Posted by panch from pool0300.cvx25-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.217.45) on Friday, August 30, 2002 at 10:03PM :
On the drive back from the foundry today I saw a Fire Department Rescue vehicle with big bold gold letters on the front..."TERRORISM RESCUE".
Now I ask you...is that really necessary? Do they mean to imply that if that vehicle is busy, or broken down, that they can't respond to a "terror" attack? What's it supposed to have in it...Dick Cheney?
The United States sent its soldiers ten thousand miles away to kill three million Vietnamese...and got 55,000 of themselves killed. Three million...you have any idea how many people that is? And for nothing, nothing more than they are starting all over again with this terror nonsense.
Vietnam had been in continual warfare for forty years before the United States got involved...first with the Chinese then the French. There were hardly any adults left in Vietnam...I can remember the pictures on the news...all of the people they showed were practically children...12 and 14 year olds...there WERE no adults left by then.
It's one thing for Saddam to feel threatened by the countries around him, or covet his neighbor's oil fields...especially as Iraq has always claimed Kuwait as a part of it...but to go half way around the world for no good reason and kill three million children and young adults...to drop gasoline jelly on them while they sleep...is that not terror? Is that not using weapons of mass destruction?
If you send a warplane, a tank, a heavily armed Marine, and all together, against a 16 year old girl with a rifle...is that NOT Terror?
What makes the difference...that the United States is willing to send that much weaponry and trained professional soldiers with the best gear and systems in the world against peasants and farmers in their own country who have some rifles and a lot of nerve? That's okay?
What is Terror? What about all the deranged nuts Reagan and others unleashed onto the streets because they wanted to be tough on welfare cheats? These guys now prey on our children and are we not terrified? Aren't we all filled with terror at the world we've created for ourselves...and like the Puritan Pilgrims of old, aren't we just projecting our inner devils and demons to the outside world...into those dark, lovely, steaming forrests where the Pilgrims saw a Devil lurking everywhere...the devil they carried in their own hearts, the 'evil" in themselves they had to beat back with daily, hourly and constant self-mortification?
Haven't we created a frightening society that is a terror to us...a lifestyle fraught with insecurity, with anxiety, with fear and terror? Do we seek now to place the blame for it on the backs of people far away from us...blame THEM for the terror we've created all around us?
Does this mean that from now on the United States can do as it wishes to anyone anywhere and if the people react...we brand them terrorists? We aren't likely to go up against any nation with a serious army...mostly half clad peasants badly oppressed by their own puppets...and are these people NEVER to say "no"? Must they accept anything we dish out?
What about our own "Madrasa of Terror"...the one in Fort Benning Georgia...the "School for the Americas"? How come we don't have to shut that down? You have any idea how many human beings have been killed in Latin America in the last 50 years? It's another few million. There too we can say..."we didn't do it...it was their own leaders". But who befriended these leaders...who supplied them and trained their death squads and toppled them when they weren't to our liking and propped them up when they did as we told them? Then too anyone who fought back, for life, for dignity...we branded a Communist, and that was all it took.
Now we'll call anyone a Terrorist...do you see how many countries have all of a sudden discovered the terrorist angle? And we dumb cluck Assyrians are walking right into the propellar blades again. White America is alarmed at the influx of darkies...of darkies who have just as much right under the Constitution as they do...and it scared them. this terroriam bullshit is the beginning of demonizing first, "radical" Islam...although Muslims in America know better, and then all Islam...it is also the beginning of a hate campaign against Arabs and others from the Mideast...they wont be particular. It will start innocently enough but already Americans polled believe the First Amendment goes too far.
What will happen if the day comes when anyone from the Mideast will be looked upon with suspicion...I mean much more so than now? Will we repeat that we are "okay"...that we are Christian? You really think that will save us? We are all eagerly feeding the fires of hatred and ignorance among our fellow Americans, the white ones...so pleased that someone is going to "get" those dastardly Muslims and Arabs...we are setting the traps that will ensnare us eventually...we always have.
Protestant, Puritan America does not really consider us to be legitimate Christians...no matter how much you insist that you were first. Our service, the clothes, the language...it's all too exotic...after all...Protestants came after...they saw themselves as a pure form of Christianity...the way it ought to be...in other words they distanced themselves from all that Catholic showy stuff...the gold and brocade and idols...that's how they see us...as the same pagan throwbacks they left behind in the Old World...they are the new streamlined Christians..another TRUE one.
While we see ourselves as one with "them" because of what we think is our 'common" religion...they see only more darkies from THAT place...the place where terrorists, who look a lot like us...no matter how much we insist there is an Assyrian Christian "type", all come from...so why take chances? Hell, maybe a Muslim terrorist will pose as a Christian Assyrian? "Why let any of them in?" "Better keep an eye on all of them."
And for speaking like this I'll be called a "hater of America"...when the opposite is true. It is Cheney and Bush and Ashcroft and Enron and WorldCom and the rest of them who hate what America really is...hate that they can't impose their damn religion on all of us...hate that the Constitution does not allow them to haul a woman back into their dark Ages...hates that Blacks can bring action against white cops...hates that the Constitution tries to barr them from getting OUR money to promote their "religion".
I love what America promises, and has still the ability to deliver. Since 9/11 people who thought of themselves as real "America bashers" in this country suddeenly saw the light...they became "patriotic" in one day. hell...they were just posing then, and they're posing now. Those of us who really criticized America did it fromn love of what this country can be...we didn't do it because we hated the place, because we were secret Russian agents of Commie Cells...as the "patriots" of the day, the ones who lied to Congress to get 55,000 of us killed, claimed.
The true patriot is quick to correct to watch out for the easy fix, the manipulative demigogue...the rogue and thief hisind behind the flag. The same is true now...Ashcroft is no lover of America as it was and can be...his only use for the Constitution is to use it to gut it. He and others will turn our institutions against themselves and each other...they already have. We are even more at war with our own citizens than we were in the 30's and 50's...than we are with this Drug War.
Truly, Americans have become their own worst enemies...they terrorize themselves...and seek to blame others for it. The suicide bombers would never have bothered with America, if America had not bothered with them and their countries first...never.
Our first and greatest mistake was becomming Christian...not that there is something inherently wrong with being Christian...just that you should never cut yourself off from your roots...from your ancestors and family and ways...especially not if you are going to go wandering the earth. We had no way of knowing at the time that another religion, far more vigorous than ours, would sweep over that region and dominate us. Had we been content to live among them without casting our eyes to our co-religionists...especially given the treacherous and covetous ways of these co-religionists...we would have fared much better.
But as it is we have made ourselves suspect in our old Homelands...and we aren't much trusted in these new lands...where once we were persecuted and held down...we moved to countries where we feel free to be religious...but haven't the nerve or the stomach to be Assyrian.
And now comes this final result of Western Christian meddling in the Mideast and like idots we cheer the West on, encouraging it to think the worst possible things about the region we come from. When the mob is aroused it doesn't stop to make distinctions. We stand a very good chance of wiping half of us out physically...and disappearing the rest of us in a sea of assimilation.
Actually, we've been at it for some time now. That's why 80,000 Assyrians in Chicago held their breathe and kept silent...and why that Block is about all the attention they want.
-- panch
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