Posted on 12/26/2001 7:04:17 AM PST by freespeechplease
Lest we forget.. The founding fathers of the United States were considered terrorists by the legal government of the colonies
Then the word terrorist has nothing to do with your point.
LOL! Thank you for posting the "banner of shame" on this joker. That long discouraged practice should be revisited from time to time.
To me the moral equivalence of Texas leaving the union to terrorism is insulting and far more hateful than mere passivist that just wants to give peace a chance. I consider such a debate softball a insult inviting insult. Certainly not hate. My only hate I have toward your "free speech" is that you have constructed it so poorly and given me nothing to debate, thus inviting me to inherently hate your feeble attempt at "free speech".
Texas WAS its own country before it was ever a state, numbnuts.
And the subject of your post was not patriotism, but terrorism. They are not equivalent, and your attempt to back-pedal by merely switching one noun for another is pretty pathetic.
Now please don't bore us by protesting "Waaah! You know what I meant!"; you already know you're not making any sense at all.
;-)
No hate here. If anything there is compassion. I, like you, once posted on a board while in a chemically altered state that left me incoherent. Why don't you lay down, sleep off your drug of choice, then come back and debate. You have not responded to many of the replies to you and have not sourced your reply and you messed with Texas. Take a nap, come down, then come back and play. Everything will be OK
Signed, the Compassionate Conservative MD
Ya pegged this pinhead. Here's what he posted on the J'Accuse LewRockwell thread:
Michael, I agree with your viewpoints, but I believe that freerepublic is no longer the place where you will find an ear. There is so much censorship at this sight that any thoughts that run against blind allegiance to Bush are quickly deleted. I will not be at all surprised if you have your privileges removed for this article.
Gee, the light bulb that just went on over your head wouldn't even illuminate a dorm-room refrigerator.
To point out just how different the colonists and the British government were from today's lawless terrorists who blithely murder innocent civilians, one need look no further than the Boston Massacre.
In 1770 an incident involving a British soldier (in an argument over payment for a wig) escalated into mob violence (taunting young men pelting the soldier and others who came to his rescue with ice, snow, and coal). Someone shouted "fire", the soldiers fired on the mob, and five people were killed.
John Adams, the nation's second President, courageously undertook the legal defense of the soldiers in the face of hostile public opinion. A jury (made up of colonists, of course) acquited all the soldiers except two, who were convicted of manslaughter. Those two plead "the privilege of clergy" which reduced their sentence from imprisonment to branding on the thumb.
Most people can discern a significant difference in the events surrounding the Revolutionary War as compared to Al Queda terrorism, even if you see only a "moral equivalence". Nor would that have changed even if the Revolutionary War had ended in defeat.
By the way, you would have been correct if you had argued that the Founding Fathers were considered "traitors" by the British government. But "traitors" is very different than "terrorists".
Is this a form of retreat from your original statement? A watering down of the word "terror"?
There is "initiatory force and "retaliatory force". Terror applied in retaliation is expected and invited by the perpetraitors of initiatory force. The casualties of Hiroshima, Bagdad, and Kabul were the result of retaliatory force and the enemy bears the burden of responsibility of such acts.
Belgrade is a different matter in my opinion, But Clinton thought it was a good war. Who could argue with such a man of peace(piece)?
Why couldn't you have said that in the first place? If you don't want to come off as a troller, you need to be a bit more elaborate with your proposed arguments or point...one sentence or snippy paragraph doesn not bode well...
Re: A state seceding from the Union...Texas actually did this in the past in fact...I don't remember why, but the frontiersman who served Texas are regarded as patriots by Texans and sure aren't regarded as "terrorists" in U.S. history books. In fact, the colonies were taxed much less by Britain than the federal government taxes us today...I'd say I would support any state that had had enough of socialistic trends in government...
How can "we" forget something that is entirely untrue? The "legal" government of the British colonies in America never used the word "terrorists" to describe the "rebels" or the "insurrectionists" that fought against the British Crown's control. Both rebellion and any form of armed insurrection were punishable by the gallows at the time, so why expand the description with inaccurate and unnecessary hyperbole?
The accepted definition of "terrorism" is as follows, and in no way describes the actions, intents, tactics or strategies of the leaders of the American Revolution:
"terrorism- the threat or use of violence, often against the civilian population, to achieve political ends. Terrorism involves activities such as assassinations, bombings, random killings, hijackings, and skyjackings. It is used for political, not military, purposes, and by groups too weak to mount open assaults. Terrorism reaches back to ancient Greece and has occurred throughout history. In the 20th cent. acts of terrorism have been associated with the Italian Red Brigades, the Irish Republican Army, the Palestine Liberation Organization, Peru's Shining Path, and the Weathermen among many groups. It is a modern tool of the alienated and its psychological impact on the public has increased because of extensive coverage by the media. Governments find terrorism difficult to prevent; international agreements to tighten borders or return terrorists for trial may offer some deterrence. In 1999 the UN Security Council unanimously called for better international cooperation in fighting terrorism and asked governments not to aid terrorists.See B. Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (1998).
Nothing Ozama Bin Laden has done or will do in any way resembles or can be construed to describe the actions of the American revolution's leaders. Your statement is not only inaccurate, it is deliberately fraudulent and misleading.
Oh, looks like I was wrong, you ARE trolling, in that you pulled out your playbook of no-thought-required U.S.-bashing. Hiroshima, huh. How much do you know about history? Not much, I'd say. Did you know that Hiroshima was home to the battallion that gleefully helped slaughter 150,000 civilians in Nanking, China? Did you know the japanese were given warning after warning to surrender or else...after we dropped the first atomic bomb, they still refused. Only after the second did they yield....Did you know that had we not used fatman and little boy, the conservative estimates of U.S. and allied deaths was several times that of the casualities of Hiroshima/Nagasaki...AND THAT'S JUST ON THE ALLIED SIDE!. There was no such thing as a non-militarized area in japan...there were fortifications everywhere, and the war would've undoubtedly gone on and on.
Yugoslavia is, as someone else said, another matter...that was a nasty buyproduct (sic) of the Clintonazis and the new reich of NATO. I sure as hell didn't vote for that clown...did you?
Baghdad? So you're blaming us for Saddam's actions? Granted, I don't agree with our policy for the past decade regarding IRAQ, we should've ignored the Arab whiners and advisors who said we shouldn't remove Saddam and ousted the f**ker, but blaming the U.S. because Saddam is a megalomaniac is absurd. Did you know Iraq's oil production is practically at the point it was before the gulf war? Saddam could easily provide for his people, he just chooses to feed his war machine and build new palaces and monuments to his grandeur (or delusions thereof).
Kabul. I think it's interesting how each argument gets progressively weaker....it's obvious to me that U.S. forces to everything possible to avoid innocent deaths, especially when the Talibums (who park their tanks and fighter jets in residential neighborhoods and playgrounds) clearly use afghans as human shields. ANY innocent deaths caused by the U.S. is unintentional...keyword is "UNINTENTIONAL". You seem to miss that keypoint...using 747's full of people and jet fuel against buildings that would normally be full to capacity (thank god they weren't) of folks like you and me just trying to make a living clearly doesn't fall under the category of "unintentional" and neither does waiting until hundreds of humanitarian rescue personel are on the scene to slam the next one in.
Please, go troll and cry "censorship" somewhere else, maybe LewRockwell or antiwar.com?...you don't know the meaning of censorship.
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