Squelching dissent
I heard you on the wireless back in Two Thousand Two
Lying awake intent at tuning in on you.
If I was young it didn't stop you coming through.
Oh-a oh
They took the credit for your second symphony.
Rewritten by machine and new technology,
and now I understand the problems you can see.
What did you tell them?
Internet killed the journalist star.
Internet killed the journalist star.
Pixels came and broke your heart.
Oh-a-a-a oh
Lying awake intent at tuning in on you.
If I was young it didn't stop you coming through.
Oh-a oh
They took the credit for your second symphony.
Rewritten by machine and new technology,
and now I understand the problems you can see.
What did you tell them?
Internet killed the journalist star.
Internet killed the journalist star.
Pixels came and broke your heart.
Oh-a-a-a oh
buy the Ticket take the Ride
Ask yourself - do you want to feed the troll?
Caribe - especially... We all know that he isn't the least bit interested in examining things. As he stated above, to him, his worldview is simply obvious. The sun rises in the east, gravity pulls objects down. Things simply are the way there are. Why do you ask silly questions? It's obvious!
Some of us know that Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was assassinated in cold blood in a joint FBI/Chicago Police operation. An FBI flunkie drugged Hampton before he returned to his apartment. Later that night, a CPD strike force shot their way into the apartment. They shot several people, and when they identified Hampton, who was unarmed, drugged and already shot twice in the chest, was then shot twice in the head. Many people think that the Black Panthers were all "terrorists", but some of us know that the only Panther-related crime Hampton was even charged with was a conviction related to a theft of $71 of ice cream. Some terrorist. Ah, but the dissent that the Panthers "stirred up" struck fear deeply into the hearts of the 'winners' of the socio-economic racist structures that existed since the inception of the country. That dissent was 'suppressed' with two slugs to the head. Stalin would have been proud.
"What?" Some people can't be bothered to learn American history. Some people tell themselves that slavery was an aberration and, heck, it was abolished, uh, a long time ago. But some of us know that the Jim Crow era wasn't just making it hard for black people to vote. From the end of reconstruction to the start of WWII, America had for-profit gulags that many Soviet dissidents would possibly recognize. Or, depending on when and where they were imprisoned, they might recognize that many Soviet gulags were better. For decades, black men, primarily in the south, could be grabbed off the street, arrested, tried and convicted for 'crimes' such as 'vagrancy' (the crime of being unable to prove that you have a job - tough to do when you're a sharecropper...) These men would then be slapped with court and attorney fees along with a fine. How would they pay for these? Well, it so happens that the j.udge's brother owns a turpentine camp far out in the woods. He'll contract with the court to pay this guy's fines working at the 'camp'. It might only take ten years to pay it off. At the camp, he could be beaten, starved or, if he was unlucky, simply beaten to death and dumpped. Maybe it wasn't a turpentine 'camp', maybe it was a mine or a brick kiln. The owners of these operations would, surprise!, hold auctions to buy and sell these men, er, I mean buy and sell their 'contracts'. Here's a site/book about this operation:
http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/the-book
Take a look into an American gulag:
Rounded up seemingly randomly, brought before a sham trial, sent off to a work camp with no contact for the imprisoned man's family, given barely enough food to keep them working, punished in cruel and insane ways, and often worked or beaten to death? Yep. Solzhenitsyn would have found it familiar, but with heat replacing cold.
Some people ask themselves, "Why are so many people from Rev. Jeremiah Wright's generation so angry?" Some of us know why.
When G-Dub said "it's not in the American soul to torture," some people just nodded in agreement thinking happy thoughts of cops getting kittens out of trees with American flags flapping in the distance. Other Americans know who Jonh Burge is. Some of us know that he learned his techniques during his service in the US military in Viet Nam "interrogating" Vietnamese people. He came home and 'improved' them to the point that Vladamir Putin would be proud.
Are only some of us aware of J. Edgar Hoover? Senator McCarthy? The current domestic spying apparatus? (The infiltration of fucking vegan groups!?!) The suspension of habeas corpus? Secret overseas prisons? Waterboarding? Some of us know that Stalin would have a good belly laugh. If he could have seen Tom Delay's quest to create a single-party rule or a situation where a politician's campaign co-chair being in charge of clearing 'undesireables' off the voter rolls then being in charge of counting votes, Stalin would have pulled something laughing.
