As mentioned by Meteor Blades in a postscript to last night's "Open Thread for Night Owls, Early Birds & Ex-Pats":
Jewish Army trainee in Ga. says he was beaten, harassed after instructors used anti-Semitic slurs
Reading the reported details of the attack, its prologue in his harassment by by his drill sergeants, and the other context, the anti-Semitism seems the "garden variety" we (unfortunately) expect from Georgians. Not (necessarily) an institutionalization of it by the military, as I was worried we might see now that fake "Christians" have remade much of the military along their apocalyptic lines that require Jews as human sacrifices to bait a "messiah" to appear in Jerusalem (or something).
Of course, Georgia's baseline bigotry is as unacceptable and disturbing as it's ever been. Especially as years pass with so many chances to change are blown, so many other examples of Dixie changing its tune prove that Georgia, like most other places, can get past such self-defeating inhumanity.
But this story does have two (so far, at least) special warnings:
The investigation has cleared (so far) the attackers from a bigotry crime, without any declared or evident grounds, in face of some pretty clear evidence. That whitewash is indeed likely an institutionalized bigotry, if not merely a coverup of anything more than just a laundry room assault among novice "warriors". A more serious investigation, somewhere not buried in the heart of Dominionist Christian Georgia (and under patronage of someone other than Senator Saxby Chambliss, who stole his Senate seat from Max Cleland in the wave that swept the Christianist neocons like Bush into power), should uncover what larger "strategy" is in action in that apparently unsupportable dismissal.
An even larger problem is this attack's clues to the composition of today's military. Not just investigators who will coverup bigotry attacks on people being trained to unquestioningly protect each other with their lives on a moment's notice. But if the attackers really did start their beating by spitting "Juden", the Nazis' dehumanizing label for Jews, at their Jewish victim, in Georgia where inductees don't usually speak German, they're probably already either associated with some White supremacist gang, or are just interested in so associating. They probably see joining the US military as roleplaying Nazis. And with Dominionists so powerful inside the military, with the military waging an often declared "Crusade" against Muslims, dehumanizing them enough that they've been demonstrably tortured and massacred regardless of their military value, Bush's military is surely a popular destination for these evil scumbags.
Those people will soon have a young, Black Commander-in-Chief named Barack Hussein Obama. They will have been given a mountain of excuses to disrespect his command. They will have a military that has endlessly perverted itself for commitment to the Iraq War that Obama will end. A military that defied even Clinton, an indisputably White Christian Southerner himself (though no Dominionist), when he tried merely to eliminate the "ban" on (suppression of, really) gays in the military, not take away the Pentagon's apocalyptic Crusade reason for being. Clinton faced deep and effective defiance, stretching well beyond the "Don't Ask / Don't Tell" compromise, even as he gave the military superb budgets in the face of the end of the Cold War, and even a victory in the Balkans without a single lost American life. What will Obama face, when he offers what these bloodthirsty neonazis are consistently instructed to believe is "surrender in Iraq", and actual sacrifices when Obama cuts their budgets as he closes down the uncontrolled Iraq War to finance rebuilding America for a change? Especially as veterans start showing damage from the abuse Bush's military has put them through, and find the veterans' services are dilapidated, shortsighted, underfunded, even beyond their typical disgraceful condition that has always plagued it, even when not maliciously and by design as Bush's regime has delivered for most of a decade. While the recondite Bush backers and apologists issue a smokescreen of lies blaming Obama for "betraying veterans" because Bush's willful neglect actually shows its failures during Obama's watch, and saboteurs inside the military block Obama's reforms benefiting veterans just so Obama can take more blame.
We just lived through a Bush decade that wasn't just bad, it was strategically bad. Signs are everywhere that the real devastation is emerging only as Bush's spin doctors sew up the patient, which will start to emerge from the anesthesia only in January 2009. The military has had the most unmediated manipulations by Bush's traitorous minions. I hope some of Obama's best work lies in the herculean task of scouring it of some of America's worst evils, whether institutions or just bad people.
But I can't see what he can possibly do to mitigate a generation poisoned by training in evildoing, who've tasted blood and been rewarded for it. A new generation of hope coming up behind them won't eliminate their lost generation of despair. What can we do to survive them?