-Caveat Lector- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 21:19:13 +1100 From: Bond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [ParanoidTimes] Liberty or Death? Choose One
Liberty or Death? Choose One by Paul Gross October 29, 2001 The horrible events of September the 11th have brought America to a crossroads. Down one road lies a police state, perpetual war, and more dead innocents both here and abroad. Down the other road lies freedom, peace and prosperity. One would think that such a choice would be easy and obvious. Yet our leaders, from the President on down, seem to be hell-bent on taking the wrong road. The first thing to realize is that the attack of Sept. 11 was not unprovoked, nor was it "an attack on our freedom." Our media, with its own socialist and anti-capitalist biases, produces a lot of blather about how the rest of the world hates the US for its free, capitalistic system. It's pure nonsense. Free trade produces friends, not enemies. Think about it: every single time two people trade anything, each one of them gets something he values more than what he gives up. Each one's life is a little better, a little happier. One does not hate people who consistently make ones life better. Who hates the Swiss, who trade peaceably with all the world, but do not meddle in foreign politics? No, what earns us hatred is neither freedom nor trade - it is outright murder, terrorism, and our support of foreign tyrants and terrorist governments. Such has been our government's "foreign policy" for decades. I could give many examples of our insane foreign policies, but in the present case, probably only two are relevant: our support of Israel and our "economic sanctions" on Iraq. Israel has been locked into a vicious cycle of murder and revenge since its inception. Back in the first World War, Britain controlled Palestine, and wanted the assistance of the Muslims who lived there in fighting the Germans and Turks, so the British promised the Muslims eventual self-rule in Palestine in return for their help. The Brits got the help they wanted, but they never got around to keeping their promise. Thirty years later, after WWII, neither Britain nor the US was willing to take in the survivors of the Holocaust, so hordes of homeless Jews descended on Palestine. With encouragement and funds from America, they launched a war of terror against the British, who promptly tucked tail and ran. The Jewish minority seized power and renamed the country Israel. The Israelis, with American backing, stole the land of the Palestinian Moslems, forced millions of them to flee the country, and passed explicitly racist new laws forbidding their return. Since its beginning, Isra! el has cashed in on the pity one naturally feels for victims of the Holocaust, but isn't it about time we realized that being a victim does not entitle one to make victims of other innocent people? This is clearly a lesson the Israelis have never learned, because they still treat Moslems pretty much the same way Hitler treated the Jews, before he decided on his "final solution." Every terrorist bomb that goes off in Israel is met with bloody reprisals - NOT against the terrorists, who can't be found, but against random Palestinian neighborhoods. Such reprisals actually aid the terrorists' cause by garnering them new recruits and donations from sympathetic Moslems. People who unjustly lose their homes and their loved ones make first-class, fanatical recruits - the kind of people who are willing to hijack airplanes and fly them into enemy buildings. Why do Palestinians hate the US government? Because the state of Israel is the creation of the US government. Because Israel has always received most of its funding from the US government and from American Jews. Because it gets the latest in weapons technology from the US government, not to mention the bulldozers it uses to destroy Palestinian homes. And because it is protected from international justice in the United Nations by the veto power wielded by the US government. And the Palestinians are right. The Israeli government, aided and enabled by our government, has done them enormous harm, harm they did not deserve any more than the people in the World Trade Center deserved to be attacked. U.S. Government policy toward Iraq is even worse. Our government has deliberately bombed all water purification and sewage treatment facilities in Iraq, then imposed "economic sanctions," preventing foreign trade in food, medicine, chlorine needed to purify water - or parts to repair the water and sewage systems. Thanks to our actions, 1.4 million Iraqis have died, including about 500,000 children, dead of starvation.. (These are U.N. figures, not Saddam Hussein's.) You want to talk terrorist atrocities? The World Trade Center attack was barely a fender-bender, compared to the train-wreck horror that our government has inflicted on innocent people in Iraq. Anyone who believes that the terrorist attacks on the US were "unprovoked" must not regard the mass-murder of innocent foreign civilians as "provocation." What is our justification for murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people? Well, we don't like Saddam Hussein, and want to punish him for being a bad guy. Interesting. Has Saddam missed any meals because of our economic sanctions, do you suppose? Does some genius in Washington believe that anyone in the world will blame Saddam for the suffering of the Iraqi people? Are we killing innocent hostages so that Saddam will be overcome with guilt and resign or commit suicide? What I'd like to know is: why are there no calls for our latest three Presidents to be turned over to Iraq to stand trial