School of the Americas Protest

[LowerCaseRepublican]

Was reading the AP and Nov. 18-20, 19,000+ people were at Ft. Benning, GA for the School of the Americas protest (although it is now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation)

 

http://lennybrucefan.tripod.com/id50.html -- my column on WHISC/SOA.

[FlaSoxxJim]

Wow, good turnout.

 

[JUGGERNAUT]

Sometimes you have to fight "evil" with "evil". If you don't have that capability then "evil" can use that which you hold dearest against you.

[FlaSoxxJim]

Sometimes you have to fight "evil" with "evil".  If you don't have that capability then "evil" can use that which you hold dearest against you.

And sometimes you just have to teach the evil how to be really effective at being evil, too? That seems to be the thing the School of the Americas has been particularly good at.

[Soxy]

Sometimes you have to fight "evil" with "evil".  If you don't have that capability then "evil" can use that which you hold dearest against you.

I'm going to need a Bible verse to back up that statement. Or some other moral source from which you are justifying that statement. . .

[kapkomet]

*ahem*

 

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

I'm going to need a Bible verse to back up that statement. Or some other moral source from which you are justifying that statement. . .

 

 

Actually, if you study the Old Testament the Hebrew people were perpetrating some world-class evil against their neighbors, backed by God of course. Of course if you sicced Old Testament God on us he'd have us wiped out for allowing the religous freedoms we do.

 

 

Back on topic though. We train people who attend SOA in counter-insurgency tactics so they can go home and train their own people. If a few of them abuse that training there's really nothing we can do about it. As Ive said every time he brings this up: I think LCR is more angry about the fact that their training is used against narco's and neo-communists down there than anything else.

Edited November 21, 2005 by NUKE_CLEVELAND

[mr_genius]

I'm going to need a Bible verse to back up that statement.

 

lol

[Soxy]

Actually, if you study the Old Testament the Hebrew people were perpetrating some world-class evil against their neighbors, backed by God of course.  Of course if you sicced Old Testament God on us he'd have us wiped out for allowing the religous freedoms we do.

Mmmmm, I think that it's not so much you should repay evil with evil as much as evil comes to those who are evil. So, it's not condoning the use of evil, but saying that it's a sort of divine retribution that will befall the evil.

 

If you look at the Proverbs and stuff it's not the evil should have evil things done to them, it's more of a God will take care of them. And ultimately, I think that's a huge difference between the SOA and what's up in biblical times. There God it handing out the retribution and in Juggs case we've replaced God's wisdom in "punishment" with our own subjective judgements of evil, repayment, and a very relativistic sense of morality that, in my opinion, is not at all based in the Judeo-Christian ethos.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

Nuke, I have no problem with them going after the FARC, ELZN etc. because they are armed militias.

 

What I do have a problem with is the all to numerous times that we've, in the name of anti-communism, embraced bloodthirsty iron-fisted dictators, deposed leaders we didn't like (Allende, Arbenz, etc.) and trained groups like the Atacatl batallion that was responsible for the Jesuit slaughter. Plus, I'm sure that you wouldn't like that some of the Plan Colombia money is going to support the right-wing para-militaries (deemed terrorist organizations by the US State Department) who have been notorious for extra-legal murders, kidnappings, arsons, etc. If we're serious about closing camps that wreak havoc on their native populations, then we should close the SOA. It is more than just mere coincidence that every time a story about an atrocity comes out of Central and South America, people trained at the School of the Americas are almost always implicated.