What might Paine have said about Bush?
Truthout
by Sherwood Ross
08/26/06
Peculiarly, a lot of what American patriot Tom Paine wrote in 1775 about the British Crown seems to apply to President Bush today. ... As historian John Keane wrote in his excellent Tom Paine: A Political Life (Little, Brown and Co.), despots -- as Paine saw them -- plunder 'the pockets and lives of their subjects, since that is the most effective way of raising and feeding armies and making their subjects afraid, obedient, and willing to pay taxes. Wars between despotic states thereby tend to increase rulers' lust for power over their own populations. War, wrote Paine, is 'the art of conquering at home' [original italics].' And so we are, indeed, conquered at home. We live under a regime that can arrest and imprison any of us for as long as it likes, one that denies our privacy, scraps our international treaties, and shreds our Bill of Rights. We been given no honest reason for launching the war on Iraq. The real reason most probably is oil, just as Paine wrote that the reason King George III made war on America was because 'her crime is property'...
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/082606F.shtml
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
by Sherwood Ross
08/26/06
Peculiarly, a lot of what American patriot Tom Paine wrote in 1775 about the British Crown seems to apply to President Bush today. ... As historian John Keane wrote in his excellent Tom Paine: A Political Life (Little, Brown and Co.), despots -- as Paine saw them -- plunder 'the pockets and lives of their subjects, since that is the most effective way of raising and feeding armies and making their subjects afraid, obedient, and willing to pay taxes. Wars between despotic states thereby tend to increase rulers' lust for power over their own populations. War, wrote Paine, is 'the art of conquering at home' [original italics].' And so we are, indeed, conquered at home. We live under a regime that can arrest and imprison any of us for as long as it likes, one that denies our privacy, scraps our international treaties, and shreds our Bill of Rights. We been given no honest reason for launching the war on Iraq. The real reason most probably is oil, just as Paine wrote that the reason King George III made war on America was because 'her crime is property'...
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/082606F.shtml
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
rudkla - 29. Aug, 14:44
