Obama’s Double Standard on Evil and Atrocities
Posted on April 25th, 2009
by Jim Bovard |
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At a Holocaust Remembrance Day event at the Capitol on Thursday, President Obama called for “fighting the silence that is evil’s greatest co-conspirator.”
On the same day, Obama decided to oppose creation of a truth commission to vigorously investigate and expose U.S. torture crimes.
This is another of those damn paradoxes of which Washington is full of.
Perhaps Obama believes that any atrocity with less than a million victims is merely a technical error.
Condemning a genocide committed by a foreign government cannot redeem Obama if he effectively pardons U.S. government officials guilty of barbaric practices.
Obama could reverse his opposition to a full disclosure. Or, perhaps more likely, the surge of events and the information already pried out of the government will create enough momentum that far more facts will become public.
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“Less than a million victims” is beside the point. A pliable standard of justice is more to the point. See, the Nazis were the bad guys, so they needed to be punished. America is never the bad guy, so we don’t deserve to be punished no matter what we did. There is, therefore, no need for a “truth commission”, which by its very existence would be an unpardonable insult, suggesting, by its very name, that Americans sometimes lie or cover up the truth. You might think our first “black president” (half-black, actually, with zero experience of slavery in the USA in his ancestry) would have a more balanced view of this sort of thing; maybe he does, and simply lacks the integrity to risk his re-election by saying so in public.
You make some good points, but I think part of the problem is the punditocracy has made it difficult to do so effectively (though I agree they are needed!). Just picture what talk radio will sound like, and what morons like Peter King and Michele Bachmann in Congress will do.
The first step to prosecutions, then, needs to be selling the American public on them, BEFORE the pundits and loudmouths can claim witchhunt.
Jim Bovard and his TAC cheering section. Evidently the only people in America who somehow think that Khalid Sheik Muhammad is somehow the victim in all this.
Jim Bovard and his TAC cheering section. Evidently the only people in America who somehow think that Khalid Sheik Muhammad is somehow the victim in all this.
Justice is about more than just determining which party is more at fault.
It’s about determining which acts default on the promises implied by the existence of the law.
Strapping a man down and pouring water down his throat to make him think he’s drowning is a violation of our common law, and that law is the only thing that sets the West apart from savagery.
Holding this line is a lot more important than preventing a few casualties, because if it is not held, we’ve created a situation where it becomes progressively more and more difficult for anyone, anywhere to live.