The Austin Texas Bombing Is A HUGE Image Blow To The "Tea Party" Right

[friendly_jacek]

Re: The Austin Texas Bombing Is A HUGE Image Blow To The "Tea Party" Right

Yep. Partisans in WWII would not be treated as terrorists today. In fact just the opposite. Yet Germans killed any they captured.

Since you mentioned that, very true. That did not stop the resistance. Later in the war, germans resorted to exucuting 100 civilians (Poles or Russians) for every german killed by resistance. That did not stop the resistance either.

And yes, germans referred to partisans as terrorists indeed to marginalize the movement of course.

Basically, the distinction between terrorists and patriots depends solely on the side of the conflict you sit.

I don't know if American's Revolutionaries were refered to as terrorists by british, but I would not be surprised if they were (if that world was in use then).

[flintlock]

Re: The Austin Texas Bombing Is A HUGE Image Blow To The "Tea Party" Right

I don't know if American's Revolutionaries were refered to as terrorists by british, but I would not be surprised if they were (if that world was in use then).

Well, the British did tend to slaughter surrendering troops at alarming rates, especially in the South. And the prisoners they did take were held in the most horrible conditions. They refered to them as rebels, which at the time was probably about as bad a term as you could call an adversary. Terrorism as we know it hadn't really taken off at that time of course. Technically, they were in rebellion against the King so all could be executed. Many were. The fact they were subject to execution makes it all the more remarkable that our founding fathers were willing to risk all. How many rich and powerful leaders today would do the same?

I'm not defending terrorists. But there is a difference between the insurgents fighting our troops and the people who fly planes into buildings. Are some of the insurgents also terrorists? Perhaps. But our leaders brand them all terrorists in order to justify to our people a questionable war.

[D-Mack]

Re: The Austin Texas Bombing Is A HUGE Image Blow To The "Tea Party" Right

Well, the British did tend to slaughter surrendering troops at alarming rates, especially in the South. And the prisoners they did take were held in the most horrible conditions. They refered to them as rebels, which at the time was probably about as bad a term as you could call an adversary. Terrorism as we know it hadn't really taken off at that time of course. Technically, they were in rebellion against the King so all could be executed. Many were. The fact they were subject to execution makes it all the more remarkable that our founding fathers were willing to risk all. How many rich and powerful leaders today would do the same?

I'm not defending terrorists. But there is a difference between the insurgents fighting our troops and the people who fly planes into buildings. Are some of the insurgents also terrorists? Perhaps. But our leaders brand them all terrorists in order to justify to our people a questionable war.

FEMA was teaching that the "Founding Fathers" was the first terrorist organization in the US

[don]

Re: The Austin Texas Bombing Is A HUGE Image Blow To The "Tea Party" Right

Joe Stack may become many things to many people. That's already started. Will he have the legs of Tiger?

The Joe Stack Manifesto
What it Really Means

By Christopher Ketcham

If, as author Bill Blum has noted, a terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn’t have an air force, then the suicide pilot Andrew “Joe” Stack most certainly qualifies as a terrorist, having made an effective little bomb out of his Piper Cherokee. At the minimum, he appears to have been a thoughtful terrorist, so we should pause a moment to consider his thinking. For crashing his plane into the offices of the IRS in Austin, Tex. – and, worse, for leaving a manifesto explaining why he did it – Stack has been accused by the usual mouthpieces on the Democratic left (Daily Kos, for example) as a right-wing Tea Party loon (the Tea Partiers demur). His suicide letter, now published far and wide on the internet, has been dismissed as a “rant” for its “ideological incoherence” and “self-pity,” in the words of Salon’s Joan Walsh, herself a model of the Democratic left in that she can always be expected to say nothing worth reading.

The coherence is there for all to see who have eyes to see it. Read the manifesto. “When the wealthy fuck up,” writes Stack, “the poor get to die for the mistakes.” Such a system, he notes, is predicated on “two interpretations for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us.” Stack is talking, of course, about the remarkable functionality of corporatism, or, rather, corporate socialism – socialism for the rich – the marriage of big business and big government, the wealth and power that has accrued in large-scale institutions whose growth the Democratic and Republican Parties have together abetted (the left only somewhat less skilled at it than the right). Corporations marred by their own stupidity and greed get bail-outs, writes Stack, while healthcare companies plunder the ranks of the sick and the dying for profit. Big labor unions, he writes, collude with company executives to defraud union membership. Stack drops $5,000 out of pocket and “at least 1000 hours of my time writing” on various matters to get the attention of his representatives in Congress, only to conclude it is “a futile exercise.” “They universally treated me as if I was wasting their time,” he writes. Five thousand dollars and a thousand hours of letter writing was not enough for consideration.

Stack singles out the “vulgar and corrupt” Catholic Church as a “monster of organized religion” that grows inordinately wealthy exploiting religious tax exemptions. God only knows how much money the “ecclesiastical corporations” (as James Madison put it) are squirreling away by a pretense of service to the greater good. And, obviously, Stack goes after the IRS, on the charge of “taxation without representation.” That is, he is attacking a gigantic system of wealth transfer – itself designed, like organized religious doctrine, to confuse, stultify, mystify – that keeps alive a government which ably represents its corporate handlers but coldly calculates the length and breadth of the shaft for its citizens. As a software engineer in Austin, for example, Stack finds that “three or four large companies in the area” collude “to drive down prices and wages” for engineering professionals like himself, while the Department of Justice, he alleges, does nothing about it. If true, it’s not a surprising development for a government that in recent years has allowed bigness oligopolies to take the dominant position in just about every major sector of the economy (in banking, finance, food production, energy, defense, steel, pharmaceuticals, airlines, and media), while institutionalizing unfairness for the small man. Two interpretations of the law: one that favors the large and powerful, the other that dashes the rest of us against the rocks of “justice.”

