Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Long Live McCarthyism!

Those who thought that the superb movie Good Night, and Good Luck by George Clooney is just retelling tales of a past buried in the black depths of US history are sadly mistaken.

Mc Carthyism is still alive, and in better shape than ever!

What? The fabled US Freedom of Speech?

Oh, you mean the concept that allows fascists, neo-nazis and equally pleasant gentlemen to widely express their views, demonstrate in the streets and spit their hatred in the face of citizens cowed by fear?

Well, that wonderful concept is reserved for a certain class of people: the far-right extremists, the wackos, the religious fundamentalists who'd have anyone bow low before their idea of a divine entity.

As to the left-wingers, the liberals, the critics of W's long list of ineptitudes and mistakes, well, those cannot benefit from that oh so generous and advanced concept.

They are branded as traitors, as madmen. They are compared to Hitler, and great top-class (and right-wing) national papers take care to help in the unmasking and denouciation of those dangerous outcasts of the self-righteous American Society. This is what a professor of the presitigous university of Yale found out, at his expense. And of course, he's not the only one to have known the sorry fate of the outcast rejected by all, by friends, colleagues and students alike. His crime? Well, to harbor views that do not run with the mainstream of the Wall Street Journal's news, or with those of the so delicately balanced Fox News.

Anyuone interested can find the whole story here, in this paper of the Guardian's today edition.

A week or two ago, I was reading a paper reporting the words of former Justice Sandra O'Connor, recently retired from the US Supreme Court. In her speech before a floor of corporate lawyers, she was warning them against the threatening changes in the US governance, against what she called the US's current edging toward a dictatorship.

Well, it would seem the US is still edging in that direction. As things stand, the polarization of the opinion within the US, the years of pushing forward all the fundamentalists and extremists, be they religious or neo-cons, has transformed the US. Before the Bush years, the US used to be an image feared or hated in some parts of the world.

It is now a threatening, looming figure for many of its own citizens as well.