[irtheory] Re: War ain't beanbag. Irony is conserved.

[R. A. Hettinga]

--- begin forwarded text


To: irtheory at yahoogroups.com
User-Agent: eGroups-EW/0.82
From: "Carmi Turchick" <tribalypredisposed at yahoo.com>
Mailing-List: list irtheory at yahoogroups.com; contact
irtheory-owner at yahoogroups.com
Delivered-To: mailing list irtheory at yahoogroups.com
Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2004 20:37:43 -0000
Subject: [irtheory] Re: War ain't beanbag. Irony is conserved.
Reply-To: irtheory at 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 at yahoogroups.com, "R. A. Hettinga" <rah at s...> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> 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
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.

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?

> 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
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
>
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: PGP 8.0.3
>
> iQA/AwUBQMxbPcPxH8jf3ohaEQIV1QCg3WCvUqbISoWl83PYkCi04IflyJsAoI8p
> /FuTkpzHwSDUaTG392g2yuB1
> =nx0v
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> --
> -----------------
> R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'



------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar.
Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/_tgrlB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->


Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/irtheory/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
     irtheory-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
     http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/


--- end forwarded text


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
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'