Italian judges don't often order the arrest of CIA officers. Yet that is precisely what has happened in the aftermath of the kidnapping of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, an Egyptian national. Thirteen CIA officers "escorted" him back to Egypt, there to be interrogated in the rather unsubtle fashion characteristic of the Egyptian justice system.
Is the rest of the world finally telling the Bush administration that they will no longer tolerate the "rendition" system of torture-by-proxy?
Note to Jon Stewart (if he should happen to glance this way): Love the show, but the use of the term "Nazi" is perfectly justifiable when describing such practices.
3 comments:
I thought Jon Stewart's complaint about the term "Nazi" was right on the button.
You may be right about the instance you cite. But in the main, we have trivialized the word and the Holocaust by referring to anyone in our time as being Nazilike. I have done it in my Ratbang blog, and I took Jon Stewart's admonition seriously, I won't do it anymore.
We probably should stop it altogether rather than pointing to certain instances (as you did) as being worthy of being likened to Nazism.
Fascism (lower case "f") is a more general term for the same thing. It originated as a term for the authority of Roman magistrates. And the people in Mussolini's totalitarian party were called Fascisti (upper case "f"). But Nazi refers to a specific party in Germany who were responsible for the Holocaust, and I am in total agreement with Jon Stewart. The name should be reserved for the people and practices of that specific party because their reign was so horrific and unimaginably sadistic and cruel.
Ratbang Diary (http://ratbangdiary.blogspot.com)
It would have been better had world leaders expected the sort of cruelty Hitler eventually, and predictably, committed. Let us hope the modern Chamberlains do not wind up with similar results. If and when Bush nukes Tehran in aggression and conquest, we will look back and regret our reluctance to admit what we might have seen in Bush.
I've been wielding the term "NeoConNazis" myself for roughly the past two years to describe this US Fascist Regime. The shoe cetainly fits, from repression of individual liberties to aggressive wars -- crimes against humanity, according to the Nuremberg Tribunals -- to extra-judicial detentions to outright torture. Before there *was* a Holocaust, there were Nazis. One must separate cause and effect there. And the victims of that tragedy are not served by merely *stifling* genuine similarities observed today. To the contrary, resistance to seeing the Nazi-like qualities of the US "leadership" actually facilitates a return to that type of atrocity. Kudos to Barry Schwartz for the "appeasemnt" analogy, which truly fits this Bush Reich. And Joseph, you're batting 1000, as always. Keep up the splendid work!
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