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How today’s pro-immigrant activists are adopting the tactics of abolitionists
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the same “rule of law” argument that was made to forcibly return fugitive slaves to bondage in the 19th century is now being made to forcibly return undocumented workers to their home countries, resulting in an escalating — and, paradoxically, ever more lawless — use of state violence.
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Daily Archives: March 6, 2017
Trump Assumes Command of the American Church
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Trump Assumes Command of the American Church – Reason.com
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As Donald Trump demonstrated in his first address to Congress, no matter how loathsome a ruler may be, he can bring an assembly of politicians to its feet and disarm some critics simply by invoking the quasi-secular faith—Americanism—and eulogizing the latest uniformed war-state employee to sacrifice his life for it. Trump has indeed shown he can fill the job expected of any president: supreme head of what Andrew Bacevich calls the Church of America the Redeemer.
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If we are ever to abolish America’s bloody and costly permanent war state we will have to rethink the quasi-secular faith which holds that dying—and killing—for one’s country is the greatest honor and virtue to which one one can aspire. It is time we learned that killing and dying for an ideology—even so-called liberal democracy— is as bad as doing so for a religion, even so-called radical Islam.
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The raid killed at least 25 noncombatants, including children — among them an American citizen
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Apparently you don’t have to be a “radical Islamic terrorist” to resent foreign troops storming your village at night
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According to the quasi-secular faith, reckless disregard for human life doesn’t matter. All that matters is that a man gave his life carrying out orders issued by the high priests of the American Church in the name of National Security. It is heresy even to wonder if the death was in vain, if the noncombatant deaths constitute war crimes, or if the operation bore any relation to the actual security of the American people.
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Woe betide anyone who suggests (as some military people have) that such raids create militants and fill the ranks of people who want revenge against Americans for what they allow their government to do.
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Inconveniently, it was Owens’s father who admonished Trump not “to hide behind my son’s death to prevent an investigation” of the ill-conceived operation.
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That Trump would exploit a grieving widow and invoke the national quasi-secular faith for his own advantage is hardly surprising.
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