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Before I start comparing Bush and Obama to Nazis, I want to say a few words about Godwin�s Law, which, in its original form, goes like this: �As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.� Now, as Glenn Greenwald used to be at pains to assert back when he wrote for Salon (and I hope I don�t get the NSA on my ass for mentioning him), just because lots of people make spurious comparisons between Hitler and whatever it is they don�t like doesn�t mean that some comparisons aren�t apt and important. Some things really are appallingly Naziesque, and a comparison becomes necessary in order to convey a proper understanding of their evil and of the moral revulsion that they warrant.
Having said that, I recently watched Roberto Rossellini�s 1946 film, Paisan. The middle film in his �War Trilogy� (the first being Rome Open City (1945) and the last being Germany, Year Zero (1948), Paisan is an episodic film depicting stories of interactions between Italians and Americans during the Allied invasion of Italy in WWII. The sixth and final story of the film revolves around a group of Italian partisans and their American OSS advisors as they fight Nazis in the marshlands of the Po River. Spoilers to follow, for those who have not yet seen the movie, although it doesn�t� really traffic in mystery and suspense. Now, the film ends with the American agents and the Italian partisans getting captured by the Nazis. The leader of the American force asks his Nazi captor what he plans to do with the partisans and the Nazi responds (and I�m paraphrasing here): �Well, they�re not POWs, because we don�t recognize them as the soldiers of any government. They�re bandits and will be treated accordingly.� And the Nazis end up murdering the captured partisans, violating the rights to which they would have been entitled as POWs (it�s also generally illegal to murder unarmed people, but that�s a different matter).Now, if you�re anything like me, you saw this bit about the partisans not being POWs and you were immediately reminded of the prisoners who have been languishing at Guantanamo for ten or more years now, many of whom were cleared for release years ago, many of whom have never been charged with a crime, let alone given the opportunity to defend themselves in court, let alone convicted. This situation arises because the Bush administration (and subsequently the Obama administration, which has largely followed the Bush people�s lead when it comes to the �War on Terror�) refused to recognize its prisoners as being prisoners of war. Well, ok, so if they�re not prisoners of war, then they�re just criminals, right? And they should be processed in the American criminal justice system and be accorded the rights that this system recognizes? Right?
Wrong. Why deal with all the tedious legal technicalities of �fair trials� and �presumption of innocence� and �not getting tortured� that come with the Bill of Rights? So, instead of recognizing them as POWs or criminals, the Bush people just invented a bullshit category for them: they are �detainees.� Detainees, the Bushies argued, had no rights under American law or international law. They�re not soldiers, they�re terrorists, but not like Timothy McVeigh or Eric Rudolph (both of whom were processed in the American criminal justice system), because they�re foreign and Muslim. Anwar al-Awlawki, who was assassinated on Obama�s orders in 2011, wasn�t foreign, but rather an American citizen, but he was still a Muslim, and that made him a foreigner in the eyes of enough Americans that most citizens of this country didn�t object to his extrajudicial execution. And almost none of them give a shit about the �detainees,� many of whom are completely innocent and have been cleared for release, who continue to rot away in the tropical gulag that the U.S. operates in Guantanamo (which it acquired through imperialist aggression against Spain and paternalistic meddling against Cuba; there�s a lot of bullshit going on here). And if people are shocked to hear that these crimes are comparable in some ways to those perpetrated by the Nazis, well, maybe it wouldn�t hurt to shock them every now and then.
