Thursday, May 01, 2003

In Every Generation My daughter made a new family Haggadah this year, and I have been mulling over the phrase “”Every person, in every generation, must regard his or her self  as having been personally freed from bondage in Mitzraim, the biblical Land of Egypt.”   For it seems to me that indeed every generation faces the same struggles for freedom and liberty, over and over again.  Why is it that there is no single victory, no point when freedom for all, equality, abundance is ever achieved.   Yes, it is there for some.  If you have money, are white, live in the U.S., have connections with the power structure within our society, then, yes you have freedom and abundance today.   But the revolutionary idea  “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” was so powerful, not because it was perfectly achieved, but because it set out the radical idea of inalienable human rights.   Our horror at totalitarianism is its total rejection of inalienable human rights.    Even though Bush tonight declared his hollow victory, our group in Lexington is still holding weekly vigils on the Lexington Green.   Wednesday, a young tourist with his girl friend came up to the half dozen of us holding our signs, and said he felt as if he was living in Hitler’s time, that the U.S. appeared to be following the path of Nazi Germany.   It is a theme that is often repeated by many people, including Jews who lived through that time in Europe.   The idea is not that there are brown shirts in the streets—not yet, but that the leaders, the government, the ones who have the greatest responsibility to protect and defend our inalienable human rights, are the very ones who are threatening to destroy them.   The destruction comes in little bites, as more and more people in America are defined as outsiders, as enemies, as “other”, coupled with the idea that the “others” have no human rights.   In this manner, Bush shows himself as the executioner, who pardons and fawns over his own kind who commit crimes, like Enron, like his daughters, and like his own cocaine use, but then fails utterly to have any empathy, mercy, or consideration for those unlike him, poor, framed, black, and processed relentlessly through the Texas judicial murder mill.   Totalitarians love terror, because it justifies their own disregard for humanity.  In this respect, most of the world rightly considers Bush to be dangerous fundamentalist fanatic who is willing to sacrifice lives in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Yemen, with no regard for human rights.   Results matter, not language.  No matter how much the slaughter of Iraqi’s is dressed up, it was basically an unnecessary carnage.  Iraq never was a threat to the U.S.  Yet, like Hitler’s intervention in the Spanish civil war, Bush needed a place to demonstrate his military vengeance, so as to stoke fear of America around the world.   So the slaughter of innocent conscripts and civilians was basically a big show.  This is totalitarianism.   In our own country, with the largest prison population in the world, how can we talk of liberty for all, when among black men in their 20s or early 30s, about 11 percent are in prison.  How can we talk of democracy, when released prisoners cannot vote in many jurisdictions, permanently depriving a huge percentage  of the population the right to vote.   Now, we have a turning of the screw, with the terror laws enforced by Ashcroft.  During the dirty war in Argentina with the thousands of disappeared, who would have thought that the disappeared could appear in the U.S.   True, those who are secretly detained are not yet being thrown from helicopters into the North Atlantic.  But they could be.  Under Ashcroft’s rules, like in Argentina, we would never know until the relatives came forward to seek information.   So in our own 21st century, it seems we have come full circle, and once again we confront the totalitarians of our time, in every generation.  They are not the rag tag criminals who commit random acts of terror, or blow themselves and their victims up in cafes.  They are the ones who control the true power—the power of the roman legions, the power of the American nuclear arsenal, the power to station an army in 14 countries in Asia over the last ten years, preparing to strike down China if it should become a rival.  They are our own leaders, and we must confront their mad totalitarian dreams more successfully than the Germans did. 11:42:54 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2003 Toby Sackton. Last update: 6/12/2003; 12:31:43 PM.