Andrew Sullivan Notices Nazi Parallel

Appearing at The Jaundiced Eye, the Independent Bloggers' Alliance, and My Left Wing. "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." -- President George W. Bush "The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan." -- Adolf Hitler in "Mein Kampf" It's ever so politically incorrect to compare anyone at all to the Nazis, even when the similarity is obvious, but maybe Andrew Sullivan can get away with it. He is a conservative, after all, if not a neoconservative. As Glenn Greenwald has explained, if right-wingers do it, it's all good. In a column entitled "Bush’s torturers follow where the Nazis led," Sullivan catalogs his unfolding horror as he learned that the Bush Administration did, indeed, authorize torture. Hurts to learn that you've been a good German and enabled atrocities, doesn't it. I remember that my first response to the reports of abuse and torture at Guantanamo Bay was to accuse the accusers of exaggeration or deliberate deception. I didn’t believe America would ever do those things. I’d also supported George W Bush in 2000, believed it necessary to give the president the benefit of the doubt in wartime, and knew Donald Rumsfeld as a friend. . . . They redefined torture solely as something that would be equivalent to the loss of major organs or leading to imminent death. Everything else was what was first called “coercive interrogation”, subsequently amended to “enhanced interrogation”. These terms were deployed in order for the president to be able to say that he didn’t support “torture”. We were through the looking glass. . . . So is “enhanced interrogation” torture? One way to answer this question is to examine history. The phrase has a lineage. Verschärfte Verneh-mung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the “third degree”. It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation. . . . The Nazis even argued that “the acts of torture in no case resulted in death. Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement”. This argument is almost verbatim that made by John Yoo, the Bush administration’s house lawyer, who now sits comfortably at the Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. I think Sully has a rather idealized image of America's past, but at least he's awakened to its present. We are now a country that worships at the altar of Jack Bauer and venerates idiocy as long as it looks really bad-ass. "It's better to be strong and wrong than weak and right." -- Bill Clinton

24 Goes Green

It may sound like a publicity stunt, but Fox spokesman Chris Anderson says the network isn't after bigger ratings. "We are publicizing '24's' commitment to climate change for two reasons and two reasons only: to inspire the public to take global warming seriously and hopefully to motivate other studios to make changes to their production practices as well," he says. The show's electricity bills will go toward renewable-energy credits that will bring a share of wind, solar and water power to Los Angeles's grid. A diesel-powered soundstage will be converted to electricity, thus lessening the show's contribution to the local air pollution problem, and the show's five location scouts will be given Priuses to drive. Scripts, schedules and memos -- which used to be hand-delivered by car -- will be sent via e-mail. The "24" page at Fox.com now features energy conservation tips and a public service announcement about global warming featuring Kiefer Sutherland; more information will be posted when the show airs in January. Plus, climate change will be incorporated into the series' plot (which just might scare some viewers into taking action). Maybe I'm wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised Kiefer himself gently nudged 24 in this direction. After all, his dad was a long-haired, rabble-rousing hippie from the old school (M*A*S*H, FTA). And from the few interviews I've read, Kiefer has always appeared uncomfortable with the program's fascist inclinations, especially in the later episodes. Still, as a struggling actor who was one step away from either obscurity or a reality TV series before 24, I'm sure he's even more uncomfortable nibbling the hand that signs his big paychecks. But hey, whatever works. I'm not a purist. Anything that gets the mainstream audience thinking seriously about global warming is good. Sure, maybe Jack Bauer beats up dirtbag Muslims, but at least his recycles his trash, right? A tip of the Kangol to The Blogging Curmudgeon.