LAND Of The FREE... by out2theblack

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

LAND Of The FREE...

POSTED BY: OUT2THEBLACK
UPDATED: Monday, April 5, 2010 19:03
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VIEWED: 1142
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Sunday, April 4, 2010 3:21 PM

"What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider.....the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think....for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about.....and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated.....by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.....

"Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'.....must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.....Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.

"You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone.....you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.

"That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.

"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father.....could never have imagined."

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)

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Sunday, April 4, 2010 4:35 PM

FREMDFIRMA

You'd do better, and be more accurate, quoting the White Rose Society.

Despite certain modern and political differences, much of what they wrote is every bit as relevant now as it was then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/whiterose.html

-Frem

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Sunday, April 4, 2010 4:57 PM

PIRATENEWS

John Lee, conspiracy therapist at Hollywood award-winner History Channel-mocked SNL-spoofed PirateNew.org wooHOO!!!!!!

New Order of the Barbarians 1969
http://www.sweetliberty.org/nobarbarians1.htm

Barbarians Inside the Gates 9/11/2001
www.amazon.com

I did his last interview, now he's dead, and I'm on History Channel.
www.piratenews.org/flight93.html

Quote:
"Now I get it. I think that it’s so alluring to be this sort of master race in a way, to see these people coming in and giving us all these things that we need; healthcare and cures for diseases... peace. So I think it’s really interesting that being humans we know there’s something wrong. It’s one of those things where it may look better now but in the future we’d regret it."
-Morena Baccarin
http://www.scifi.co.uk/blog/v-exclusive-morena-baccarin-interview

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Sunday, April 4, 2010 5:15 PM

TRAVELER

Thank you Fremdfirma. I wrote down the name of the book listed in the Wiki article, "Sophie Scholl and the White Rose." Wiki says it is in English, so my fingers are crossed that our library system has at least one copy of it.

http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=28764731
Traveler

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Sunday, April 4, 2010 10:26 PM

OLDENGLANDDRY

http://www.socialistworld.net/view/36

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Monday, April 5, 2010 7:37 AM

FREMDFIRMA

Well, Traveler - appreciate the notice taken despite the surrounding nuttery, and since you're interested I'll expound on that.

See, that they failed utterly makes the White Rose Societys efforts no less heroic, but there's a lot of lessons to be learned not only about not repeating history, but also in realizing WHY they failed.

And I do have the answer to that question - like many other folk with good intentions they were coming at the problem from the wrong end, although in their own case they simply didn't have TIME to hit it from the correct one.

And it comes right back to what I do, and why.
And rather than having you dig and dredge, imma save you the effort by cutting right to the meat of it, via the work of Alice Miller.

Adolf Hitler: How Could a Monster Succeed in Blinding a Nation?
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=18610

You'll note the similarity here between the childrearing practices of Authoritarian-Adversarial "parenting" of that era, and the espousement of the same by vile critters like Dobson and Ezzo, something that has been known to be harmful since at *LEAST* a couple hundred years.

Quote:
"These first years have, among other things, the advantage that one can use force and compulsion. With age children forget everything they encountered in their early childhood. Thus if one can take away children's will, they will not remember afterward that they had had a will."

Versuch von der Erziehung und Unterweisung der Kinder, 1748

Quote:
“As long as the child will be trained not by love, but by fear, so long will humanity live not by justice, but by force. As long as the child will be ruled by the educator’s threat and by the father’s rod, so long will mankind be dominated by the policeman’s club, by fear of jail, and by panic of invasion by armies and navies.

Boris Sidis, from “A lecture on the abuse of the fear instinct in early education” in Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1919.

The so-called "parents" which do this shit, they KNOW it's wrong, strip away the justifications and rationalizations, and there it is, the fear of their own childs retaliation, which is a contributory factor in why so many folk fling their emotionally stunted, intellectually crippled, unprepared kids out the door forever when they reach an age when force can no longer be legally or safely applied - and even today, especially in rural areas, murdering ones parents is far more common than you'd think.

And you see the tremendous effects of this.. well, lets call it what it is, abuse, everywhere, anywhere, in the force-resistance-more-force model of Authoritarianism, all the more shameful because it flat out *does not work* - not now, not then, not for several hundred years, and only out of a combination of memory repression, denial, and religious influence does it continue, for the same reason folks keep paying into an investment long after it's bloody obvious things have gone to hell, because to admit failure is anethma to all they have had beaten into them.

http://www.alice-miller.com/articles_en.php?lang=en&nid=46&grp=11
http://www.alice-miller.com/articles_en.php?lang=en&nid=47&grp=11
http://www.alice-miller.com/articles_en.php?lang=en&nid=50&grp=11

That whole born better/born bad, and divine-right-of-kings bullshit, it comes out of this same root, the same lies we can't admit, the same hurt we choose to blame on others because we've been blinded, quite deliberately, to the proper cause.

But nature finds a way.

