Susan Sontag essay: Iraq torture photos

Susan Sontag has a brilliant essay in today's Guardian What have we done? evaluating the meaning of the Iraq toture photos and what they reveal about contemporary American society.

"You ask yourself how someone can grin at the sufferings and humiliation of another human being - drag a naked Iraqi man along the floor with a leash? set guard dogs at the genitals and legs of cowering, naked prisoners? rape and sodomise prisoners? force shackled hooded prisoners to masturbate or commit sexual acts with each other? beat prisoners to death? - and feel naive in asking the questions, since the answer is, self-evidently: people do these things to other people. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too, do them when they have permission. When they are told or made to feel that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be mistreated, humiliated, tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior, despicable race or religion. For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show. Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be circulated and seen by many people, it was all fun. And this idea of fun is, alas, more and more - contrary to what Mr Bush is telling the world - part of "the true nature and heart of America". "

Also in today's Guardian - this really disturbing article by John Sutherland on the literature that's popular in far-right circles: Far right or far wrong?.

"The book currently generating the most chatter is Jean Raspail's Camp of Saints. First published in 1973, in France... Raspail's loathsome novel has recently achieved something like respectability. The author has a website and has been hailed "the Frantz Fanon of the White Race". Camp of Saints articulates a western nightmare fashionable among neo-conservatives. Civilisations won't "clash". The developed world (and in the Middle East, Israel) will simply be outspawned into extinction...The book has also found a powerful advocate in Daniel Pipes. A leading neo-conservative and Middle East expert, he was appointed last August to the US Institute of Peace (a "non-partisan federal institution" dedicated to the "prevention, management and resolution of international conflicts") by George Bush."

I found this review of the book on the American Renaissance site:
Fairest Things Have Fleetest Endings
AM describes itself as “a literate, undeceived journal of race, immigration and the decline of civility".

The book is available from Amazon.com, which amazingly hosts many ecstatic reviews by racists.