With all the recently hyped euphoria about ‘change’ in the 2008 election campaign there is, unfortunately, the same suspension of disbelief that allowed Americans to look beyond the ugly Abu Ghraib torture and hope, against the reality of lies, that “it’s just a few bad apples”.
It was not just “a few bad apples” at the core of Abu Ghraib, and it’s not “just a few bad apples” at the core of this Vichy American government’s veneer-thin façade over the underlying two-party global corporatist Empire.
Most Americans seemed to have been distracted beyond reason that the ugly torture and photos of perversions that occurred at Abu Ghraib might be as the Bush administration lied; “only the crimes of a few bad apples”.
Perhaps one can not totally blame the American people for being predisposed to accept convenient lies about their country so visibly torturing prisoners in direct contravention to the Geneva Convention, US law, and the Nuremberg Tribunal, rather than face the bigger and even uglier truth that their country’s government is, at its very core, a criminal empire. After all, Americans have recently had to ‘look beyond’ innumerable acts of their government’s criminal behavior including; the launch of an unjustified aggressive, pre-emptive, and imperialist oil-war abroad that has killed thousands and cost billions, the un-Constitutional spying on our fellow Americans at home, and the thuggish suppression of our own Justice Department, Supreme Court, and even Constitution.
Hannah Arendt presciently warned of, and correctly diagnosed, the real ‘core’ of such criminality by a government when she said, “Empire abroad (always) entails tyranny at home” --- a diagnosis seconded by Ben Franklin and other of our founding fathers.
But there has been a somewhat wishful hope, one might even say a suspension of disbelief, during this 2008 presidential election season fanned by the flames of MSM hyperbole about the TV ‘excitement’ of democracy, that lures Americans to ‘look past’ the criminality of the Bush years and to want to believe that all this criminality, warfare, lies, looting, and tyranny might have been the cause of only “a few bad apples” at the bottom of only the Republican barrel --- but it is not.
It’s not a ‘few bad apples’ of the Bush regime, anymore than it was a ‘few bad apples’ at Abu Ghraib that are responsible for this tyranny of empire. Instead it is, at the core, the entire façade of this two-party Vichy government and the Vichy media power behind a hidden corporatist empire itself.
The reason that such a pessimistic, but realistic, assessment is justified is that both corporatist parties and most of the institutional defenses of our former democracy have proven themselves lately to all be ‘bad apples’ --- to their very core.
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