----- Original Message -----
From: John Stroebel
I will make this 'public service announcement' short and sweet.....
If you do NOT know that Bush/Cheney are going to do something VERY LARGE
to stay in office....
and that they are going to make it as BIG AND BAD as it can be.....
then you better get with that RIGHT NOW. Cause it is going to happen
within the next 2 years.
Bush and Cheney will NEVER allow themselves to be investigated
independently OR by someone new who wants payback for the obscene
destruction inflicted on our people and the people of the Middle East.
Never. THAT is NOT in the plan.
SO! Get with it. THEN decide WHAT YOU are going to DO when it
happens....and make a PLAN.
....at the VERY WORST you will be prepared.
Ask yourself...what are you preparing FOR and what you are prepared TO
DO.
People, the writing is on the wall....in bright red blood.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi everyone, I don't post here often, but I just can't stay quiet anymore.
A couple years ago, before the 2004 election, there was a consistent pattern
of certain posters saying that Bush was going to attack Iran either to rally
"patriotic" voters, or as an excuse to avoid _that_ election.
The exact same accusation was also being bandied about on academic
(anthropology) websites I frequent that are dominated by the very socialist
elements of the left who might have been tempted by Ralph Nader's candidacy.
I concluded at the time that some element of the Democratic Party's spin
machine was busy trying to persuade possible 3d party voters that Bush and
the Republicans were such a menace that everybody needed to vote for the
Democratic Party candidate.
My contention is that the current situation is no more deserving of a
hysterical reaction than have many other historical episodes: Some of what
follows will make it look as though I am defending current foreign
adventurism and threats to civil
liberties, my purpose is really to show that the real problem we have is
more general, definitely as much from the Democratic Party as the Republican
Party and of earlier origin, and that the answer is still to persuade people
of libertarian principles rather than to throw ourselves into the service of
one of the major parties.
In 1838, the Cheroke people were forcibly removed from their homeland
(though it had been recognized by the US government as a sovereign nation)
and relocated to Oklahoma. The US Supreme Court had previously ruled the
land grab illegal, and, in response, the then occupant of the White House
was reputed to have said, "Mr. Marshall has made his decision; now let him
enforce it." The removal was then carried out by the US Army behind the fig
leaf of having a
"voluntary" land transfer signed by persons who held no office at all in the
(democratically elected) Cherokee government.
The US took the Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Phillipines from Spain
at the end of the 1800s, with a pretext ("Remember the Maine!") that makes
the WMDs seem perfectly reasonable. The US did give Cuba its independence
(though, as a "close friend") almost immediately, and I believe things in
Puerto Rico have generally been handled democratically; but we ended up
fighting a bloody guerilla campaign in the Phillipines that dragged on for
decades. I know Iraq is further than the Phillipines, but by God! the
Phillipines are sure a long way from Kansas.
What is more:
In 1942, within two months of Pearl Harbor, the United States government
(under authority of a mere "Executive Order") rounded up every Japanese
citizen and every American citizen of Japanese descent on the US west coast,
to to the third generation, and put them in "War Relocation Camps". No
evidence whatsoever of any hostile or "disloyal" intention was required.
There were no standards at all except race. Persons of German or Italian
descent were only given similar treatment if they demonstrated hostile or
"disloyal" intent. No legal defense was permitted for any of these people.
Some may find it odd that the only three public figures opposed this order;
J.Edgar Hoover and Elanor Roosevelt did so without going public, a Mr Carr,
then governor of Colorado, opposed it openly. The US Supreme Court of that
time upheld the executive order and the "internment" policy, and so, AFAIK,
that is theoretically still an option for any US president.
Even before the US entered WW II, the US White House manipulated matters so
that all US mail going to or from occupied Europe was flown on planes that
made an overnight stop in Bermuda (British). There, the British secret
service maintained a large staff of experts who were given access to the US
mail for the purpose of identifying persons (even if US citizens) they
suspected might be Axis agents, and, since some of what went through really
was from spies, they also would take the opportunity to decode or manipulate
delivery of such materials. Material that might be of interest to the White
House was passed on to its occupant. Also before US entry into WW II,
suspected German and Italian agents in the US were sometimes kidnapped and
taken to Canada, and sometimes assasinated in the US by British agents with
the knowledge of the White House. The existence of the both these operations
was revealed in the 1960s by British personnel who had participated.
(J.Edgar Hoover objected to both the above practices, even according to the
British agents carrying them out, who, when they wrote, were
condenscendingly critical of Hoover for being insufficiently far-seeing).
>From at least the mid 1960s until the mid 1970s, wiretaps of dissenting
political leaders (notably, Martin Luther King) were made by the FBI
(apparently Hoover had either become a convert to domestic spying, or feared
communism more than he had the Nazis). The White House was kept fully
informed.
In the mid 1980s, it came to light that the FBI files on leaders of the
political opposition had been given to a White House employee, a political
hack whose job during the then-president's first election campaign had been
to harass his opponent at public events.
In 1917-1918, any US male drafted who refused involuntary induction into the
US military to go fight in the brilliant idea that was WW I, was jailed for
the duration of the war plus for some time thereafter. Similar things were
done from 1965-73 in relation to the Vietnam War.
I am leaving out many other cases, including those involving Lincoln
(Republican), who suspended habeus corpus and did other things. I leave
Lincoln out because he openly cited the "insurrection" exception
specifically allowed by the constitution. It doesn't mean I like what he
did, or that anything else I've left out was less onerous or less dubious
constitutionally than those I've included.
In other words, those of us who are worried that centralization of power and
adventurism will tend to lead toward a truly horrendous situation, whether
we are more afraid it might be brought about by a Clinton, or a
Bush, or both, or either, or anyone else, should remember that if we want to
do anything about this real menace, we cannot simply allow ourselves to be
panicked into jumping into the ranks of one of the big political parties
when they start feeding us a bunch of hysterical Revelations-style crap.
Anybody with half a brain will realize without me needing to tell them that
nothing on earth save a full nuclear exchange with Russia or China could
provide anything close to enough excuse for a US president to postppone or
abrogate elections. And to tell you the truth I bet there would probably
continue to be elections even after such an exchange. I was in the military,
and there are less fascists in the US military per capita than in the
average metropolitan city hall.
It is therefore the worst sort of paranoia, and probably a sign that someone
is being manipulated by the spinmeisters of one of the major parties, to
claim that Bush etc. are going to try something to postpone the 2008
elections, just as it was three years ago to say that he was going to attack
Iran to postpone the 2004 elections.
Over the years, even when I find people who agree nearly 100% with
libertarian ideas, they end up backing off because every time the curious
start to look at "Libertarian" circles, they find ample ground to think that
the Libertarian movement is full of nuts. This is a movement that is
crippled by being associated with those people who make dire forecasts every
election year that never come true. And that might be the very effect the
chicken-littles are actually aiming at.
The vast majority of our loss of liberties comes in the fabian manner. It is
easier for those who wish to steal freedom to do so little by little when
nobody even notices anything is going on.
Michael Burns
ForumWebSiteAt http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Libertarian
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Libertarian/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
