Reply #29: A few relevant links to consider [View All]

[JohnyCanuck]

All articles by Dr. Norman Livergood, a former department head at the US Army War College.

Police State USA

Military Dictatorship USA

The Necessity for Enlightened Thinking

From the Necessity for Enlightened Thinking:

In a democracy such as ours in America, it's the responsibility of citizens to inform themselves and to struggle against any encroachment of constitutional liberties. If some people are too unintelligent or morally deficient to see the tyrannous acts of the Bush administration, if some people are too cowardly to stand against those acts, it's still your individual responsibility as an American citizen to uphold the principles of democracy on which this nation is founded.

One of the most effective ways of feeling this is to view the 1961 Academy Award-winning film, "Judgment at Nuremberg," and consider how you could, in the future, be considered as one of three classes of war criminals depicted in the film:

* Nazi villains such as Goering (though not depicted in this movie, the Nuremberg tribunals included Goering's trial and conviction as a war criminal)

* Ordinary criminals such as the German judges who took advantage of the Nazi tyranny to feather their own nests

* Germans who prided themselves on upholding the nation's principles, such as Emil Janning, former German secretary of justice (portrayed in the movie by Burt Lancaster) and the widow of a convicted German general executed for ordering the murder of American POWs (portrayed by Marlene Dietrich). These kinds of people were shocked when they found that the world held them responsible for what had happened in Nazi Germany.

Abby Mann's brilliant screenplay "Judgment at Nuremberg" drives home several crucial points that we cannot afford to overlook:

We're responsible for being aware of of what's going on in our society; we can't plead ignorance. In the movie, the defense attorney argued strenuously that all those who supported or tolerated Nazis were guilty, not just those individuals then being tried.