Sam Smith "SIGNS ON THE ROAD TO ABU GHRAIB"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

In the late 1920s, the French essayist Julien Benda wrote The Treason of
the Intellectuals. Benda already saw a new class of intelligentsia that
favored many of the same principles popular among today's leaders. Among
them:

--"The extolling of courage at the expense of other virtues. Placing the
warrior, the aggressor, the 'killer litigator,' and the reckless higher
in society than the wise, the just, and the sensible."

--"The extolling of harshness and the scorn for human love -- pity,
charity, benevolence"

--"A cult of success . . the teaching which says that when a will is
successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas the will
which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt."

But behind such enormous shifts in our common philosophy, more modest
but important changes were taking place, things such as the misbegotten
war on drugs which in many ways was the domestication of warfare,
turning our guns from foreign enemies towards our own inner cities and
more fatal to young black males than assignment to Vietnam had been to
their parents. From the assault on constitutional rights, to the
mistreatment of prisoners and increasing brutality, the war on drugs set
the pattern with which the whole country would become familiar following
September 11. The difference was that now the country's elite could not
avoid what was happening. Liberals, shocked to learn of Abu Ghraib, had
said not a mumbling word as their beloved Bill Clinton oversaw a
doubling of the nation's prison population with all its attendant
cruelties, many of which were precise precedents for what happened in Iraq.

full: http://prorev.com/abu.htm

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