The Politics of Violence: An Instance of One Dimension of Today’s Darkness
Threats Against IRS Employees On The Rise, Increased 21 Percent From 2008 To 2009
by Marcus Baram
Huffington post, March 1, 2010
This afternoon’s incident at an Internal Revenue Service facility in Utah, in which several people were removed on stretchers after an “unknown substance” was found, appears to be the latest in an alarming rise in threats against the agency’s employees.
According to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration, the number of threats against IRS employees increased 21.5% from FY 2008, when there were 834 threats to FY 2009, when there were 1,014 threats.
Over the past four years, there appears to be a “steady, upward trend” in threats against IRS staffers, a TIGTA official told Dow Jones Newswires last week. The most unnerving incident in recent memory occurred just two weeks ago, when Joseph Stack flew his plane into IRS offices in Austin, Texas, killing one employee nearing retirement.
Other notable attacks on the tax-collecting arm of the government in recent years include:
In March of 2009, Randy Nowak hired a hit man to kill an IRS worker auditing his tax return and to burn down IRS offices in Lakeland, Fla. He was sentenced to 30 years in jail.
In 2008, Earnest Milton Barnett rammed his Jeep Cherokee into the IRS’s Birmingham, Ala., offices and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
March 8th, 2010 at 10:21 pm
The same vicious diatribe continues about the government and the same aquiescence to this obscenity follows along meekly…..
You can bet our attorney general will be out giving a talk before some organization this week….and the President will be dithering and compromisiong along. I heard a man ask last week here in Spokane if everyone didn’t really, in their heart of hearts didn’t want to destroy the local IRS……
News about CAnada, France and Germany lately and why these nations did’nt get drowned in the economic deluge of 18 months ago…..and how they continued to be fiscally strong, and looking after their workers. These people don’t have their media telling their citizens that their governments are lousy, tyrranical or trying to enslave them. they treat government service as a good thing. They have not bouth into the “greed is God” idolatry. The GErman embassy worker I discussed several posts ago at this site thanked ME as an AMerican that we had sent post WWII people from the US with guidance on how to establish a society with moral and humane business practices and policies.
It is a grievous blow to us that a Southern White political philosophy, enamored of willfull ignorance greed misanthropy, and misogyny, plutocracy,
and militarism has gained so much power and concomittantly, such a group of in C.S. Lewis’ terms, men with hollow chests are the alleged oppositon.
Stand To.
RHRandall
Major, USA (ret.)
March 9th, 2010 at 12:38 am
It would be good to carefully track the various innuendos that Palin, Beck, et. al. out out there, which subtly or not incite violence.
I seems especially important to make explicit the fact that the foundation of the Rue-publican’s methods is “trickery.”
March 9th, 2010 at 8:40 am
Alarming, only if you are asleep.
from: “The Coming Insurrection” by the Invisible Committee:
“It’s useless to wait–for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.”
March 9th, 2010 at 10:32 am
Amen, RHRandall, Major, USA (ret.)!
I was not familiar with your CS Lewis reference. Excellent, if I may say so!
“Men Without Chests ”
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition1.htm
Dan said,
I’m afraid I agree with you. I think that’s where we are. But even more we have to continue to do our best for the sake of those around us and those with whom we happen to come in contact, not just play the game Eric Berne described, “Ain’t it awful.”* And, Hanu Man Ji, that is my selfish point of view!
Larry
* http://www.uumin.org/sam/sermons/s554.htm
March 9th, 2010 at 12:23 pm
Men grow up, exposed to magazines like `Playboy`, only to find, that they end up emasculated; actually, castrated and, unable to play their true role, as men of vigor and spirit: big brother then, takes over and freedom is endangered.
March 9th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
Speaking of “men with no chests,” Robert Bly talks about the phenomenon of “male numbness” — the kind of emptiness that in the final analysis enables us to be ready to kill other human beings, and support other men in doing so…
“In high school, a girl might ask ‘Do you love me?’ I couldn’t answer. If I asked her the same question, she might reply ‘Well, I respect you, and I admire you, and I’m fond of you, and I’m even interested in you, but I don’t love you.’
“Apparently when she looked into her chest, she saw a whole spectrum of affections, a whole procession of feelings, and she could easily tell them all apart. If I looked into my chest, I saw nothing at all. I had then either to remain silent or fake it.
