Glenn Greenwald’s article about Leon Panetta’s open admission that the President can order the murder of anyone — even Americans — upon the CIA’s and the president having declared such a person to be a “terrorist,” ends on the most disturbing question: Why do so few people even care? That Republican GOP candidates — except one — and various neocon voices applaud the assertion of such authority is predictable: Those who long for power over others want no limitations placed on their actions. To suggest outmoded “due process” considerations — such as formal charges and a trial — is to deny that the monopoly on the use of violence (which defines the state) might have limits! Meanwhile, those of us who compare modern America with Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia continue to be labeled “paranoid extremists.” It is all the more remarkable that our current president asserts the same kind of “due-process-free” power to kill that once sent percaled Ku Klux Klansmen in search of their enemies!
There is a most powerful book that ought to be read by everyone — particularly those of Tom Brokaw’s “greatest generation” who still like to pretend that they fought in WWII to end tyranny. It is Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free, a post-WWII study of the responses of ordinary Germans to the question “What was it like living under Nazi tyranny?”
I have just finished the writing of another book, to be titled The Wizards of Ozymandias. The book is dedicated to “the memory and the spirit of Sophie and Hans Scholl and the White Rose, who reminded us what it means to be civilized.” The young people who worked, peacefully, within Nazi Germany to resist Nazism were unceremoniously guillotined by government officials who, not unlike their modern American counterparts, acted to kill their version of “terrorists.” It would be pointless for members of this administration, the Republicans who want only to replace Obama with their unrestrained power, or the neocons, to bother reading Mayer’s book. For the rest of us, however, it might provide the antidote that answers Greenwald’s closing question.
11:37 am on January 31, 2012