The Essential Role of an Enlightened Witness in Society
http://www.alice-miller.com/articles_en.php?lang=en&nid=41&grp=11

The difference between another link in the chains, and another ally helping break them is often as not, one single person who stood up, even if powerless to assist, and questioned or decried the abuse itself, who spoke out against it even if none listened - so while they failed *at the time* - the White Rose left a legacy that by it's very existence as a historical record, functions consistently as a helping witness to the german people, and was the very foundation that inspired Ms Miller to continue down that road of realization and spread that knowledge to all who are capable of receiving it.

You may have noted that I mention many of the kids I've pulled outta hell serve as my moral guides, because they don't play the little semantic games we excuse our own conduct with, case in point.
http://www.strike-the-root.com/diffusion-and-confusion

Quote:
Ethical confusion: It is ethically wrong to take a non-aggressing person’s justly acquired property. Always has been, always will be. This is an objective ethical observation and is quite simple to understand, so much so that we make sure we teach this to our children by the time they reach kindergarten age.

Then we spend the rest of their lives getting them to understand the exceptions to the rule. Except there really aren’t any. A five-year old knows more about ethics than most grownups, who have hopelessly confusing and conflicting subjective definitions that change depending upon situation and personal preference.

Grownups even go so far as to invent words like “taxation” and claim that it means something other than theft. “War” is distinct from murder. Don’t worry, son, it’s a bit confusing for you now, but you’ll understand when you get older.

Oh, the kid gets it just fine. Dad’s the one who is hopelessly muddled.

=============

Quote:
I ask again: What's the difference between crashing an airplane into an IRS office building and delivering a missile to a far away enemy-occupied house or carpet bombing a distant mountainside or napalming a foreign jungle?

Ethics are universal. If people insist on making them subjective and applying them differently depending upon the circumstances, depending upon their personal preferences and ideologies, then they become useless. Human society without ethics will quickly perish, and the evidence of this imminent peril surrounds us all. The time has come, my friends, to drop the fiddles and grab some fire extinguishers.

Responsibility is an attribute of the individual. Groups are not responsible or irresponsible. Groups cannot diffuse responsibility out among its members. Each individual is responsible and answerable for the actions he chooses to undertake. The Nuremburg defense is a fail.

Still confused?

Go ask a five-year old. He knows.

All the excuses in the world are meaningless to a father holding a murdered child, to a child looking at the shattered remains of their family, or even a child standing there with a stunned look, trying to understand why someone who supposedly "loves" them just violently attacked them, because they dared disagree.

But they learn, and they learn from what we DO, not what we say.

We tell them the world is an ugly place, hurt or be hurt, lie or be deceived, steal or be stolen from, and then demonstrate it in the most hurtful, abusive fashion, be it physical, moral, or emotional - and when it comes to children, often in ways you could not legally inflict on a housepet - and then act surprised when this *becomes* a self fulfilling prophecy ?

And if it stopped there, that would be bad enough, but it didn't, and doesn't.

Children listen to the voice of their heart, the essence of humanity which is the humane and cooperative behavior which drove us to create civilization in the first place, for if we truly were "born bad" if "human nature" was as evil as we are told - then how exactly, without a civilization to forcibly "socialize" us, did we create one, eh ?
Simple, because it's not a chicken-vs-egg argument, but because that is a LIE, we're born human, and our societys idea of socialization to our current norm is to brutally crush every ounce of humanity out of those poor kids while they are still too weak physically, emotionally and legally to properly resist.

But again, nature finds a way.

Just like when you try to poison critters, and in a couple generations they're seasoning their food with your poison, so too with humans, and in response to the tremendously abusive Dobson-esque war upon our own children, some wound up born with that inner voice a lot stronger, strong enough to conflict with what was being mercilessly pounded into them.

See, most of the childhood mental aberration of school age kids comes from the conflict between that inner voice, their own conscience and humanity, and the things they are being told, the behaviors they are being forced to adapt in order to function within our society - for every trueborn sociopath, there's a hundred more who are NOT true sociopaths, but suffer from a form of learned sociopathy as a defense and adaptation to a social system that rewards it while punishing altruism as a weakness.

Even so, some children refuse to bow, they fight back, the conflict of those mixed messages drives them to aberration, and then we go and call it a mental illness, try to classify it, and then medicate it out of existence.

And then, for those that continue to resist, who are becoming more and more common as we're now beginning to see medication resistant children, often the second or third generation from a family drenched in psychotropics from ritalin to prozac...

The hellcamps, which were, and are, for the juvie "justice" system is still riddled with em, as are some religions - effectively concentration camps for kids, complete with all of the implications for those words.

And BECAUSE of that, we've taken the most decent, most humane, the visionaries who are the prime motivators behind most social and mental evolution and development - and WE DESTROYED THEM.

Folks like to ponder what mighta happened if someone capped Hitler before he came to power, but ponder what mighta happened if say, someone had capped Ghandi ? or Mother Theresa ?