The point is that some of us know that while the US really is better than the USSR was from Stalin onwards, we also know that the US was tragically never radically that different than the USSR. Some of us compare our historical reality to the potential that our Constitution holds out for us and the rest of the world.
Some of us care to know the messy reality and strive to correct those problems to meet our potential. Some of us just stick our fingers in our ears to seal off to the other voices and live in our "obvious" version of reality. Some of us know when we've driven into a ditch and try to get out of it and back on the road. Some of us slam on the gas and work to achieve "victory" over the ditch.
"Brother, you have no idea." That's ironic.
So, I'll ask again, do you really want to feed the troll?
Caribe - especially... We all know that he isn't the least bit interested in examining things. As he stated above, to him, his worldview is simply obvious. The sun rises in the east, gravity pulls objects down. Things simply are the way there are. Why do you ask silly questions? It's obvious!
Some of us know that Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was assassinated in cold blood in a joint FBI/Chicago Police operation. An FBI flunkie drugged Hampton before he returned to his apartment. Later that night, a CPD strike force shot their way into the apartment. They shot several people, and when they identified Hampton, who was unarmed, drugged and already shot twice in the chest, was then shot twice in the head. Many people think that the Black Panthers were all "terrorists", but some of us know that the only Panther-related crime Hampton was even charged with was a conviction related to a theft of $71 of ice cream. Some terrorist. Ah, but the dissent that the Panthers "stirred up" struck fear deeply into the hearts of the 'winners' of the socio-economic racist structures that existed since the inception of the country. That dissent was 'suppressed' with two slugs to the head. Stalin would have been proud.
"What?" Some people can't be bothered to learn American history. Some people tell themselves that slavery was an aberration and, heck, it was abolished, uh, a long time ago. But some of us know that the Jim Crow era wasn't just making it hard for black people to vote. From the end of reconstruction to the start of WWII, America had for-profit gulags that many Soviet dissidents would possibly recognize. Or, depending on when and where they were imprisoned, they might recognize that many Soviet gulags were better. For decades, black men, primarily in the south, could be grabbed off the street, arrested, tried and convicted for 'crimes' such as 'vagrancy' (the crime of being unable to prove that you have a job - tough to do when you're a sharecropper...) These men would then be slapped with court and attorney fees along with a fine. How would they pay for these? Well, it so happens that the j.udge's brother owns a turpentine camp far out in the woods. He'll contract with the court to pay this guy's fines working at the 'camp'. It might only take ten years to pay it off. At the camp, he could be beaten, starved or, if he was unlucky, simply beaten to death and dumpped. Maybe it wasn't a turpentine 'camp', maybe it was a mine or a brick kiln. The owners of these operations would, surprise!, hold auctions to buy and sell these men, er, I mean buy and sell their 'contracts'. Here's a site/book about this operation:
http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/the-book
Take a look into an American gulag:
Rounded up seemingly randomly, brought before a sham trial, sent off to a work camp with no contact for the imprisoned man's family, given barely enough food to keep them working, punished in cruel and insane ways, and often worked or beaten to death? Yep. Solzhenitsyn would have found it familiar, but with heat replacing cold.
Some people ask themselves, "Why are so many people from Rev. Jeremiah Wright's generation so angry?" Some of us know why.
When G-Dub said "it's not in the American soul to torture," some people just nodded in agreement thinking happy thoughts of cops getting kittens out of trees with American flags flapping in the distance. Other Americans know who Jonh Burge is. Some of us know that he learned his techniques during his service in the US military in Viet Nam "interrogating" Vietnamese people. He came home and 'improved' them to the point that Vladamir Putin would be proud.
Are only some of us aware of J. Edgar Hoover? Senator McCarthy? The current domestic spying apparatus? (The infiltration of fucking vegan groups!?!) The suspension of habeas corpus? Secret overseas prisons? Waterboarding? Some of us know that Stalin would have a good belly laugh. If he could have seen Tom Delay's quest to create a single-party rule or a situation where a politician's campaign co-chair being in charge of clearing 'undesireables' off the voter rolls then being in charge of counting votes, Stalin would have pulled something laughing.
