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Re: Olympic bombing
At 05:41 PM 7/27/96 +0200, Mike van der Merwe wrote:
>
>Hi all
>
>I can just see the FBI screaming "we need weaker encryption to combat
>terrosism on US soil" with nasty effects -- it seems all to many people,
>lawmakers included, will be only to happy to sacrifice their privacy that
>the FBI can better combat these terrorist acts (which could *of course*
>could been prevented had only the FBI been able to read their encrypted
>mail...)
>
>Somehow I got the feeling watching CNN that the FBI was given a shitload
>of ammo. Call me cynical but the Reichstag fire comes to mind...
>
>Later
>Mike
This was on another list. It expresses my sentiments quite well.
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>Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 21:36:25 -0600
>From: "L. Neil Smith" <[email protected]>
>Message-Id: <[email protected]>
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: TWA 800 and Atlanta
>Cc: [email protected]
>
>TWA 800 AND THE POLICE STATE OF GEORGIA
>
>By L. Neil Smith <[email protected]>
>
>Special to _The Libertarian Enterprise_
>
> I've been sitting around all week, watching the Olympics whether I
>like it or not, because my wife and daughter want to watch them, and I
>can deny them nothing.
>
> In between undeniably dramatic moments -- astonishingly courageous
>little girls "playing hurt", as if they were major-league football
>players -- I've been treated to story after story of how, due to the
>efforts of thousands of uniformed professional paranoids, Georgia, USA
>is coming to resemble _Soviet_ Georgia. The sight of _hundreds_ of
>trailers moved in to house these security "troops" is demoralizing in
>and of itself to anyone with a regard for a free society.
>
> At the same time, I've been a TV witness to the tragedy of TWA
>Flight 800 and an ignoble struggle by network fear-vampires to wring
>the story of its last delectable drop -- "It was a bomb!" "It was a
>missile!" "It was a bomb!" "It was a missile!" -- the whole thing
>beginning to sound like a macabre Certs commercial.
>
> Over it all hung the spectre of international terrorism, and the
>swollen, corrupt, bulbous-nosed, droopy-jowled visage of a politician
>(no "New Democrat" as it turns out, but just another damned fascist)
>grimly determined -- exactly like Richard Milhous "Guns are an
>Abomination" Nixon before him -- to be the last democratically elected
>President of the United States: William Jefferson Blythe Clinton.
>
> Clinton -- aided by his vile minions, the national "news" media --
>went into raptures of ecstasy, listing all the ways that the freedom
>of Americans would have to be curtailed (Clinton has spoken of this
>before; it's a favorite theme of his) due to the heinous act he
>transparently hoped had been committed against TWA 800.
>
> Afterward, the round-heeled sprayheads obligingly searched out the
>usual street-cretins to rubberstamp Our Glorious Leader's latest Five
>Minute Plan, and add that they wouldn't mind at all paying extra for
>the "service" of having their inalienable rights violated even worse
>-- within the increasingly Bulgarian-style compounds American airports
>have become -- than they're being violated now.
>
> But there's a simpler, more effective way to prevent the criminal
>acts generally labelled "terrorism" that Clinton and his idiot-box
>doxies don't want anyone to know about. Behind virtually every
>terrorist attack we've ever seen or suffered, it's relatively easy to
>discover vicious and repeated acts of aggression against innocent
>individuals by the state.
>
> Preceeding the highly-publicized excesses of the Irish Republican
>Army, for example, we find 850 years of violent occupation by an
>exceptionally brutal foreign power that's managed to con the world
>into believing that it's civilized.
>
> Half a hundred years of Middle Eastern terror arise directly from
>the fact that, instead of coming to America -- the appropriate refuge
>for "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" -- either before or
>after World War II, European Jews decided to take somebody else's land
>away, and treat their victims the same way they themselves were
>treated by the Nazis. (In fairness, at least before the war, would-be
>refugees from Hitler's terroristic state weren't given much choice, at
>least not by the American Medical Association, the American Bar
>Association, and the Roosevelt Administration, all of whom worked
>overtime, keeping out imported professional competition.)
>
> Similarly, there would never have been an Oklahoma City had there
>never been a Ruby Ridge or Waco. If Clinton had any real interest in
>reducing the threat of "domestic terrorism" (he most assuredly does
>not: terrorism, like war before it, has become "the health of the
>state") instead of ratcheting government controls tighter around the
>necks of 250 million Americans who've done nothing wrong, he'd
>immediately arrest, try, convict, and punish all of those responsible
>for Ruby Ridge and Waco, abolish the outlaw agencies in whose names
>they were perpetrated, and repeal or nullify the unconstitutional laws
>which provided them their justification.
>
> The trouble is, he'd have to arrest, try, convict, and punish
>_himself_.
>
> Oh, yeah, the plan: the best-kept "secret" of our overly-
>governmentalized age is that terrorism almost invariably
>_reactionary_; simply stop doing things -- things you shouldn't be
>doing anyway -- that cause terrorists to attack you and the attacks
>will stop.
>
> Terrorism is the price that governments -- and their hostage
>subjects -- pay for exercising illegitimate power. Despite pundits
>whose ignorance is exceeded only by their presumption (_Wall Street
>Journal_'s Paul Gigot leaps immediately to mind) 20th century history
>demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that no further expansion of
>that power will do anything but make make the problem worse.
>
> Benjamin Franklin warned us, more or less, that anyone who trades
>liberty for safety is a fool, in part, because there ain't no such
>_thing_ as safety.
>
> We're reminded by Amnesty International that more individuals have
>been murdered by governments in this century -- well over 100 million
>-- than have died in its wars (war itself being a government
>enterprise, as well), proving that government is a worse threat than
>anything it claims to protect us from. Tragedies like TWA 800 is
>presumed to be, represent a failure of the _state_ -- of the very
>_idea_ of the state -- and it is the state, not individuals, that must
>be penalized, by reducing its income, and especially the power it
>wields over individual lives.
>
> Americans are famous the world over for doing what was never done
>before. It's time we did something historically unprecedented again.
>We flew the first airplane; we sent the first men to the Moon. Both of
>those were possible _only_ because we were the first people ever to
>tell a King to go to hell.
>
> Now it's time to tell a President to go to hell. It's time to be
>the first people ever to _refuse_ to be steam-rollered out of our
>liberties by jackbooted thugs claiming to protect us from people and
>events that don't threaten any of us nearly as much as the thugs
>themselves.
>
>===================================
>
>L. Neil Smith's award-winning first novel, _The Probability Broach_,
>which has long been out of print, will be republished by TOR Books
>this October. Permission to redistribute this article is herewith
>granted by the author, provided that it is reproduced unedited, in its
>entirety, and appropriate credit given.
>
>
>
Jim Bell
[email protected]