Titanic Post

It is not easy to recognize fascism if you haven’t been there before. Our eyesight is blurred by everything from cultural optimism to psychic denial. But news of the NSA’s mass spying on American’s phone records - in number of victims, at least, perhaps the most broadly illegal and unconstitutional act in our history - makes it all simpler. There is not an ounce of hyperbole in calling the NSA’s action those of a fascist regime and not of a democratic state. NSA has not only violated the law, it even refuses to allow the Justice Department to investigate its violation. This is the behavior of a dictatorship, not of a democracy.

A recent example of how we got where we are is in the following language of the Emper…, pardon, the President, follows. Freedom and democracy are no longer what we thought it was. The present regime defines freedom as when business can do whatever it wants. Democracy is getting to choose a pre-selected lap-dog of industry every four years. The interview below can be read in full at the English pages of Der Spiegel. I do not have their permission to post any part of anything anywhere. Der Spiegel is the German equivalent of our Time magazine—only more truthful and without the glaring omissions of topics that really matter. The voice of BILD is a reporter from the BILD am Sonntag of Germany. Kind of like the Washington Times with cleavage.

GEORGE W. BUSH INTERVIEW

“Germans Don’t Like War. I Can Understand That.”

Kai Diekmann of Germany’s BILD am Sonntag newspaper recently interviewed President George W. Bush in the Oval Office. Here is a full transcript of the interview.

BILD: Taking a look at the past, do the Americans feel that the Germans abandoned them when they went to war with Saddam Hussein?

Bush: I’ve come to realize that the nature of the German people are such that war is very abhorrent, that Germany is a country now that is — no matter where they sit on the political spectrum, Germans are — just don’t like war. And I can understand that. There’s a generation of people who had their lives torn about because of a terrible war.

I felt like — I made the decision I made based upon my full understanding that threats must be dealt with before they come to fruition. And I fully understood during that period of time not everybody would agree with me. And so we put together a significant coalition and followed through on a difficult decision.

The point now is not what went on in the past. The point now is how do we work together to achieve important goals. And one such goal is a democracy in Germany [italics are mine]. And I appreciate the German government’s — previous government’s support and this government’s support of helping the Iraqis rebuild their lives. Training missions are important. Debt relief was important. Gerhard Schr der relieved the debt on Iraq. And all those gestures are very important gestures that say that even though people disagreed with the decision to go into Iraq, we now agree that it’s important that a democracy in Iraq succeed. And that’s how I view the relationship.