, but we were based around the post-enlightenment, proto-humanist goal of people always striving towards a greater goal and holding to our basic ideals. I really think AmeriKKKa was meant to be "The Great Work of Alchemy" which was to improve mankind and create a society better than Rome had ever been. We certainly are bigger, and more powerful, but far less efficient and dependent on too many false economies. Also we are already collapsing the same way Rome did, the rich elites circling wagons to drink the country's blood dry, and who cares the barbarians at the gates and the radicals within, as long as the next three months are superb. We'd slip once in a while, such as during the outset of industrialization, we'd ignore the truths, such as by allowing slavery for a long time after independance, but we were always about our ideals. Even "Rich Elite" class presidents (and just rich people) would often go out of their way to help people, to help society. Even with institutionalized racism, there were still people who'd help other races gain rights and have dignity.
But, with the onset of this century, the "Forces of Control" have worked to enslave the world, and they have nearly won. The beginning of this nightmare was the "Sinking of the Lusitania" though there were plenty of other contemptible "Bully little Wars" in that time. The Lusitania was a ship that was so packed with explosives (proven!) it was a wonder it didn't blow itself out of the water with it's passengers before the German U-Boat was able to find it with the deliberately leaked route.
All modern wars have been lies, to murder mankind and profit from the chaos and misery. People bray "WWII", but without "WWI" there would have been no WWII. The Kaiser would have held onto a little extra territory and when the cantankerous cook kicked the bucket, his kids and relatives would have embarrassingly and apologetically given back what he stole. And, a certain "Corporal" with an Anti-Semitic disposition (common and fashionable for the times) would have eked out a simple living doing picture postcards and miscellaneous "Bohemian/Starving Artiste" pursuits.
AmeriKKKa, in putting its ideals aside for the war, said to any enemy, past or present; "You are right! Ideals are a creature of convenience at best and likely just a lie to tell slaves that they are free! We are as lousy as you could be if you tried, and we have more power than you, that is all we are."
Frankly, I don't think AmeriKKKa can be saved at this point. I'm probably going to just escape. SeaSteading. Ideally an artificial island I make out of floating concrete in Mexico or India, but I could just buy a decommissioned boat and find a sandbar island in the middle of the pacific. Bring a few friends and retire to avoid the riots and split ups that'll start happening 10 or 20 years from now, at best.
Santiago is right, American complacence is closer to the Russians' attitude during the Soviet reign of terror (especially Uncle Joe's) than the few Germans who dared to resist.
I remember watching the DHS thugs search my 6th month old at the airport. I saw the look in his eyes. He knew it was wrong, and was looking to me to make it stop. I pussied out. I should have said enough. I should have fought back. I should have told them to get their fucking filthy hands off of my child. I didn't. I didn't complain when the DHS assholes fondled my balls 3 times (I did after and almost got arrested) the next time I was flying. I didn't say no when they told me to take off my shoes after I watched some dude with seriously fucked up feet go in front of me. We aren't Nazis. We don't want this shit to happen. Who we are are the Jews in Warsaw that waited until they were starved and dying to fight back. Only, I am not sure we will fight back then. The only people that seem to fighting are the ones that cannot articulate what or who they are fighting (and Santiago, opposing Obama doesn't make you racist. Opposing Obama for no reason that they can articulate and then spouting racist code words is what makes people racist). Its sad. I have to get on a plane tomorrow. I wonder if I will stand up for myself.
As anyone who has read the Toledo Blade piece on the Tiger Force in Vietnam knows, Americans have never really been any better than Nazis.
Nazi has become a brand name. We say that we must learn from history, but we learn the wrong things. We don't learn that intimidation, theft, torture, and murder is wrong. We learn that doing those things under the Nazi battle flag is wrong. How can we be evil like the Nazis? All our window dressing is different.
Naziism wasn't so much an ideology as a failure mode of society. Its what happens when stressed out people come under the spell of true believers who are convinced they have all the answers. The people turn control of their lives over to the sociopathic opportunists form an echo chamber around the often psychotic leaders of the party.
