The real, mortal danger comes when a civilization's core values are compromised from the inside. When the very things that distinguish it from its enemies are trampled by those who claim to be their defendants. When those who make the decisions at the centre give away moral superiority for the sake of some temporary tactical advantage. When in the fog of war one forgets what he or she ultimately stands for and morphs into something else.
In absolute, atemporal logic, this is the biggest threat for a civilization: to lose or compromise its core principles. From there on, it's only a matter of time before it succumbs to historical erosion.
What emerges from Guantanamo seems to confirm the worst fears.
Read Andrew Sullivan's text after the jump. And his other today's pieces that are linked from there. Read carefully. And reflect.
Sadly, the mindset that made it possible seems to be back, and its champions ride the wave again. We'll talk about that soon.
I would just say now that America increasingly hysterically has begun to hate the hope that it voted for little more than a year ago.
I ultimately don't much care about Obama, he's just a guy. And yes, he maybe screwed up a thing or two. But this is not about him, it's about us.
God save us.
Pasting from Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish:
"Camp No"
This is the isolated part of Gitmo where paddy wagons came and went, whence screams could be heard during "aggressive questioning", and whence three corpses are believed to have emerged after the kind of treatment once reserved for totalitarian states but now indelibly part of the American way.
No, this is not a satellite of a secret Iran torture chamber; it is not a Soviet camp; it is not an isolated black site in North Korea. It is in Gitmo. And it is where America's founding principles came to die.
The corpses were delivered to their families with their necks cut out, to make it impossible to tell whether they were strangled to death in a session engineered by Cheney and Rumsfeld or whether they hanged themselves simultaneously as the cover-up insisted.
No comments:
Post a Comment