Official US response to capture of Saddam Hussein: a degrading spectacle

[freethought23]

The official American response to the capture of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein must provoke feelings of deep disgust. It requires a political and media establishment from whom all traces of democratic or humane instinct have been eradicated to react with a display of such ignorance, vindictiveness and sadism.

There is irony in the fact that only a regime as depraved as the current one in Washington could create by its actions a degree of sympathy for Hussein, a right-wing nationalist thug and former ally of the US.

Banner headlines screaming “We’ve got him!,” the innumerable and tedious variations on the “rat” caught in his “hole,” countless news items citing the event as George W. Bush’s “ultimate Christmas present”—what does this all add up to? Victor’s justice, with an unspeakably backward and repellent quality to it.

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The spectacle of official America celebrating over Saddam Hussein’s capture, with its air of a particularly primitive and bloodthirsty ritual, will horrify and outrage masses of people. It becomes more and more apparent, and this is a relatively recent feature of modern social life, that the American ruling elite inhabits a political and moral universe that is distant and alien from the lives and feelings of the overwhelming majority of humanity, including American humanity. In decent-minded people such goings-on can only evoke feelings of shame, the sense of witnessing something unclean.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/dec2003/huss-d16.shtml