Nazis may claim to hate communists, communists may claim to hate theocrats, etc. but in the end they all drink at the same watering hole. Ms. Rand's Objectivist movement may be the exception that proves the rule. While paying loud lip service to individuality, they were privately as mean spirited and cliquish as any politburo. They believed they were following a prophet with all the answers, so what good was it to think for themselves?
People need to learn that no one has all the answers. Unfortunately, that will never get taught since it would expose the wise men of our society as charlatans with books of fairy tales.
"Americans don't have the spine like the Germans did. Ask the the Werewolves who were massacred."
please study
This article didn't strike me as an exercise in Godwin's Law or some crazed hyperbole. It seemed very sober. But to say that Americans won't even bother to protest is to ignore recent history.
I and eleventy gazillion other people took to the streets of planet Earth to protest the onset of the war in Iraq not so long ago. You can see the end result of the most-protested war in history: It went off exactly as unplanned.
Ask any of the countless millions who protested the Iraq war what they think of the US Government's plainly hypocritical and predictable use of torture and you'll get a plain answer. Ask them if they're going to wave a placard in the street and they'll ask if you've got anything that'll actually work.
Angelo,
Oh great, one line retorts.
Please study what? The Werewolves got away with it for a very short time. Then they were turned in en masse by the population to be shot by the Allied forces.
Would you like me to give you all of the assassination attempts taken on Hitler? Or perhaps you'd like all of the ways he was opposed by someone at nearly every turn. Want an example to keep you busy for the longest time? Read Admiral Wilhelm Canaris' exploits in the Abwehr.
How many Americans have done this? none.
Incitatus,
Exactly my point.
Kurt,
In the eyes of a lot of people it does.
The system we live under is like the moving sidewalk at the airport. There are those, such as Bush, his lawyers, his staff, and those who voted him in who actively walk on the sidewalk. Then there are those who remain still, basically those who fail to use means at their disposal to remove these individuals from power and impose a new system. If you are not actively walking in the other direction, then you are complicit in the deeds of the prevailing system because you refuse to renounce what privilege you enjoy and take on the attendant risk of trying to depose what you believe to be an unjust system.
An earlier commenter was unhappy that Ted called him a Nazi when he had done all he could, vote against Bush twice. When did voting ever become the be-all/end-all of social change? Hell, it isn't even a beginning really. Do you really think that voting for either candidate vetted through a system favoring powerful monied elites will produce much social change? If you abhor violence, certainly there are more active things you could do to resist the system. At some point, violence is the only option. revolutions by definition involve bloodletting.
I suspect the reason why others and myself are nazis as ted put it, is because we are too fond of the privileges we obtain from the very system we oppose. Why would you lay it all on the line if you had a reasonably sane, safe, and comfortable life. Now the Iraqi guy with 14 children, who saw them all killed in front of him one by one by American troops, that guy has nothing to lose. For him, the contract with society has been rescinded. He may have us in his sights now. But for most of us, the kind of personal social devastation that would cause a revolutionary response is not present. We still have hope for the future.
It seems the more one could envision revolutionary change as being real and the less personal risk involve, the easier it would be to convince sympathetic ears to engage in resistance to the system. Until that time, I imagine there won't be many that will be eager to sign up to be first to lose their life and attendant privilege. Does that make a person a Nazi? Fuck yeah it does. Call a spade a spade....
Suresh,
Our system is nothing like the Nazi system. If Obama were to be taken out (to the government bureaucrat perhaps reading this I do not in any way endorse that) nothing would happen. At all. There is no core of people ready to take power who are in the higher positions. Joe Biden will take over and the machine will continue going without a hitch. In fact, things could get worse, as with Lincoln's assassination.
The US is nothing like the Nazi state (I reiterate) Ted himself ought to have been smart enough to know that. But I suspect he is now just playing the liberal pundit part as a anti-thetical Ann Coulter, for example. If Hitler had been taken out the system would have been turned upside down and another force would have swept in.
