Bishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, gave an interview to Newsweek Magazine recently:
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The 73-year-old Tutu is an Anglican archbishop who fought the racist, semi-fascist apartheid-based regime in South Africa through the 1970s, 1980s and up to the mid 1990s, when the country finally became a Democracy in a fairly bloodless revolution.
Tutu says Bush is not religious, and that, in fact, the US is growing to look like the semi-fascist state he spent most of his adult life opposing.
More below:
Tutu was asked about his reaction to the Bush re-election - his first response was to laugh -
I still can't believe that it really could have happened. Just look at the facts on the table: He'd gone into a war having misled people--whether deliberately or not--about why he went to war. You would think that would have knocked him out [of the race.] It didn't. Look at the number of American soldiers who have died since he claimed that the war had ended. And yet it seems this doesn't make most Americans worry too much. I was teaching in Jacksonville, Fla., [during the election campaign] and I was shocked, because I had naively believed all these many years that Americans genuinely believed in freedom of speech. [But I] discovered there that when you made an utterance that was remotely contrary to what the White House was saying, then they attacked you. For a South African the déjà vu was frightening. They behaved exactly the same way that used to happen here [during apartheid]--vilifying those who are putting forward a slightly different view.
Tutu sees other similarities between old-school South Africa and our new, bold nation -
Look at the [detentions in] Guantanamo Bay. You say, why do you detain people without trial in the fashion that you have done? And when they give the answer security, you say no, no, no, this can't be America. This is what we used to hear in South Africa. It's unbelievable that a country that many of us have looked to as the bastion of true freedom could now have eroded so many of the liberties we believed were upheld almost religiously. [But] feeling as devastated in many ways as I am, it is wonderful to find that there are [also] Americans who have felt very strongly [about administration policies]--the people who turned out for rallies against the war. One always has to be very careful not to do what we used to do here, where you generalize very facilely, and one has to remember that there are very many Americans who are feeling deeply distressed about what has taken place in their country. We take our hats off to them.
Obviously, there are lots of places where the history is NOT parallel - but how far does the similarity go? Do we need non-violent protests? Should the world boycott US products and tourism? Do we need a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" of our own?