WORD OF LIFE « The Burning Platform

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Appalachian Trail Deblazer says:

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26th November 2011 at 10:03 pm
Diogenes says:

It’s sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues…

“The Anguish in the American Dream”

“The United States of America can dream only because of one of the most extensive acts of genocide in recorded human history. When Europeans landed in the region that was eventually to include the United States, there were people here. Population estimates vary, but a conservative estimate is 12 million north of the Rio Grande, perhaps 2 million in what is now Canada and the rest in what is now the continental United States. By the end of the so-called Indian Wars, the 1900 census recorded 237,000 indigenous people in the United States. That’s an extermination rate of 95 to 99 percent.[3] That is to say, the European colonists and their heirs successfully eliminated almost the entire indigenous population — or the “merciless Indian Savages” as they are labeled in the Declaration of Independence, one of the most famous articulations of the American Dream. Almost every Indian died in the course of the European invasion to create the United States so that we may dream our dreams. Millions of people died for the crime of being inconveniently located on land desired by Europeans who believed in their right to dominate.”

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/23-5

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26th November 2011 at 10:20 pm
Appalachian Trail Deblazer says:

Old Chief “Two Eagles” was asked by the US Indian Agent, “You have observed the white man for 90 years. You have seen his wars and his technological advances. You have seen his progress and the damage he has done.”

The old Chief nodded in agreement.

The Agent continued, ” Considering all these events, in your opinion, where did the white man go wrong?”

The Chief stared at the Agent and replied, “When white man find land, Indians running it, No taxes, No debt, smoke pipe, plenty buffalo, plenty beaver, water clean. Women did all work, Medicine Man free. Indian man spend all day hunting and fishing; all night having sex.”

The old Chief leaned back and smiled, Only white man dumb enough to think he can improve system like that.”

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26th November 2011 at 10:36 pm
Reverse Engineer says:

“Get Ready, Little Lady. Hell is Coming to Breakfast”- Lone Waite, The Oulaw Josey Wales

RE

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26th November 2011 at 4:31 am
Stan says:

How can Obama win a second term? Easy.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/21/house-republicans-hold-their-noses-about-mitt-romney.html

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26th November 2011 at 6:08 am
flash says:

Diogenes.

G Dubya wasn’t the first killer thug to pursue a policy of you’re either with US or against US.
And, God help those caught on the wrong side of that line.

The Founding Father of ‘Collective Responsibility’

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: Is the Fed Treasonous?

The phrase “collective responsibility” is rather pleasant sounding, with its implication that, perhaps, we should all collectively take responsibility for our own actions. What parents should not teach their children such things? But for at least the past 150 years “collective responsibility” also has a specific meaning with regard to U.S. military policy. In the military context, “collective responsibility” is a euphemism for the mass murder of innocent civilians. It is a phrase that was used by General William Tecumseh Sherman himself, long preceding today’s nonchalant dismissal of the murder of civilians in foreign countries as “collateral damage.”

The idea is that if the U.S is at war with another nation it is not only the combatants who are legitimate “targets” but all inhabitants of the “enemy nation,” women, children, the disabled, everyone. As such, it is the primary cause of “blowback,” or retaliation for the intentional murder of noncombatants by the U.S. military. It is common sense to expect the people of other countries to retaliate for such atrocities, even committing acts of terrorism against us. But most Americans seem to be so brainwashed in the lies and propaganda of “American Exceptionalism” (the idea that whatever foreign policy the U.S. pursues is virtuous by virtue of the fact that it is the U.S. foreign policy) that they simply cannot imagine why anyone from any foreign country would want to harm us. In their ignorance they are prone to believe such fantasies and absurdities as the theory that Middle East terrorists attacked us on 9/11 because they hate the idea of freedom.

William Tecumseh Sherman was indeed the founding father of terrorism perpetrated by the U.S. government and disquised by the language of “collective security.” Sherman biographer William Fellman (author of Citizen Sherman) quotes Sherman as saying this about his fellow American citizens from the Southern states: “To the petulant and persistent secessionists, why death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better . . . . Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources” (emphasis added). Sherman was referring here to his plans for the civilian population of Georgia after the Confederate Army had left the state.

Referring to his plans for the civilian population of Northern Alabama, Fellman quotes Sherman as saying that the “Government of the United States” had the “right” to “take their lives, their homes, their lands, their everything . . . . We will take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property . . . ” And he was not referring to slaves when he used the word “property.”

In a July 31, 1862 letter to his wife Sherman wrote that “the war will soon assume a turn to extermination not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people . . . . There is a class of people, men, women, and children, who must be killed . . .” (emphasis added).

In the autumn of 1862 Confederate snipers were firing at U.S. Navy gunboats on the Mississippi River. Unable to apprehend the combatants, Sherman took revenge on the civilian population by burning the entire town of Randolph, Tennessee to the ground. In the spring of 1863, after the Confederate Army had evacuated, Sherman ordered the destruction of Jackson, Mississippi. Afterwards, in a letter to Grant Sherman boasted that “The inhabitants are subjugated. They cry aloud for mercy. The land is devastated for 30 miles around.”

