America’s guilty silence

[babylonsister]

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2105.shtml

America’s guilty silence
By James Brooks
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Jun 20, 2007, 01:06



Crimes against humanity don’t happen unless it is possible to commit them with impunity. Government corruption and gross imbalances of power will bring them closer to the edge of possibility. But the anticipation of impunity must be personal and social as well as legal and political. The perpetrators need to make sense of their crimes within a positive sense of themselves.

A shared sense of impunity that can pay for mass murder and torture chambers without self-reproach requires denial, distortion, and ignorance of swaths of reality. In totalitarian societies, the state handles these chores to try to keep the people unaware of its most criminal activities.

But in societies that enjoy relative freedom of the press, citizens encounter many unsavory facts that are impossible to deny directly. When “democracies” engage in war crimes, this knowledge pressures citizens to internalize a collective sense of impunity, which must be robust enough to neutralize incriminating truth as it appears.

Most informed US citizens are aware that their government runs a global network of secret detention centers where torture is routinely employed. They also know what this activity looks like, having seen photos of their troops’ bestial behavior at Abu Ghraib. If they followed the story, they know that this behavior was also reported at several other prisons and detention centers in Iraq, under policy directives from the very top of the Pentagon.

They know about the human rights horrors of Guantanamo and Bagram Air Force base, that the CIA runs a global ring dedicated to kidnappings, “extraordinary rendition,” and torture, that hundreds of our detainees have disappeared, and so on.

It is possible to know these things by reading big city newspapers. An objective observer could glean the general shape of these facts from network television news. The American public has been told. And the public has turned the page.


more...

[Vilis Veritas]

1. What is really freaky about the whole thing...

is that America and the world is not really silent. There is some play in MSM, there is some public outcry, there are countries and people in the world that KNOW what is going on, yet, the entire world seems to have installed a big IGNORE button and pushed it HARD.

Did I somehow step into an episode of the Twilight Zone?

Peace.

[AndyTiedye]

2. Balderdash!

Most informed US citizens are aware that their government runs a global network of secret detention centers where torture is routinely employed.

Key word here is informed. Most people aren't.

It is possible to know these things by reading big city newspapers.

And most people who live in big cities are pretty unhappy with the regime at this point.
People who get their news from Repiglican newspaper chains and/or FauxNews still think the war is going great and Bush** is a saint.

"Big-city newspapers" also includes the Washington Post, which is still shilling for the regime as much as ever.

An objective observer could glean the general shape of these facts from network television news.

If one could remain objective while watching it, possibly, but network "news" isn't exactly designed to encourage objectivity on the part of its viewers.

The American public has been told. And the public has turned the page.

We were also told that these people attacked us -- that they were involved in 9/11. All lies, of course.