Reuters, March 7: Soldiers depicted in the new video would not face criminal charges, the Pentagon said. One section of the video showed a bound and wounded prisoner sprawled on the ground, and showed his bullet entry and exit wounds. At one point, a US soldier kicked the prisoner in the face. Army documents quoted a soldier at the scene as saying he "thought the dude eventually died. We weren't in any hurry to call the medics".
Coughley then explains that it is the dynamic of "merging with the herd" that causes people to have such a lack of conscience:
Does anyone read William Shirer's 'Berlin Diary: Journal of a Foreign Correspondent' nowadays? He was a gifted American reporter who described life in Nazi Germany from 1934 through 1941 (and in 1959 wrote his masterpiece, 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich') , but the diary itself is a story of personal despair and recounts the series of Germany's national catastrophes that "slipped inexorably towards the abyss of war and self-destruction".
Bush has plunged America into the abyss of everlasting war, and the parallels between what Bush America is becoming and what Hitler's Germany became in the 1930s are as startling as they are repellent.
In Nuremberg in September 1934, Shirer wrote that "when Hitler finally appeared on the balcony for a moment [the faces in the audience] reminded me of the crazed expressions I saw once in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some Holy Rollers . . . They looked up to him as if he were a Messiah . . ." and went on to record Hitler's shriek that "We are strong and we will get stronger!"
"There, in the floodlit night . . . the little men of Germany who have made Nazism possible achieved the highest state of being . . .: the shedding of their individual souls and minds--with the personal doubts and responsibilities and problems--until under the mystic lights . . . they were merged in the herd."
Coughley concludes this way:
Hitler's sycophants applauded his insane ambitions to dominate the world, and in Bush Washington the same type of people bow and scrape and applaud his voodoo schemes to impose "freedom" by the bomb and the bullet. America has lost all international moral authority it ever had, courtesy of a messianic ninny who seeks to construct an ethically corrupt system that encourages the strong to persecute the weak, the rich to despise the poor, and credulous bigots to triumph over common sense and decency. If someone doesn't agree with you, then go kick him in the face. It doesn't demand thought, and millions of people will think you're a great patriot.
I know it's hard to think about what is going on and the danger we are in. Somehow I believe it is better to be informed that to be ignorant. Somehow I think that it is necessary for there to be a critical mass of informed people for a difference to be made. It is so important that we not tune out what is being done in our name.
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