Sherman’s troops also destroyed Meridian, Mississippi after Confederate troops were driven out, after which Sherman wrote to Grant: “For five days, ten thousand of our men worked hard and with a will, in that work of destruction, with axes, sledges, crowbars, clawbars, and with fire, and I have no hesitation in pronouncing the work well done. Meridian . . . no longer exists.”

When Sherman’s chief military engineer, Captain O.M. Poe, advised that the bombing of Atlanta after the Confederates had fled was of no military significance, Sherman ignored him and declared that the corpses of women and children in the streets was “a beautiful sight,” as Fellman writes in Citizen Sherman.

In October of 1864 Sherman ordered the murder of randomly-chosen citizens in retaliation for Confederate Army attacks on his army. He wrote to General Louis Watkins: “Cannot you send over about Fairmount and Adairsville, burn ten or twelve houses . . . , kill a few at random, and let them know that it will be repeated every time a [military] train is fired upon . . . ” (See John B. Walters, Merchant of Terror: General Sherman and Total War, p. 137).

Two months after the formal end of the war, Sherman was placed in charge of the Military District of the Missouri, which was all land west of the Mississippi. His assignment was to commence a war of genocide against the Plains Indians, primarily to make way for the government-subsidized transcontinental railroads. Lincoln’s personal friend, General Grenville Dodge, was the chief engineer of the project and recommended that slaves be made of the Indians, who could then be forced to dig the railroad beds from Iowa to California. Government policy was to attempt to murder as many of the Plains Indians instead, women and children included, and Sherman was the natural choice as the director of such an enterprise.

Fellman quotes Sherman’s marching orders as the following (p. 26): “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to the extermination, men, women and children” (emphasis added). Fellman writes that Sherman “had given [General] Sheridan prior authorization to slaughter as many women and children as well as men Sheridan or his subordinates felt was necessary.” “The more Indians we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed next year,” Sherman wrote to Sheridan. By 1890 the U.S. Army murdered as many as 60,000 Indians, placing the survivors in concentration camps known as “reservations.”

As Murray Rothbard once wrote, all government power rests ultimately on a series of myths and superstitions about the alleged magnificence of the state and its leaders and henchmen (and of corollary myths about the “evils” of the civil society). Americans will continue to be duped into supporting unconstitutional wars of aggression – and to be the victims of blowback – as long as they are conned into believing that such monsters and psychopathic killers as William Tecumseh Sherman are secular saints and heroes.

September 12, 2011

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution – And What It Means for America Today.

Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

The Best of Thomas DiLorenzo at LRC

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26th November 2011 at 7:24 am
Diogenes says:

hey – g’morning flash

Agreed – the line of killer thugs stretches back to long before cuneiform appeared and began to document the victories…

And the bodies – the line of bodies is just as long.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNhMxxUKZ4I

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26th November 2011 at 8:10 am
flash says:

Diogenes
awesome vid. I’m constantly amazed at how easily people accept the power to destroy both property and life as somehow benevolent.

It’s OK to kill as long as your not being killed, but there always that chance that someone will bite back and then the party aint’ so much of a good time anymore.
And this may just be the “shot heard around the world.” just as Margolis predicted years back.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0415934680/ref=as_li_tf_til?tag=lewrockwell&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0415934680&adid=07VSCT6MYBBFEW1G5JM1&&ref-refURL=
War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet, Revised Edition [Paperback]
Eric Margolis (Author), Eric S. Margolis (Author)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/26/us-pakistan-nato-idUSTRE7AP03S20111126

Pakistan stops NATO supplies after deadly raid

Reuters) – NATO helicopters and fighter jets attacked two military outposts in northwest Pakistan Saturday, killing as many as 28 troops and plunging U.S.-Pakistan relations deeper into crisis.

Pakistan shut down NATO supply routes into Afghanistan – used for sending in nearly half of the alliance’s land shipments – in retaliation for the worst such incident since Islamabad uneasily allied itself with Washington following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

Islamabad also said it had ordered the United States to vacate a drone base in the country, but a senior U.S. official said Washington had received no such request and noted that Pakistan had made similar eviction threats in the past, without following through.

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26th November 2011 at 9:30 am
flash says:

Kipling gave some sage advice for those left behind.

The Young British Soldier

WHEN the ‘arf-made recruity goes out to the East
‘E acts like a babe an’ ‘e drinks like a beast,
An’ ‘e wonders because ‘e is frequent deceased
Ere ‘e’s fit for to serve as a soldier.
Serve, serve, serve as a soldier,
Serve, serve, serve as a soldier,
Serve, serve, serve as a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!

