Remember William Haynes? Here's something I got in the mail by him...

[Tiggeroshii]

>I used to know a man whose family was German aristocracy prior to World WarTwo. They owned a number of large industries and estates. I asked him how many German people were true Nazis, and the answer he gave has stuck with me and guided my attitude toward fanaticism ever since.
>
>"Very few people were true Nazis "he said," but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything, I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories."
>
>We are told again and again by "experts" and "talking heads" that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace.
>
>Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history.
>
>It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of the many shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is that the "peaceful majority" is the "silent majority" and it is cowed and extraneous.
>
>Communist Russia comprised Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.
>
>The average Japanese individual prior to World War 2 was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet. And, who can forget Rwanda , which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were "peace loving"?
>
>History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points:
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>Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awake one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.
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>Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late. As for us who watch it all unfold; we must pay attention to the only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.
>
>Lastly, I wish to add: I sincerely think that anyone who rejects this as just another political rant, or doubts the seriousness of this issue or just deletes it without paying heed to it, or sending it on, is part of the problem. Lets quit laughing at and forwarding the jokes and cartoons which denigrate and ridicule our leaders in this war against terror. Best we support them.
>
>William Haynes
>
> "Human beings understand reason, compassion, dignity ...
>Predators understand strength"

The hypocrisy still lives on....

[Tiggeroshii]

1. What a great guy

Almost became a federal judge.

"Human beings understand reason, compassion, dignity ...
Predators understand strength"

Would this display of 'strength' amount to forceful interrogations involving simulated drowning, forcing self defecation, stripping your own people of their constitutional rights holding them in prison cells with no definite trial -or due process? Would it involve responding to violence with misdirected violence or justifying torture on children as a means to get to their parents?

Because if that's the case, it sounds like Mr. Haynes falls under his own category as an inhuman predator: He shows no "display of reason, compassion or dignity" while flaunting and abusing the strengths this nation has given him and those people he works for.

[Kutjara]

2. For one brief, shining moment, I thought...

...he was going to draw a parallel between the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the rise of the Neocons in America. But no, he spun off into the usual bullshit. What was that old biblical admonition against complaining about the mote in your neighbor's eye when you've got a beam in your own?

[SpiralHawk]

4. Nazis-Neocons is the inevitable parallel.

Any reasonable reader cannot help but see that, even though he does not say it, and in fact wants in his writing to support the hate-bearing, violence-mongering, corporate totalitarian cabal of corrupt republicon war profiteers.

[pnorman]

3. There is much truth to the idea that one "fanatic" (ie: willing to die for a belief),

is worth 10 or even 100 "docile bystander". But in the example of Germany and Japan, to limit the discussion to just those two, there were far greater forces moving events, than the shock-troops. They too were "manipulated".

But his observations are still well worth considering.

pnorman