Posted on 12/29/2001 9:27:49 AM PST by Demidog
"Now this may come as a surprise to you Roscoe,
but I'm really not interested in Pravda's propaganda..."
- malador
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If you follow Harry Browne,
you're unwittingly familiar with it already.
838 by Roscoe
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So Pravda is a libertarian organization?
Make up your mind, Roscoe.
Libertarians can't be socialists
and anarchists at the same time.
The two philosophies do not intersect.
To: malador
"Harry Browne is popular on Pravda.
http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/09/13/15078.html
825 by Roscoe
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To: Roscoe
How would you know if he's popular?
They ran his column.
It's a brilliant column too.
# 839 by Demidog
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It was a great article, Demidog.
Writings like that is the reason
I voted for Harry.
Yeah, Our Government has the right to burn stupid religious people. Or shoot a woman that was not armed, while she was holding her baby.
How about the Beck thing that happened August 31st?
Does anyone other than me remember when The Move was bombed?
I can post links for all of this, if you would like.
To: monkeyshine
So you agree with the methods of communist China ....
just rape the people for unjust and terrible programs.
# 217 by Buckeroo
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To: Buckeroo
I do?
What a strange way to read my statement considering I said exactly the opposite.
I'll rephrase it, and summarize everything I've been saying on this thread:
As long as the system isn't running the way I want it to be run,
I will have to try to make the best of it as it is in the meantime.
# 221 by monkeyshine
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I can agree that we must make
the best use we can of the present system.
Don't expect me to stop working
for a return to the way things were meant to be.
I can work within the system,
and still point out that our government is at present
an evil corruption of what it was meant to be.
Hmmm.
So if Republicans or Democrats say somthing you don't like, you will quit the party?
What party's attitude do you like?
Might I be able to change your mind?
To: monkeyshine
All aid is bad because it is forced from us a the point of a gun.
It is immoral. It is theft.
That's why it is proper to say that all foreign aid
adminstered by the federal government is wrong.
# 199 by Demidog
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To: Demidog
OK. From that perspective I can agree.
But you would be better off arguing against the income tax than foreign aid.
As long as my income is going to be taken from me by force (an argument I can agree with)
then I am going to defend the use of that money in areas that are going to improve
the system for our way of life and my personal prosperity.
If we can abolish the income tax, end the war on drugs, and privatize social security,
I would be more willing to scrutinize foreign aid and domestic subsidies.
But picking on the child (foreign aid) of the father (the income tax) is a silly way to go about it.
# 210 by monkeyshine
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We have to fight against the children
of the income tax too, monkeyshine.
When I look around, I see more than just one violation.
If I just concentrated solely on one major violation,
50 more would slip by un-challenged.
The small violations are actually more important
to our freedom than that large income tax parent.
Small violations, while they may seem "not as important"
as larger crimes, happen much more frequently.
That frequent violation of our rights
gets people used to the violations,
and they begin to assume that rights are not inviolate,
and that there are things we "would be better off arguing against."
There is nothing as important as our individual rights.
Individual rights are freedom.
That's not a barrier to the libertarian way of live, FITZ.
You don't need Federal parks.
You will still have state parks to play in.
... When I was Governor, I was attacked from the other direction for sticking up for the rights of religious fundamentalists to run their child care centers and to practice home schooling under appropriate safeguards. I just have always had an almost libertarian view that we should try to protect the rights of American individual citizens to live up to the fullest of their capacities, and I'm going to stick right with that.
If you do, it is pitiful.
Do you remember when the guy that was almost dead when he was rescued?
He was charged with trespassing on Federal land. I think the courts let him off.
He was snowmobiling and went the wrong way in a storm.
With the exception of Geraldo Rivera, most Americans seem to have grasped, by now, that responsibility for the Waco massacre goes all the way to the top. Even so, we cannot pin the blame solely on Bill and Hillary.
The militarization of U.S. policing has proceeded unchecked through Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Indeed, one of the earliest Waco-like incidents occurred on May 13, 1985, long before Bill Clinton was even a blip on the political radar screen.