Our system is much like the Russian system. If you take out the head absolutely nothing happens. The machine continues to work. Thats the point of the US system. Sure we can convict George Bush, so what? The only thing that will happen is things like this will just go underground even further and the flow of information chocked to death.
The US system was built not to take a violent revolution. You may have the best cause in the world, you'll be seen as a crazy nut and the population will not follow you.
It has nothing to do with losing our comforts. People are oblivious to the reality. And the flow of information will prevent them from seeing it or believing it. Welcome to Plato's cavern my friend.
Santiago,
I am not sure who those "many" you refer to are, but I do se a lot of racist assholes at the teabagger events and disrupting the town halls. Of course, I also see a lot of uninsured mexican farm workers that breathe in pesticide all day. I wouldn't say all the people pushing back on Obama are racists, but the one's fueling the fire and getting the nutbags out in mass certainly are (I speak of Rush, Hannity, Beck, Savage, etc). Maybe I am wrong, but having grown up in the heart of KKK land in Indiana, I recognize the KKK code words when they talk, and hear Militia Mike on the bullhorn.
Since we're talking about Nazis, let's not forget that it was 60 years ago this day that they, and their Soviet buddies, invaded and carved the great but unfortunate country of Poland.
Unfortunately too, at the same time as Frau Merkel will acknowledge her country's collective guilt and proffer apologies, Messrs Putin & Medvedev will, predictably, belittle their country's culpability.
Incitatus,
Nazism is fiercely anti-communism, and because of that, as Hitler strived to gain power, he got a lot of clandistine financial help from wealthy inividuals, not only Germans, but believe it or not, English, French and Americans.
When Hitler came to power, the German Army was nothing but a small police force allowed only rifles and very limited number of machine guns by the Versai Treaty.
If that was the case, can you tell me please, why did the west allow Hitler to re-arm and build this power war machine, while the Soviet Union was screaming and pleading with the west to stop him and Poland refused any cooperation with the Soviet Union It was very very easy to stop the German re-armament. Very very easy indeed.!!?
Kurt,
You have not seen "alot of racist assholes" at the tea bag protests. I haven't seen one racist sign.
Here's a novel idea for you Statists. When you disagree with someone why don't you try debating their ideas. The fact that you can only reduce yourself to name calling shows the lack of intellectual depth.
Dude, if you can't find a racist sign at the tea bag protests, you simply arent looking.
I suggest taking your partisan blinders off and looking again.
Anon@9/2/09 4:10 PM,
You should read up a little on Soviet history right before and right after the signing of the Ribbentropp-Molotov pact to get a glimpse of what Soviet leadership, and particularly Stalin, thought about Hitler's rising.
Of course Nazis were virulently anti-Bolshevik (and vice-versa). Those were the two competing totalitarian ideologies in a decade where liberal democracy (and the free market) seemed doomed to extinction.
santiago,
I apologize. Last time I saw werwolf spelled incorrectly on this blog it was neocon trolls making some stupid comparison to the war on terror.
"Unfortunately too, at the same time as Frau Merkel will acknowledge her country's collective guilt and proffer apologies, Messrs Putin & Medvedev will, predictably, belittle their country's culpability."
It should make sense that Germans are a little more sorry than Russians. Last I checked it was the Russians (and a small army of nuns) that physically emptied the German death camps in Poland.
Merkel needs to stop cavorting with bankers, but she is spot on when speaking about regulating them. It is going to be fun later this month to watch her and Sarkozy try to convince the Americans that banks should not be able to blackmail governments.
Spelling aside, the word "Werwolf" should be capitalized for two reasons: In this English usage, it's a proper noun, and in German all nouns are capitalized.
(Sorry to bother you with the grammar patrol.)
Aside from watching the news (where I have not seen one racist sign) I just googled "tea party protesters racist signs" and didn't see one. Huffington post has "10 most offensive protest signs" and not one is racist.
So far the only sign I've seen that is slightly offensive, is the Obama/Joker sign, and that was created by a Kucinich supporter.
And so far the only violence has been by SEIU thugs and today, an ObamaCare supporter bit off someone's finger.
