War Museum Of The Future-'Our Children Sobbing & Saying YES That's What We Did & We Are Ashamed'

[kpete]

They Will Steal It!

Monday 03 January 2011

by: Thom Hartmann, Berrett-Koehler Publishers | Serialized Book

They Will Steal It!

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

- John F. Kennedy

............................

When the 1993 movie Schindler’s List came out, we were living in Atlanta and living with us was Oliver, a 16-year-old German exchange student. Oliver, who had been through the German public schools and was a high school student, went with us to see it, and midway through the movie he broke down and sobbed; he cried the rest of the way through that movie and for an hour as we drove home. When he could finally talk about it, he said: “I knew we did that stuff. We learned that in school. But I didn’t really, really know we did that stuff—until I saw the movie.”

When we lived in Germany, we used to go on daytrips and weekly excursions with our kids. We went to the Dachau concentration camp, where Sigmund Rascher performed his experiments on people, many of whom died. We walked through Dachau with our children, and looked at pictures of the people, the bodies stacked up to be put in the crematorium, and we walked among the furnaces.

I wonder when the day will come that a generation of Americans will walk through a museum at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, or Abu Ghraib in Iraq, or Guantánamo in Cuba, or perhaps one of the hidden detention sites inside the United States or in Poland or in Czechoslovakia, and view it as our Dachau— places where horrific acts took place.

And we will walk through those museums with our children, saying, “Yes, that’s what we did. This is what George Bush, Alberto Gonzalez, and Dick Cheney did. And we are ashamed.”

A Bush administration Schindler’s List, about the torture and the killings carried out in our name, under the guise of promoting democracy and bringing peace:

* 1 million dead in Iraq
* 4.5 million Iraqi refugees
* Iraqi children prostituting themselves because their parents are dead
* 5 million Iraqi orphans
* Tortured Iraqi prisoners
* Aerial bombardment and murder of wedding parties and civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan

And on that future day, when a film is made about America’s killing and torturing human beings, I wonder if our children and grandchildren will watch the movie and break down sobbing as Oliver did.

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[Solly Mack]

1. k/r

[sinkingfeeling]

2. Unfortunately, I doubt that day will ever come. Our culture is so driven by the empire and its

worship of the military, that I can't image a nation where the majority of people would allow the truth of our 'wars' to be shown.

[kenfrequed]

3. The rationalizers..

Still tell us that we beat the indigenous people of this nation 'fair and square' as though we played Risk with them prior to negotiating treaties.

They still hide or pretend that the Phillipine theatre of the Spanish-American war didn't exist.

Most of us are completely numb and dehumanized to the horrors that our nation has perpetrated abroad.

Sadly I don't see it as likely that we will build such a museum. Had we impeached the Bushies we might have been able to say 'a week before never' rather than 'likely never.'

[Mnemosyne]

4. KnR for truth and visibility. n/t

[elehhhhna]

5. Yeah. Just like my generation weeping about their parents dropping TWO atomic bombs.

Meaning: not.