Peter Lavelle <untimely_thoughts at yahoo.com> wrote:The worst foto to come will be when Americans look at themselves.
Maybe I am just hoping, but I agree with Doug. It is incidences like this “photos to prove we are superior” that become part of a much larger popular consciousness. With so much media control, it has hard for most Americans to put this awful war into perspective; however pictures of us as the “bad guys” may have some longer-term currency.
I remember my father telling me, now deceased and a vet of the Pacific War during WWII, about the interrogation and abuse of Japanese troops. He hated the “japs,” but thought that “we were right and had the hardware to back it up”, torture was not necessary and even “unbecoming of Americans”.
Having studied the holocaust against the Jews for longer than a decade (ending a half decade ago and feel no desire to revisit this subject on this forum), I suggest members of this list to read or re-reader Browning’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.” All that is happening in Iraq can be found in this tome. Modernity’s pathetic realization and the all too inhumane acceptance there of is playing itself out again, this time with Americans holding the bucket.
For those of who remember the Vietnam War, I was a child then, and its impact on America’s doubtful self-identity in the world, be prepared for much worse. People do change their mind, given good reason to do so.
This list is remarkable in many ways. It is the pulse on what is happening. However, sometimes I doubt that this pulse has the slightest sense of the future that is in the making.
The occasional interloper,
Peter
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