The Enemy Within: Fear-Based Right-Wing Politics are Selling Out America

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

If you’re over the age of 20 you can probably remember a time when the United States demonized some foreign nation for the way it handled law enforcement.  When my parents were children it was Nazi Germany.  The phrase “papers please” is still synonymous with overbearing totalitarian dictatorships to the extent that it was invoked by opponents of the Arizona immigration bill before the media noticed that oil was leaking into the Gulf of Mexico.  Americans spent the late 1930s and early 1940s imagining the jackbooted gestapo dragging victims away without trial or resource and comforting themselves in the notion that, here, in the United States, we have rights and liberties.

When I was a child it was the Soviet Union.  Like Nazi Germany, the specter of Soviet totalitarianism also lingers in American politics.  Hammers and sickles featured prominently on the signs held aloft by the Tea Party in opposition to President Obama’s healthcare reform legislation and, as we did during the second World War, Americans spent the Cold War imagining nighttime raids by Stalin’s KGB and the horror of being “disappeared” without trial or resource.

Younger Americans will remember the run-up to China’s inclusion in the World Trade Organization and the characterization of China’s police state as much the same as the Soviet one.  Americans wrung their hands over China’s human rights record and congratulated ourselves on our moral superiority just as we did with the Nazis and the Soviets.  Once again we comforted ourselves in the knowledge that such callous disregard for due process and justice could never take root in the American system, steeped as it was in the Enlightenment philosophy of our Founding Fathers.

We like to imagine our enemies as demons – as inhuman incarnations of wickedness, depravity, and evil.  We like to ascribe our enemy’s actions – those we deem barbarous anyway – to their inhumanity.  How quickly we forget that the people of Nazi Germany, of Soviet Russia, of Maoist China were and are people too: people who feared and worried, who believed their nation was engaged in an epic struggle against shadowy enemies within, hellbent on destroying their very way of life.

To the Nazis it was the insidious Jews that sabotaged the rise of the German state to greatness and betrayed the Kaiser to the allies in the First World War.  To the Soviets it was the Kulak and nefarious capitalist spies that threatened the peace and kept the national economy from reaching a long-promised communist utopia.  To the Chinese, western corrupted dissidents imperiled the peace and stability of the nation and undermined the march of progress.

And to the Americans it is Muslim terrorists – extremists who hate us for our very way of life – who lurk in shadows and strike without warning.

Like everyone else, the United States has its own bogyman – an over-hyped and much feared enemy of minimal consequence in whose name all manner of travesties and previously unthinkable compromises may be justified.  Since the arrest of the alleged Times Square Bomber, the pundits and politicians have lined up around the block to weigh in on the virtues and villainy of the American treatment of terrorists.

Or more accurately, alleged terrorists.

The protections in the United States Constitution extend, not merely to US Citizens but, in most cases, to all individuals within the territory of the United States and while nefarious legal arguments may be made for the treatment or mistreatment of prisoners picked up in foreign nations and held on imprisoned islands, the United States Constitution is, unquestionably, the supreme law of the land in, among other locations, JFK International Airport.

When national leaders like Senator John McCain, who condemned law enforcement officers for Mirandizing the alleged Times Square Bomber, and Senator Joe Lieberman, who plans to introduce legislation literally stripping citizenship and constitutional rights from those accused of joining a foreign terrorist network, set aside American notions of liberty, justice, and due process out of fear and populist jingoism, they would render the United States little better than vilified regimes she has set herself against for the last century.  While the causes of war and political opposition are many and varied, to some extent American blood was shed in Europe and – yes – in Vietnam in opposition to the politics of despotic fear so gleefully embraced by these two United States Senators.

Lieberman, at least and for all his failings, has no election to concern himself with this November and so to some degree his willingness to reduce American Citizenship to a mere legal formality can be attributed to his own well meaning, if misguided, views on national security.  McCain, however, is engaged in a bitter primary battle for his seat and has shown himself willing to lunge to the right without thought for the ramifications of his mercurial politics.  Lieberman may be wrong, but McCain has truly sold his soul; what sort of man imprisoned without rights and tortured without resource, would wish such a fate on another?