Unexceptional Americans:

Why We Can't See the Trees or the Forest

The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia

By Noam Chomsky

May 19, 2009 "Tomdispatch" -- The torture memos released by the White House elicited shock, indignation, and surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable. The surprise, less so....

Torture has been routinely practiced from the early days of the conquest of the national territory, and continued to be used as the imperial ventures of the "infant empire" -- as George Washington called the new republic -- extended to the Philippines, Haiti, and elsewhere.

Keep in mind as well that torture was the least of the many crimes of aggression, terror, subversion, and economic strangulation that have darkened U.S. history, much as in the case of other great powers.....

The My Lai massacre was a mere footnote to the vastly greater atrocities of the post-Tet pacification programs, ignored while indignation in this country was largely focused on this single crime.

Watergate was doubtless criminal, but the furor over it displaced incomparably worse crimes at home and abroad, including the FBI-organized assassination of black organizer Fred Hampton as part of the infamous COINTELPRO repression, or the bombing of Cambodia, to mention just two egregious examples.

Torture is hideous enough; the invasion of Iraq was a far worse crime.

Quite commonly, selective atrocities have this function.

Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon, not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity, but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead.

Noam Chomsky
is Institute Professor (retired) at MIT. He is the author of many books and articles on international affairs and social-political issues, and a long-time participant in activist movements.

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Condemning Torture, Condoning Mass Murder

By Charles Davis

May 18, 2009 "STR" -- A peculiar notion has arisen of late, maintaining that things like torture, domestic spying and illegal wars are all attributable to the Right -- namely, the administration of President George W. Bush -- and are in fact historical anomalies, not at all in keeping with the traditions of these great United States.

The idea that war crimes and civil liberties violations are strictly conservative affairs is particularly comforting to wide-eyed Democrats in awe of America’s First Black President ™, and it affords the heirs to the same liberal establishment which brought us Vietnam and Hiroshima another opportunity to grandstand about their commitment to human rights even as the noble humanitarian Barack Obama continues to extra-judicially murder foreigners with unmanned drones.

Unfortunately for partisan Democrats – and even more so the victims of U.S. exceptionalism – American imperialism and its associated evils have long enjoyed bipartisan backing....

That the U.S. government spends the majority of the tax dollars it expropriates from its subjects on empire and incarceration, and trillions more on propping up the financial elite while regular folks face stagnating wages is not an accident - it's by design.

Charles Davis is a journalist based in Washington, DC.
More of his work may be found at his website.

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