The point is that some of us know that while the US really is better than the USSR was from Stalin onwards, we also know that the US was tragically never radically that different than the USSR. Some of us compare our historical reality to the potential that our Constitution holds out for us and the rest of the world.
Some of us care to know the messy reality and strive to correct those problems to meet our potential. Some of us just stick our fingers in our ears to seal off to the other voices and live in our "obvious" version of reality. Some of us know when we've driven into a ditch and try to get out of it and back on the road. Some of us slam on the gas and work to achieve "victory" over the ditch.
"Brother, you have no idea." That's ironic.
So, I'll ask again, do you really want to feed the troll?
Bacon is meat candy.
Yes, but the US did not exterminate MILLIONS of their own people under the word of one man. We had many social problems located in one region of the US that did indeed end up in violence (ie Racial issues), but we were no where near close to annihilating the black population or any other population. Comparing America's to USSR's history is completely incomprehensible.
"You can't get angry about it, you have to cry." -Yasmeen
MSMITH - I think that was exactly Lilek's point. While there have been terrible human rights abuses in this country, you'd have to be completely out of touch with reality to think that (in the 20th century) the U.S. ever came close to heaping the misery on it's citizens that the Soviets did on theirs. To suggest that in the time frame that the U.S. and the Soviet Union both existed that there was a moral equivilancy is amazingly ignorant.
Solzhenitsyn was a twice decorated soldier when he complained about Stalin's conduct of the war in a letter to a friend. For that crime he was sentenced to fifteen years hard labour as a slave of the state plus a lifetime of internal exile. At the same time U.S. GIs were free to complain bitterly about the "brilliance" of any and all of their commanders. A right which they exercised with vigor then, and today.
A little closer to home, I think it's pretty clear that nobody lives in fear for the political positions they've taken on this very public forum
And yet, before the Soviet collapse, I heard such great wisdoms as "The Soviet system isn't any better, or worse, than our system, just different" uttered by a suppposedly educated friend of mine. I kind of felt like unloading on the stupid shit that said that, but then recalled that he'd graduated from Evergreen, and really couldn't be held responsible for the head full of mush that he was carrying around.
Solzhenitsyn was a twice decorated soldier when he complained about Stalin's conduct of the war in a letter to a friend. For that crime he was sentenced to fifteen years hard labour as a slave of the state plus a lifetime of internal exile. At the same time U.S. GIs were free to complain bitterly about the "brilliance" of any and all of their commanders. A right which they exercised with vigor then, and today.
A little closer to home, I think it's pretty clear that nobody lives in fear for the political positions they've taken on this very public forum
And yet, before the Soviet collapse, I heard such great wisdoms as "The Soviet system isn't any better, or worse, than our system, just different" uttered by a suppposedly educated friend of mine. I kind of felt like unloading on the stupid shit that said that, but then recalled that he'd graduated from Evergreen, and really couldn't be held responsible for the head full of mush that he was carrying around.
Last edited by L K Day on Thu Aug 07, 2008 8:07 am, edited 3 times in total.
MSMITH wrote:but we were no where near close to annihilating the black population or any other population.
Stop, take a breath and think about the history of the US. "we were not where near close to annihilating ... any other population." Blankets intentionally laced with small pox ... trail of tears ... US military shooting women and children point blank ... oh, that's right! The US did a pretty "good job" of ethnic cleansing and a so-so job of genocide against the indigenous population. So, because 18th and 19th century technology wasn't good enough to really wipe out a population hiding in remote areas, we're fundamentally different than the USSR?
People are people. I think we all have more in common than we have different. When you say that it's "incomprehensible" to compare one group of human beings to another group of human beings it sounds to me like a pre-existing ideological barrier. (particularly when they existed during overlapping time periods and both came out of the same European cultural background.)Comparing America's to USSR's history is completely incomprehensible.
Yes, the USSR (particularly from Stalin's rise to power onward) was overall way worse than the US was/is overall. Gosh, what an achievement! Stalin's forced famine that killed 7 to 10 million Ukrainians killed more people than the US government's "Indian Wars" 50 years earlier. Go USA! Hooray!