Democrat=Hypocrite
Spelling aside, the word "Werwolf" should be capitalized for two reasons: In this English usage, it's a proper noun, and in German all nouns are capitalized.
(Sorry to bother you with the grammar patrol.)
What a DB.
Thanks Grouchy. What do I do with a word like strudel?
Angelo ha detto:
It is going to be fun later this month to watch her and Sarkozy try to convince the Americans that banks should not be able to blackmail governments.
It would be even more fun if they convinced themselves that banks shouldn't be bailed out, and then try to convince the Americans of that.
What do I do with a word like strudel?
Iß mal ein Stück!
Anon 431
You're either lying through your teeth or don't know how to use Google properly (here's a hint- don't bother with the quotes)
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/politicalwhore/files/2009/07/obama-witchdoctor-muck.jpg&imgrefurl=http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/politicalwhore/2009/07/23/st-petersburg-anti-tax-activist-david-mckalip-sends-out-barack-obama-as-witch-doctor-e-mail-photo/&usg=__lajeAYkWlAl2EpL_PBFKNlLPjM0=&h=622&w=420&sz=112&hl=en&start=12&tbnid=0c9WRxZwWOPIGM:&tbnh=136&tbnw=92&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522tea%2Bparty%2522%2Bsign%2Bracist%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG
Just 1 of about 100 racist signs found through a simple 30 second Google search.
Tea party supporter=Liar or incompetent.
Do you forget who these people are that we "tortured"? They were the ones cutting American's heads off on video. Cry me a river. Socialist!!!!
Do you forget who these people are that we "tortured"? They were the ones cutting American's heads off on video. Cry me a river. Socialist!!!!
This one makes me laugh.
"These people" are human beings. Just because some vicious ones did something egregious on video is NO reason to tar every one of "these people" with the same brush! Imagine, if somebody else tarred you with the kind of hate filled characterizations reserved for abortion doctor killers just because you happen to belong to the same party!!
Answer to incitatus post of 9/2 4:10
Instead of answering my points, you just advise me to read more history.
It is not a matter of reading more but a it is a matter of who writes what you read and what biases s/he has.
My point was that the West shares in the responsiblity of starting WWII, by allowing Germany to re-arm when it was almost effortless to stop it.
I think the reasoning was that Nazism is fiercely anticommunism that first, it will attack and destroy the Soviet Union but it will be so weakened and depleted after that war and then at that time the West will move against Germany.
Things didn't work exactly according to that plan and the rest is history!!
Studies have placed the total worth of oil and gas reserves in the Central Asian republics at between $3 and $6 trillion.
About the reason for US war with Afghanistan
The illegal invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq were planned long before Bush was ever elected.
The US invaded their counties and tortured their people.
I read that report and I was appalled by it. How sick and sadistic the CIA are.
Like any other country those who perpetrated the crimes should be punished. To bad three hundred million Americans don't pick up the phone and start telling their elected representative to do it.
After all they do work for you????
You pay their salaries.
Bush,Cheny and the rest of the crew are as guilty as sin and no better then Hitler was. Over a million people died in Iraq and for what bloody oil.
How many young men and women have to die before Americans say enough all ready.
Stupid bloody pipelines, gas and oil. That's what American soldiers are dieing for.
What do I do with a word like strudel?
Good question. I think you could get away with either usage.
Anon Limbaughite:
I went to a teabagger event just see what you assholes are up to in Santa Cruz.... You know, hippie Santa Cruz... I counted 14 signs with the word nigger on them in reference to the President of the United States. One of your kind called me a traitor, literally screamed in my face, when I said that I thought the "President seems a little incurious and that worries me," when Bush was President. I have seen racism all my life. Some of the worst racism I have seen is from the Republicans hear in Santa Cruz County (theirs tends to be directed at brown people more so than black people, but I suspect that is a product of demographics). You really have to be willfully obtuse to believe that their are no racists at the teabagging events. And that joker sign was no more created by a Kucinich supporter than by President Obama himself. You gotta be kidding. Here is a clue, turn of the Rush, pick up a couple of newspapers..... maybe a couple of English language papers from other parts of world. Then get back to me.
what, no respect for Walt Kelly? That's unfortunate.
sure let's investigate the specifics, but (to your point) a complete witch hunt will be very unpopular, and Obama has quickly used up (watered down?) his political capital
Hey Kurt:
And that joker sign was no more created by a Kucinich supporter than by President Obama himself. You gotta be kidding.
