I had an uncle who was a POW in Japan in WWII, and he was treated horribly. Turns out that the Japanese guards believed that Americans tortured Japanese prisoners, and so thought they were justified. Of course, then we didn’t torture prisoners. The Japanese were being told this so that they’d fight to the death and not surrender, I believe.

On the flip side, once I spoke with a young woman who told me her grandfather had been a POW in WWII. Oh, that must have been hard for him, I said. Not at all, she replied. He had been in the Italian army, and Americans took him prisoner. He thought it was the luckiest break he ever got. He liked the Americans so much, he immigrated to the U.S. after the War.

That’s the country we used to be.

Do you think Bushies will EVER connect that statement to what THEY THEMSELVES are doing? The guy quoted above obviously didn’t (in fact, he thought he was making exactly the opposite point!).

For any Bushies who happen to be reading: In WWII, when we found that our soldiers were being mistreated as prisoners, we felt justified in treating the enemy in kind. Now, it is known to all that WE mistreat (understatement) our enemy prisoners…

Do you think they will get it now? I fear they won’t…

you will see PHOTOS of WHO and WHERE Bin Laden and his NETWORKS ARE….

PLEASE FORWARD THIS INFORMATION TO THE FBI
gavriild@gmail.com

His stated inference is that the great brown menace we’re fighting is uncivilized. Their customs are indeed different from ours (& amongst themselves they vary greatly as well) but the reason they’re fighting us is that, you know, WE INVADED THEIR COUNTRY.

Bin Laden had nothing to do with Iraq, of course. Iraqis were not planning, much less carrying out, terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden is a religious extremist, not the leader of a country. And at the time he & his followers carried out their attacks, they were a very small group, right? Largely marginalized around the world & numbering about a thousand fanatics, give or take? I seem to recall that from a BBC documentary that never got any air time over here. How many Americans realize how much we’ve sacrificed for about a thousand fanatics (whom we have not been able to crush anyway)? Hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced, countries ruined, our moral standing pissed away … for a thousand religious wackos.

And yet Bush is still president, despite an unprecedented level of incompetence coupled with a resounding lack of compliance with the rule of law (either national or international). This has nothing to do with being a Republican or a Democrat, you know? It’s about doing what’s right for a country that has gone drastically, horribly wrong. And the failure of the elected officials in our government to deal with this assault on democracy is something that I fear we shall never recover from.

There’s one other thing I’d like to mention. After WWII, many low level German soldiers who took part in rounding up Jews said basically that they had no trouble doing so because after years of being fed Goebbels’ poisonous propaganda they simply didn’t really think of Jews as people.

Now the United States has people in the military who are so misguided (or brainwashed) that they feel that they’re fighting against the forces of Satan in Iraq, conflating the Devil with a religion not their own, and dehumanizing every Iraqi in the process. And people like Captain Ed here on the “homefront” dismiss them as uncivilized, as somehow lesser beings than us, comfortable in the conceit that he’s a patriot and not something much cruder and uglier.

I am sickened by what’s happened to my country.