During the 50s, my family was spied on by the FBI, including 'turning' life-long friends into informers - just like what the Stasi and the KGB were doing at the same time. But, you say, my grandfather wasn't dragged off to a gulag, so America is totally different! Really? When the "G Men" were loitering in front of their house day after day to intimidate them, I suspect that my family were pretty worried that they might be hauled off. Over the last few years, plenty of people of Middle Eastern ethnicity have worried that they'll be 'disappeared'. While almost no one was disappeared, it's still a sad situation that the current administration took so many "lessons" from the USSR.
During the decades of the Cold War, the US and the USSR both started and funded a bunch of nasty proxy wars with pretty equal callous indifference to the populations caught in the middle.
One really tragic similarity between the USSR and the current administration is the politicization of science. In the USSR, scientific research would be screened for "correctness" according to the current ideological and political trends. The end result was that fields like agriculture sucked to the point that Soviet citizens starved to death. (Oh, and in the end, the USSR collapsed in part because all of this crippled 'political' science left them unable to compete with the west.) With such an obvious historical lesson, it's really appalling that the current administration has placed 20-something political minders to reign in government climate scientists to stop them from publicizing their research on global warming. (which between famine and war has the potential to kill a lot more people than the USSR ever did.)
Obviously, we could go on and on with similarities and parallels between the US and the USSR. As I said before, there's not really a "moral equivalence" argument to be made. Like it or not, though, there are a lot more similarities than there should be given the incredible potential that our constitutional "DNA" promises. It seemed that with the Civil Rights movement, the aftermath of our involvement in Viet Nam and the potential created by the implosion of the USSR, that the US was really making progress in achieving that potential both internally and internationally. It's really sad that our reaction to the 9/11/2001 attacks has been to become more like the USSR in how we interact with the world and roll back so much progress.
(Given that today is the anniversary of the nuking of Hiroshima, I'll make a little aside: As bad as the USSR was, they never nuked a civilian city. We nuked two.)
Bacon is meat candy.
Well, No one said we were perfect by any means.
As for the Indians, ALL NATIVES, were destroyed by not only ourselves, but all of the invading east (until the late 19th century). I mean Spain definitely had their fair share of the action, If you didn't recall, Our brothers to the south do speak Spanish.
And as for the red scare, I'm sorry your family fell victim to ten years of McCarthyism. But, No one was killed, and the government has indeed apologized for this incident. (Something the USSR would never think of doing)
On the note of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, let me put the decision in your hands. Either, You tell 1 million of our own men to march to their death in the invasion of mainland Japan, which would most likely result in possibly three times as many Japanese casualties due to the nature of loyalty to their homeland, OR You drop two bombs, that reduce the number of casualties from millions, to thousands, and ultimately will end the struggle more quickly. So, what's it gonna be?
And the USSR may never have nuked a civilian city, but they certainly were prepared to with the design and test of Tsar Bomba, and the placement of Missile sites in Cuba (which turned into something you may have heard of, the Cuban Missile Crisis.)
As for the Indians, ALL NATIVES, were destroyed by not only ourselves, but all of the invading east (until the late 19th century). I mean Spain definitely had their fair share of the action, If you didn't recall, Our brothers to the south do speak Spanish.
And as for the red scare, I'm sorry your family fell victim to ten years of McCarthyism. But, No one was killed, and the government has indeed apologized for this incident. (Something the USSR would never think of doing)
On the note of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, let me put the decision in your hands. Either, You tell 1 million of our own men to march to their death in the invasion of mainland Japan, which would most likely result in possibly three times as many Japanese casualties due to the nature of loyalty to their homeland, OR You drop two bombs, that reduce the number of casualties from millions, to thousands, and ultimately will end the struggle more quickly. So, what's it gonna be?
And the USSR may never have nuked a civilian city, but they certainly were prepared to with the design and test of Tsar Bomba, and the placement of Missile sites in Cuba (which turned into something you may have heard of, the Cuban Missile Crisis.)
"You can't get angry about it, you have to cry." -Yasmeen