Enabling Evil

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C

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 06:04:25 -0600

Enabling Evil

 

 

http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts107.html

 

Enabling Evil

 

 

by Paul Craig Roberts

 

 

 

In 1996 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published Hitler's Willing

Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. His thesis is that

the mass murder of Jews was not done on the quiet by a few Nazi

fanatics. Instead, Goldhagen writes, by their complicity ordinary

Germans were willing participants in the slaughter.

 

In other words, the German people as a people were guilty as well,

because they accepted and permitted the slaughter of an ethnic group.

 

Goldhagen's thesis has had rough sledding. German newspapers in the

Third Reich did not report on the progress of the Holocaust. Few

Germans had the means or were willing to take the risks of listening

to British broadcasts, which had no reporters on the German scene to

investigate extermination rumors. By the time the Holocaust was

underway, Hitler and the Gestapo had an iron grip on Germans and the

German military. The potent German war machine had fallen victim to

Nazi hubris and bitten off more of Russia than it could chew.

Opposition to Hitler rose within the military. Generals hatched plots

to assassinate Hitler, but every attempt failed.

 

If generals commanding armies could not overthrow Hitler, it is

unclear what ordinary Germans could have done. They could not vote

Hitler out, as the Enabling Act had made him a dictator. The Gestapo

had put a stop to civil liberties, and there was no free press. And,

of course, there was no Internet reporting hard facts that the toady

German media covered up.

 

The situation in America today is quite different from wartime

Germany. There is still a free press even though it is a toady

corporate press without heart or courage. There is an opposition party

even thought it is a toady opposition. Bush is not a dictator even

though a toady Congress has permitted Bush to accumulate power in the

executive branch at the expense of both civil liberties and the

separation of powers established by the Constitution. Americans have

an abundance of hard facts available to them from a world press via

the Internet. Americans have the weapons inspectors' reports, expert

testimony, and now top-secret British government documents leaked to

the Sunday Times (London). The documents reveal that the British

government regarded Bush's premeditated invasion of Iraq as illegal

and had concerns that Prime Minister Blair and cabinet ministers could

be brought up on war crime charges for participating in naked

aggression. The documents reveal that Bush's decision to invade Iraq

had nothing whatsoever to do with the reasons he gave the US Congress

and the American people and that the " intelligence " he cited to

justify his invasion was concocted and fabricated.

 

If Germans were complicit, as Goldhagen claims, how can Americans

avoid the charge of complicity in Bush's crimes against Iraq when

Americans are in possession of such damning facts and have the power

of impeachment? Why do Americans tolerate a liar and a war criminal as

their president?

 

Why has Congress voted still more money for an illegal war launched in

deception?

 

Why does the US military permit its human and physical resources to be

squandered in a pointless war that has no strategy for victory and no

timetable for withdrawal?

 

How can America be so dominated by a lame-duck president that it loses

all sense of itself, its honor, and its purpose?

 

Americans are complicit in the deaths and maiming of thousands of

American soldiers for no valid purpose. Americans are complicit in the

deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi women and children as " collateral

damage. " No one knows how high the number is because the Bush

administration does not regard Iraqi lives as worth counting.

 

Bush's war of deception has devastated Iraq. Cities and towns are in

ruins. Infrastructure is destroyed. Half the population is unemployed.

Pollution and disease are rampant.

 

By continuing to defend Bush's lies, right-wing talk radio, Fox

" News, " the Weekly Standard, National Review, the Wall Street Journal

editorial page, the NY Post, the NY Sun and the rest of the neocon

establishment are Bush's willing executioners. The neocon media

differs not at all from the Nazi propaganda machine. The neocon media

fosters the same hatred and blood lust: kill the Iraqis, invade Syria,

bomb the Iranians, devise " useable nukes " to subdue the Muslims, kill

the American traitors who criticize our Führer, bend the world to our

exceptional will.

 

How much more shame and complicity will Americans allow Bush and his

neocon brownshirts to shovel onto their shoulders before Americans say

" enough! " and remove from office the war criminal who has sullied

America's good name?

 

June 14, 2005

 

Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute

for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent

Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal,

former contributing editor for National Review, and a former assistant

secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of

Good Intentions.

 

2005 Creators Syndicate