While the Machiavellian Neo-Cons, their corporate funders, and right-wing fundamentalist Christians believe that "The Ends justify the Means," in fact, over the course of our lives, the means we choose are imprinted on our personalities and come to define who we are. To do good is to be good, and to do evil is to be evil. Evil deeds, even in the pursuit of "good," have evil consequences.

::::::::

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.

Evil comes in many forms. Look at Rupert Murdoch. His life has been devoted to the rapacious pursuit of power, wealth, and influence. Is the world a better place for his having lived in it? Is there less hate? More compassion? More honesty? More basic goodness in humanity?

Imagine Dubya's funeral as covered by Fox News and Murdoch's worldwide media empire!

No. We simply must continue to do what we have been doing -- communicating what is right and what is wrong, naming the evil, identifying the wicked, uncovering their motives, uncovering their methods.

Yes, it ... is .... so ... slow .... -- On a day-to-day basis, agonizingly slow.

But look at the progress over the past two-and-a-half years: It is now widely acknowledged, even by former Bush supporters, that both the elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen. It is widely acknowledged that the invasion of Iraq was a horrific mistake.

Yes, I knew it in 2003. And I’d dreaded it in 2002. I felt the weight of the lives about to end -- but enough Americans chose to embrace the propaganda that we who opposed it were labeled traitors and worse.

Ask those same people now. I took a horrendous amount of ridicule from "patriotic Americans" in 2000 because I refused to vote for GWB and his cohort. Some of those people were at a military base in Germany. I would like to ask them now what they think of what I told them.

That young black woman who told me she was voting for BushCheney because "what have Democrats done for us anyway?" What does she think now that the Bush appointees on the Supreme Court have undercut decades of progress in desegregation and had the gall to cite Brown vs. Board of Education in doing so?

The military itself embraced the war against Iraq. The soldiers themselves were so propagandized that they were eager to enter the fight. Eager to vote for Bush and eager to fight.

Ask them now.

Ask them what they think now -- now that so many of their buddies have died. Ask them now, when the wounded have been treated so shamefully.

Ask the parents who waved their children off in their Humvees and Bradleys as they left the local National Guard armory on their way to Iraq, telling the reporters "how proud it made them to know their children were defending America."

Ask them now if their sons and daughters died defending America or enriching Halliburton.

Yes, it's been six and a half long years of fighting the good, non-violent fight -- but look at the bright side (yes, there is a bright side) -- for decades, starting with the John Birch Society and the Goldwater Republican movement, these so-called, self-styled conservatives have been claiming that they could run the government so much better. Their blather filled the newspaper columns and the airwaves for decades. They blamed the government for doing this wrong and doing that wrong. They blamed the majority Democrats in Congress for failing here and failing there, and asserted boldly that they could and would do better.

After the breathtaking incompetence, the politicization of even the most lowly federal agency, and the catastrophic rise in the national debt, is there any thinking American who now thinks the GOP has done a better job of running the government, providing needed services, managing the federal budget, funding scientific research for the future, defending our country against attack?

Is there any thinking American who does not honestly believe we were better off when the Democrats were governing this country? [I'm not saying they were perfect; I'm just saying they were infinitely more competent.]

Well, only Fox commentators -- but guess what? Fox is losing viewers. Hannity on MSNBC has falling viewership, but Olbermann's ratings are rising. Olbermann's courage in speaking the truth as much as he can has been rewarded with ratings success, the only measure that the TV powers-that-be care about. Guess what advertisers want to buy advertising on what program?

In order for most Americans to believe our warnings of catastrophe if those Goldwaterite-Reaganite-NeoCon policies were instituted, sadly, I now believe that the idiots had to have their chance. There was no way they would stop blathering and no way that their blathering wouldn’t influence people until they had a chance to prove just how ghastly awful, just how dangerous, just how futile, just how destructive those policies are.

Now they’ve done it. Well, actually, the reality of their catastrophic rule is even worse than I feared in 2000. And now we have to work to undo the damage as best we can.

Yes, it's slow. Damned slow. And heartbreaking for every life lost.

I will say what no presidential candidate can dare say:

Every one of those lives lost in Iraq -- American or Iraqi -- has been wasted -- carelessly, willfully, selfishly thrown away by BushCheneyRumsfeld et al.

Unfortunately, the waste of life won't end soon. And with every new casualty announcement, the ache in my heart becomes more throbbing, more piercing, more permanent.

But, history shows us that violence does not make things better. Violence is not an effective means for social change. In fact, violence against an oppressive government usually strengthens that government. Violence that targets innocent people through terrorist acts drives the rest of the populace into the embrace of the oppressors. Let me give just two examples.

1. Peru. I know Peru well. I've done field work there and have spent quite a lot of time living amongst Peruvians and working with them. Quite by accident, a friend and I witnessed some of the early history of Sindero Luminoso in Cuzco. During my travels there, I witnessed the results of the violence. Thankfully, I was not a victim of violence myself, but I was afraid – often, very afraid.

The history of economic and political oppression and repression in Latin American is long and horrible, and it can't be recounted here. But that history does still live – there is still a callous, unthinking brutality in the way Latin American elites control their countries. As a Peruvian friend said to me, the legacy of the Spanish Conquest is insidious and it lives throughout the society.

