In a message dated 08/13/2000 2:36:25 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

<< As to US policy causing
 thousands of deaths of the innocent, etc., why don't you
 compare those numbers to the hundreds of thousands
 slaughtered in third-world countries?  (There are, of course,
 plenty of ignoramuses who will say the US caused all that
 too.)  >>

gee whiz.... and you have the chutzpah to say my understanding of history is
appalling!   as I say, your jingoistic stance is not unusual -- scratch a
liberal and you find a crazed nationalist, willing to ignore millions of
deaths directly attributed to American intervention -- Chile, El Salvador,
Viet Nam, Iraq & Iran, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cambodia, Cuba, Panama, Granada,
various African countries.....  you have to willfully embrace ignorance in
order to maintain the position you do, and in this sense -- & this sense only
-- you're much more like Pound, whose blindness towards fascism caused him to
willfully ignore its consequences, than I could ever be.  but I'm glad we're
having this little discussion, I enjoy smoking you closet right-wingers out
into the open where anyone with even a smattering of recent history can see
what a dupe you are, and what tripe you're willing to swallow so you can
continue enjoy your *middle-class* consumerism without the appropriate guilt
feelings that nearly everything you eat or wear is drenched in blood.  I can
only encourage you to continue to respond.  btw, I found your concern about
what one can say in Franco's Spain laughable in the light of the capacities
of the NSA (that's the National Security Agency) to monitor every single
telephone and electronic message of any american.  as for free speech, as
long as folks are uttering the banal  propaganda idiocies that you engage in,
there's no need to censure you.  but I would be remiss if I didn't at least
point you in a driection in which you could rectify your woeful
misconceptions; I can recommend several books to add to your reading list:
*Manufacturing Consent* by Noam Chomsky, or *Killing Hope: US Military and
CIA interventions Since World War ll* by William Blum.  I should warn you
though; reading these books will probably put you off your feed for a few
days.  the only anodyne to this loss of appetite is for you to dismiss the
authors as just more examples of *leftist ignoramuses* -- which one can do if
one has a predilection, as you seem to have, of coyly averting one's eyes
from the facts.

joe brennan