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Change (869) Progressive Values - Issues (636) Right Wingers Ruining America (302) Right Wingers Endangering America (264) Non-Violence (53)
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Daniel Geery's article, Why Not Assassinate?-I, is definitely worth reading all the way through. His "fantasies" on the first page are cleverly undermined by his contrary arguments on the second page. So read both pages and think about it. We have all had these fantasies, especially when hearing news reports such as the one I woke up to this morning: "Five more American soldiers were killed and seven injured in a roadside bomb attack...." And on and on. OR: "At least 75 Iraqis were killed, including women and children, by a bomb attack on a food market in Baghdad...." And on and on.... We are living in an age in which unspeakable barbarism is not called barbarism -- it's called "surge," or "defense of Islam," or "revenge on our Infidel enemies," or "justified by national security." That anyone, of any religion, of any political persuasion would place a car bomb loaded with nails in Piccadilly Circus with the expectation of wounding or killing as many innocent humans as possible is completely wicked. It is equally wicked, despicably wicked, to plot a war against another country for the financial benefit of one's corporate friends, to falsify evidence and lie, and then invade that country on the basis of lies. To waste human life, both American and Iraqi, in the pursuit of that war was, is, and will continue to be wicked. No future historian will ever be able to claim this war was anything but wicked. At the present time, the American government is controlled by those who believe that their ends -- their goals, objectives and wishes -- justify whatever means they use. Knowing that many of their ends would be unwelcome to most Americans, they have hidden them, or at least tried to. If we were to embrace assassination as a way to rid ourselves of the extreme Machiavellians who control the GOP and the American government, that would make US like THEM -- we would be embracing wickedness, and in the end, we would become what we seek to destroy. An immutable fact of life is that the means we choose to accomplish the goals in our lives come to define what we are. We become what we have done and how we have done it. If you need proof of that statement, just look at Karl Rove and the minions who do his bidding. Lies, once told, must be maintained, and in the maintaining of falsehoods, one’s entire life becomes a falsehood. A student who cheats on exams in order to get into law school or medical school becomes a cheater and has to pretend to have knowledge that was never acquired. A job applicant with lies on his resume has to maintain those lies through year after year and job after job. The one who cheats becomes a cheat. The one who lies becomes a liar. ... And the one who kills, even for what seems like a laudable goal, becomes a killer. And then, when one's enemy is dead, that enemy is a martyr. We must be glad that Hitler was not assassinated, that his defeat ended in the ignominy of suicide. It is delusional to think that lives would have been saved and the future would have been better if Hitler had died in 1944. Instead the post-war years would have been crowded with unrepentant Nazis on the world stage, arguing their cause, not on trial at Nuremburg. I believe Bonhoeffer later reached the same conclusion. He did not object to his execution because he came to believe that he had been wrong to assist in an assassination plot. It would be lovely if Dick Cheney would keel over dead. But then we would have to live through a state funeral which glorified all his wickedness. It would be lovely if Dubya's airplane hit turbulence and crashed, killing all aboard -- but then we'd have to live through a whole bunch of state funerals and glorifying memorials, including one for Karl Rove, who will be remembered as the one person more than any other who has done the most damage to our civil liberties, our rights, our constitutional protections, and our ability to trust our most fundamental institutions of government. Election officials? Corrupted. Legislators? Corrupted. War powers? Corrupted. And on and on and on. How much worse it would be if they were to be glorified in death! Their supporters, few as they are, are powerful and they control most of what the American people see and learn, and because it is considered impolite to criticize the dead, anyone who sought to stop the glorification would be slandered and abused.
http://www.sarahhoffman.net S. E. Hoffman is a scientist and writer, as well as a musician and classical singer. She has undergraduate degrees in geology and astronomy from San Francisco State University and a graduate degree in oceanography from Oregon State University. She is a geologist specializing in the origin and evolution of the Earth's crust. She wrote the original scientific paper that proposed that life on Earth originated in oceanic hydrothermal vents. Her studies of ancient rocks showed that Earth had an ocean at least 3.5 billion years ago and that the geochemical signatures of hydrothermal alteration in those rocks are exactly the same as those found in modern oceanic crust. She is a regular reviewer of science books for Publishers Weekly as well as a freelance science journalist.
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