Monday, June 13, 2011

Two great articles

Lew Rockwell published an article Thursday by Butler Shaffer that begins:

Why TSA, Wars, State Defined Diets, Seat-Belt Laws, the War On Drugs, Police Brutality, and Efforts to Control the Internet, Are Essential to the State: The title of this article encompasses topics that arouse attention and criticism among persons of libertarian persuasion. The discussion of such matters usually treats each issue as though it were sui generis, independent of one another. Most of us respond as though the woman who is groped at the airport has no connection with the man who is tasered by a police officer; that the person serving time in prison for selling marijuana is unrelated to the men being held at Guantanamo. The belief that one person’s maltreatment is isolated from the rest of us, is essential to the maintenance of state power.

And Becky Akers commented on the abuse of the British cruise passengers in LA on Saturday. She concludes:
Calculated, casual cruelty that would have been unthinkable a decade ago – a time by no means kind or genteel – is now Standard Operating Procedure. Meanwhile, too many Americans look the other way. Jaw-dropping barbarities have become so common that most witnesses shrug -- if they even notice. And some horrifically benighted ones actually cheer the ferocity. "They had it coming," they smugly opine. "Don’t they know you can’t do [whatever innocent activity earned government’s ire] nowadays? What, they think they’re special and don’t have to go by the rules?"

The Nazis made certain ethnicities and conditions illegal – and punishable. So have the Warriors. But those of us watching should heed the command of Prof. Yehuda Bauer: "Thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander."

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