Scary Monsters

When I was a pre-school kid, my dad was stationed in Germany and my parents took me to see the Berlin Wall. My memories of that trip are vivid: I have never seen anything so chilling and sinister.

Note that these are historical photos gleaned from the Web.

They were not taken by my family during out trip to Berlin, but they do epitomize what we saw there.

The wall itself, monstrous and ugly, cinder blocks hastily slapped together, shards of broken glass embedded on the top of the wall and coils of barbed wire strung above that, clearly intended to lacerate human tissue. Where families once lived, windows bricked up on the East zone side of the street so that apartment buildings themselves became part of the wall.

East German Volkspolizei (VoPos), armed with machine guns, survey us through binoculars as we approach the wall. Scattered at intervals along the wall, wreaths and small memorials to those killed trying to get across.

I remember looking upon these memorials in awe, and feeling a kind of childish metaphysical dread wash over me. Someone was killed here, I was thinking. Here, where I am standing.

At Bernauer Strasse, my father throws a pack of American cigarettes over the wall to East German workmen repairing the church roof (below). A well-intentioned if now seemingly ironic gift. They wave their thanks.

And also present, of course, were the defenders of the "free world" whose role, I later came to understand, was somewhat more complicated than my parents had led me to believe.

Partly as a result of that experience, I could never be a communist in the old "one party state + command economy" mode. On the other hand, the fact that Soviet-style communism was a monumental world-historical cock-up does not seem to me to imply that all things not-communism are therefore just fine and dandy, couldn't be better, exempt from criticism. The hard-edged capitalism we practice in America, and push on to the rest of the world, is no workers' paradise either. And while communism was blatantly undemocratic in many senses, our society creates all kinds of barriers to real democratic self-governance. We can do better.

Mistakes?

"Mistakes were made, and I'm frankly not happy about it."

George W. Bush

President of the United States

Mistakes?

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their henchmen systematically misled us into a war in Iraq when that country had nothing whatever to do with 9-11, had no collaborative relationships with Al Qaeda, possessed no weapons of mass destruction, and posed no direct threat to this country or its interests. Some will say that the administration was the victim of bad intelligence, but the Bush administration was itself actively engaged in producing this bad intelligence, suppressing evidence contrary to the case for war (and there was a great deal of that), and selling the public on the snake oil of war. They deliberately manufactured and marketed the misleading case for war.

Mistakes?

As Americans, we are globally reviled as a direct result of our policies. Our war in Iraq has killed tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people and accomplished little more than to provide al-Qaeda and like-minded groups with priceless public reations successes. Our policies lend credibility to the terrorists' narratives of a Western war on Islam. In a world where many millions of people now hate us with an intensity they would not have felt otherwise, we're much less safe now than we were before the war. It's only a matter of time until that realization comes home with devastating effect.

Mistakes?

We have become a country which secretly abducts people, holds them indefinitely without due process or basic protecions of human rights, and either tortures them directly or subcontracts the dirty work to allied countries through a process dubbed -- in a masterpiece of obfuscatory bureaucratic euphemism --"rendition" .

Mistakes?

The government now eavesdrops wholesale on our electronic and telephone communications. Dissidents and critics of administration policy have been singled out, investigated, and harassed in the name of the War on Terror and under the Orwellian cloak of the PATRIOT Act. A cartoonish compulsory militarism pervades our culture, and anyone who appears out of step is accused of not "supporting the troops".

These are not "mistakes". These are the products of a political project centered on resurrecting an imperial presidency in order to impose an American imperium on the rest of the world. And I'm frankly not happy about it.

It may be too soon to talk about Fascism in America, but it's not too late to start asking questions about the direction in which we are moving. I fear for the future of my country, the country my daughter will inherit. Will your kids be happy, safe, and free in the America we are creating?