Pynchon, The War, and Doug. What else is there?

[Richard Fiero]

The Great Quail wrote:
>  . . .
>Doug, really, trust me --it's more difficult for members of 
>this List to avoid being exposed to Leftist propaganda!

My keyboard contains a delete key.  If yours is anything like 
mine, it does also.  My mail reader also has a simple way of 
trashing unwanted mail.
What is "Leftist?"  This word is so far undefined.  Pacifist 
does not equate to leftist.
I'll bet that without the surprisingly viable peace movement, 
far more civilians would be napalmed or blown up -- as in the 
Gulf War with 100,000 combatants killed and also 100,000 
civilians. jbor, it might have been only 97,000. Go look it up 
and don't harass me with incidentals.
There's a disconnect which bothers me greatly: a) we deplore 
the killing of "innocent" civilians; b) we blame current Iraqi 
or Afghan civilian deaths on the governments which those 
civilians allow to exist; c) we bristle when Chomsky reminds us 
of civilian deaths that the U.S. is responsible for and 
discount all of Chomsky; d) we maintain that a military 
response to the civilian deaths at WTC/Pentagon is 
appropriate.  We have plenty of history to show that wars are 
fought mostly against civilians and we have lots of modern U.S. 
involvement starting with Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima and 
Dresden. More recently, we have the U.S. handholding of the 
Nicaraguan Contras who were responsible for 30,000 civilian 
deaths  in attacks against rural schools and medical clinics 
along with CIA hijinx in mining Nicaraguan harbors.  That's 
just one example and Nicaragua was never any sort of threat to 
any U.S. interest.  Yet we prefer to read Chomsky as saying 
that the U.S. deserved the WTC rather than reading him to state 
that the U.S. has legitimized the killing of civilians in the 
prosecution of war by other means.  As noted elsewhere, should 
we now sanction the British bombing of Boston Mass. to reduce 
the financial support to the IRA?  Which way is it?  Do we 
deplore the killing of civilians because we may have to take 
responsibility for what our U.S. government has been up to all 
along and pay for our lack of active interest with our 
lives?  Or do we deplore the killing of civilians anywhere and at any time?

If we are speaking English, Jihad translates as Crusade. Please 
leave Jihad to Islamic scholars.

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"There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch
what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks
like that; there never is."