Was I a good American in the time of George Bush?

There's a wonderful opinion piece in today's Guardian Comments from Rebecca Solnit which asks the question that has always puzzled me. Why have so many Americans bought into Bush apocalyptic fantasies, why have they allowed him to rip up Habeas Corpus and ignore large parts of the constitution, why has the right wing blather machine operated by O'Reilly, Limbaugh and others been allowed to spew it's filth and lies and why have so many Americans believed this rubbish?

She does suggest that the US is beginning to wake up, which November's elections also indicated.

These days Americans seem to be waking up one at a time, groggy and embittered, from the hypnotic nightmare that was the Bush administration's one great success - spreading a miasma of fear and patriotic submissiveness that made it possible to mount an illegal and immoral war, piss on the bill of rights, burn the constitution and violate international charters on human rights and prisoners of war with widespread torture. None of the sleepers seems to remember that they were part of the legions who obeyed the orders to fear and hate - but we welcome the latecomers into our ranks anyway.

What took them so long? How could people believe that a fairly defanged country, one we had been bombing since the first Gulf war, was an apocalyptic menace in a world where most nations were well-equipped for mass civilian murder? A year ago, the turning point was marked by the comedian Stephen Colbert's volley of (accurate) insults delivered to Bush's face, in the guise of giving the keynote address at the Washington press corps' annual dinner. He was just aggressively ignored by the mainstream media. Perhaps Katrina turned the tide: the indifference, incompetence, and obliviousness of the federal government was so gross that its pedestal melted.

And there were others who were in resistance all along. I remember with admiration the Japanese-Americans who came out in the months after 9/11 to testify that they had been incarcerated en masse during the second world war, not for what they did but for who they were, and they were not going to remain silent as the same treatment was meted out to Arabs and Muslims.

It's a wonderful examination of the role of the citizen when faced with a reactionary government and the analogy with Germans during WWII is a valid one. Many Americans, and as I have said many times before, especially many Republican Senators, will one day have to justify the undemocratic things that they have supported under the Bush administration.

Detention without trial, the euphemism of "alternative interrogation techniques" which most of us recognise as permission to torture, all of this has been carried out with the tacit support of the Senate. And on the day that they are held to account, saying "we were under attack" will not be sufficient justification for giving up all that your nation once proudly stood for.

As Solnit concludes:

There is resistance. But if it were enough, the crimes would have stopped, the war would have ended. When it does and they do, some will have been heroes. Some will have been honourable but moderate, in times that did not call for moderation. And some will have consented, through inaction, to crimes against humanity.

I think she's a little too harsh on herself and her fellow citizens, who were browbeaten with charges of treason and lacking patriotism into an understandable reticence to put one's head above the parapet.

There is, however, no excuse for the men and women who had the power to limit, through law, what Bush would and would not be permitted to do. They had the power to set parameters and they manifestly failed in their duty to do so.

It is to them that the German analogy is most fitting.

Click the title to read the article. It's certainly worth reading.

Tags: Bush, Cheney, War on Terror, Iraq war, Habeas Corpus, bill of rights, protest in America