During my internship in Washington, DC, my program took the participants to see "Cabaret." I'd seen the 1972 movie a few years earlier and hadn't been too impressed, but the stage production was different, and absolutely fantastic. The dramaturg included in the program an essay comparing the rise of socialism and Nazism to the current political climate in America. The essay showed ten signs that demonstrated the decline of Germany into paranoia and oppression; those signs were then linked to events happening in America, making several frightening parallels.
The movie Rendition opens today, which shows the darker side of our current administration. In his review of the movie, Roger Ebert comments that rendition started under Clinton. There is actually basis for rendition between states in the Constitution. Article 4, Section 2, Clause 2 states:
A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.
This is commonly called extradition, and when it appears as a plot device in Law and Order, we're ok with it. However, rendition, or more specifically extraordinary rendition, is completely different from that. The United States has repeatedly denied claims that the government engages in this behavior, through interviews with various officials and reports for Congress. Whether or not there is hard proof, I don't believe that it's a stretch, considering the presence of America in other countries, CIA satellite stations abroad, and Abu Ghraib. The plot of the movie Rendition follows an Egyptian-born American citizen being kidnapped off a flight from South Africa to Chicago. He is taken to an unnamed country and tortured during an interrogation to discover why a known terrorist, or someone with the same name, called him on his cell phone, which he may not even have had at the time. His wife, when she discovers his disappearance does everything in her power to free him, attempting to fight faceless security admins who care more about averting the possibility of a terrorist plot than actually considering the likelihood that the man is a terrorist.
The last time I was in an American law class, which was earlier this morning, we operated on an adversarial system of law, whereby people are innocent until proven guilty. And I'm pretty sure I read somewhere in the United States Constitution the words "due process." Yes, that's right, Amendments 5 and 14. But then, if the government is working to protect us from foreign threats, we should blindly accept it.
These attitudes toward foreign-born citizens is reminiscent of something.
"A member of the U.S. Congressional Nazi crimes committee visiting Buchenwald concentration camp shortly after its liberation, 24 April 1945."
The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its forein and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more power is diffused, checked, and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide.- R.J. Rummel, Death by Government
2 comments:
Many folks think that "it" cannot happen here. "It," of course, being tyranny. Perhaps "it" won't happen here, but as Americans we inherited a system which made "it" impossible.
Unfortunately, this system (a constitutional republic where the role of government is to protect the rights of the individual) rests on the idea that the citizenry will be educated, alert, and willing to act. When people simply assume "it" can't happen here, they undermind that system and we are left hoping that "it" won't happen here.
Post a Comment