Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Friday, March 15, 2002 Worst of all possible Worlds In a Bee reprint from a NYT OpEd (must be registered to access but click here for it), Clancy Sigal wants us to be afraid, be very afraid of our government's hunt for terrorists. The consequences of it may be as evil as what occured to his family. "In the summer of 1919 a series of dynamite bombings, carried out by anarchists, swept over several American cities. A suicide bomber blew himself up outside the Washington home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Then, on Sept. 16, 1920, the House of Morgan in lower Manhattan was blown up, killing 33 people and injuring 400." "My Russian-immigrant parents fit the profile (as "Reds"). They were foreign-born, Jewish, radical labor organizers who had actively participated in several turbulent strikes. They had no fixed address and were living in sin. They were arrested, jailed and almost deported during the infamous Palmer raids of 1920 and 1921" "Using existing sedition laws, he and his chief investigating officer, a ravenously ambitious 24- year-old named J. Edgar Hoover, ordered 500 agents of the newly created Federal Bureau of Investigation to go after Communists, socialists, union activists, and pacifists and arrest them without warrants or judicial hearings. Homes were ransacked, political literature burned. Estimates vary, but between 4,000 and l0,000 people were secretly, efficiently rounded up." His parents were picked up - "but my mother told me federal agents had beaten him (the father) on the way to jail. Both of my parents were released to go back to their lives — my mother after a few days and my father after a few weeks" Many years later, the FBI came looking to talk to Clancy and only found his mother who, " politely met them at the door, invited them in for coffee and charmed them out of their intended purpose. But she was pale and terrified when I got home. " "The Palmer raids, though long ago, cut deep and left scars on individuals caught up in them and on America's views of how government could be permitted to deal with anyone dissident and different. What scars is our government inflicting today? " Let's recap. The Palmer raids probably saved this country from untold numbers of acts of subversion and destruction. In the process, the author's parents were tortured, deported, and later killed by the brutal police state tactics - no, wait! They were only briefly detained, the dad might have gotten a few lumps or not (every agitator exaggerates police brutality), and then released to return to their activities. That's America all right. No one has ever suffered worse than here at the hands of this country. posted by Mark Butterworth | 1:50 PM | |
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