Politics & Power Quote by Peter Singer

Singer is skewering a particularly comfortable moral reflex: the idea that evil is always somewhere else, lodged in the motives of foreign “people who hate freedom,” never in the routines of our own institutions. By pairing Bush’s grand post-9/11 metaphysics with the knee-jerk reaction to Abu Ghraib, Singer spotlights how national self-image works as an ethical solvent. If abuse “is not what Americans do,” then it becomes an aberration, a few bad actors, a PR problem - anything but a predictable outcome of policy, secrecy, and power.

The intent isn’t just to accuse Bush of hypocrisy; it’s to show how rhetoric manufactures innocence. “Hate freedom” is less a diagnosis than a narrative device: it turns geopolitical conflict into a morality play, where the home team embodies values by definition. That makes the photographs of torture uniquely destabilizing. Images don’t argue; they indict. Bush’s response tries to reassert the brand - American = humane - instead of treating the scandal as evidence that values require enforcement, not recitation.

Singer’s subtext is utilitarian and unsentimental: if we care about suffering, we can’t outsource moral failure to enemies or treat national identity as a shield against accountability. The context is the early War on Terror, when the administration’s absolutist language about evil met the messy reality of detention, coercion, and “enhanced” methods. Singer is warning that the most dangerous evil may be the kind that arrives wearing our own flag.