from americablog, quoting newsweek…. I think they went a little overboard on SA being the MOST hated – it’s just the most recently hated/publicized. If only the USA could help out in Congo, neh? They blog as follows:
Hey, cool, we’re now being compared to one of the most loathed, oppressive, vile governments in the history of mankind. You gotta admit, it takes a real special gift to take us from a shining city on the hill to apartheid in only 5 years.
Tell me again that Osama hasn’t already won?
For anyone who has lived under an authoritarian regime, phone tapping—or at least the threat of it—is always a given. But U.S. citizens have always been lucky enough to believe themselves protected from such government intrusion. So why have they reacted so insipidly to yet another post-9/11 erosion of U.S. civil liberties?
I’m sure there are many well-meaning Americans who agree with their president’s explanation that it’s all a necessary evil (and that patriotic citizens will not be spied on unless they dial up Osama bin Laden). But the nasty echoes of apartheid South Africa should at least give them pause.
Then there’s this from Desmond Tutu:
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African Anglican leader who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his principled fight for justice in his native country. “It’s unbelievable,” he told me in an interview, “that a country that many of us have looked to as the bastion of true freedom could now have eroded so many of the liberties we believed were upheld almost religiously.”
Tutu recalled teaching in Jacksonville, Fla., when Bush won re-election in 2004. “I was shocked,” he said, “because I had naively believed all these many years that Americans genuinely believed in freedom of speech. [But I] discovered there that when you made an utterance that was remotely contrary to what the White House was saying, then they attacked you. For a South African the déjà vu was frightening. They behaved exactly the same way that used to happen here—vilifying those who are putting forward a slightly different view.” Tutu made these comments to me exactly a year ago next week.
