NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/alt/conspira/13478

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-28 | 9.2 KB

Xref: sparky alt.conspiracy:13478 talk.politics.misc:65452 alt.activism.d:4364 misc.legal:21768 alt.politics.bush:14956 alt.president.clinton:1279
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy,talk.politics.misc,alt.activism.d,misc.legal,alt.politics.bush,alt.president.clinton
Path: sparky!uunet!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ucla-cs!lanai.cs.ucla.edu!pierce
From: [e-mail] (Brad Pierce)
Subject: Re: Weinberger's Pardon
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (Mr Usenet)
Nntp-Posting-Host: lanai.cs.ucla.edu
Organization: UCLA, Computer Science Department
References: <[e-mail]>
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 92 20:07:56 GMT
Lines: 188

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Jack Sarfatti)
writes in "alt.conspiracy":

|Please circulate this to other relevant usenet conferences thankyou.

|Letters Editor
|San Francisco Chronicle

|I applaud President Bush's pardon of Cap Weinberger and the others.  It is
|not a question that these patriots are "above the law" as President Clinton

  "Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy."
        -- George Bernard Shaw

|fears. The real issue is justice and the balance of power between the
|Congress and the Executive. Nazi Germany made racial laws, were they just?

  "Naturally the common people don't want war ... but after all it is
   the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a
   simple matter to drag the people along ... All you have to do is
   tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for
   lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.  It works the
   same in any country."
        -- Hermann Goering, 1936

|The Boland ammendment is such an unjust law that cripples the Presidency.

|Every President since George Washington has had secret operations which
|could not be revealed openly to Congress or anyone else at inopportune
|moments. Even President Clinton will find that he will have to have such
|operations.

  "Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism."
            George Washington,
            Farewell Address

|Prosecuter Walsh is a dangerous fanatic right out of the Spanish
|Inquisition and should be relieved of his duties.

|Sincerely,


|Jack Sarfatti


  "'My country right or wrong' is like saying, 'My mother drunk or sober.'"
        -- G. K. Chesterton

  "Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us
   in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of
   grave national emergency... Always there has been some terrible evil
   to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing
   the exorbitant sums demanded.  Yet, in retrospect, these disasters
   seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real."
               -- General Douglas MacArthur, 1957.

  "Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome
   nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I
   hate them!"
               -- Albert Einstein

-----------

Excerpted and condensed without permission from Milton Mayer's _They
thought they were free; the Germans, 1933-45_ (U. of Chicago Press, 1955).
The following comments are attributed to a German philologist (pp. 166-172):

``What no one seemed to notice," ... ``was the ever widening
gap ... between the government and the people. ... And it became
always wider. ...

``What happened here was the gradual habituation of the
people ...  to be being governed by surprise; to receiving
decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation
was so complicated that the government had to act on information
which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that ...
it could not be released because of national security. ...

``This separation of government from people ...  took place
so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not
even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or
associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social
purposes. And all the crises and reforms ... so occupied the
people that they did not see the slow motion underneath ...

``... 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.  I do not speak of your `little
men' ...; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, ... .
Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and
never had. ... Nazism 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. ...

``To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to
notice it ...  unless one has a much greater degree of political
awareness ... than most of us had ever had occasion to develop.
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' that no `patriotic German' could resent 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. ...

``How is this to be avoided ... Many, many times since it
all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims ...
`Resist the beginnings' and `Consider the end.' But one must
foresee the end in order to resist ... the beginnings. ...  and
how is this to be done ...? ...

``Your `little men', ..., were not against National
Socialism in principle.  Men like me, who were, are the greater
offenders ...

``... One doesn't see exactly where or how to move. ... Each
act, each occasion, 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 with 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.' ... And it is not just fear ... that restrains
you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

``Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of
decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets,
..., `everyone' is happy.  One hears no protest, and certainly
sees none. ...  you speak privately to your colleagues, some of
whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say,
`It's not so bad' or `You're seeing things' or `You're an
alarmist.'

``And you *are* an alarmist. You are saying that *this* must
lead to *this*, and you can't prove it. ... On the one hand, your
enemies ... intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-
pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your
close friends, ... people who have always thought as you have.

``... in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel
that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from
the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further
and serves as a further deterrent to - to what?  It is clearer
all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must
*make* an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a
troublemaker.  So you wait...

``But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds
or thousands will join with you, never comes. *That's* the
difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had
come immediately after the first and smallest... But of course
this isn't the way it happens.  In between come all the hundreds
of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them
preparing you not to be shocked by the next.  Step C is not so
much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step
B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

``And one day, too late, your principles ... all rush in
upon you.  The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and
some minor incident, in my case my little boy ...  saying `Jew
swine,' collapses it all at once, and you see that everything,
everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.
The world you were born in - your nation, your people - is not
the world you were born in at all. 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. ...

``... Life ... has flowed to a new level, carrying you with
it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live
... more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles.
You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years
ago, a year ago, things that your father ... could not have
imagined.

``Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you
are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't
done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we
do nothing). ...  You remember everything now, and your heart
breaks.  Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."

-----------