OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: Eric Lomax's "The Railway Man" And Today's America

Therein lies one of history's most profound ironies, an irony that is extraordinarily upsetting to decent Americans regardless of what states they live in and regardless of what is thought or (lyingly) said by George Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, their red state savages-allies in Congress, or their red state savages-supporters in the South and elsewhere. The irony is that, while Japan and Germany, with American tutelage, have become peaceful democracies, America has gone in the other direction. It has become the most warlike nation on earth, fighting war after war after war. Japan and Germany learned that down that road of war after war lies ruin, but America has been determining for 45 years now to go down that exact road, and is firmly set on it. Likewise, Japan and Germany used to be the torturers, as so powerfully evidenced in Lomax's book, but now it is America that is the torturer. It was Japan and Germany that claimed that war, torture, mass killing and other evil were necessary for national safety, and now it is America that claims it will achieve national safety through war. Japan and Germany learned that taking on one country after another leads to other countries ultimately ganging up on them, notwithstanding that they too had allies. Now it is the United States (which likewise has at least some -- at least putative -- allies) that is taking on one country after another (Afghanistan, Iraq, perhaps Iran, perhaps Syria, and who knows what others); and now it is the United States that consequently is finding that other countries, learning from the very Munich analogy that George Bush loves to wrongly cite in his own favor, are beginning to gang up against it, as are international non-state terrorist organizations as well, with the national ganger-uppers so far being, most loudly, countries in the one billion person Muslim world, but with several non-Muslim countries likewise being none too happy with us. It is now America that has taken over the mantle of World War II Germany and Japan, as well as the mantle of the post WWII Soviet Union, which collapsed in part because of the bitter enmity of many countries that affected it in many ways, including straining its economy beyond what it could service, and because of its invasion of Afghanistan, the graveyard of great powers for centuries. It is now America that is warlike and that is using torture, like the Japanese of Lomax's book, and that is justifying torture and is engaging in, and causing, mass killing -- with the result being three million dead by one hand or another in Viet Nam and, it is estimated, somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 or more in Iraq.

The irony is just horrid. We have become the World War II Japanese and Germans. We do what they did, and we use similar justifications, albeit we alter them to fit our own circumstances. Meanwhile, the Japanese and the Germans are now the opposite. Oh my.

The savages in our government and their red state allies like to say that their opponents are nothing but cutters and runners, are only 1960s liberals, are treasonous, do not honor the flag, are unpatriotic, and what not. Well, the truth is that the flag they want everyone to automatically worship, and the kind of patriotism that horrible human beings like Bush want everyone to automatically defer to, have become a cover for evil. If opposing that evil makes one a cutter and runner, treasonous, a "mere" 1960s liberal, then I say let's have more such cutting and running, more such "treason," more such 1960s liberalism. If accusations of treason and lack of patriotism are to be thrown around, in my view the traitors are those like Bush and his allies who ignore the ideals that give meaning to America, and instead are making this country into one that imitates the barbarism of our enemies of WW II (and of the Soviet Union before and during the Cold War). Those whom Bush and his allies slander seem to lack the wit or courage to say this, however.

You know, liberals like this writer are not pacifists. What liberals of today are, though, is far more likely to pick their spots, when it comes to fighting wars, than are the reactionary radicals who inhabit the top levels of government today -- are far more likely to be cautious today, to try other methods to the uttermost today before launching into warfare, to try to be wise and exercise good judgment today. Far from liberals being pacifists or virtually pacifists, as the right wing likes to imply, the people and the media of this country seem never to reflect that the toughest wars in this country's history were run at the top civilian level by liberals. The Revolution was run by the Continental Congress, dominated by great liberals of their day. The Civil War was run by Lincoln, a great liberal for his day. The Philippines Insurrection was run by Theodore Roosevelt, a liberal. World Wars I and II were run by Wilson and FDR, both liberals. Korea was initially run by Truman, a liberal (and then by Eisenhower, a moderate, not a reactionary). Viet Nam was run for four years by Johnson, a liberal, before it was run by Nixon. Liberals almost all. Yet, the reactionary, militaristic "thugs in suits" (as I believe Howard Zinn calls them) who run our government today, and the ignorant, often politically spineless savages who are their allies in Congress, the red states and elsewhere, claim that liberals (read Democrats?) cannot run national security and won't fight where necessary, while the liberals themselves (for sure read Democrats) lack the wit to point out that it was persons of liberal stripe, not reactionaries like George Bush and company, who ran most of this country's toughest wars. (Those wars include, let it be said, some as misguided as is Bush II's long war against Iraq, to wit, the Philippines Insurrection and Viet Nam, both of which, it is important to say, were, like Bush's Iraq war after its first few weeks, insurgencies, not conventional wars. Bush learned nothing from these prior terrible experiences, thus demonstrating his brainlessness yet again.)

I conclude with this: It has seemed to me for some time now that the great problems of this country include a widely prevailing lack of imagination or empathy, so that one does not understand or care about what the other guy may be feeling (and that causes approval of torture as well as other major problems). The causative factors of our disasters, you see, are not confined to wide ranging dishonesty, wide incompetence, wide lack of knowledge of history and current events, and unhappy widespread stupidity. They also, as said, include wide lack of imagination. That lack of imagination is brought up short by Lomax's book, which hits you in the face with the human meaning of torture, both when it occurs and in later years, and which causes one to reflect, when reading of the torture, that we now do the exact same things that were done to Lomax, and that in this and other ways we have become like the enemies we once abhorred.*

*This posting represents the personal views of Lawrence R. Velvel. If you wish to respond to this email/blog, please email your response to me at velvel@mslaw.edu. Your response may be posted on the blog if you have no objection; please tell me if you do object.

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