“The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. A slaughter here, a little torture there. It becomes moral to do things that would be immoral if an ordinary individual did ’em.” - Joe Hill, The Fireman
To me, murder is murder. There should be no diplomatic immunity, executive privilege, or collateral damage when it comes to killing human beings. Some may say that war is different but that's a lie because all war is a lie. The wars conducted this century under presidents Bush, Obama and Trump are based on nothing but lies.
Pyongyang 1953
Considering present day circumstances, how are people affected when they read the below excerpt from the DPRK’s Foreign Minister’s cable to the United Nations Security Council dated 13 January 1951.
Could it be? Are the people in charge of this country that crazy? Would they really risk a nuclear war based on lies?
Heh. You bet your ass they are and would.
(top line attributed to Walter Benjamin and the bottom one to Louis Pasteur.)
Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.
African Proverb
Napoleon once said, "What is history, but a fable agreed upon?”
(paraphrasing ~François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694–1778), "Jeannot et Colin”)
People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
The obscurest epoch is today.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains
Yeah, I know, I put in a cute comment about arendt's use of "Mr. Burns" -- standard academic writing would have been "Burns" or "Ken Burns." Apologies to arendt.
When does a war become an occupation?
Before Occupy Wall Street, this was the plan to try to bring an end to the utter abomination that is the United States Empire war in and occupation of Afghanistan.
Years ago I wrote an essay titled, "I just wrote a check for U.S. Imperialism and War". It was around April 15th of a year during the Neverending War Period, of which we currently reside, when I had to write a check to cover the federal taxes owed the previous year.
