America Unfit to Change the World

[Guest guest]

http://www.blackcommentator.com/89/89_cover_change_world.html

 

"They wanted to humiliate us. It was disgusting. They covered our

heads with plastic bags and hit our backs with sharp objects, which

added to our wounds. They then took off all our clothes, made us

stand next to the wall and carried out immoral acts that I cannot

even talk about. Women soldiers took pictures of naked men and did

not care." – Iraqi former prisoner Hashim Muhsin, speaking to

Aljazeera news agency

 

Military Police Private Lynndie England wears the obscenely grinning

face that America now presents to the world. In a profound sense, it

is Pvt. England and her comrades who most authentically represent

the raw white racism that is the Great Enabler of the current

American imperial abomination. Centuries of U.S. history prepared

Private England to instantly assume the role of depraved dominatrix

at the slave punishment facility called Abu Ghraib Prison.

 

"He's getting hard," shouted the 21-year-old Army reservist from

West Virginia, gleefully pointing to the crotch of the naked, hooded

prisoner, one of seven selected for a night of Ku Klux Klan-style

fun and games. Pvt. England and her six confederates, including

another young female, piled the naked men in a pyramid to simulate

homosexual ####. She placed her hand on a prisoner's buttocks,

grinning like a cheerleader as the camera captured an ancient truth:

would-be slave masters are the most debased people on Earth.

 

 

 

In the Abu Ghraib pictures we see U.S. soldiers performing a slave

master's ritual, a specific, American kind of grotesquerie.

Thoroughly ordinary young men and women pretend to be gods, lording

over darker humanity. U.S. culture empowers them to act out their

most hideous fantasies at the expense of "lesser" peoples. Lynndie

England demanded that Iraqi men surrender their dignity by

masturbating for her sick enjoyment. The Iraqi victims knew that the

Americans' ############ theater could turn into a snuff film at any

moment. To the Arab men, Pvt. England and Specialist Megan Ambuhl

must have seemed like "Bay Watch" from Hell.

 

A crisis of depravity

 

None of the Abu Ghraib prison guards involved in the assaults appear

to believe they were doing anything morally repugnant. Rather, they

whine that they should have gotten better training, or claim to have

been misused by intelligence agents. Their President is whining, too.

 

"This is not America," said George Bush on Wednesday, pleading the

national case to the Arab world. "America is a country of justice

and law and freedom and treating people with respect."

 

No, America is a country built on genocide, slavery and insatiable

land-piracy, where even the lowest status white person is a king or

queen compared to a "hajji" or "gook" or some other variety

of "nigger." This is the cultural well from which springs America's

ceaseless domestic and international wars, the fountainhead of

aggression as a national trait.

 

 

 

It is also the national characteristic that renders Americans unfit

to "change the world" – Bush's favorite refrain. The same racism

that encourages Americans to believe they have a right to dominate

the planet, prevents them from perceiving non-whites as human

beings – and brings out the dominatrix in Pvt. England. As Freedom

Rider columnist Margaret Kimberley put it in the current issue

of : "The abuse of Iraqi prisoners was inevitable. The plan to

invade Iraq presupposed that its people are inferior and unworthy of

thought or consideration…. They hate us because after we kill and

destroy we ask stupid questions as if we were innocent."

 

The stupid, destructive President of the United States cannot help

but hector Iraqis, even as he attempts to make amends for

the "abhorrent abuses" against helpless prisoners. "They [iraqis]

must also understand that what took place in that prison does not

represent the America that I know," said Bush. In fact, it is the

Bush "base" of the electorate that are the most virulent, war-

worshipping racists. Bush's America rejects information that does

not conform to its core myths of American goodness and U.###########

Destiny.

 

Now the Americans have been knocked senseless by the photographic

boomerang from Abu Ghraib, revealing the psychosexual aspect of the

Occupation. U.S. intelligence and psychological warfare techniques

are designed to assault the target's sense of cultural and sexual

self – thus "breaking" him. Since the U.S. war in Iraq is in

practice a race war, the military'######### inevitably becomes the

total subjugation of one people by the other: the breaking of a

nation. Iraqis correctly perceive that Americans intend to defile

their nationality and – for the men – their manhood. This aspect of

the rape of Iraq is felt even more strongly than the economic

pillaging of the country, because it assaults all Iraqi regions,

ethnicities and classes.

