Evil-doer proof perplex
Roger Baker
rcbaker@eden.infohwy.com
Mon, 10 Dec 2001 12:50:51 -0800
--Apple-Mail-1--354519197
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=US-ASCII;
format=flowed
On Monday, December 10, 2001, at 02:32 AM, Jim Strong wrote:
> Good and evil, right and wrong, tolerance and
> intolerance, non-violence and violence - all these
> things, Roger, are most often defined and/or justified
> in the mind of the beholder/doer of the deed.
> ------------------------------------------------
> The issues that are clearer to me personally are the
> obvious cases of abuse like the Enron scandal - which
> still is in its infancy, the manipulation of the stock
> market that has gone on forever, and the people in the
> world who don't have the basics to survive - food,
> shelter and clothing.
> -------------------------------------------------
> The thing about violence, it seems to me, is it is a
> VERY BIG "First Step" issue. You really don't want to
> take that first step and go there unless there is no
> other choice. I tend to side with Voltaire's
> suggestion (the only excuse for intolerance is
> intolerance) and extrapolate accordingly. Governments
> or religions that posit it is "okay" to be intolerant
> of those different from them, or to do harm to or
> "minimize" those who do not believeas they do or who
> don't buy into the same rituals of belief systems as
> theirs are the problem to me. Whether it is the
> Spanish Inquisition, the New England Witch trials,
> Joseph Stalin, the Khmer Rouge (champion small country
> killers of all time) or any other
> organization/political party/church or government that
> wants to do anything but provide a fair, basic level
> of services to the population.
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Your earlier reference to a "journalist" who is using
> a psuedonym to reveal the "TRUTH" about American
> casualties in Afghanistan is an example of what I am
> talking about. It appears you accept almost blindly
> the premise (upon which it obviously is based ) that
> this is the Pentagon/MACVSOG Viet Nam Body Count
> Apparatus in action once again. I doubt that they are
> that blatantly stupid this time. If casualty numbers
> are being "cooked," the guv-mint will pay the
> credibility price once again in the end. But at least
> even the Neanderthals at Fox News (hume et al) use
> their real names...
Jim; I see very little about would I can disagree with
what you write above.
I support the Green Party exactly because it questions
corporate political empires like Enron, and instinctively so.
The Greens won't take any corporate money and have non-violence
as one of their basic principles (Green leader Joschka Fischer in
Germany is being quite un-green in supporting
our unilateral fuzzy goals of the Afghan war rather than resolution
through international law).
The USA is becoming well known for snubbing the rest of the world
on arms control, biowarfare, landmines, global warming -- all except
when we them to endorse our wars for the benefit of our global empire.
This hidden motivation makes it forbidden to define terrorism
in a way that would include our early support for bin Laden, over-
throwing the government of Chile, and so on.
The reason why the casualty reporter writes under a psuedonym,
I feel certain, is because the US military won't allow any reporters in,
so he is obliged to operate secretly at high risk to even make a rough
estimate of US military casualties. The US control over
reporting is now acknowledged to be much greater than was the
case in Vietnam, and in WWII you could freely get Hitler's speeches.
Are they afraid we may decide to become terrorists if we see the
evidence?
Not allowing the bin Laden tape to be made public is symbolic
of a Bush/corporate media policy of spin and media control that
forces us to turn to relatively independant British, Paki, and Indian
news sources to find out what is going on.
We live under widespread and growing political corruption where the
President is chosen by a right wing Supreme Court, and neither party
wants to clean up the system so that elections represent the will of the
majority,
because the big money wants to continue to buy elections.
Democracy only gets in the way. Minorities have learned on the basis of
experience that their votes don't count; they vote with their feet so to
speak.
This is not a right versus left issue; this is an authoritarian empire
versus a free people, free press kind of issue in which dissent is
repressed.
Will the US government impose conditions like in the Soviet Union when
their press covered the Chechnian war in Pravda -- in a country in which
ten
media conglomerates with no journalistic morals beyond those of
Enron, control our "press" and TV?
We are being polarized into the corporate warlords who live in gated
communities on the one end of the wealth and power spectrum.
Second as a shrinking buffer layer we have the economically fearful
middle
class who are often willing to ignore the 2 million in prison, or
question how they
got there. And who consider their highest moral commitment to be getting
the family
to Disneyland. Whereas I consider it to be far more proof of moral
character to make a
religious pilgrimage to Mecca, despite my not being a Muslim.
