Friendly Advice

See, the problem started when these neocons began looking for weasel holes in international law to “protect Americans” from whimsical war crime prosecution. Or something like that. They said, “See we’re Good Americans and not fucking Nazis, so don’t worry.” Now, it turns out they waterboard, use sleep-deprivation, and rendition to send human beings to places where you just know they’ll pull out fingernails, shock their genitals, and do some unspeakable things to them. The running gag in this ongoing American tragedy is that they tell the American people that they’re living in some sorta Kiefer Sutherland Perils of Pauline fantasy where the one little bit of crucial information they coax out of the poor sumbitch will save everybody from some kinda gawdawful annihilation – and a drunken screenwriter’s melodramatic twist is sold as foreign policy.

That, of course, is just another one of their countless lies. Tyrants torture people, especially political enemies, to coerce false confessions out of them so they can have a show trial. Any information you get out of someone you’ve tortured, who’ll say anything to stop the pain, is useless except for propaganda purposes. Same with the gossip you collect by spying on people.

So, Blackwater is kinda like the SS was for Hitler - a highly specialized Übermilitia designed solely to strike mortal fear into an occupied country’s inhabitants. I know Republicans go into fake swoons and get all spastically verklempt when compared to Stalin and the like, but if they don’t like it maybe they should change their behavior instead of attacking the messengers. Nobody compares Mother Theresa, for example, to Josef Stalin because she just didn’t act in any comparable way.

So, common sense suggests, if you don’t want to be compared to Nazis, just quit acting like Nazis. Stop torturing people and stop invading countries on false pretenses in order to steal their natural resources. When the analogy no longer works, people will quit using it.