April 19th - Reflecting on Mass Murder and Cave Man Mentality

My great-great-great-great grandfather was Colonel James Barrett, the head of the militia at Concord, Massachusetts on April 19, 1775. The battles at Lexington and Concord that day were the start of America’s War of Independence. As it happens – and I have confirmed through Daughters of the American Revolution records -- two other great-great-great grandfathers fought at Concord and at Lexington that day as well.
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While part of me wants to crow about my "revolutionary blood," the pacifist in me remembers that these battles actually undercut a very successful non-cooperation movement against trade or other relations with Britain. They gave the British an excuse to raise an army to crush the rebels through murder most foul.
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And more than 100 people, American and British, died on April 19, 1775 itself. Evidently they were all combatants, so does that mean it was not murder? And let's not forget the tens of thousands of indigenous Native American Indian people who had died from outright murder in the almost 300 earlier years of colonization, not to mention the millions who died of starvation and disease.
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But fast forwarding to modern times, April 19 is also the anniversary of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) 1993 assault with CS gas and massive military tanks on the Branch Davidian church and home outside of Waco, Texas. The attack resulted in 76 deaths, mostly of women, children and the elderly. See my book THE DAVIDIAN MASSACRE, a systematic analysis of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) and FBI crimes against the Davidians.
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BATF had come in shooting first, from the ground and from helicopters, murdering six Davidians. They had to keep the rest of the Davidian witnesses to their crimes in there long enough to have an excuse to destroy all evidence of illegal gun fire in order to protect agents from prosecution. And so FBI finally managed to destroy the evidence -- and so many inconvenient witnesses -- 51 days later.
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A disgruntled Gulf War Veteran who had witnessed American tanks bulldozing and burying living Iraqis went insane upon seeing that obviously intentional mass murder on television just two years later. Two years after that that veteran, Timothy McVeigh, blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, murdering 163 people.
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On April 20, 1999, as Bill Clinton mercilessly bombed and murdered civilians in Serbia, two loners at Columbine High School murdered 12 students and a teacher. They did so on the birthday of the third greatest mass murder of the 20th Century, Adolph Hitler. (China's Mao Tse-Tsung and the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin coming in first and second.) Fox News provides a whole list of school shootings in America over the last 10 years! And now an obviously psychotic Cho Seung-Hui has killed another 32.
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And not to let Howard K. Stern off the hook (see entry below), remember FBI killed the Davidians to get rid of witnesses. New reports state Anna Nicole Smith blamed her son Daniel's death on Howard giving him methadone, his very first "hit." And Howard definitely had reasons to want to keep Daniel sedated. After all, the card of the private detective Daniel allegedly was considering hiring to spy on Howard was found on his dead body. Howard must have feared what the grieving, and presumably relatively non-drugged Anna might say, once on the stand at Daniel's inquest. Howard Stern is suing Anna's mother and her attorney for libel and slander for alleging Stern's involvement in both Daniel and Anna's deaths. I have a feeling THAT case will be dropped the second the inquest is completed. Either way, the mother may not be as crazy and evil as Howard would like everyone to think.
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Well, enough pondering the acts of obsessed madmen -- not that the news media will let us do anything else! Fear keeps people tuning in to make sure someone is protecting them - from evils real, imagined and fabricated!
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Of course, as long as the media keep pushing out of the limelight George Bush's attempts to demonize Iran by focusing on private crimes and massacres, we might be tempted to feel safe from war. But then who was the happiest man in the world that 9-11 came along? (Besides Dick Cheney and Ariel Sharon, of course.) Remember Gary Condit? And the constant news stories about the then representative's affair with the missing young Chandra Levy? The speculation that he murdered her to keep her quiet? Those stories immediately disappeared and slipped down the post-9/11 memory hole.
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So despite the hopes of so many, Americans and Iranians, a U.S. military strike on Iran may be near. The U.S. can't keep those three aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf forever. And Israel's leader Ehud Olmert has made it clear that if Bush doesn't attack, Israel will. And then Bush will be forced to come in, at a time perhaps less convenient and more costly to the U.S.
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Nuclear weapons, if not the first day weapon of choice, will be used to crush Iran should it retaliate against an attack - especially if it uses missiles against gulf oil targets, U.S. troops and the Green Zone in Iraq, or Israel. Millions of Iranians could be dead in hours; tens of millions in weeks. And, if the Russians freak out at nuclear weapons exploding just hundreds of miles from their borders, half of humanity could be dead before the summer solstice. (See some scary nuclear war videos here.)
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Last night I was shocked when a news broadcast of the Virginia Tech madman's video rant about mass murder suddenly was interrupted by a Geico add chirping: "So easy, even a cave man can do it!"
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Was universal consciousness trying to send us a not very subtle message: EVOLVE BEYOND VIOLENCE OR DIE! Transcend god and state. Get into consciousness and community.