Aohell

Guantanamo and You

Many nations in the world have agreed to not only extend the concept of human rights to their citizens, but to visitors as well. In times of war, these same nations have agreed to behave within certain parameters, which include a certain measure of human rights for captured troops and civilian populations in occupied areas. The nations who refuse to honor these agreements are generally reviled as despotic states, showcases of man's inhumanity to man, and as examples of evil empires.

The worst governments to ever rule nations, the Communists in China and Russia and the Nazis in Germany being the chief proponents of a host of others with lower death tolls, justified their inhumanity by defining the targets of state-sponsored terror as "life unworthy of life". By placing the targets outside the scope of humanity, they claimed the right to treat them as the subhumans they had become. This is not a new concept. Rome and Greece had their hosts of slaves upon whose backs they built cruel states - perhaps democratic at the top, but imperious and bloody at the base. But as long as the states persisted in defining certain humans as being something other than human, they could persist in slavery, genocide, democide, or other reprehensible practices.

The United States of America has placed certain humans outside the scope of humanity. Although clouded under the cover of vague legalese, they are de facto life unworthy of life as they languish in Guantanamo or other, less well-known prisons under US authority. The only reason to deny them rights is to pursue a foreign policy which treats the rest of the world as a preserve for US interests, a foreign policy which creates opportunities for corporations to exploit labor overseas in a manner approaching slavery, but without the relocation costs. This imperious and bloody base supports the democracy at the top of US society. Were the US to stop behaving like the Romans of old, there would be no need to define any person as needing special treatment outside the normal law consisting of unlawful detention, denial of trial or bail, torture, and eventually death. That's what happened to Mao's, Stalin's, Hitler's, and many another dictator's victims, and it's what's happening in Guantanamo.

If you believe that the inmates at Guantanamo or in any other secret US prison are deserving of this treatment, then you yourself are defining them as life unworthy of life and are therefore participating in the authoritarian regime which prevents true democracy from developing, be it in Iraq, Afghanistan, the US, or anywhere else in the world.