SOMETHING TO REFLECT ON

 

From Chris Hedges: 

"The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, including the killing of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province. They were terrorized by heavily armed American execution squads for decades. 

It would not come as a shock to any of the students I teach in prison. Militarized police in poor urban neighborhoods kick down doors without warrants and kill with the same impunity and lack of accountability. What the rest of us are facing now, is what Aimé Césaire called imperial boomerang.

Empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland. 

The tyranny Athens imposed on others, Thucydides noted, it finally, with the collapse of Athenian democracy, imposed on itself. But before we became the victims of state terror, we were accomplices. Before we expressed moral outrage at the indiscriminate taking of innocent lives, we tolerated, and often celebrated, the same Gestapo tactics, as long as they were directed at those who lived in the nations we occupied or poor people of color.

 We sowed the wind, now we will reap the whirlwind. The machinery of terror, perfected on those we abandoned and betrayed, including the Palestinians in Gaza, is ready for us."

 Paul Krugman: 

"It has been clear for a long time, to anyone willing to see, that the people running the federal government — Trump, Miller, Noem, Bovino and more — are monsters. 

It has been equally obvious that ICE and the Border Patrol are now filled with sadistic thugs. Yet many people — almost the entire GOP, everyone serving in the Trump administration, some Democrats, a significant part of the media — were too cowardly to admit the obvious."

NYTimes letter to the editor:

"George Orwell warned in '1984' that power demands that citizens 'reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,' calling it the 'final, most essential command.' 

On Saturday, our own government asked the public to do just that when it told us that the man who was killed was intent on inflicting harm on the agents who beat and then ultimately killed him."