I watched the Killing Fields again last night, and I think the horror of what happened in Cambodia almot thirty years ago has finally sunk in. The first time I saw the movie in High School fifteen years ago, I don't think I was intellectually prepared to deal with what I saw. I had fully bought into the idea that genocide (of any sort) would never happen again. Recent years have proven that theory wrong on many levels.
Perhaps what affected me the most was the uneasy feeling that the re-education and labor camps could happen here, where I never believed that before. Even taking into account the treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the history of the American Indian, I had always believed that, at least in America, we had gotten past all of that.
John Ashcroft and George W. Bush have relieved me ot that illusion, for which I do not thank them. The USA Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act, along with Total Information Awareness and the now-defunct Operation Tips show us what our leader's vision is. According to some reports, Mr. Ashcroft wants to set up camps for Americans he deems "dangerous", but have committed no actual crime. Mr. Bush obviously believes that the government has some right to spy on Americans who have committed no crimes and are not under suspicion of having committed crimes. If this account is in anyway accurate, the U.S. Secret Service has moved whole-heartedly into making the new American police-state a reality.
In the words of a friend, "...maybe we haven't been paranoid enough."