George W. Bush had almost completed his first
year as president when I wrote the article that is reproduced below (updated in
2007 with the long lead-off quote from Richard Wright). Most of the article is a reprint of the piece
from the tabloid Star written in 1999
when Bush was still the governor of Texas.
If you do a Net search of the terms “Bush torture fraternity” you will
see that others have also reported on the severe hazing—amounting to
torture—that Bush presided over as president of Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE)
fraternity at Yale University, but I was the first to put the full story on the
Internet.
At that time, we had invaded Afghanistan, but
the revelations of the torture engaged in by our military and the CIA were yet
to come. My introduction to the Star article contained some grave
forebodings about what the little man from Texas was capable of. Fortunately, the worst of them did
not—or have not yet—come to pass. We have not yet gone the way of Joseph
Stalin’s Soviet Union. But that is
cold comfort for the hundreds of Muslim victims of the other things the article
portended, rampant torture with George Bush’s blessings.
Here is a full reproduction of that article:
"If
this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm
the dictator." – George W. Bush
To hold absolute power over others,
to define what they should love or fear, to decide if they were to live or die
and thereby to ravage the whole of their beings—that was a sensuality
that made sexual passion look pale by comparison. It was a noneconomic
conception of existence. The rewards for those followers who deserved them did
not cost one penny; the only price attached to rewards was the abject suffering
of some individual victim who was dominated by the recipient of the reward of
power.... No, they were not dumb, these [subordinate power wielders].... They
knew a thing or two about mankind. They had reached far back into history and
had dredged up from its black waters the most ancient of all realities, man's
desire to be a god.... How far wrong most people were in their appraisal of
dictators! The popular opinion was that these men were hankering for their pick
of beautiful virgins, good food, fragrant cigars, aged whisky, land, gold....
But what these men wanted was something much harder to get and the mere getting
of it was in itself a way of keeping it. It was power, not just the exercise of
bureaucratic control, but personal power to be wielded directly upon the lives
and bodies of others. – Richard Wright, The Outsider, pp. 198-199
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