“Some women feel hurt when a man will not ‘express his feelings,’ and they conclude that he is holding back, or ‘telling them something’ by such withholding; but it’s more likely that when such a man asks a question of his chest, he gets no answer at all.”
March 9th, 2010 at 8:11 pm
Bly continues:
[As a young man]…
“My head was fiery and full of blood, and my genitals were fiery and curious too. The area in between was the problem….
“Some of that numbness is gone now. I can answer questions about my feelings, and I can see people down there with different colored robes, walking around, and I can tell one from the other.
“…But there are still more down there whom I’ve not yet seen.”
**************************************
As Riane Eisler has argued, for the past 5, 000 years the basis of the “Dominator/Dominated” axis has parallelled the inequality between men and women. In the same way the human penchant for domination needs to be seen through the lens of two different paradigms, both of which are generic approaches to social power at all levels of society:
“Power for oneself only” – or – “power with others.”
March 10th, 2010 at 10:10 am
Joe DiMaggio is a case in point: he attempted to help Marylin but, even a man like him, could not save her from herself. Dimaggio was lending his strength to support, not to dominate: he was a quiet man!
March 10th, 2010 at 2:55 pm
I think one needs to understand that the politics of violence in America and elsewhere has been engendered by the fascist forces that be. Nothing so far compares to the violence that the fascist(corporatist) state visits on its citizens and its designated and manufactured enemies. That there would come real enemies of the state is a self-fulfilling prophesy. The only real answer to power is anarchy, both violent and non-violent. After reading “The Coming Insurrection” cited above and “Pacifism as Pathology” by Ward Churchill I am convinced that the existing power base cannot be dislodged without everyone, including unconditional pacifists, being willing to take up arms–not necessarily to use them, but to pose a credible threat to the existing regime. In this context, I don’t see attacks on the IRS as an inappropriate use of terror. Within this reality we must choose sides.
March 10th, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Pardon me, Dan, but this is nonsense. ANd dangerous nonsense at that, if there were a danger that people in America could possibly choose your route even if your vision were 100 percent accurate and valid. Which it is not.
“Nothing so far compares…” sounds like your saying something about our society, which is the “fascist state” you have in mind, isn’t it? And you think that history will bear out very well your “nothing so far compares.”
You think you know what anarchy is like. Take a look at Lebanon in the 1980s. Take a look at Somalia since the early 90s. That’s the face of anarchy.
And for this supposed fascist state we live in to which “nothing so far compares” with the violence it is doing to its citizens, do you really believe that the average citizen of the United States or any of the other affluent democracies with one degree or another of plutocratic corruption, is in anything like the danger of violence as existed in the fascist dictatorships of Hitler (and others then and since, where large numbers of people are shot and buried in mass graves), not to mention the violence done by Stalin to various of the peoples of the Russian empire, through starvation or bullets.
Or Mao’s China, with its Great Leap Forward disaster of starvation, and its Cultural Revolution cruelties and viciousness and intolerance.
Nothing so far comparesi
But based on this grotqesque exaggeration of the degree of fascist infiltration into our body politic, you’re ready to call people to arms! Because history gives so many heartwarming examples of countries plunged into such domestic violence yet coming up into the Promised Land of a more just society than they started with. Tell that to the people under Mugabe, or the people who have come to power or seized power in a great many nations that are far more oppressive and far more violent than our supposedly “fascist” state. Political systems have their problems, but they were constructed in large measure because people learned through many centuries, even millennia, of experience with anarchy, they came to understand that civilization made it necessary to get organized in a political sort of a way.
Very seldom does tearing down the political system lead to the best of society’s elements and ideas coming into control. It will be the ruthless Bolsheviks, not the Menscheviks that actually caried out the overthrow of the Czar, who govern the Soviet Union for seventy years. It is the Taliban –those people who like to execute women who don’t stay in their place, and that blew up ancient monumental statues of Buddha in the mountains– who took over in Pakistan after various elements had fought simultanteously against a common enemy. The storming of the Bastille led before very long to the Reign of Terror, and from there but a handful of years to Napoleon taking over as emperor, and putting all of Europe into a war of conquest.
