The Fragile Vanity of the War Criminal

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 19:09:32 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

Arthur Silber reminds us of the monsters who administer America's wars of conquest.

I referred above to "the symptoms of severe neurosis" which result from a dedicated reliance on the delusions supporting American exceptionalism. Eikenberry's comments show how that severe neurosis begins to veer ever closer to psychosis, if we use "psychosis" to indicate a condition representing an irreparable break with reality. I emphasize again that it is not simply that U.S. leaders ignore the murderous, bloody consequences of the U.S. government's actions. That would be more than sufficiently evil by itself, but U.S. leaders and functionaries like Eikenberry go much further. They transform evil into a positive good. And they go further still: they demand that others acknowledge their nobility and goodness -- and thank them for it.

"Oh, thank you, President Obama, Secretary Clinton, Ambassador Eikenberry! Thank you for destroying my country and slaughtering my family and half my relatives. How can I ever thank you enough for your overwhelming kindness and generosity! Thank you a thousand times!"

If that isn't insane, nothing is. Our leaders are profoundly, deeply terrible people. They are monsters. I stand by that description.

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War Criminals

Submitted by Underground Carpenter on Wed, 22 Jun 2011 11:07:11 GMT

Hi Bill,

I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer [Eichmann] that made it impossible to trace the incontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer . . . was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness . . . . Is wickedness, however we may define it, this being “determined to prove a villain,” not a necessary condition for evil-doing? Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?
 
Hannah Arendt, in
The Life of the Mind

About what runs through another's head, we can only guess.

Dave

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