The Sovietization of America
Eric Margolis at the Toronto Sun touches on a topic we at USTV have been pointing out for some time now, and that is the increasingly disturbing transformation of our nation into the U.S.S.A.
This week’s tentative agreement between Bush and Congress may somewhat limit torture, but exempts U.S. officials from having to observe the Geneva Convention.
Canadians had a shocking view of similar creeping totalitarianism as the full horror of Maher Arar’s persecution was revealed. Thanks to false information from the RCMP, the U.S. arrested a Canadian citizen and sent him to Syria. Arab states and Pakistan were being used by the Bush administration for outsourced torture. Syria denies the charges.
Suspects were kidnapped by the U.S., often on the basis of faulty information or lies, then sent to Arab states to be tortured until they confessed. The apparent objective of this “rendition” program? To find a few kernels of useful information. The Cheka and East Germany’s Stasi used the same practice.
I never thought I’d see the United States — champion of human rights and rule of law — legislating torture and Soviet-style kangaroo tribunals. I never thought I’d see Congress and a majority of Americans supporting such police state measures. Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln must be turning in their graves.
Is there any wonder as to why we refer to them as “Busheviks”?
Read The Full Article Here
on January 24th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
i don’t know about you , but i haven’t any relatives rounded up in the night and sent in a cattlecar to the artic because they criticized our government .
oh yeah , we’re “just as bad” as the state socialists because someone is identified by an avowed enemy of canada (like his whole damned traitorous family,who should all be relieved of their citizenships) as a fellow islamist trainee and our american
neighbors send him off to a spa ! >seems healthy enough to me , compared to say , alexander solzhenitson , who did some real time .
on January 24th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
could it be that the west is tired of you whining , spoiled boomers with your traitorous , one sided protests and have learned to just tune you out ?
why the fuck are you still here? there are probably a few boats in florida left
by the cuban refugees that you can sail back in ! since nothing we can ever do
shy of abandoning every friend we have for assholes who will always hate us .
on January 25th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
I”m not sure who Barry is talking to here, but his foul-mouthed screed and ranting accusations towards ‘you whining, spoiled boomers’, accusing those who don’t want to see the American republic descend into a police state is so ripe with judgemental assumptions that is hardly warrents much of a response. Perhaps some of the people who ‘are still here’ are here because America is their home, and they don’t like seeing proto-fascists turn it into a nationalist, anti-democratic corporate elite controlled empire. They don’t care for the NSA spying on it’s own citizens, secret government, unfettered power of the organs of the state to be used for political purposes, etc..etc… the very things that defined the USSR, irregardless of Barry’s definition of such as a society as being one operating gulags because it was ’state socialist’. Sweden, Norway, etc.. are ’state socialist’ nations as well, which seem to get along just fine without operating a gulag system to operate.
And unlike Barry, I actually do know a few expatriates from former authoritarian dictatorships, including those from Hungary and Nazi Germany, who have experienced the terrors and repressions of those societies, and who in light of those are just as, if not more critical, of the policies and actions of the Bush regime than many. This is because they are familiar with the symptoms that make up regimes like that, and don’t take it lightly when they see those same conditions rearing their ugly heads in our own society.
And if Barry would like to reference Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (not ‘Solzhenitson’ by the way), it might behoove Barry to know that some of his harshest ‘whining, spoiled’ criticisms of the policies of the west eminated from him and his critique of western capitalist corporate consumerism.
on February 3rd, 2009 at 11:04 pm
fyi , andy : my estonian sister in law was raped at the age of 8 by soviet occupation forces .a close coworker encountered soviet “liberation “forces as he was on patrol in his native poland during ‘68 . a finnish family who my family has been a virtual extended family to for 4 generations participated courageously in the resistance against the red army invasion during the ’30s .
my closest relationship (almost married)was to a wonderful chinese woman
whose folks fled china to hong kong , then to canada during the japanese invasion .very few of my coworkers are actually anglo saxon , most coming from yugoslavia (one is a former communist party member who tells me that stalin was justified in sending millions to the gulags), others are from sri lanka(i see their magazine photos showing TONS of commie build weapons being brandished, like a replay from somalia, or angola),and others are from india , the philipines , the ukraine (a cute story about a mayday parade organized during chernobyl’s meltdown ,unbeknownst to her town) , iran (who warns me about another challenge to our imperfect , struggling democracies -sharia law), china and cuba (i find out our cuban techie isn’t allowed to bring tools back home when he visits ,making it damned hard to start a small business there .)we had a great engineer from denmark , the country that is grateful for canadian sacrifices in liberating them from nazis AND getting there before the soviets did .i enjoy most working with our swiss born engineer - perhaps you know of that “neutral” country that had nukes after all -pointed at russia. got a whole family of romanians here who know why the soviets invaded
prague instead >seems that their regime was socialist enough to satisfy the kremlin .the west didn’t really realize the extent of soviet covert manipulation of so called peace protest and labour movements here until we got czech defectors informing us of things like the $2 BILLION dollar funding the kgb invested in anti vietnam protest agitation .and their puppet scargill virtually shutting down england’s industry causing miserable joblessness for decades .
public unions and dirty contracts with big government have made a joke of the term “tax payer investment” in social programs/infrastructure in canada and many of the “soft socialist” nations you mention in europe.
b.t.w ,i choose not invest effort in grammatical corrections in these posts , since
you will not be swayed in your determination to make a mountain of the relatively small problems (and admittedly stupid mistakes )that our civilization must get beyond , but not by abandoning and betraying other less perfect nations to the real predators who don’t play by any rules while exploiting ours . close guantanimo- execute undeclared enemy combatants in the field like we did to german agents in www2 according to the rules of war .
i dislike the dismantling of our other freedoms here (starting with the gun registry)because that is what generations of my ancestors fought for , not the human rights commissions that would persecute cartoonists for the hate crime of expressing the stark truth on islam’s brutal hadiths .