The Rise of the Fourth Reich - ThereAreNoSunglasses

EPILOGUE 363◆◆izing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tacticwas to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation. In November2007, former federal judge Michael B. Mukasey was sworn in asattorney general of the United States, despite contentious confirmationhearings focused on the issue of torturing prisoners. Hereplaced Alberto R. Gonzales, who was criticized for his part incrafting the Bush administration’s secretive legal arguments permittingthe torture of suspects. Mukasey, who served eighteenyears as judge of U.S. district court for the Southern District ofNew York, presided over the trials of Omar Abdel Rahman andEl Sayyid Nosair, the convicted bombers of the World TradeCenter in 1993; the trial of José Padilla, the man declared an “enemycombatant” by President Bush and the only person convictedin connection with the 9/11 attacks; and the lawsuits betweenWorld Trade Center leaser Larry Silverstein and several insurancecompanies over damages stemming from the 9/11 attacks.Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.The most significant common thread among these regimes wasthe use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people’s attentionfrom other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channelfrustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice—relentlesspropaganda and disinformation—were usually effective.Often the regimes would incite “spontaneous” acts against thetarget scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews,ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, membersof other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.”Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terroristsand dealt with accordingly. Examples of such tactics canbe heard from the mouths of those who constantly use racialslurs. Afghanistan’s former “freedom fighters” have semanticallychanged into “insurgents” then into “al-Qaeda terrorists” in thenews columns, while such epitaphs as “rag head” and “sand nigger”are commonly used in the general population.The supremacy of the military and avid militarism.Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and