Re: [Gnu-arch-users] [OT] facism gaining ground in US

[Robin Green]

On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 12:53:28PM -0700, Pierce T. Wetter III wrote:
> rise in Europe...I hear about beatings of guest workers...I hear you're
> thinking about not letting Turkey in the EU.

Hold on just a minute... not letting Turkey in the EU because of their 
government's human rights record is racist??

Torture still goes on in Turkish jails. I just read this in Private Eye today
(p.26, no. 1110):

"In Turkey one of the main campaigners against the [Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan]
pipeline, Ferhat Keya, spent most of May in prison after he was arrested
while documenting the case of an individual whose land is being used for the
pipeline but has not been compensated. Kurdish Human Rights campaigners have
complained about Mr. Kaya's treatment by police, saying his injuries were
consistent with torture. Mr. Kaya was imprisoned for six months in 2002
for referring to Kurdish leader [and alleged terrorist] Abdullah Ocalan at
a public meeting with the title "Mr" - which was seen as implying support."

Turkey has also imprisoned people for merely speaking in Kurdish, and tried
to prosecute a publisher for printing a book by Noam Chomsky on Kurdish
human rights. (After Chomsky flew in and demanded to be made co-defendant,
the government did an abrupt volt-face and dropped the case.)

(Of course this is a very hypocritical policy to exclude Turkey from the EU
for human rights reasons, because those same EU countries finance projects
abroad with dubious human rights records, including in Turkey. Recently
a quantum leap in injustice was proposed in which pretty much all laws,
constitutional protections and human rights standards would not apply to
people a certain distance from the aforementioned pipeline. I don't know
if that has gone through.)

>  Can't tell whether you're an idiot or not. I certainly don't assume 
> that
> you are, but when you go around sending senseless things like:
> 
>  "The US is a fascist state"
> 
>   you aren't exactly showing a large capability for reasonable 
> discussion.

Certainly the US is not fascist internally. However, there are proto-fascist
*tendencies* on the domestic front (Patriot Act, Patriot Act II, etc.), and
it acts in fascist ways towards other countries. Hence the wildly divergent
views about it. I think that both "the US is not fascist" and "the US is
fascist" can each be understood to be true in a certain sense.

>   Ok, we've gone from being a fascist state to "fascist towards the 
> world".

Yes, exactly.

Especially with regard to the occupation of Iraq. If Seymour Hersch's
allegations are true that young Iraqi boys were imprisoned and raped with
broom-handles, on camera, with their mothers within earshot... that sounds
like Nazi behaviour to me.

> The difference is one of intent. In our case, those guards were being 
> prosecuted for doing that. Under Saddam, those guards would have been 
> promoted. We put our sadists in Jail,

Not always. Firstly, some accusations are simply ignored and do not appear
to be properly investigated, and secondly, Bush and Rumsfeld *authorised*
abusive tactics - first in Guatamano, and then in Iraq. Thirdly, the
evidence on the ground suggest that abuse, including torture, was or is
used on a widespread scale as a means of terrorising the prisoners and
getting them to cooperate, not just out of mindless sadism (although there
was a lot of that, too).

Terrorising people by the use of violence. That's pretty much the definition
of terrorism.

-- 
Robin

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