There have been times when I've witnessed things in Peru that made me feel that there was no option but to take up a gun and fight. I can easily comprehend how the people who must live with it day after day, year after year, lifetime after lifetime, reach such despair that joining a violent revolution seems the only way to change their country.

One of the major studies of Sindero Luminoso cited social advancement as a principal reason why it attracted the support of many middle and lower middle class people. Sindero was not much supported by the desperately poor, but rather by educated people who saw themselves forever locked out of any meaningful status in their own country.

And guess what happened? There was a brutal civil war, complete with horrific terrorist bombings that killed women and children, massacres of peasants by both sides, many incidents of "desaparicidos" -- students, workers, writers, artists who left with Sinderistas, police or military escorts and never came back. When Sinderistas entered a highland village, they usually massacred all the older men in the village and forced young people to join them -- they used child soldiers, just as in Africa today.

Over time, the Peruvian population grew to hate Sindero Luminoso far beyond whatever resentments they had because of their social situation, and they began to cooperate – enthusiastically – in tracking down Sinderistas. It was that engagement by the population that eventually brought down the SL leadership and got them all sent to prison.

But, guess what? Peru is still and will remain a terribly unjust place. It is a country where "injusticia social" is a way of life.

When I was there, I would say to my Peruvian friends, "Well, you really need non-violent resistance. You need a Gandhi-like figure to lead a non-violent resistance. Nothing will really change until thousands of people march in the streets non-violently in support of their demands for justice."

And they laughed at me. Naive American woman. Ha Ha Ha.

That was before the non-violent revolutions in much of Eastern Europe. Now we have much more empirical evidence for the value and longevity of non-violent movements.

Americans are blinded by the fact that our own revolution was violent. So, we have this misguided notion that what worked for the 13 original colonies will work now.

There are two things wrong with that notion. The first is that it completely ignores the role that international politics played in the successful independence of the 13 colonies that revolted. Without the long wars between the European powers that raged through the 17th and 18th centuries, there would have been no support from France, which was essential for the American revolution to succeed. We forget that the revolution did not spread to the originally French colony of Quebec.

Secondly, as readers of “A People’s History of the United States” already know, much of the impetus for the American revolution came from the landowning and slave-holding elite, who feared their privileges would be diminished by the British crown. A primary reason why it has been so difficult for the United States to fulfill its own ideals for all its citizens is that those ideals were not meant to be applied to all.

So, the success of the violent American revolution is a red herring that distracts and obscures the futility of violence in general.

Look at the globe. Put your finger on a country. Was the revolution there violent or non-violent? Which succeeded and which failed? The violent revolutions were always followed by decades and even centuries of undemocratic, repressive governments (that was the case for England, which executed Charles I in 1649, but reinstated the monarchy in 1660. Universal suffrage did not come to Great Britain until the 20th century.

The slow, steady work of non-violence takes a great many years to show results -- but the results when they come, be it in the Ukraine or in Czechoslovakia or Poland or even the Soviet Union, come quickly, like an overpowering tsunami, and not even the most brutal Ceaucescu can withstand it.

2. On the other hand, there are the Palestinians, who have been entirely dedicated to violent action against Israel for over sixty years. The horrible back-and-forth of killing and killing and bombing and bombing. What has it accomplished?

Destruction and Death. Destruction and Death. And unending war.

I firmly believe that if the Palestinians had taken up non-violent action when they were first ejected from their homes -- if, instead of taking up the gun, they had laid down in front of the tanks, even allowing themselves to die rather than take the lives of others, there would now be a Palestinian independent country, negotiating such issues as water rights and property rights with an Israeli government. There would have been an independent Palestinian government that would now be about 40 years old, almost as old as Israel.

The insistence by Palestinian leaders that their only option was violence has doomed generations of Palestinians to poverty, despair, fear, and death.

Yet, they continue to fight and there is no end in sight.

As difficult as it may be to stay the non-violent course -- to write, to educate, protest and object nonviolently -- we must continue, because the alternative is unending war, global catastrophe, and very possibly the end of human existence. Will future paleontologists be able to figure out what killed our species off? Or will they know? Will there be a written history that will tell them how we managed to destroy ourselves?

Over the past six-and-a-half years, in American after American, what Martin Luther King Jr. called "the angels of their better natures" have awakened. We now have 70% of the American public thinking as we do on the Iraq War, yet in 2003 we were a vilified minority of just 15 or 20%. Things have changed. And if we keep doing what we're doing to the best of our ability, things will continue to change.

I do not ever want to turn on the television and find out that the funeral for GWB or Cheney is going to be broadcast worldwide, horse-drawn caisson and all. No. Let their funerals be as insignificant as Richard Nixon's. Or even less so.

At the same time, if Cheney and GWB try to ensure their continuous governance by manufacturing a national emergency before the next president can take office, we must be prepared to lay down our lives. We must shut down every city in the U.S. with prone bodies filling the streets. We must be prepared to die under the wheels of a Rumsfeldian Humvee because only by sacrificing ourselves can we save our children and grandchildren from a home-grown Stalinism made far worse by the power of contemporary electronic media. Orwell’s “1984” is a picnic compared to what the Neo-Con cabal would like to give us. Not even Orwell imagined the kind of surveillance techniques that are available now.

Instead of fantasizing about assassination plots, we must begin to seriously plan for non-violent self-sacrifice. That is what takes real courage. That is what makes lasting change.

Authors Website: http://www.sarahhoffman.net

Authors Bio:
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.