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At 6:11 AM +0000 6/13/04, Carmi Turchick wrote:

...

Here is more about the connection between the death squads and the policy of genocide and our own American facility, the School of

--- begin forwarded text To: irtheory@yahoogroups.com User-Agent: eGroups-EW/0.82 From: "Carmi Turchick" <tribalypredisposed@yahoo.com> Mailing-List: list irtheory@yahoogroups.com; contact irtheory-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list irtheory@yahoogroups.com Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2004 20:37:43 -0000 Subject: [irtheory] Re: War ain't beanbag. Irony is conserved. Reply-To: irtheory@yahoogroups.com RAH; Thank you for the perfect illustration of pure evil, and the perfect illustration of how ones altruistic nature and desire to do good can lead one to support crimes against humanity so long as they are committed by "your" side. I respond in detail below. --- In irtheory@yahoogroups.com, "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@s...> wrote: the

...

Americas...

Yawn. War, to paraphrase a famous American income- redistributionist, ain't beanbag.

Yes. We taught soldiers, hell, thugs, even, to kill commies.

Just how is an unborn fetus a commie? I seem to recall your side being really defensive of fetuses, except, I guess, when they are in the bodies of innocent civilians (well, guilty of being born Mayan) who are unfortunate enough to live in mountainous areas that are where guerrilla fighters (naturally) base their operations? It was a

war. Remember?

Oh, well I think Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh were fighting wars too. Remember? So, does your line of reasoning suddenly reverse or were their slaughters OK also? And let us see how this war started...oh yeah, WE OVERTHREW THEIR DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED GOVERNMENT because we did not like its policies. So we started the war and were the aggressors and the fact that a very few of them may have been "communists" justifies a genocide?

The commies were killing people too, remember? More to the point, they wanted to kill lots more. Deliberately, or worse, through

their

own ignorant mismanagement of the lives they would eventually have total control of.

Well, the Guatemalan truth commission found that 90% of the violations of human rights, the murder, rape, genocide, was done by government forces. They found that 3% was done by the guerrillas, and the rest they could not be sure. And there is absolutely no evidence, or even accusations, that the democratically elected government we overthrew was killing anyone or had policies that would lead to their deaths. In fact there is no evidence that the government we overthrew was a communist government. There just is no place for you to go on this one, you are supporting genocide and mass murder even of fetuses in the name of profits for one US company. This is pure evil and it comes from you. The government we overthrew was doing nothing more than exercising its rights of eminent domain in exactly the way that our own government does. They paid the company for the land, paid what the company had claimed it was worth. How does the exercise of eminenet domain rights by a sovereign government make them Communists? And does this argument not mean that a violent overthrow of the Communist President Bush would be justified?

All those "innocent" people were either totalitarians or dupes.

Lenin's "useful idiots". Even the nuns. Even the bishops. Even the nice Anglo church ladies from El Norte who thought that in a war between Ghandi and, say, Stalin, Ghandi would win. Bambi vs. Godzilla is more like it. Of course, like Lenin himself, ultimately, those "idiots" were like Ghandi joining the war on Stalin's side.

[Okay, so, in actuality, Ghandi *was* on Stalin's side, economically and ideologically, at least, the world's most beatified useful idiot in that regard. Certainly Nehru was on Stalin's team, explicitly so, creating the world's second largest command economy after China's, dooming tens of millions of his countrymen to famine, and most of

So, little children, fetuses, illiterate peasants who never even heard of Marx (and this makes up the vast majority of the victims), all of them were totalitarians or dupes? Based on their living where their ancestors had lived for millenia? So how do you define totalitarian? Must be a very different meaning than any I am familiar with; seems to me that you think it means "anyone we can profit from the murder of." I also have to point out that this "free enterprise by force" conception of yours is a novel usage of the term "free" and also happens to be exactly what totalitarians do; they profit by force, by controlling the means of production with military might. What do you call yourselves, Totalitarians Against Totalitarianism by Anyone Else? the

rest to destitution -- for *decades* -- in the process, because food prices were *calculated* by a committee somewhere instead of discovered in a market like they're supposed to be, and because cheaper, superior, foreign goods and services were legislated out of Indian markets entirely. Except for the elite, of course...]

It seems to nme that there are quite a few parts of our economy that the government controls, from food to steel to gasoline the prices are manipulated and supply is limited or enhanced by our governmet. And there are foriegn goods that are kept out or taxed heavily. Those damn Communist Republicans! Why, just recently they made it illegal to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada, an act that will directly cost some elderly people their lives. So, are the elderly all totalitarians or dupes too? Seems to me that by your own logic we can now justify massacring Republicans, including women, children and the unborn, because they are controlling the economy in a way that kills people. Care to rethink that position before we get started?

"Liberation" theology, remember that? ["Liberation" being yet

another

communard verbal expropriation, like what they did to the word "liberal". War is peace. Or, in the case of "liberation", and "liberal", freedom is literally tyranny.]

Remember Aristide's little ditty in praise of the "necklace"?

Ummm, and Aristide, who we backed, was a communist how?

Remember Ortega and the people whose property he expropriated, who

he

jailed, and those small-businessman "counter-revolutionaries" he eventually killed? He would have killed more if we'd let him. If Reagan had let him.

