Entrance gate, Dachau concentration camp. ©1979 UrbisMedia
It would be a stretch to conflate the American torture antics at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo with the horrors of Auschwitz and the other Nazi extermination camps that are being remembered on the 60 th anniversary of their liberation. But not a big stretch. There’s something disingenuous about members of the Bush administration going on about the Nazi genocide when scarcely below the surface of their pronouncements their war on terror is really viewed as a war between the predominant religions of East and West.
With Iraqis going to the polls this week—in some parts of Iraq with greater fairness and ease than in Ohio—the contrast or comparisons between the liberation of Auschwitz and the “liberation” of Iraq might seem facile to some. But in WWII American soldiers defeated andactual aggressor, not one that was picked for a putative easy “mission accomplished” rather than being the source of the perpetrators of 9-11. And American soldiers liberated the prisoners of Auschwitz from their torturers, not participants in a growing scandalous record of American abuse of Iraqi detainees.
On a BBC broadcast this week young Germans were lamenting that their generation as well will likely have to live their lives with the stain of Nazism and its genocide. Americans will not likely carry the same shame, indeed if even many Americans feel shame for how the Bush administration has squandered the world’s erstwhile esteem and admiration for our country by terrorizing its own people. The likelihood of the administration’s apologist for torture tactics being confirmed as Attorney General should be sufficient evidence of our capacity for denial.
Perhaps stripping, tormenting, humiliating and battering detainees and holding others for great lengths of time without charges or counsel might seem justified to many Americans traumatized (and kept traumatized) by 9-11. But it is a step down a slippery slope to the horrors of wars based on those twin towers of human divisiveness: race and religion.
Americans love to don the self-deceiving cloak of American exceptionalism when it comes to the nasty chapters of human history. But the edge of that historical slope may not be as remote as some American are willing to believe. After WWII, while we were trying Nazis at Nuremburg for genocide we were letting the perpetrators of Japanese atrocities against the Chinese go free in return for the information they had obtained in their Unit 714 torture facilities. In one of history’s ironic twists, that information on chemical and biological warfare formed the basis for our own weapons of mass destruction.
Apparently the Iraqi elections have gone of relatively well, at least in the north and south. But, if elections in that great pillar of democracy, America, are any indications, voting is one thing, getting your vote counted is quite another. The results could be anything from a Shiite state, to civil war, to the installation of a American puppet who will turn on the spigot of petroleum. We probably won’t really know that the Iraqis got their freedom until they tell their occupiers to pack up their troops in their helicopters and Humvees and “get the hell out of our country!”
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 1.30.2005)