And then on the other end there are the teeming masses of poor who do
the laundry
and the fast foods and who are repressed from even unionizing through
abandonment
by the Dems. When destitute, all are cast into the arms of religious
charity as the
government has adopted its stingy policy of compassionate conservatism.
Compassionate conservatism; welfare for corporations, not the poor.
Let me end up with a repost from Tim Jones and then our Texas Republican
Libertarian Ron Paul who takes political principles seriously. But why
are the
Democrats afraid to sponsor a similar resolution urging us not to lay
the
groundwork for a crazy religious war-against-evil with Iraq that the
United Nations
is strongly cautioning us against? I think it is really because Dems are
afraid of
being called unpatriotic and thus not getting their accustomed pile of
corporate
cash. If they're afraid to challenge Bush on his war, and Bush can win
on fast track.
then they can be made to come along on Bush's economic policy later.
If anything amounts to a mindless expansion of violence, a war with Iraq
based
on a Bush/Chaney interpretation of a UN resolution, even while the head
of the
UN is cautioning us against that war would be a blue ribbon example of
senseless
violence that will isolate us in world opinion.
-- Roger
***********************************************
Veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery's latest article compares
the US-led alliance against terror to the Holy Alliance signed by
Russians, Austrians and Prussians in the early nineteenth century.
Like that agreement, Avnery writes, the new international coalition
similarly allows the allies to designate any enemy (Chechen, Kurd,
Palestinian, etc) as a "terrorist." Averny argues that the inherent
danger of this development is that it will permit the allies to
continue to ignore the most fundamental world problem: the terrible
disparity between the rich and the poor regions of the earth. If the
stronger and richer nations use this alliance as an excuse to
solidify their own hegemony over the world's resources and wealth,
world-wide catastrophe will be the result. By the same token, the
danger is that the US will continue to pursue a "domestic agenda" of
supporting Israel at every turn against the better wisdom of national
policy interests, for which Mideast peace is the only guarantor of
regional stability. Avnery concludes, "It remains to be seen whether
Kissinger's dictum that 'Israel has no foreign policy, only a
domestic one' applies to the United States, too."
Associated Link: http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org
Uri Avnery
November 17, 2001
*******************************************************
A BILL is going to be voted on in Congress either
Monday or Tuesday. The bill states that "the refusal
by Iraq to admit United Nations weapons inspectors
into any facility covered by the provisions of
Security Council Resolution 687 should be considered
an act of aggression against the United States and its
allies."
Rep. Ron Paul is circulating a letter in opposition.
PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY
International Affairs Committee Drafting Resolution to
Authorize Bombing of Iraq
Rep. Ron Paul Circulating Congressional Letter in
Opposition
Friends - As many of you know, there has been immense
pressure building recently within the Bush
Administration, and the media, to make Iraq the next
target in our unending war against terrorism. Now a
number of members of Congress have written a letter
urging President Bush to do just that, and this coming
Tuesday the House International Relations Committee
will be drafting a resolution to authorize attacks on
Iraq. (Much greater attacks than what we have been
doing already, aimed at overthrowing Saddam Hussein.)
It will, among other things, stipulate that any
refusal of Iraq to grant access to UN inspectors to
any site in Iraq will be considered an "act of
aggression against the United States." Con. Ron Paul
of Texas is circulating a letter opposing any attacks
on Iraq. While not a pacifist letter, it does clearly
state that there will be massive loss of life if we do
this, that pretty much the rest of the world opposes
us doing this, that even our allies freely acknowledge
that there is no evidence that Iraq had anything to do
with the September 11 bombing, and that taking
military action against them would thus go well beyond
the original resolution authorizing use of force in
Afghanistan.
Please circulate this message to all your group and
personal email listserves, and urge your group
members, colleagues or friends to call their
Represenatives immediately (as in Monday and Tuesday)
to speak against the bombing of Iraq, and to urge them
to sign on to Rep. Paul's letter. While all members of
Congress are important, the members of the House
International Relations Committee are particularly so,
and they are listed below. If you would like a faxed
copy of Ron Paul's letter, please send a request to
cbenzschawel@peace-action.org
PLEASE TAKE ACTION NOW TO PREVENT THIS WAR FROM
SPREADING EVEN FURTHER
--Apple-Mail-1--354519197
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/enriched;
charset=US-ASCII
On Monday, December 10, 2001, at 02:32 AM, Jim Strong wrote:
<excerpt>Good and evil, right and wrong, tolerance and
intolerance, non-violence and violence - all these
things, Roger, are most often defined and/or justified
in the mind of the beholder/doer of the deed.