 

For example, during last month's siege of Fallujah U.##########

blared rock music at resisting neighborhoods, belittling the

fighters' manhood, daring them to come out to be shot in the open,

and featuring derisive, canned laughter at Iraqi "cowardice." By all

accounts the audio bombardment only stiffened Iraqi resolve, and

served as a perfect alien cultural backdrop to cement the various

Iraqi political and religious factions that had made a stand in

Fallujah.

 

As we wrote on April 10 of last year, the week the Occupation

began, "The Pirates play at psychological warfare and succeed in

psyching out only themselves."

 

Perpetrator is promoted

 

 

 

The Abu Ghraib scandal is yet another psych-out gone awry – a direct

result of U.S. intelligence agencies' attempts to bring Iraq's

prisons into the international American Gulag, the legal no man's

land centered in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The spooks and civilian

interrogators encroached relentlessly on the space and authority of

the prison's warden, Army Gen. Janis Karpinski – the basis of her

claim to not be culpable for the actions of her soldiers. Three

generals in succession were sent to investigate the growing list of

outrages at Abu Ghraib. The first investigation was conducted by

Provost Marshal Donald Ryder, the Army's chief law-enforcement

officer; the second, by Major General Geoffrey Miller, then

commander at Guantanamo. As revealed by the third investigator,

Major Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, it was Guantanamo commander Miller who

set the stage for the current debacle:

 

The recommendations of MG Miller's team that the "guard force" be

actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful

exploitation of the internees would appear to be in conflict with

the recommendations of MG Ryder's Team and AR 190-8 that military

police "do not participate in military intelligence supervised

interrogation sessions."

Thus, it was Gen. Miller's bid to extend the Guantanamo law-free

zone into all of Iraq – a nation that Bush claims to have rescued

for democracy and the rule of law! – that created the conditions in

which Pvt. England and her fellow soldiers reverted to the barbaric

behavior of slave masters, "softening up" Iraqi prisoners for later

interrogation by professional people-breakers.

 

Gen. Miller's reward was to be named commander of all Iraqi prisons,

last month. "I would like to personally apologize to the people of

Iraq for a small number of leaders and soldiers who have violated

our policies and possibly committed criminal acts," said Miller,

himself the culprit in the scandal, whose policy was to

systematically remove Iraqi prisoners from the protections of

domestic and international law.

 

In light of Miller's promotion, Condoleezza Rice's remarks on

Tuesday count for less than a grain of Iraqi sand:

 

"Those pictures were awful because America – American men and women

in uniform, active and reserve, are serving in Iraq at great

sacrifice. People are losing their lives. We came there to help to

liberate the people of Iraq. We came there to build schools, and to

build clinics, and we want very much that the images of Americans

should be the images of helping the Iraqi people. It's simply

unacceptable that anyone would engage in the abuse of Iraqi

prisoners. And we will get to the bottom of it. And those who are

responsible will be punished."

 

 

 

Rice and Bush are worried about Abu Ghraib's effect on their own

images with the American electorate. Normally, atrocities against

Arabs would not represent a domestic problem for the White House.

The American electorate was largely unmoved by the collective

punishment of Fallujah, where hundreds of Iraqi noncombatants were

slaughtered to avenge the killing of four armed American

mercenaries. Potential Bush voters care nothing for the fate of male

Iraqi prisoners – but they are gravely concerned about how the war

might affect young American soldiers.

 

The image that terrifies them is that of Pvt. England, smiling

moronically as she engages in unspeakable acts. The photos and

testimony show England pursuing her unequal relationships with naked

male victims as spiritedly as the Marquis de Sade. Americans who

would never fret over injustice to Iraqis, agonize: What is Iraq

doing to American womanhood?

 

However, Iraqis, not Americans, will decide the fate of Bush's

imperial expedition. Polls conducted just before the Abu Graib story

broke "found that 60 percent of Iraqis now want U.S. troops to go

home immediately, even though they acknowledge that their departure

might bring further instability," according to Time Magazine. The

Iraqi general public has since become aware of the shame that untold

numbers of men have borne in silence – the "immoral acts that I

cannot even talk about," as former prisoner Hashim Muhsin put it.

Revulsion will lead to convulsions, further hastening U.S. departure

from Iraq.

 

Pvt. England is reported to be back in Fort Bragg, North Carolina,

and pregnant. Her smiling, bottomless corruption has surely helped

give birth to a mighty rage.