Elizabeth Keyes on the combination of evil and American empire — parallels Svetlana Alexievich's message in her Soviet era book, Zinky Boys

© 2018 Peter Free

 

31 May 2018

 

 

U.S. propaganda interests me

 

The result has been our shared ability to walk past the decomposing corpses we killed and not smell them.

 

 

That's quite a trick

 

Certainly surpassing Joseph Goebbels' ability to distort German perspectives during the early 1940s.

 

Similarly pertinent is Svetlana Alexievich's Zinky Boys. Reading it, you get glimpses of the Soviet Union's Orwellian attempts to crush spirit.

 

 

Most Americans will recoil — at these two comparisons

 

Our shared reaction indicates how effective malevolently pretending to be God's Right Hand has been — in arming the capacity for wrong within us.

 

 

Elizabeth Keyes thinks so, too

 

Her recent essay uses M. Scott Peck's People of the Lie — with its focus on the Christian concept of "evil" — as foundation for a critique of American leadership:

 

 

President Obama posed as a person of character most convincingly.  It got him the White House.  Twice.

 

Obama took no responsibility for his breathtaking, 180-degree reversals of golden promises of anti-Bush reform, pre-election.

 

[H]e failed to act on . . . the restoration of habeas corpus rights and the prosecution of the perpetrators of the clandestine Bush torture program . . . .

 

Obama’s policy decisions instead included deadly drone warfare, assassination kill lists, unlimited due-process-less detentions, military tribunals, countless corporate wars and U.S. military . . . garrisoning; and the continuation of Gitmo and God only knows what other black sites.

 

“We tortured some folks,” he finally admitted with a shrug at a press conference. 

 

“Folks”?  Now there’s a friendly word.

 

This is heart-of-darkness territory.  Obama chose to become an enabler of violators of human rights and then a violator of them himself.

 

The status quo establishment in America has us locked into perpetual war with untold mass global deaths and maiming and ever-increasing economic hardship for all humanity except for a tiny percentage of transnational elites.

 

© 2018 Elizabeth Keyes, I Pledge Allegiance to the United States of Sociopathy, CounterPunch (30 May 2018)

 

 

Keyes does not bother to add that President Obama casually destroyed Libya, adding it to the hell that George W. Bush had (equally irresponsibly) lit afire in Iraq.

 

 

Are we just as wrong as Nazi era Germans were?

 

Americans become pretty self-righteous about World War II Germans' claimed obliviousness to the existence of Holocaust death camps in their back yards.

 

But, if you think about it, how is what we have been doing from (say) the beginning of the Vietnam War and afterward much different? As you read, the United States is helping Saudi Arabia kill children in Yemen.

 

We probably have even less excuse for claimed ignorance than pre-Internet Germans did.

 

Ergo, Ms. Keyes' reference to evil — as an entity — and to People of the Lie.

 

 

The moral? — When we pretend that "evil" is too strong a word to describe American behavior . . .

 

. . . we lose chunks of our individual souls. Metaphorical or not.

 

How do you think that a just Deity, or karma, should deal with that?

 

Chanting USAx3 is probably not sufficient.