Don't think the "innocent" Allende would have been any different, he'd already started the process of expropriation and confiscation of people's livelihoods, and eventually, their lives, when, yes, Pinochet took him out. Life is hard. War sucks. People die.

Again, the overthrow of a Democracy that was the one stable one in Latin America, by the CIA,...was a blow against Communism? And it is OK because it was a "war" and never mind that we started it? Does it matter that this "war" was against an unarmed population that never even revolted or went into the hills to fight? Does it matter that this "war" meant that ten thousand people we had picked out were put into a soccer stadium and massacred? There was no uprising in Chile and yet somehow you claim there was a "war?" I have to assume that you think it is somehow far worse to leave people unemployed than to massacre them. So then Bush again must be seen by your own argument as a Communist that must be overthrown (for confiscating people's livelihoods by subsidizing the export of their jobs) and Republicans must be rounded up into footbal stadiums and massacred. When do we start?

And of course, there's the Sendero Luminoso, the "Shining" Path.

Real

humanitarians.

Ah, back to the "he did it too" argument. Well, then it must be OK, right? Would that argument still hold after we have all of the Republicans rounded up?

Oh. That's right. Butchers like the Sendero's Guzman, like Ortega, or, these days, Chavez and Castro, are *heroes* to people like you. "Freedom fighters," or some such emetic nonsense. I'm a functional atheist (okay, a Unitarian; there's some pyroclastic irony for you...), but one of the best things the Pope did -- after helping first Thatcher and then Reagan *free* three-quarters of Eurasia, if you now count India, and start what is an irreversible process in China -- was to kill "liberation" theology in its metaphoric crib, before it literally killed tens of millions of people, much more

than

centuries of ignorance and cryptofeudal tyranny hadn't done already in South America. (See, speaking of Guzman and Sendero, the works of Hernando de Soto for more on that...)

"See above for completely unsupportable accusations of what might have happened if, if, if, but did not."

A nation-state, if you remember your first political "science"

class,

is about force and geographic monopolies thereof. Politics is about who controls and spends the economic rents that a force-monopoly violently expropriates from its citizenry

[and in our case from the citizenry of other nations as well] and about buying

non-violent acquiescence in that expropriation through "social" programs and other forms of fraud, thus lowering the transaction cost of what would have been a more violent act of theft.

As Mancur Olsen said in "Power and Prosperity", a prince is a bandit who doesn't move.

Absent any *physical* brakes on his power -- be they economic or violent -- whoever is in charge of a nation state, and whatever elite he needs to keep himself in power, can do whatever they damn well please. It is only an armed (first) and educated (second), and thus *free* population that prevents them from turning into tyrants.

An excellent description of America today and how our poorly educated (at the very least in political realms) population has allowed the Republicans and Democrats to loot and pillage at will. Thank you.

Stalin, the subject of "Power and Prosperity" -- and ultimate model for erst-and-proto-tinpots from Santiago to Managua to Havana to Caracas, from New Delhi to Baghdad, from Phnom Penh to Pyongyang -- being the canonical example.

Your heroes, from the "liberation" theology Church Ladies to Castro, were about selling oppression to the masses.

My heroes, certainly the people who ran, and, yes, those who graduated from, the School of the Americas, thugs and all, were, ultimately, on the side of good and right.

So, by "good and right" you mean what exactly? The policy that any attempt to stop the forced expropriation, "the economic rents that a force-monopoly violently expropriates from its citizenry" when done by us to a foreign population is evil? That any attempt by a foreign population to stop us from ripping them off and controlling their economy by force is justification for mass murder and genocide? How then do you define good and right? And ultimately, by the

count of democracy versus tyranny in this half of the world -- more important, by the count of free versus confiscatory crypto-and-neo-feudal markets -- it looks like they won, so they were on the right side of history as well.

Hold on, so I can only conclude that you are saying LESS DEMOCRACY is a win for us? How does the violent overthrow of TWO DEMOCRACIES by the CIA and the USA mean more democracy and less tyranny? How does the installing of a brutal military dictator equal more Democracy? Perhaps I just have never seen the term "Democracy" applied to an unelected military dictator with total unchallenged power before, could you reference this usage for me?

War ain't beanbag. Until we solve the problem of force-monopoly

with

free markets someday,

Yes, how will we end the American force-monopoly in the third world? That is indeed one of the keys. war, and monopolistic violence, is,

paradoxically, how we protect free markets,

If by "free" you mean "completly controlled for our own interests." and, through them,

freedom itself.

If by "freedom" you mean "the right to be massacred by us for disagreeing, or even for just looking like someday you might disagree should we ever allow you to be born alive."

Irony, apparently, is abundant in the universe, and, like matter

and

energy, force and fraud, it is conserved as well.

Yes, it is indeed remarkably present in this post of yours where you espouse how good it is that we commit unthinkable evil acts on complete innocents so that they may be "free." None of those you hold to be evil, Hitler, Stalin, etc, would have said anything very much different from what you just did to justify their own horrific acts. How does it feel to be evil? Carmi Turchick

Cheers, RAH

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-- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@i...> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and

antiquity,

[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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