By doing this, culling out the most humane of us in a desperate bid to protect a destructive status quo which profits the few at the cost of the many, we have stifled our development as human beings and even sent it into retrograde, threatening even the very idea of civilization itself as the Authoritarian factionalism begins to annihilate the concept of society itself.

And therein lies the path to the destruction of us all.

A child cries in pain and sorrow, today it's a call for help, soon it becomes a prophecy, and eventually that wail becomes the battlecry of a monster bent on the destruction of it's fellow man in an explosive hateful misanthrophy carried to its logical extreme by folks like Carl Panzram.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Panzram
"I wish all mankind had one neck so I could choke it!"

Most of em, of course, never get that far, self-destructing into drug use, suicide, or caught up in their own whirlwind of violent doom, in and out of the halls of so-called justice, often as not for things that would magically be socially acceptable if they wore a badge or uniform.
http://www.vachss.com/av_dispatches/lifestyle.html

And some find those socially acceptable paths, in essence however, NO DIFFERENT than the monsters Vachss describes here, only catapulted to power by a system that actually *rewards* that behavior, generously, if you hide it behind the right excuses - these are our generals, our politicians, our presidents, Shrub was a primo example.

But they're still fucking monsters.

And again, nature finds a way - while I still "know" essentially very little about the Dark Spark, they seem to be almost natural tykebombs.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LaserGuidedTykebomb

I dunno what it is that actually causes it, some bizarre and extremely rare combination of genetics, environment, and Myers-Briggs personality base, usually ISTP - but some who choose vengeance take it the next step past someone like Panzram, rather than attack humanity or society, they go after the systems, structures, and people that produce the monsters, the things that enable and protect this disastrous status quo.

The only time I've ever really seen this played out in media was the character of Milliardo Peacecraft from Gundam Wing - after seeking, and getting, revenge for the destruction of his family, he found it both ineffective and unsatisfying, and over time came to a realization that in order to find peace with himself, he needed to address the conditions which created his tormented existence and resolve them, or he would never rest easy - he outright says as much in the movie finale Endless Waltz.

Some Byronic characters also have this as their primary or secondary motivation, but with Milliardo it was pretty exclusive, so it was a lot more obvious.

What makes them what they are isn't motivation, so much as how it is a driving, unignorable *compulsion* though, which in combination with a sideways thought process and resistance to emotional trauma make them from a social aspect almost like the terminator, they'll just keep coming until totally wiped from existence, it's not a fun mental "place" for them, but nature is a bitch, sometimes.

Anyhows, the key element of solving the social, emotional, and mental flatspin-stall that we're buried in is a concerted push to continue along the path of actual human development instead of regressing into barbarism, but in order for that to happen, we have to stop culling out the children capable of it, because without people who are willing and capable of listening to such words as the White Rose was speaking, any effort on that respect is doomed from the very start.

First you must have the people *capable* of making that jump, and we're not there yet, and for a long while we were sliding in the other direction, not so much any more, but it's all a matter of time, a foregone conclusion if you will - that we will either push past this dark age (which it WILL be historically remembered as) or we will destroy ourselves and our biosphere and become naught more than the stardust we are all in essence spawned from.

And that's a race I plan to win, even though my whole lifetime will carry the baton only so far.

And my most terrible and fearsome weapon in that fight ?
Compassion.

Frem.
"Abashed the Devil stood, And felt how awful goodness is."
—Paradise Lost (bk. IV, l. 846)

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Monday, April 5, 2010 6:24 PM

TRAVELER

And again thank you Fremdfirma:

Want to let you know how much I appreciate the time you spent responding to my post. Now I have other books to seek out because of your efforts.

By some grace I escaped the destruction you discussed. At first I self-medicated with alcohol and that turned against me. My behavior grew more cruel with each passing year. Then, like some light turning on I saw the damage I caused in my selfishness. It has been many years and a lot of work to bring peace into my life. The work is never done. So discovering story of The White Rose and getting a list of books like the ones you have offered are always welcome.

Thank You Again;
Traveler

http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=28764731
Traveler

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Monday, April 5, 2010 7:03 PM

FREMDFIRMA

Well, not much I can say to that, but I will, in that perspective, offer you two articles from Vachss, and one from Ellis Amdur that I think you will find appropriate in the context of this discussion.

If You Could Listen to a Child's Soul...
http://www.vachss.com/av_dispatches/disp_9101_a.html

You Carry the Cure In Your Own Heart
http://www.vachss.com/av_dispatches/disp_9408_a.html

Satsujin no Ken - Katsujin no Ken
The Sword that Takes Life, the Sword that Gives Life
http://www.vachss.com/guest_dispatches/ellis_amdur.html

I myself went a couple rounds with bottled escapism, but in the end my solution to it was... novel.
"This stuff costs too damn much!"
Yep, I beat impending alcoholism... with greed.
*laughs*

Sometimes setting evil against evil is the best way to destroy both of em.

-Frem

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