Now all you recruities what’s drafted to-day,
You shut up your rag-box an’ ‘ark to my lay,
An’ I’ll sing you a soldier as far as I may:
A soldier what’s fit for a soldier.
Fit, fit, fit for a soldier . . .

First mind you steer clear o’ the grog-sellers’ huts,
For they sell you Fixed Bay’nets that rots out your guts -
Ay, drink that ‘ud eat the live steel from your butts -
An’ it’s bad for the young British soldier.
Bad, bad, bad for the soldier . . .

When the cholera comes – as it will past a doubt -
Keep out of the wet and don’t go on the shout,
For the sickness gets in as the liquor dies out,
An’ it crumples the young British soldier.
Crum-, crum-, crumples the soldier . . .

But the worst o’ your foes is the sun over’ead:
You must wear your ‘elmet for all that is said:
If ‘e finds you uncovered ‘e’ll knock you down dead,
An’ you’ll die like a fool of a soldier.
Fool, fool, fool of a soldier . . .

If you’re cast for fatigue by a sergeant unkind,
Don’t grouse like a woman nor crack on nor blind;
Be handy and civil, and then you will find
That it’s beer for the young British soldier.
Beer, beer, beer for the soldier . . .

Now, if you must marry, take care she is old -
A troop-sergeant’s widow’s the nicest I’m told,
For beauty won’t help if your rations is cold,
Nor love ain’t enough for a soldier.
‘Nough, ‘nough, ‘nough for a soldier . . .

If the wife should go wrong with a comrade, be loath
To shoot when you catch ‘em – you’ll swing, on my oath! -
Make ‘im take ‘er and keep ‘er: that’s Hell for them both,
An’ you’re shut o’ the curse of a soldier.
Curse, curse, curse of a soldier . . .

When first under fire an’ you’re wishful to duck,
Don’t look nor take ‘eed at the man that is struck,
Be thankful you’re livin’, and trust to your luck
And march to your front like a soldier.
Front, front, front like a soldier . . .

When ‘arf of your bullets fly wide in the ditch,
Don’t call your Martini a cross-eyed old bitch;
She’s human as you are – you treat her as sich,
An’ she’ll fight for the young British soldier.
Fight, fight, fight for the soldier . . .

When shakin’ their bustles like ladies so fine,
The guns o’ the enemy wheel into line,
Shoot low at the limbers an’ don’t mind the shine,
For noise never startles the soldier.
Start-, start-, startles the soldier . . .

If your officer’s dead and the sergeants look white,
Remember it’s ruin to run from a fight:
So take open order, lie down, and sit tight,
And wait for supports like a soldier.
Wait, wait, wait like a soldier . . .

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!

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26th November 2011 at 9:34 am
SSS says:

Best. Movie. Ever.

Amazing how it can draw such disparate supporters like RE, Flash, Admin, and me into its fold. Then again, that’s what makes it the ……… Best. Movie. Ever.

Point of interest, or not. Unlike the fictional Josey Wales, Ten Bears was a real life Comanche chief. He just didn’t live during the same time frame that the novel/movie said he did.

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26th November 2011 at 10:39 pm
llpoh says:

Great movie – but best ever? C’mon.

Godfather wins that race hands down.

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26th November 2011 at 10:48 pm
SSS says:

llpoh

I like Westerns. “The Outlaw Josey Wales” is the best Western movie ever made. In my mind, that translates to ……… Best. Movie. Ever.

I continue to read history books about the western expansion during and after the Civil War. You know, “Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce.” Stuff like that.

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26th November 2011 at 11:31 pm
llpoh says:

SSS – I would tend to agree with you if my dearly departed ancestors were not often despatched in such quantities by those evil murdering cowboys. I much prefer seeing a bunch of dagos offing each other.

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26th November 2011 at 11:41 pm
SSS says:

llpoh

You’re totally missing my point, Josey Wales made a man-to-man treaty with the Indians. It worked.

The USG did the same thing. And broke its word on too many occasions.

Josey Wales is a man of his word. And it’s never been done better in any movie I’ve seen.

That plus his spitting tobacco on the dog.

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26th November 2011 at 12:00 am
llpoh says:

SSS – I understood – just making my point about those murdering cowboys in general. The old Indian was one of the Seven Civilized Tribes, by memory. That poor old dog didn’t deserve all of that tobacco spit. Just goes to show ol’ Josey wasn’t perfect, I guess.

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26th November 2011 at 12:31 am
Reverse Engineer says:

@SSS

I’ll put it in my Top 10, not sure I can give it “Best”. In no particular order, I’ll add 9 pthers

Last of the Mohicans
Pale Rider
Chinatown
Dr. Strangelove
Taxi Driver
The Untouchables
The Grapes of Wrath
Animal House
Catch-22

RE

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26th November 2011 at 1:22 am
Colma Rising says:

Not a single Romero movie…

tsk tsk tsk, RE.

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26th November 2011 at 1:26 am

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