for their crimes against humanity? Seems only fair, if we expect anyone to turn over Osama bin Laden to us. And here's the point that really ought to make you think: The government of Iraq, like most of the Moslem governments of the Middle East, is not democratically elected. The Middle East abounds in monarchies, dictatorships and theocracies, but nowhere do the common people elect their leaders. They don't get to elect their leaders because of American support of virtually every dictator and princeling that money can buy - including both Saddam Hussein (who was going to be our tool against Iran) and the Afghani Taliban (who were going to help us against the Russians.) That is the tiny grain of truth behind our government's lie: "they hate us for being a free country." They hate us because our country arms and supports the tyrants who keep them enslaved, impoverished, and politically powerless. The people of the Middle East owe us a great deal for our interventions in their affairs; pray that they will forgive us instead of trying to pay us back. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Syria, and all the other places that breed and shelter international terrorists, there are no elections, and no ruler uses public opinion polls to decide policy. The common people of such countries are totally powerless - and therefore innocent of responsibility for their governments' actions and policies. They are, in fact, victims of their own governments. Any action we take against them is like attacking the inhabitants of a concentration camp because we don't like the people who run the camp. (And never mind that we helped build the camp!) On the other hand, in democratic countries like the US and Israel, we do elect our leaders, and our opinions can and do affect government policies. So if you are a Palestinian or an Iraqi with a legitimate grievance against the US government, are you entirely wrong to blame common American citizens, or to consider them proper targets for your enmity? Now the vicious cycle opens to receive us. Will we, like the Israelis, make war on innocents to retaliate against guilty people we cannot locate? Will we drop bombs on civilians while the terrorists sit back and get ready to welcome a flood of new recruits? No matter how massive our retaliation, every innocent person we kill will have friends and family who will turn into our sworn enemies. Indeed, the more massive our retaliation, the more victims it will produce, and the more hatred we will incur in response. Some of those new enemies will come our way with bombs, and some will just bring pocket knives, box-cutters and ingenuity, the way twenty brave men did on Sept. 11. How do you stop a man who's willing to die, just to get you? Shall we now create another million innocent victims, and help the terrorists to recruit thousands of such men, filled with hate and with nothing to lose? We've seen what twenty men can do. What might twenty thousand do? Our leaders say we will have to give up a little more, always a little more, of our freedom. Don't object to the government snooping through your e-mail or monitoring your phone calls. Wait in line for hours to board your next airline flight, and don't squawk when the nice folks at the boarding gate want to strip-search you and check out your body cavities. What will they do if a new group of terrorists use karate to overpower a flight crew? Insist that all passengers on every flight be handcuffed, no doubt. The bottom line is, you can't stop a determined terrorist. The best way, the only way, to stop him is not to provoke such fanatical hatred in the first place. Don't drop bombs on innocent people, and don't enforce "economic sanctions" that starve innocent children, as we are still doing in Iraq. Don't give aid and don't give arms to foreign governments that murder innocent people, as Israel does. The Swiss have exactly the right idea. Trade peacefully with all nations, be prepared to defend yourself, but don't meddle. That is the road to peace, and prosperity. It is also the road to freedom. And let's for once be clear about what "freedom" is. "Freedom" means each person owns his own life and is responsible for making his own choices about his own life. Freedom begins where government compulsion ends. We won't be kept free by new laws restricting our freedom to travel or laws allowing government agents to rummage through our clothing or our homes or our cars or our e-mail whenever they feel like it, or to listen in on our phone calls. "Freedom" means freedom from government. We need our government to stop meddling where they have no damn business and we especially need them to stop murdering and terrorizing foreigners, or supporting foreign governments that murder and terrorize their own people. Every time another innocent foreigner is killed with US bombs, our government puts our lives more at risk. We need to stop our government from exporting terror, death and destruction, leaving us free to export the seeds of peace: the goods a! nd services that peaceable people all over the world need and want to make their own lives better. That's the real secret of good international relations: give people what they want, in exchange for what you want. Don't murder them. What should we do about the terrorists - those who did not snuff themselves along with their victims? If we can identify guilty individuals and prove their guilt (and I mean: prove it in court, to an impartial jury. Naturally, those who decline to put up a legal defense are more likely to be found guilty.) - then put a bounty on their heads. Their heads, not the heads of innocent civilians who happen to reside in the same