Geof Stone, guest-blogger a casa di Lessig, inquadra storicamente il fenomeno Iraq con una serie di post molto interessanti, cominciando con i Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, passando per la Guerra Civile e le due Guerre Mondiali, e finendo con il Bill O’Reilly Show.
Mettere in prospettiva aiuta a capire:
“The United States has a long and consistent pattern of unduly restricting civil liberties in time of war. Time after time, we have panicked in the face of war fever. We have lashed out at those we fear and allowed ourselves to be manipulated by opportunistic and exploitative politicians. We did this in 1798, when we enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts, during the Civil War when Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, during World War I when the nation brutally suppressed all criticism of the war and the draft, during World War II when we interned 120,000 individuals of Japanese descent, during the Cold War when we humiliated, abused and silenced tens of thousands of individuals for their political beliefs and associations, and during the Vietnam War when the government engaged in an aggressive program of surveillance, infiltration, and surreptitious harassment designed to “exposre, disrupt, and neutralize” antiwar dissent.”
Post assai lunghi, e per niente prolissi.