On more than one occassion I have expressed my outrage at the “progressive”/”liberal” mantra that the US is “a nation of laws” and the associated demand to call Bush & Co to account for their war crimes. According to this narrative, Bush & Co are to blame for the sorry state we are in: using the fear that 9/11 induced in the helpless minds of the American people, they turned us into a lawless nation – Guantanomo! Renditions! Eavesdroppings! NSA! CIA! Obama is an asshole/wimp/disappointment because he doesn’t prosecute Bush & Cheney and has not returned the “the law” into its central holy place in the American pantheon.
I don’t buy into this narrative at all. Bush & Co is America. They are an unadorned manifestation of the inherent character and values the US was founded on. They did not do anything not done before, neither in degree nor kind. Human rights were never very popular in the US. Perhaps the only change wrought by 9/11, was that it removed the shame of saying openly what most Americans already believed. The citizens of the United States, for the most part, were willing to whole heartedly support Bush & Co’s trampling on human rights, its naked aggression and greedy conquests. At best, 9/11 allowed Bush & Co to act more shamelessly and openly than their predecessors, but essentially they did nothing that hadn’t been done before.
The idea of “the law” is a beautiful thing. It symbolizes the belief that the relations between people (and countries) should be governed by fair and objective criteria, not by the arbitrary cruelty and greed of rulers besotted by power. Unfortunately this idea has little or no connection to the reality of the United States of America. The United States is a country founded on arbitrary cruelty and greed. From the very beginning, settlers built their stake in this land through the genocide of its native inhabitants, then built up the country through the enslavement of millions. Over the years, the US expanded its borders by war against its neighbors and then beyond its borders. The lawless invasion of Iraq (and Afghanistan) to promote corporate interests is the norm. A “nation of laws?” I think not. A nation of unbridled greed and lawless conquest is more apt a description. “Manifest Destiny” is just one of many pretty phrases used over the years to cover up the true, ugly motivations behind US wars. “Spreading democracy” is just a more modern version.
Putting aside its lawless adventures of imperial conquest, the way the US treats its own inhabitents makes a mockery of law and justice. I’ve already mentioned genocide and slavery. To this day, even if 9/11 had never happened, torture is the norm in US prisons (see here as well). As I’ve said in those articles, it galls me that so many US “progressives” shed tears over the prisoners in Guantanomo, without losing five seconds of sleep over the US prisoners tortured every day five minutes from their homes. When right-wing critics of these “progressives” noted that the prisoners in Guantanomo are treated better than prisoners here at home, they were right. That doesn’t justify the crimes of Guantanomo. Rather, it justly mocks the crocodile tears of those people who can heartlessly ignore the crimes much closer to home.
The motivation for this rant is an article I just read in the New Yorker about the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham in Texas. More than the fact that an innocent man was put to death by the state, what truly broke my heart in this story was this sentance: “After his death, his parents were allowed to touch his face for the first time in more than a decade.” Even if Willingham was the monster that the state of Texas claimed he was, what kind of society can be so heartless, so cruel, so devoid of any human compassion, that they won’t let a parent hug their child for over a decade, let alone right before he dies? Sodom and Gomorrah have nothing on the good old USA.
Tags: Human Rights