No, a call to arms is nonsense, based on a nonsensical assessment of our situation and an utterly ungrounded notion of what anarchy means. Your black-and-white contraster is in overdrive here. Anarchy is hugely dangerous, in any situation. (And I can just hear your saying, no, your anarchy would be a good anarchy, not like what happens in Mogadishu.) And what we still have constructed here in America makes us among the luckiest tiny percent of people who have ever lived, since the tyrants of the Mesopotamian kingdoms first emerged. We should cherish and repair and improve the system that we find, because it is a treasure the likes of which most civilized societies –the overwhelming majority– have not given to their people nearly so well, from ancient Rome and ancient China, to the Dark Ages and unward through the Middle Ages and onward far toward the present.
Acting like we have nothing to lose is folly.
March 10th, 2010 at 8:35 pm
Nice venting, Andy. Sorry for not making my meaning clear–by “Nothing so far compares” I meant that only in reference to the recent IRS attacks named in the article you cited above, nothing more. I was not comparing America today with Nazi Germany or any other dictatorship. I’ve given my working definition of fascism here and in other posts as corporatism, the same definition Mussolini used. I consider him an authority–and think you express a rather knee jerk reaction to the use of the term fascism in conjunction with the lovely country we live in. So be it. Others before me have also observed the fascist nature of the U.S. of A.: Bertram Gross, Lewis Lapham, Naomi Wolf, Kevin Phillips, Naomi Klein, as foreseen by Huey Long and Sinclair Lewis.
By anarchy I mean resistance, whatever form it takes. It need not always result in violence, but a credible opposition is necessary, and violence should not be ruled out. Please read the books I’ve cited above by The Invisible Committee and Ward Churchill. I fear that sooner or later we must sacrifice our relative comfort and choose sides.
March 10th, 2010 at 8:48 pm
I’m not sure I follow you, Dan, about the meaning of “Nothing so far compares.” But I gather that I at least partly misunderstood, though you stick by the notion that America should be understood as a fascist state, as was Mussolini’s (and maybe Nazi Germany’s), but you’re not making a direct equation between our fascism and theirs. But, I gather you believe it makes sense to call the United States a fascist state more than it makes sense to call it a constitutional democracy or anything else of a liberal character. Is that right?
And I gather that you still believe that we should be readying ourselves to seek change through the use of violence –if it’s necessary, after we’ve tried “resistance,” whatever that is, and found that other forms of resistance have not worked. Is that right?
March 11th, 2010 at 9:01 am
Andy wrote:
I’m not sure I follow you, Dan, about the meaning of “Nothing so far compares.”
I meant that none of the small acts of terror so far in America, namely the IRS attacks cited above, compare in magnitude to the daily state violence that has killed millions worldwide and is now quashing dissent at home and enforcing various methods of social control over its citizens.
Andy wrote:
I gather you believe it makes sense to call the United States a fascist state more than it makes sense to call it a constitutional democracy or anything else of a liberal character.
Yes, when corporations have first amendment rights and can legally wield money as speech they control the “democratic” process by selection of candidates for office, purchase of votes, control of perceptions via the media, etc., and for many other reasons elaborated by many authors, we have what Sheldon Wolin calls managed democracy or inverted totalitarianism and Bertram Gross called friendly fascism.
Andy wrote:
I gather that you still believe that we should be readying ourselves to seek change through the use of violence –if it’s necessary, after we’ve tried “resistance,” whatever that is, and found that other forms of resistance have not worked.
Yes, again, with some reservations. Americans have the ability to commit millions of individual acts of non-violent resistance every day. Ideally millions more Americans will wake up to the necessity and efficacy of this approach. As a practical matter citizens would not engage in violent resistance unless it had a high probability of success. Otherwise it would be self-defeating and accomplish little or nothing. Individual martyring acts such as those against the IRS probably fall into that category, though any act which would raise the consciousness of the populace to the necessity of resistance would be a plus.
March 13th, 2010 at 5:22 pm
I very much enjoyed Glenn Beck’s advice to his listeners: “Run like hell if your church teaches that Christianity is about social justice.
Then, he held a swastika symbol in one hand and hammer and sickle in the other.
March 16th, 2010 at 7:43 am
Dan said,
Noam Chomsky said recently that the nonviolent anti-war movement is much stronger now than it was during the Vietnam war. That could be. For one thing there are more wars to oppose now. Anyway, I think Professor Chomsky is a great example. In this video with Amy Goodman Professor Chomsky talks about President Obama’s foreign and national security policies, the lessons of Vietnam and his own activism.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/15/noam_chomsky_on_obamas_foreign_policy
Larry