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The clearest way I can illustrate this is that after Pearl Harbor was attacked, FDR have his famous speech which carried foremost the message: "we have nothing to fear but fear itself".
Contrast that to Bush's message, which was, essentially: Be afraid! Give up your liberty for (the illusion of) security!
For years it was: If you see something suspicious, call the cops! Let the government inspect you if you want to ride the subway! (But only at some stops. Terrorists, please don't walk a block down to the next station!). If you really want to help, spend money buying whatever! Take off your shoes to board a plane! Our government recommends you buy a bunch of hardware to protect your home against chemical weapons and dirty bombs!
Or: oh, hey, we invented a color-coded system to tell you how scared you should be all the time! (Pay no attention to the fact that we'll go on high sheet every time my administration comes under scrutiny for anything!)
Or: hey, we can label ANYONE we want as "ENEMY COMBATANTS" and they will have NO RIGHTS and we will torture them.
What changed was that Bush's administration used inflated fear of terrorism as a means of control. And if you voted against something in Congress... say, a war with Iraq (who had NOTHING TO DO with 9-11) you were branded as unpatriotic, and you got death threats.
Don't forget Freedom Fries, because those French pussies wouldn't join "George and Tony's Rootin' Tootin' Shoot 'Em Up Middle East Tour."
My god man I completely forgot about those stupid fucking terror alerts. "Today's terror alert level is Orange, just like it was yesterday and just it'll be tomorrow. Slightly elevated. Be afraid, but don't be too afraid to go to work, and make sure to vote for Bush again to protect you."
Remember leading up to the Iraq invasion, people were walking around unironically saying "I'd rather fight them over there than over here" as if Iraq could actually project power to the other side of the planet.
Fuck I hate this so much.
I think American citizens of Japanese descent would disagree with your good old days assessment of how Americans were treated by their own government during WW2. They certainly had their liberty and livelihoods taken from them. Furthermore people of color in general were still under the thumb of institutionalized racism that continues to this day. Do you believe they were better off back then too?
You're talking about oppression of minorities, and no one is going to argue that that was unconscionable. But I'm referring to the character if America as a whole. No part of our population was untouched by the darkness of the Bush administration.
I think FreeLikeGNU has a point here… the happier America as described has generally only been a reality for a subset of the population. Can we really suggest that is/was the ‘character [of] America’ as a whole?
The whole “MAGA” thing feels related to this point. Its like a large group of American’s feel the oppression, fear and lack of optimism and, in their anger and frustration, have embraced a view that what made America great was the division and exploitation rather than the optimism.
I’d argue causality — that they were purposefully led to that view by exploitative fuckwad Republican leadership that cared about Party more than the country and who used the fear, and exploited the crisis, to gain and maintain power and now don’t want to give it up. But we don’t really need to understand why or who led that change to also step back and be sad that the change happened.
Pretty sure you said:
You don't think sending an entire ethnic group who are also American citizens to internment camps in the dessert forcing them to abandon their homes, work, friends, businesses is what you just described?
That's slightly different. (Very slightly). Those American citizens actually did have the right to fight their incarceration in court.
... It just so happens that the court absolutely shit the bed in a 6-3 ruling about their constitutionality
On the other hand, internment camps were effectively ended by the the supreme Court the next year.
Contrast that with "enemy combatants" who had NO ACCESS TO THE CIVILIAN COURT SYSTEM.
I don't see how "slightly different" could support the argument that things were effectively better at the time citizens were put into camps. The legal system supported a racist policy by "6-3 ruling about their constitutionality". Furthermore:
No. It was over two years before the order was suspended and the last of the camps shut down. The order was not officially terminated until 1976!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066
@flossdaily @Dark_Arc
All true.
The fear mongering the GOP party engages in now is unparealleled in its scope and voracity. All one has to do is mention limits on gun ownership to see the responses that start with "BUT I NEED PROTECTION!"
Not everyone is out to get you.
A lot of these gun nuts actually believe the only thing holding China back from invading us is the fact that we're heavily armed. Don't get me wrong, in the event of a foreign invasion I can see how a heavily armed population could deter or thwart the enemy. But Americans don't understand how insanely fucking overpowered the US military is. The ability to project power to the other side of the planet on MULTIPLE FRONTS is uniquely American, and it is the US military's principle objective since WWII. The only way to do that is with countless trillions of dollars which only the US has been willing and able to do for decades.
The idea of Russia, China, or literally anyone, packing hundreds of thousands or millions of troops into boats, sailing across the Atlantic or the Pacific, landing ground troops in our cities, taking out the air force, navy, coast guard, army, and national guard, to the point where friggin Bubba and his Meal Team 6 commandos need to grab their guns and start shooting commies in the streets...it would be funny if it weren't their core political ideology...
I feel like theres also some people who want guns so they could fight the government (like texas threatening to secede), which is equally hilarious.
I could definitely see that, thanks. It's been a great frustration of my life to see "American the brave" regularly be "America the scared", and as I've gotten older I've increasingly found it (and many post 9-11 policies) ridiculous. I hope we can fix this in the coming decades, I wasn't old enough to speak up or understand what was going on then... I am now.