country. If the guilty parties turn out to be rulers or agents of a foreign government, then put a billion-dollar bounty on the "head of state," so to speak, and offer American passports to anyone who earns a bounty, with extra passports for their family members.. Free enterprise will take over from there, without the loss of any more innocent lives, American or otherwise. And watch the terrorists become extinct. What will ensure their extinction is not just the deaths of a few well-known terrorists. We can never track down and kill all the people who have committed terrorist acts, or those who might do so in the future. We need to recognize that these are fanatical people, but not crazy people. They do not kill for love of killing; they act from absolute conviction (not unfounded) that they have no other way to obtain justice (or revenge, depending on your point of view) for wrongs done to themselves, their families, their countrymen, and innocent members of the religious faith they share. What we can do is take away their Cause. Stop bombing Iraq, and end the "economic sanctions" that are keeping food and medicine from reaching innocent Iraqis. Stop supporting Israel, and at the same time stop supporting every petty tyrant who promises us an oil concession. This isn't "giving in to terrorism" - it's doing something we should have done years ago: minding our own business! If you worry that the Israelis might be wiped out, then consider the alternative we should have adopted fifty-five years ago: give them all US passports. That is the only honest and generous thing we could do for them. Offering them a place in our land is generous; helping them steal land that belongs to someone else is criminal, and constitutes the prime reason America is hated in the Middle East. And bring our troops home. They are not earning respect for our ideas of justice, any more than people respect a bully who thrashes anyone he doesn't like. They are not protecting us. They are earnin! g us new enemies with every bomb they drop. In short, stop meddling in foreign quarrels, and foreigners will have no further reason to do us harm. They still may not like us very much, because of past wrongs we have done them, but if we stop creating new wrongs, and perhaps offer compensation for old ones, they are likely to regard us as a criminal who has actually seen the error of his ways, and forgive us. Those who mistake blind nationalism for a true patriot's love of liberty may shudder at the idea that America, the richest and most powerful nation on earth, should need or want forgiveness from the residents of the pestholes of the Third World. If Might makes Right, then they are right to shudder. But it doesn't, and they are not. It is not right to murder innocent people or to support murderers. Including the murderers in our own government. Like a fireman who starts the fires that he is duty-bound to fight, our government has accomplished the opposite of its primary duty: protecting its citizens from violence. Its international bumbling, meddling, and sheer vicious mass murdering have created a vast number of enemies for us around the world. Thanks entirely to our own government, our lives are more at risk today, here at home, than ever before in our history. If the government were a private security firm, we would not only fire them, we'd sue them for damages! Now they propose to "protect" us by taking away more of our liberty, and by murdering ever more innocents in other countries, creating a new generation of terrorists who in turn will murder more innocents here. Short of murdering half the world's population, our government cannot achieve its stated objectives. The things they want to do have all been tried before, and they have brought us to where we are today. Wake up, bozos! It's time to realize that we can't win friends and influence people by dropping bombs on them. How hard is that to figure out? If we are to achieve any kind of peace but the peace of a graveyard, we must find another way. And if you think clearly, the other way is obvious and easy. What do the terrorists want? Do they want to conquer us? Force us to convert to Islam? Take away our land or our wealth? Murder us all to the last man, woman and child? No, no, no and no. They want our government to leave them alone. That's all. They want the same thing we want, really: they want to be free to make their own choices and live their own lives, without interference from violent foreign enemies. As we value our own freedom, we must respect theirs. Here at the crossroads, we face a clear choice: liberty, or death? Our government is trying to convince us that unlimited war and an all-intrusive police state is the way to go. Rally round the flag, boys! Support our noble leader and valiant fighting men, as they hunt down and kill all the people who hate us. If any innocents get hurt along the way, that's just too bad, but we'll just have to hunt down and kill all the people who hate us for hurting them. And if anyone objects to that, kill them too. And so on. And so on. And who's that knocking on your door? Or take the other road, the one that leads to the security of being armed, but not hated; to the prosperity that comes from free trade; to the peace that comes of NOT having our government creating new enemies for us; and to the freedom that we must reclaim from those who have arrogated to themselves the rights to snoop through our e-mail, our homes, our cars, our telephone calls, our financial records, and our pockets. ! But once you set foot on that road, be warned: your enemies do not live in impoverished Afghanistan. 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