I would venture that what drove Stack to a suicidal-homicidal rage was in part that he could no longer accept the unfairness of the bigness complexes, no longer navigate the labyrinth with the required shrug and sullen grunt. I hear in his words distant echoes of Paul Goodman, the author and anarchist and one of the great unsung thinkers of our time. Writing in 1963, Goodman observed that institutional bigness, and the centralization necessary to maintain bigness, was the bane of American life: “one interlocked system of big government, big corporations, big municipalities, big labor, big education, and big communication, in which all of us are pretty regimented and brainwashed, and in which direct initiative and deciding have become difficult or impossible.” The assumption, wrote Goodman, is “now appallingly unanimous among the ordinary electorate, professional politicians, most radicals, and even political scientists who should know better, [that] politics is essentially a matter of ‘getting into power,’ and then ‘deciding,’ directing, controlling, coercing, the activities of society” – that is, coercing so that centralization and bigness remain the norm. The individual, taken alone, is worth nothing in the face of such monstrously outsized structural imbalances. It’s clear that Joe Stack understood this, feeling worthless enough that the only conceivable act of value was ultimate destruction.

http://www.counterpunch.org/ketcham02222010.html

[Serge_Tomiko]

Re: The Austin Texas Bombing Is A HUGE Image Blow To The "Tea Party" Right

Since you mentioned that, very true. That did not stop the resistance. Later in the war, germans resorted to exucuting 100 civilians (Poles or Russians) for every german killed by resistance. That did not stop the resistance either.

Of course it did. How else could a small country and small army control such a vast territory? The truth is there were multiple faction in every country, and many countries attempt to minimize the collaboration that occurred within their borders. France is the most egregious example. Anti-democratic partisans operated heavily behind the lines after the Anglo-American invasion and play a not insignificant role in slowing down their advance.

And yes, germans referred to partisans as terrorists indeed to marginalize the movement of course.

No they didn't. The Geneva Convention was quite explicit that partisan warfare is illegal. That was enough. Anyway, anti-partisan actions was generally left to foreign regiments, particularly in the East. Local politics often dominated in those lands.

Basically, the distinction between terrorists and patriots depends solely on the side of the conflict you sit.

I don't know if American's Revolutionaries were refered to as terrorists by british, but I would not be surprised if they were (if that world was in use then).

The British attempted to distinguish between uniformed regiments and partisans, i.e. the Swamp Fox.

[flintlock]

Re: The Austin Texas Bombing Is A HUGE Image Blow To The "Tea Party" Right

Only at times I guess the uniforms were not good enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Waxhaws



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paoli_Massacre ( in this one, the killing of prisoners is debatable)

One thing was always certain. The atrocities were always the worst when Loyalist vs Patriot or any battle involving Indians.

[radon]

Re: The Austin Texas Bombing Is A HUGE Image Blow To The "Tea Party" Right

Radon

Tell me how you think this is different than the college professor who shot and killed three professors in Alabama because they denied her tenure.

She didn't like their response so she killed some people.

The plane guy had the same response: he didn't like what some people said so he tried to kill some people in their organization.

I cannot qualify either of those people as being patriotic. I think they are both nut cases.

Cindy

The university doesn't owe anyone tenure. Many people, even tenure track, don't make it. You should be more surprised that someone with sociopathic tendencies and a history of gun violence made it that far. I see no parallel whatsoever. She had the freedom to go and do something else.

On the other hand, see what happens if you don't pay taxes.

Really this is a straw man. If the tenure committee garnished her wages, put a lien on her house and emptied her savings account, and there was no recourse to the law outside of arbitration, which the committee gets to choose by the way, then you might have a point. Not getting into a club and being sent to prison are two different things.

[radon]

Re: The Austin Texas Bombing Is A HUGE Image Blow To The "Tea Party" Right

Radon

I like your air force guy concept. But you missed the point. Suppose for example you have an air force guy who does not like how his mortgage is being foreclosed on so he flies a plane into a branch bank and kills all the people who were involved with his loan and a few customers. Would that be patriotic?

Cindy

Cindy

Of course not. He freely singed on the dotted line to the terms of the mortgage. Nobody compelled him to make that commitment.

Can you say the same for the IRS? Your parallel doesn't work even if income taxes somehow become voluntary, but at least it would be closer. My example was intended to show that being a terrorist or a patriot was context dependent.

You branded him a nutcase because he flew a plane into a building. I demonstrated that blowing up a building full of people is insufficant so show that he is crazy. My evidence is that military personal carry out similar acts and are not labeled as such. In once case we have a person who is labeled a crazy terrorist and one who is a patriot hero. In both cases a building is destroyed and people are dead. One of the distinctions between the two cases is that one is operating under orders, ie the states assumed monopoly on force, and the other is not.

So let's revert to the example. What if the use of force was sanctioned by the state? ie he was ordered to attack the bank and he bombed it killing everyone. Would you think he is a murder? Is he patriotic because he carried out his duty to his country?

For some reason it is popular to believe that nothing is worth fighting or dieing over, and anyone who thinks differently is branded a nut or a criminal. It is ok when some organ of the state sends thugs to kick your door in, physically or financially, and haul you off, but if you fight back you are either crazy(if he looks like you), or a terrorist(if he doesn't). No thought is ever given to whether the crazy-criminal-terrorist ever had a legitimate complaint. Everyone is so quick to label someone who steps out of line and has the audacity to act against the states interest, and yet stalwartly refuse to question whether the states will is right.

From your analogies above my impression is that your judgment of the pilots character is more the result of a social consensus than an analysis of the motivations of the actors involved. In short that version of morality rests solely on which side of the conflict you are on.