Posted by pancho from pool0187.cvx24-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.210.187) on Wednesday, November 27, 2002 at 8:51AM :
In Reply to: Noam Chomsky posted by Tony from dsc04-lai-ca-3-12.rasserver.net (199.182.38.12) on Wednesday, November 27, 2002 at 2:01AM :
Much later...after the Nazii Christians (you don't like that do you...try, "Islamic Terrorists" then)...had their grand Barbecue...people said they'd had no idea anything like this was to happen.
Nice try. It was all spelled out in Mein Kampf, long before Hitler was elected on a promise to make Germany "Shtrong". The Reichstag fire didn't hurt.
We will never be able to say, "we didn't know". especially the Darkies among us. We could organize right now and make ourselves as much "American" as the parents of Tim McVeigh...but we wont...we're going to hate ourselves all the more because we will be hated all the more. We have an unending capacity for self-loathing...and we don't like 'trouble"...people like that wake up one morning surrounded by more trouble than they knew existed...and the laws we could have used to protect ourselves with will prove inadequate, if they exist at all, they will have been "improved and modernized" to cope with a situation the Founding Fathers "couldn't have forseen".
There were lots of things they couldn't have forseen...like the proliferation of Slavery and what to do about it...like Women's Rights and a whole host of unforseen things. That was precisely the beauty and the utility of our Constitution...it wasn't a strait jacket to binf us up as a nation of robots...something that could not have brought together such diverse people and made us what we were...made us so damn tempting that these corporate types now have something well worth the raiding and undoing. The Constitution has within it our best protection...against anything this world can dish up. We've been filled with fear deliberately, and not just since 9/11...we've been quaking with fear and suspicion and paranoia since the old Red Scare days...
No one claim ignorance or innocence. It's all right out there for us to see. Hitler's recipe book had to be ferreted out to be read...in our case it's all around us.
There will be no "good" Americans this time...if we allow ourselves to gut the very principles that made us Americans...we'll have nothing to defend that claim with.
-- pancho
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