------------------------------------------------
The issues that are clearer to me personally are the
obvious cases of abuse like the Enron scandal - which
still is in its infancy, the manipulation of the stock
market that has gone on forever, and the people in the
world who don't have the basics to survive - food,
shelter and clothing.
-------------------------------------------------
The thing about violence, it seems to me, is it is a
VERY BIG "First Step" issue. You really don't want to
take that first step and go there unless there is no
other choice. I tend to side with Voltaire's
suggestion (the only excuse for intolerance is
intolerance) and extrapolate accordingly. Governments
or religions that posit it is "okay" to be intolerant
of those different from them, or to do harm to or
"minimize" those who do not believeas they do or who
don't buy into the same rituals of belief systems as
theirs are the problem to me. Whether it is the
Spanish Inquisition, the New England Witch trials,
Joseph Stalin, the Khmer Rouge (champion small country
killers of all time) or any other
organization/political party/church or government that
wants to do anything but provide a fair, basic level
of services to the population.
-----------------------------------------------------
Your earlier reference to a "journalist" who is using
a psuedonym to reveal the "TRUTH" about American
casualties in Afghanistan is an example of what I am
talking about. It appears you accept almost blindly
the premise (upon which it obviously is based ) that
this is the Pentagon/MACVSOG Viet Nam Body Count
Apparatus in action once again. I doubt that they are
that blatantly stupid this time. If casualty numbers
are being "cooked," the guv-mint will pay the
credibility price once again in the end. But at least
even the Neanderthals at Fox News (hume et al) use
their real names...
</excerpt>
Jim; I see very little about would I can disagree with
what you write above.
I support the Green Party exactly because it questions
corporate political empires like Enron, and instinctively so.
The Greens won't take any corporate money and have non-violence
as one of their basic principles (Green leader Joschka Fischer in
Germany is being quite un-green in supporting
our unilateral fuzzy goals of the Afghan war rather than resolution
through international law).
The USA is becoming well known for snubbing the rest of the world
on arms control, biowarfare, landmines, global warming -- all except
when we them to endorse our wars for the benefit of our global
empire.
This hidden motivation makes it forbidden to define terrorism
in a way that would include our early support for bin Laden, over-
throwing the government of Chile, and so on.
The reason why the casualty reporter writes under a psuedonym,
I feel certain, is because the US military won't allow any reporters
in,
so he is obliged to operate secretly at high risk to even make a rough
estimate of US military casualties. The US control over
reporting is now acknowledged to be much greater than was the
case in Vietnam, and in WWII you could freely get Hitler's speeches.
Are they afraid we may decide to become terrorists if we see the
evidence?
Not allowing the bin Laden tape to be made public is symbolic
of a Bush/corporate media policy of spin and media control that
forces us to turn to relatively independant British, Paki, and Indian
news sources to find out what is going on.
We live under widespread and growing political corruption where the
President is chosen by a right wing Supreme Court, and neither party
wants to clean up the system so that elections represent the will of
the majority,
because the big money wants to continue to buy elections.
Democracy only gets in the way. Minorities have learned on the basis
of
experience that their votes don't count; they vote with their feet so
to speak.
This is not a right versus left issue; this is an authoritarian empire
versus a free people, free press kind of issue in which dissent is
repressed.
Will the US government impose conditions like in the Soviet Union when
their press covered the Chechnian war in Pravda -- in a country in
which ten
media conglomerates with no journalistic morals beyond those of
Enron, control our "press" and TV?
We are being polarized into the corporate warlords who live in gated
communities on the one end of the wealth and power spectrum.
Second as a shrinking buffer layer we have the economically fearful
middle
class who are often willing to ignore the 2 million in prison, or
question how they
got there. And who consider their highest moral commitment to be
getting the family
to Disneyland. Whereas I consider it to be far more proof of moral
character to make a
religious pilgrimage to Mecca, despite my not being a Muslim.