"I abstained from voting in November," he wrote in an e-mail. "Living in Illinois, my vote means close to nothing as there was no chance Obama would not win the state." If he had to choose a politician to support, Alkhateeb said, it would be Ohio Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/08/obama-joker-artist.html
Your apology is accepted.
Some of the worst racism I have seen is from the Republicans hear in Santa Cruz County
That's amazing Kurt. So someone will yell, let's say, "hey Jap, get back to the internment camp!" and then announce they are Republican? What an amazing place you live in. Someone does something racist, then they announce their party affiliation.
BTW which party was it that put the browns in internment camps hmmmmmm? Gotcha ;)
which party was it that put the browns in internment camps hmmmmmm?
The democrats with full consent of the repugs.
Would you describe this act as progressive or conservative?
Anon@9/4/09 1:49 PM,
If your reasoning is that the West is to blame for WWII because it didn't strike Germany first, I can't see how that absolves the Soviet Union from having started the actual war, in cooperation with the Nazis.
I gather by the tone evident in a lot of these posts, including the main post by the blog author, that you all seem to think you're pretty hard cases.
Smart. Tough. Been through the wringer and came out clean and dry on the other side.
You think you're hard? You have no fucking clue about hard.
I used to think I was hard. In my heyday I could bench twice and squat three times my weight. I was an All-Conference center and linebacker, did the decathlon twice at Penn Relays, played crease attack for a Division I school and later played loosehead prop for same.
I've been through medical school. Seen some really terrible things happen to people. Watched people exhale their last, rattling breath.
Yup, I was hard like nails. Oh, sure, I'd never fought in a war or done Underwater Demolition Training or anything like that, but as far as a squiddy civvie went I was a true human diamond, forged by the heat and pressure of living a fairly extreme life.
What a fucking fool I was.
I just recently found out what hard really is.
Eva Mozes Kor was 11 when she was deported to Auschwitz in 1945. Due to the "luck" of having a twin sister, she was not sent directly to the gas chamber but instead was kept alive for medical experiments by Josef Mengele.
They would tie her up and extract her blood, then subject her to extreme temperatures to see how her blood-depleted body would react under duress.
They then began to give her injections, which eventually caused her to become so ill that Mengele himself was called in to look at her fever chart.
"Poor child," he said mockingly. "So young. What a shame she only has two weeks to live."
She fought through the pain, fever, chills and the specter of looming death with with a single-mindedness of purpose which is simply mind-boggling, driven not to die because she knew that if she did die her twin sister would be immediately killed and carved up by Mengele for his ongoing studies of the comparative anatomy and physiology of twins who died at the same time.
She ultimately survived the fever and lived long enough to be liberated by Soviet troops along with her sister.
Think about that. This 11-year-old girl faced down the Angel Of Death and won.
That's hard.
You are not hard.
You wouldn't even last a day at an NFL training camp, let alone Auschwitz.
You all also seem to think you know everything there is to know about Nazism.
You clearly don't know a fucking thing about Nazism.
Mengele is Nazism.
Auschwitz is Nazism.
We are not Nazis.
Yet.
Incitatus,
There was no need for the West to strike first or second if it, in the first place had prevented Germany from re-arming, which was very easy and almost effortless.
As I mentioned in a previous post, when Hitler assumed power and started the re-armament, the German Army was nothing but a small police force allowed only rifles and small numbers of machine guns as the Versai treaty stipulated. The Germans were not allowed to have tanks, planes or ships.
Do you speed read or what or are insisting in seeing what you are looking for??!!
comsympinko said:
"We are not Nazis.
Yet."