That day, police emptied 10,000 rounds of ammunition into a house in West Philadelphia, in a ninety-minute period. They fired Uzis, shotguns, M-16s,.50-caliber machineguns, Browning semiautomatic rifles and M-60 machineguns. A 20mm antitank gun was also on hand, though police claim they never fired it.
Later that day, a canvas satchel containing four and a half pounds of C-4 plastic explosive was dropped on the house by helicopter. The ensuing fire consumed not only that house, but sixty others, leaving the neighborhood a smoking ruin.
At whom was all this firepower aimed? The targets were four men, three women and six children -- members of an anti-government, urban survivalist cult called MOVE.
Police say the cultists shot first, after lawmen tried to arrest four of them. But Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor inadvertently cast doubt on this claim when he testified that the first shots came from automatic weapons. MOVE had no such weapons; only two shotguns, two pistols and one.22-caliber rifle.
In any case, all MOVE members in the house were killed that day, except for one woman and one 13 year old boy.
Back in 1986, I attended the trial of Ramona Africa - the lone adult survivor of the MOVE house - and wrote a cover story about the massacre for the East Village Eye. In that article, I suggested that the scorched-earth tactics used against MOVE were a trial balloon, designed to test public reaction to a new style of ultra-violent policing.
My theory rested partly on the fact that federal agencies had encouraged and facilitated the MOVE massacre behind the scenes. The FBI, for instance, provided C-4, a military explosive forbidden to civilian police. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms provided permission and tax waivers for other military weapons.
Most curious, however, were the "reforms” enacted in the massacre´s wake. Arguing that the slaughter had resulted from random bungling by overzealous cops, Mayor W. Wilson Goode announced a sweeping reorganization supposedly aimed at increasing the professionalism of Philadelphia police.
Goode´s proposals ranged from the creation of an elite counter-terrorist strike force, to the establishment of unprecedented liaisons with federal law enforcement agencies, to training for police at military facilities, and even to anti-terrorist schools and "crisis management” training for city officials by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
In short, Goode called for more of the very same medicine that had caused the problem in the first place; outside meddling from federal goons.
Years later, in 1993, federal "crisis management” once again made headlines, this time in Waco, Texas. Parallels between the MOVE and Waco massacres read like guidelines drawn from the same tactical handbook.
In both cases, last-minute offers to negotiate were ignored by lawmen. In both cases, fires were deliberately allowed to burn out of control. Both at Waco and at the MOVE house, people trying to escape the flames were forced back inside by gunfire. Even more startling, lawmen in both cases claimed that the cultists had set fire to themselves. In the midst of a civil suit brought by MOVE survivors and relatives, Lt. Frank Powell suddenly anounced that the fire had been deliberately set by MOVE members, not by the bomb he dropped.
"They chose their own end,” Powell told reporters on May 1, 1996. MOVE members had doused the roof with flammable liquid, then torched it, Powell said.
His claim - which contradicted the findings of the city Fire Marshal and the mayor´s MOVE Commission - evidently did not impress the jury, which awarded Ramona Africa and relatives of two other MOVE victims $1.5 million in damages. If the MOVE bombing really was a trial balloon, it was evidently a successful one. The media accepted the story of bungling, overzealous cops. Public outrage was confined to ineffectual liberal handwringing, much of it centered around the irrelevant fact that the MOVE victims were black.
Is Waco another trial balloon? Have the feds upped the ante this time, with a blatant use of Delta Force commandos, a higher body count, and a "whiter” list of victims (about half the Waco dead were Anglo, the other half mostly black, with some Mexicans and Asians)? Very likely. If we fail to challenge this latest atrocity, even ghastlier Wacos may lie ahead.
Richard Poe is a freelance journalist and a New York Times-bestselling author. His latest book is Wave 4 (Prima, 1999). Poe´s Website can be found at RichardPoe.com
Emma Goldman, Noam Chomsky.
No, Libertarians don't hate America. Course not.
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