Are Americans Immune from Empathy?

opinion by Don Torrence

Ralph Nader characterized the Bush regime as having embraced "messianic militarism," an apt description of the neocon power elite that has been instrumental in causing the present debacle in Afghanistan and Iraq. They manufactured and refined an ideological imperative that justifies the slaughter of over a hundred thousand Iraqis on the basis that it is God's plan that the US bring freedom and democracy to the region.

Doing God's will, then, is tantamount to being sanctified as an instrument of God, and--as such--your dictates are not to be questioned. Those outside this messianic imperative are the heathen, and are expendable. Thus the torture at Guantanamo and other US facilities.

Where are the voices of dissent crying out against these crimes carried out in the name of the American people? Their silence allows this barbarism to continue. Have the American people become "immune from empathy" as author Randall Robinson suggests?

There is some truth to Robinson's critique, and it stems partly from the fact that we live in an insular society that is shaped by four or five media conglomerates, which offer a worldview that validates white supremacy, condones unremitting competition, and portrays a draconian world in which the marketplace determines starvation of opulence.

This absurd glorification of the marketplace is convenient for the elites as it sanctions their continued expropriation of wealth and assuage their consciences in a world in which some 2.5 billion people exist on one or two dollars a day.

The present predatory capitalism has resulted in systemic corruption (Enron, Tyco, etc.) and has spawned a culture of violence. Subtle messages of class superiority and racial inferiority are evoked in the media, from the pulpit, and from the lectern. Compassion for the poor and dispossessed is seen as weakness in a culture that embraces messianic militarism with its emphasis on hierarchy and the so-called masculine virtues.

Certainly many Americans have become immune from empathy. This--together with our insular views--has allowed George W. Bush's messianic militarism to come to full bloom in the twisted ugliness of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram Air Base. The "Gulag's of our time" will continue until the American public demands their closure and the bringing to justice of those responsible.