Scheer interviews Gordon in his latest at Scheer Intelligence: Nuremberg on the Potomac
Gordon: "We have destroyed human life out of all proportion."
Gordon: "what they do to you in basic training is actually a slightly lighter version of what they do when they train torturers. "
Gordon: " especially among upper-class liberals in the United States, the objection to Trump is his manner, and his manner is crude and obnoxious, as you say. But what he’s really doing is not only continuing to kill people, and in fact increasing the number of drone strikes, for example, over the already great number that the Obama administration–
Sheer: "A man of impeccable manners. Barack Obama. I even feel that way about Bill Clinton. When Bill Clinton’s on television, I smile. I like him. He’s warm, he’s encouraging. And then I forget, he’s the guy that ended the welfare system"
Scheer: "American exceptionalism ... to my mind, is a really, it’s the most profound problem that American people have to face."
Gordon: "By definition, the United States is a country that does not torture. Therefore, whatever it is that you are observing, it cannot be torture, because that would be a logical contradiction, because we are the nation that doesn’t do that. And it’s almost impossible to enter into that understanding of the world, because no amount of evidence that you can present to the person who believes that is going to break that worldview. And so American exceptionalism allows us not only to have military bases in over 100 countries around the world; not only to conduct secret wars that the people in this country don’t even know about ... This whole idea that we are a unique bearer of human rights and democracy in the world–it’s very hard to break, because it’s a concealed, hermetically sealed worldview that people imbibe in grade school. And they imbibe it as they grow up, and it takes a lot of effort to break through."
Scheer: "most of the terrible wars since World War II have been fought under democrats, and financed enthusiastically."
Gordon: " It’s no accident that the reservists who were downstairs at Abu Ghraib, they were from West Virginia, and most of them in their civilian life were prison guards."
Gordon: "torture actually is a red thread that runs through the entire history of the United States, beginning with the Native American population ... Slavery itself would not have been as successful as it was at allowing the amassing of capital ... unless, the farmers figured out, they were caused physical pain. And it was the use, the concerted, intentional, well-documented use of physical pain in the cotton fields a century later that forced people to develop a physical technology of their bodies that allowed them, in the course of 40 years, to multiply by eight times the amount of cotton a human being could pick in a day, because the alternative was to have the skin taken off your back with a whip."
Scheer: " we don’t care about the people we bomb, and we don’t care–they’re expendable, they’re throwaway people. You want them out of sight, out of mind. It’s very deliberate ... the wars don’t make sense. And growing that cotton that way didn’t ultimately make sense. And slavery didn’t make sense. Except–except if we have a barbaric part of our nature, if we have a need to exploit others. Not just for economic reasons; if power corrupts. "
Listen or read: Scheer is a jewel
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-u-s-deserves-its-own-nuremberg-trials/sidd