And then on the other end there are the teeming masses of poor who do
the laundry
and the fast foods and who are repressed from even unionizing through
abandonment
by the Dems. When destitute, all are cast into the arms of religious
charity as the
government has adopted its stingy policy of compassionate
conservatism.
Compassionate conservatism; welfare for corporations, not the poor.
Let me end up with a repost from Tim Jones and then our Texas
Republican
Libertarian Ron Paul who takes political principles seriously. But why
are the
Democrats afraid to sponsor a similar resolution urging us not to lay
the
groundwork for a crazy religious war-against-evil with Iraq that the
United Nations
is strongly cautioning us against? I think it is really because Dems
are afraid of
being called unpatriotic and thus not getting their accustomed pile of
corporate
cash. If they're afraid to challenge Bush on his war, and Bush can
win on fast track.
then they can be made to come along on Bush's economic policy later.
If anything amounts to a mindless expansion of violence, a war with
Iraq based
on a Bush/Chaney interpretation of a UN resolution, even while the
head of the
UN is cautioning us against that war would be a blue ribbon example of
senseless
violence that will isolate us in world opinion.
-- Roger
***********************************************
Veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery's latest article compares
the US-led alliance against terror to the Holy Alliance signed by
Russians, Austrians and Prussians in the early nineteenth century.
Like that agreement, Avnery writes, the new international coalition
similarly allows the allies to designate any enemy (Chechen, Kurd,
Palestinian, etc) as a "terrorist." Averny argues that the inherent
danger of this development is that it will permit the allies to
continue to ignore the most fundamental world problem: the terrible
disparity between the rich and the poor regions of the earth. If the
stronger and richer nations use this alliance as an excuse to
solidify their own hegemony over the world's resources and wealth,
world-wide catastrophe will be the result. By the same token, the
danger is that the US will continue to pursue a "domestic agenda" of
supporting Israel at every turn against the better wisdom of national
policy interests, for which Mideast peace is the only guarantor of
regional stability. Avnery concludes, "It remains to be seen whether
Kissinger's dictum that 'Israel has no foreign policy, only a
domestic one' applies to the United States, too."
Associated Link:
<underline><color><param>1A1A,1A1A,FFFF</param>http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org</color></underline>
Uri Avnery
November 17, 2001
*******************************************************
<color><param>0000,0000,DEDE</param>A BILL is going to be voted on in
Congress either
Monday or Tuesday. The bill states that "the refusal
by Iraq to admit United Nations weapons inspectors
into any facility covered by the provisions of
Security Council Resolution 687 should be considered
an act of aggression against the United States and its
allies."
Rep. Ron Paul is circulating a letter in opposition.
PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY
International Affairs Committee Drafting Resolution to
Authorize Bombing of Iraq
Rep. Ron Paul Circulating Congressional Letter in
Opposition
Friends - As many of you know, there has been immense
pressure building recently within the Bush
Administration, and the media, to make Iraq the next
target in our unending war against terrorism. Now a
number of members of Congress have written a letter
urging President Bush to do just that, and this coming
Tuesday the House International Relations Committee
will be drafting a resolution to authorize attacks on
Iraq. (Much greater attacks than what we have been
doing already, aimed at overthrowing Saddam Hussein.)
It will, among other things, stipulate that any
refusal of Iraq to grant access to UN inspectors to
any site in Iraq will be considered an "act of
aggression against the United States." Con. Ron Paul
of Texas is circulating a letter opposing any attacks
on Iraq. While not a pacifist letter, it does clearly
state that there will be massive loss of life if we do
this, that pretty much the rest of the world opposes
us doing this, that even our allies freely acknowledge
that there is no evidence that Iraq had anything to do
with the September 11 bombing, and that taking
military action against them would thus go well beyond
the original resolution authorizing use of force in
Afghanistan.
Please circulate this message to all your group and
personal email listserves, and urge your group
members, colleagues or friends to call their
Represenatives immediately (as in Monday and Tuesday)
to speak against the bombing of Iraq, and to urge them
to sign on to Rep. Paul's letter. While all members of
Congress are important, the members of the House
International Relations Committee are particularly so,
and they are listed below. If you would like a faxed
copy of Ron Paul's letter, please send a request to
cbenzschawel@peace-action.org
PLEASE TAKE ACTION NOW TO PREVENT THIS WAR FROM
SPREADING EVEN FURTHER
</color>
--Apple-Mail-1--354519197--