[Trombone-l] Valery Ponomarev

[sabutin]

Sorry if anyone has been offended...but I am offended when people 
doubt an obvious truth like this because of preconceived (and TOTALLY 
wrong) notions of how the world works.

I am personally offended. Because I am personally going to lose a 
great deal if this country tips into the techno-fascist, 
media-controlled state that it is now about a millimeter away from 
becoming.

And we ALL should be offended when personal freedoms are gradually 
taken away from us...here AND abroad...in the name of a patently 
false "anti-terrorism". This is exactly what happened in Nazi 
Germany, only modernized by the use of an all-encompassing and 
all-knowing media.

As in " I'm gonna go out on a limb and call it BS, mainly because a search
of cnn.com for +"Valery Ponomarev" +"broken arm" gets no results at all."

Nice work, Earl.

THAT'S BS, and if you do not know it, I am here to TELL you so.

If a close friend of yours was injured in a totally negligent 
police-related action that was not widely reported (Yet...because a 
BUNCH of us are trying to help Valery) and I wrote something 
similar,,,how the hell would YOU react?

Read this. Written by a man who lived through the run-up to Hitler's 
total takeover of the country.

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

"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 . . . 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. . . 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 youwould 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)

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

"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. ...But the one great shocking occasion, when tens 
or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes."

"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."

Breaking Valery's arm was "regretted." Probably well explained too, 
if you speak Lewis Carrollese.

"The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or 
small. `Off with his head!' she said, without even looking round."

It IS their way or it's their way, now. It's their way, one way or 
another, and what are you going to do about it?

The author of the piece makes a point that things are changing 
worldwide because of American policies both domestically and abroad, 
and then asks:

"You doubt  this idea? OK. Try to imagine the above story happening 
in 1996. Nope. End of argument."

End of argument.

If you cannot see the truth of this...then it is eventually going to 
get REALLY personal for you, too.

"Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee." Hemingway.

Next time you try to get on an airplane?

Be afraid.

Be very afraid.

That's what they WANT you to be.

Afraid.

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Churchill.

And they've GOTCHA.

S.

P.S. Damn right I'm angry.