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Mickey Z
Cool Observer
the Department of Homeland Security.
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
It Can Happen Here (or anywhere)
In a review of “Hotel Rwanda,” Stephen Holden of the New York Times declares that the film, “radically downplays the actual gore, which is observed either through a fog or from a distance. Bodies are strewn everywhere, but the streets don’t run with blood, and no hideous mutilation is shown. Even the beatings seem tentative. Still, the movie does its job. You are left with the uncomfortable suspicion that if the conditions for such a perfect storm of hatred were right, a similar catastrophe could boil up almost anywhere.”
Putting aside the Times’ pathetic penchant for using the passive tense, this passage did make my stomach churn. How hard would it be to stir up the indoctrinated masses here in the U.S.? I’m talking, for example, about the fanatics who respond with such hostility to, say, an article that does not canonize Pat Tillman...threatening violence and demanding people like me leave the country. When the capacity for critical, independent thought is either surrendered (or at the very least, co-opted), the concept of “going too far” does not exist and that’s precisely when things seem to mysteriously “boil up.”
Anyone who thinks the U.S. would not let this happen here (or anywhere), can check out something I wrote on the ten-year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide:
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/mickeyz04222004/
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