Berlin, 1927
"Berlin, 1927."
You bet.
Also Washington, 2009.
The threat is very real.
The reality is that there's a loooooooooong way to go.
We need to stop it in its tracks.
The problem is, the rightards are already abusing the Nazi meme, and there is currently no outlet for abusing them back.
If a gibbering moron like Glenn Beck can get 2 million viewers, all bets are off.
If only there were some way to break up the media conglomerates that make this kind of misinformed douchebaggery the currency of political debate (Cough...Fairness Doctrine...cough...Sherman Anti-Trust Act...cough)...
This is one of the most ridiculous things I've read as of late. Why are people so hot to trot about applying the label of "Nazi". It's like they lay in wait just hoping they get a chance to use what's become the catch all for lebeling people they don't like. It's this kind og hyperbole that achieves nothing in the way of a viable solution to a problem. The CIA has been accused of using interogation techniques that the international community considers torture. The investigation is not complete, so I feel that it's a but foolish to jump to conclusions like this article does little to accompish anything save getting people riled up and pushing people further and further away from rational discussion. I hardly believe that "waterboarding" someone while being interogated is akin to killing tens of thousands of people in a couple days by lining them up in front of a mass grave and shooting them in cold blood. Nor is it akin to loading miillions of people onto cattle cars and shipping them off to industrialized extermination camps that operated with the efficiency of an auto industry assembly line. The use of comparisons to the Nazis is nothing more than an ever emotional reaction, much like the Ann Coulters and Michael Savages are famous for. There's no difference.
"If only there were some way to break up the media conglomerates that make this kind of misinformed douchebaggery the currency of political debate "
I had hoped the rise of the Internet would do that. Instead it seems to have selectively amplified the misinformed douchebaggery. Unintended consequences and all that.
Folks here might want to be aware, in the midst of the angst, that a day before Mr. Obama was given (for he won NOTHING of that porize imvho) the Nobel Prize, he was formally brought to criminal book before the Madrid High Court of Alcalde Barroso? Along with two Bushes and a Clinton?
Also a Blair, a Brown, a Thatcher and one other I don't remember. Puppet-lapdog "Prime Minister" lackey-accomplices from Perfidious Albion, to match their Infandous American Couterparts-in-crime.
Fifteen tries and fourteen failures. But then THIS BRILLIANT SUCCESS at LAST.
Verify! Google "Brussells Tribunal" plus the names above (Barosso included, plus possibly the word 'Madrid' or the phrase "Madrid Court") - you'll find the full report thereabouts, doubtless. Or do a site-search on http://www.informationclearinghouse.info, where I first got the GREAT News a few days back. :)
The formal charges on the indictment are war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity vis-a-vis the Iraq and (I think) Afghanistan incursions-of-choice. Universal Jurisdiction in SApain was abolished the very day AFTER Judge Barosso took the case up. Not unlike why the Palestinbian Authority Prexy tried to delay the Goldstone Report, that - the Emperor's Henchmen can move an entire Legislature, from time to time.
But not a Judge - not this time, anyhow. Anything "Haaa-aa-appens AAA-aa-acciDENTally(alibi-lie-alibi)" to that Good Man, the Additional Criminal Event just tacks onto the indictment and (in case of any maner of untimely judicial demise) automaticaly moves to the International Criminal Court at the Hague for adjudication.
Sauce for Miz Goosie and sauce for Mister Gander, samesame. (Yum.)
This has been a Public Service Announcement from the Spiritual Heart of the Global Peace Industry and the Global Funny Hat Medicine Society. I'm Walking Turtle, your Funny-Hatted Correspondent-at-Large.
Reject All Terror, LIVE the ESSENCE of John 8:32 and have a truly GREAT day under the Law! :)
Also, DO carry on propagating the Terror of the Very Best Example at all times. It riles them to believe that we perceive the web they weave; our DO(ING the BEST against their foul prevarications with that Most Powerful Weapon sure does knock 'em back at every burst of PhotoKinetic Moral Energy. KEEP ON THINKING FREE.
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