george bush like a communist?

If I am not mistaken, one claim made by George Bush the younger was that,

with regards to torture,

he had been told by the relevant "experts" that it was allowable,

hence he thought no further.

First there is a Socratic thought: about such matters there really are no experts---alternatively, a moderately reasonable individual if given the relevant facts about, e.g., "water-boarding" would say, without hesitation, that it is torture, and unjustified.

But, secondly, I recently happened to be reading the novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera. The character Tomas is thinking about the Czechoslovak Communists

who said things like "we didn't know"....

Once the terrors of Stalin were revealed, after many had been unfairly murdered,

Tomas describes the sort of things the prosecuting attorneys (responsible for the

deaths of innocent men and women) say:

I didn't know; I believed [what I was told]....

Tomas finds this an inadequate defense for those murderers, and I make a similar judgment about Bush and his like....

Alas, the situation with Communism was superior to ours insofar as the wrongness, the fundamental criminality of what had been done was recognized.....(a country had been placed in the hands of a foreign power, just as the USA has now been placed in the hands of a ruling class, whose powers have become more entrenched than ever before...... and how is that connected to torture in particular? Well, the use of any means to hold onto power is a common thread--although admittedly, the USA seems (usually) to favor the murder and terror of people in distant countries, while the terror in CSSR was internal.... . I suppose the forms of internal control in the USA, as has been noted by others, are largely more psychological......though there again, I have been told that the use of tasers (e.g.) is more common in the minority neighborhoods of the country....