American Society

commenter jri nails it:

The problem is American Society. We have slowly become a country dominated by people with very harsh impulses for people in certain classes: prisoners, children, the poor, gays, minorities, non-christions. These people are the pawns of a powerful political organizations. They are the willingly ignorant masses that will reliably vote Republican and will sit down to their nightly dose of "reality" TV and buy thier cheap consumer items by the truckload. They are the people who are marching us towards our destiny and the world's largest banana republic.

The violence in the Iraqi prison is not a problem to these people. This is how they expect the conquered to be treated. This is what they would do to you if they won a contest against you. They think that killing and force are the answer and that losers lose because that is the natural order of things.

I don't expect at least half of me fellow countrymen to feel the slightest twinge of regret or sorrow over what happened in Abu Ghreib. In fact, I think that they will say the guards didn't go far enough.

We have been setting ourselves up for this for at least 30 years. The stiffening of prison sentences, the hardening of attitudes against academia, the fetishizing of the military, the increasingly authoritarian tone taken by the media and government have all led to this moment, and I do not think that we have seen the end of it.