Bush's "Multi-Racial" Cabinet Supports Torture/Brutality! How Could They?

[KoKo]

What's shocking about this latest in today's NYT's Expose of the torture and killing of two Afghani's is that we have an African-American Secretary of State who replaced another African-American who served at the same time when this torture was going on. We have a Hispanic/American who was Bush's Legal authority on how to treat prisoners in detention, who know serves as his Attorney General and we have other cabinet members whose ancestors probably came to America to escape some perscecution in whatever their homelands were, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest.

But,the worst to me is that this brutal torture could be condoned by the very folks in this Aministration who remember lychings and racial persecution that took place in their lifetimes.

What have we become that our memories are so short. How could this very multi-cultural administration ever participate and order this kind of horror. How?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html?hp&ex=1116648000&en=6cca0512a38427c3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[aeolian]

1. Brutality is a human trait, not specific to any race, creed, or culture.

[KoKo]

4. Yes, but these are people who remember the struggles who probably

had family who were subjected to brutality. There's a whole history of struggle in America against this very type of behavior. These are not just ordinary citizens these are the leaders of our government!

How could they not remember? How can their own families even look at them?

[aeolian]

5. I can't speak for them, but I imagine that their own delusions of grandeur

are what's guiding them now. Even if they do remember the wrongs of the past, they probably see what they're doing now as somehow totally different, and therefore excusable. In their own eyes, how could they be wrong?

...If they even care about the morality at all...

[TahitiNut]

11. It's easy to comprehend.

Some might draw parallels with "generational child abuse." Some might observe that, for many, "success" is achieved by becoming the abuser rather than the abused. This is what authoritarian systems teach. With "rank" comes the privilege of being a tyrant. We "pay our dues" by taking abuse - only to "earn" the privilege of being an abuser. This is VERY common "logic." (See John Bolton.)

Furthermore, remember that there were Jewish capos in the concentration camps. Oppressed minorities have ALWAYS had some who joined the oppressors. More important, the "logic" that people who share demographics with oppressed people should always and especially stand against oppression APOLOGIZES those who oppress merely because they share demographics with oppressors.

Every one of us has had "family" who were oppressed. Every one of us has had "family" who were oppressors. We are all members of the Human Family and share the guilt of the Villains as much as the pain of the Victims!

I personally tire of the "logic" that places some special racial or ethnic obligation on people ... and I see it as a kind of bigotry. We must hold ourselves, not to a black standard or a Jewish standard, but to a Human Standard. Instead, we seem to be rationalizing a decreasingly lower standard with every atrocity. The Bushoilinis attempt to apologize their invasion, occupation, and oppression in Iraq as "better than Saddam" - and it's even arguable at that.

[impeachthescoundrel]

2. I have absolutely no respect for republicans anyway

But when I see one that is black or Hispanic or anything besides white it turns my stomach.

[spooked911]

3. Cause they were nasty islamic terrorists, of course. (sarcasm)

And after 9/11, everyone knows how evil those people are.

[atreides1]

6. Because

Condi and Colin are only black on the outside, just like Clarence Thomas.

And the Inquisitor General is only Hispanic when PR calls for it.

As for Norman Mineta, this was the only job he could find, where he didn't actually have to work.

As for the others, well being of we don't really know why their ancestors came to America. It might be that their ancestors came to
the New World so that they could persecute the natives.

Bush's cabinet as well as the Repukes in the congress have no morals,
their loyalty is to Bsuh and to Bush alone. They have no love for this country or any of its people, they are on a course to usurp the U.S. Constitution and to have absolute power.

They are traitors, and should from this day forward be regarded as such. Don't call them senators or representatives, or refer to them as cabinet members, call them what they truly are TRAITORS.

[BrotherBuzz]

7. Condoliesa Rice is the poster girl for the reich

She is a powerful icon. In substance her persona is completely impotent, delivering the PR message,designed by her corporatist puppet masters.

Having an female Afro-American Secretary of State for a fascist junta imposed by sequential coups is the ultimate hypocrisy. She is the perfect disguise. How does one address a walking, talking, living, breathing lie? She is an animated programed Potemkin village for a society and foreign policy based upon brutal force, inequity, racism, and class warfare.

Credit to another DUer who composed those words...wish I could remember who...

[aeolian]

8. I doubt that its about race for them at all.

Besides using an person's melanin content as a political foil, they have little use for it. In a sick sort of way, they are an equal-oprotunity sort of group: as long as you're cold, heartless, and power hungry, you're in.

[Just Me]

9. Puzzles me, somewhat, too, KoKo01.

:shrug:

The "drinking the kool-aid" thingy comes as close to an explanation as I can imagine. They are in a brainwashed state and rewarded for staying in that state by turning off their eyes, ears, minds and hearts to their own contributions to such horrors.

Reading, "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" helped me to somewhat grasp the corporacratic mindset. I am going to pick up "Blinded by the Right" this weekend (hopefully).

[leveymg]

10. Look at the faces in the stands of the Roman Colosseum. Half were

what we would today call "people of color". Like America, Rome after the Republic was a empire that encompassed many peoples: Libyans, Anatolians, Turks, Germans, Egyptians. At 1AD, half the population were slaves or immigrants from the conquered Eastern colonies. By the end of the Empire, the capitol had moved east to what is today Turkey.

Rome also was a multicultural civilization that participated in and ordered a kind of horror that rivals our own.

Yes, our memories are short.

[supernova]

12. People who were abused often grow up to abuse

It happens within the micrcosm of the family.

I think it's true at the national and international level too. Populations which were on the recieving end of harrassement and maltreatment, harrass and otherwise mistreat minority populations when they come to power.

Dominance is the only way they know how to exercise power.

Sad. The cycle of violence continues. :cry: