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 17 Sep 2007 @ 09:57, by jazzolog. Violence, War
People in the West are always getting ready to live.
---Chinese proverb
If you're afraid of being grabbed by God, don't look at a wall. Definitely don't sit still.
---Jiyu Kennett
When the mind is not aroused, this is discipline.
When the mind is unmoved, this is concentration.
When the mind is not obscured, this is insight.
---Hseuh-Yen
Frank Rich is a columnist for The New York Times who focuses on American politics and cultural trends. His column yesterday~~~
Will the Democrats Betray Us?
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 16 September 2007
"Sir, I don't know, actually": The fact that America's surrogate commander in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to take away from last week's festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff.
Not that many Americans were watching. The country knew going in that the White House would win its latest campaign to stay its course of indefinitely shoveling our troops and treasure into the bottomless pit of Iraq. The only troops coming home alive or with their limbs intact in President Bush's troop "reduction" are those who were scheduled to be withdrawn by April anyway. Otherwise the president would have had to extend combat tours yet again, mobilize more reserves or bring back the draft.
On the sixth anniversary of the day that did not change everything, General Petraeus couldn't say we are safer because he knows we are not. Last Sunday, Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the C.I.A.'s Osama bin Laden unit, explained why. He wrote in The Daily News that Al Qaeda, under the de facto protection of Pervez Musharraf, is "on balance" more threatening today that it was on 9/11. [link] And as goes Pakistan, so goes Afghanistan. On Tuesday, just as the Senate hearings began, Lisa Myers of NBC News reported on a Taliban camp near Kabul in an area nominally controlled by the Afghan government we installed. It is training bomb makers to attack America. [link]
Little of this registered in or beyond the Beltway. New bin Laden tapes and the latest 9/11 memorial rites notwithstanding, we're back in a 9/10 mind-set. Bin Laden, said Frances Townsend, the top White House homeland security official, "is virtually impotent." Karen Hughes, the Bush crony in charge of America's P.R. in the jihadists' world, recently held a press conference anointing Cal Ripken Jr. our international "special sports envoy." We are once more sleepwalking through history, fiddling while the Qaeda not in Iraq prepares to burn.
This is why the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, including those more accurate than Mr. Bush's recent false analogies, can take us only so far. Our situation is graver than it was during Vietnam. More >
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28 Aug 2007 @ 19:56, by vaxen. Violence, War
In a recent television program, Phil Donahue spoke with swindled employees of Enron, World,com, and other criminal corporations. Many of the workers who had been fired, without severance pay, by these companies days after the senior executives had stolen millions, were still dazed. These were well-intentioned, hard-working people who had been completely savaged by corporate fat-cats. "What can we do?" they asked.
Well, certainly the first thing American workers must do is wake up to what the Bush regime is doing: fostering and allowing corporate crime to run rampant, destroying the life savings of hundreds of people.
We must be aware that the Bush regime is actually a military dictatorship which will inevitably lead to the total destruction of our civil liberties unless we make sure that doesn't happen.
It's easy to miss the unmistakable aspects of the "High Cabal's" dictatorship if we assume that tyranny in the United States will necessarily take the same form as in, say, Nazi Germany, the communist Soviet Union, Sadam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq, or other instances of despotism.
The United States has a long and glorious history of civil rights and some amount of governance by the will of the people. So the "High Cabal's" puppet Bush regime must start from a different historical position in its insane drive toward a police state. Daily, we see the Bush-led junta demolishing Constitutional liberties with impunity. We must recognize that the old forms of military dictatorship--with jackbooted storm troopers--have been replaced with new "war on terrorism" military control of civilians.
9/11 was an unconscionable act of terror and whether the Bush regime planned and carried out that operation is still an open question. I would not be surprised if the "High Cabal" perpetrates a second terrorist act within the next year--to create a pretext for suspending all Constitutional liberties in the hysteria that would inevitably ensue. It's quite possible that the Bush-led junta will create a Weimar Germany style financial crash to usher in a complete Nazi-like police state.
One of Dubya's appointees to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission told a Detroit crowd in July 2002 that America could "forget about civil rights" if there was another terrorist attack on the United States by "the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center."
What the Bush regime is doing is so tyrannical that we must begin immediately to act as a people to stop its deliberate destruction of our nation.
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The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012
CHARLES J. DUNLAP, JR.
From Parameters, Winter 1992-93, pp. 2-20.
The letter that follows takes us on a darkly imagined excursion into the future. A military coup has taken place in the United States--the year is 2012--and General Thomas E. T. Brutus, Commander-in-Chief of the Unified Armed Forces of the United States, now occupies the White House as permanent Military Plenipotentiary.
His position has been ratified by a national referendum, though scattered disorders still prevail and arrests for acts of sedition are underway. A senior retired officer of the Unified Armed Forces, known here simply as Prisoner 222305759, is one of those arrested, having been convicted by court-martial for opposing the coup. Prior to his execution, he is able to smuggle out of prison a letter to an old War College classmate discussing the "Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012."
In it, he argues that the coup was the outgrowth of trends visible as far back as 1992. These trends were the massive diversion of military forces to civilian uses, the monolithic unification of the armed forces, and the insularity of the military community. His letter survives and is here presented verbatim.
It goes without saying (I hope) that the coup scenario above is purely a literary device intended to dramatize my concern over certain contemporary developments affecting the armed forces, and is emphatically not a prediction. -- The Author More >
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16 Aug 2007 @ 23:55, by vaxen. Violence, War
The War Ahead And The Way Ahead
by Charles K. Bartles, Lester W. Grau and Jacob W. Kipp
FMSO analysts
War is fought on the strategic, operational and tactical level. Although nuclear planning often dominates the military professional’s view of the strategic level of war, the strategic level of war is primarily concerned with how the entire nation supports the war and handles the war’s impact on foreign relations, domestic politics, economics, education, transport, trade, banking and taxation. The operational level of war is concerned with the management of campaigns and, in the United States Armed Forces, is conducted by echelons above Corps. The tactical level of war, in the view of the United States Armed Forces, is the business of divisions and below. As the US Army goes through transformation, there is no apparent move to adjust these levels or definitions to fit the Units of Action and Units of Employment structure.
Pinning the level of war on force size reflects the emphasis of force-on-force combat with operational planning focusing the synchronized application of combat power to break enemy formations. Since the events of 9/11, the US military has fought an inherently more complex conflict in disparate theaters against a range of opponents which seldom resemble the conventional armies of the industrial era. Fighting terrorism now means dealing with insurgencies. In these conflicts, the political dimension takes on greater import and the military response has to be shaped to fit the desired political outcome in regions that are quite distinct and profoundly different culturally from the United States and the modern West. More >
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8 Aug 2007 @ 17:44, by a-d. Violence, War
W Is For War
By Mary Sparrowdancer /// [ [link] ]
© 2007 - All Rights Reserved
8-7-7 /// posted by a-d from [ [link] ]
Webster's defines war as "a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations." It defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group." While many people have been deliberately misled by the mainstream media to think that there is an ongoing "war" between the state of Israel and "Palestinian terrorists" bent on taking Israel's land away, the truth is that only one side in this "war" has tanks, drones, Apache attack helicopters, F-16s, unconfirmed nuclear weapons, a deadly navy complete with gunboats, an army equipped with sophisticated and offensive weaponry, a sophisticated air force and billions of dollars in military funding. Only one side is even recognized as a state. The other side consists of millions of largely unarmed Palestinian refugees who have been running for their lives for almost 60 years now. They have been running for their lives on their own ancestral lands, which have been violently confiscated from them by the state of Israel. It is the Palestinians who have had their land taken away. Not Israel. More >
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4 Aug 2007 @ 17:01, by vaxen. Violence, War
Despite the absence of any threat to Iran’s Jews, the Israeli media recently reported that the Israeli government has been trying to find new ways to entice Iranian Jews to Israel. The Ma’ariv newspaper pointed out that previous schemes had found few takers. There was, noted the report, “a lack of desire on the part of thousands of Iranian Jews to leave”. According to the New York-based Forward newspaper, a campaign to convince Iranian Jews to emigrate to Israel caused only 152 out of these 25,000 Jews to leave Iran between October 2005 and September 2006, and most of them were said to have emigrated for economic reasons, not political ones. More >
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 12 Jul 2007 @ 23:14, by quinty. Violence, War
After Saddam Hussein destroyed the World Trade Center - with the help of what’sname, oh you know, that guy who’s head of al Qaeda (if Bush can’t think of his name why should I?) - and we drove Saddam from power, thereby removing a greater threat than Hitler from the world’s stage, all his terrorists buddies, all those jihadi types, you know, came rushing to Iraq to take us on. More >
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 26 Jun 2007 @ 23:56, by quinty. Violence, War
My Google web crawler brought up this piece I wrote two years ago, which appeared on Bemusings on July 14, 2005. For whatever it’s worth, here’s a glmpse at the past, and through the past at the present, since nothing appears to have changed in two years. Except the mounting dead and destruction. And the opposition to the war, which has only increased over time. And will continue to increase.
How many American soldiers were dead by July 2005? Nearly 1800.
Today's statistic is 3565. ( [link] for that source.)
When it comes to Iraqis there is no way of measuring. The number, though, is enormous.
Buddy’s Bemusings then: [link]
Buddy’s Bemusings today: [link]
BACK TO JULY, 2005............... More >
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30 May 2007 @ 01:03, by a-d. Violence, War
but don't take my word for it!.... Just read the first page of this web-site
[ [link] ]
See if you feel as "jazzed" about it happy as I did when I found it! : )
Feel free to comment on anything said in this link, eh? We need to discuss and share our experiences and thoughts around this Awakening "Thinggggg"...: ) More >
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21 Apr 2007 @ 23:43, by vaxen. Violence, War
Nefarious War
Last year we fought by the head-stream of the Sang-kan,
This year we are fighting on the Tsung-ho road.
We have washed our armor in the waves of Chiao-chi lake,
We have pastured our horses on Tien-shan's snowy slopes.
The long, long war goes on ten thousand miles from home,
Our three armies are worn and grown old.
The barbarian does man-slaughter, not plowing;
On this yellow sand-plains nothing has been seen but
blanched skulls and bones.
Where the Chin emperor built the walls against the Tartars,
There the defenders of Han are burning beacon fires.
The beacon fires burn and never go out,
There is no end to war!—
In the battlefield men grapple each other and die;
The horses of the vanquished utter lamentable cries to heaven,
While ravens and kites peck at human entrails,
Carry them up in their flight, and hang them on the branches of dead trees.
So, men are scattered and smeared over the desert grass,
And the generals have accomplished nothing.
Oh, nefarious war! I see why arms
Were so seldom used by the benign sovereigns. More >
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12 Apr 2007 @ 14:33, by vaxen. Violence, War
"Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Your wealth has been stripped of you by unjust men... The people of Baghdad shall flourish under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws." (General F.S. Maude, commander of British forces in Iraq, 1917)
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"Peoples of Egypt, you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion. Do not believe it! Reply that I have come to restore your rights!" (Napoleon Bonaparte, 1798)
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If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law: Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobediance, 1849
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Thought I'd 'putz' this in here just for the fun of it. Not that I, in any way, countenance Eugene Iacocca, but herein you can see some fundamental hypocrisy mixed in with the mans' burden of seeing the monster 'Amerika' for what it is now and always has been.
I grew up in this land and saw the fundamental insanity close up from an early age. This is not my government that sits in the marble halls of an Architectural monstrosity (The "White" House)...
Anyone with half a brain can see the writing on the wall. I will not allow myself, ever again, to participate in the insanity of a supposed 'political' process nor will I listen to supposed 'leaders' shout out their calumny and vapidness expecting me to 'pay' for their errant foolishness at thinking that what they have to say is worth a peanut in a hull rotten with the wasted lives of countless generations of fools who believed that someone else could ever have their best interests at heart.
No, Washington, you've never been ought by pomp and circumstance for me. My earnest desire is to see you and all your denizens sink into the darkest of holes like the ones you create for all earths peoples everyday with your traitorous assumptions to and usurpations of 'our power.'
To me you'll always be nothing but flotsam blowing in the wind and I yearn for the day when we free our planet forever from the likes of you whether you sit in the Kremlin, Jerusalem, or Timbuktu.
Iacoccas' Shpiel: More >
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