MODERN DAY NAZIS

those who are segregating children from their mothers on the
industrial scale? they're modern day nazis, i'd would say

Concerning the government's claims about the
polygamists in Texas, the initial answer is that the
amount of truth may be roughly the same as the FBI's
press releases on Waco.

To wit: virtually no truth.

The court proceedings were indeed Nazi-like.
Hundreds of children are ripped away from families in
a mass proceeding of condign punishment. If the
teenage pregnancy rate proves lower than in the
general population, I would not be surprised.

The militarization of law enforcement through
Department of Defense sales to local police
departments of armored personnel carriers and other
heavy weapons is widely discussed among civil
libertarians. The accustomed ranting response by the
cretinous crowd is why worry IF you have "done nothing wrong."

As for camera surveillance at street corners or
warrantless searches, why worry IF you have "done
nothing wrong."

The military operation against the polygamists
-- for the police tactics resembled such -- reminds me
of the reaction of the late Soviet government to a
discovery in the late 1950s of a colony of Old
Believers living peacefully in the forests of, if
memory serves, the Urals. These peaceful Orthodox
Christians had checked out of the surrounding society
of mass murder and socialist repression and had
established a place to live amid a vast forest. They
went undetected for decades.

When the Soviet state finally realized that such
a group had lived outside its grasp, it marched
detachments of KGB killers through the forested
mountains and, yes, took the children and, to be sure,
sent many of the parents to slave
labor camps.

The family at Ruby Ridge, the families at Waco,
and the families of the polygamists wished to secede,
if you will, from American civil society as it now
exists. This tradition was once common and free
enough in the United States. Historian Arthur Bestor
tells the story of these Backwoods Utopias in an
eponymous work. Readers can also consult earlier
works by the leftist Vernon Calverton.

What strikes one forcibly is how many
freedom-haters America has today spawned -- ranging
from those who support drug testing in chess as a form
of social intrusiveness to those who defend torching
dissenters at Waco or mass confiscation of children
from parents.

The next step Stateside will be the Israeli
practice of group punishment -- of which the recent
court actions against the polygamists will prove to be
a harbinger. If an evident majority of a town or city
supports forces that our central regime in Washington,
DC decides are, say, beyond the mainstream, then we
will have week-long curfews and snipers picking off
those in search of food and water.

Those who live to a fair age will witness such
events in our country.

One ventures to believe that a majority of
readers here likely support the concept of a
national security state. If confronted with Ben
Franklin's quotation that those who would trade
liberty for security will end up with neither -- well,
the response inside the brain, if there is still some
shame in expressing the words publicly, is that we
live in a different world than did Franklin.

Right. We actually live in a less dangerous
world with fewer mortal threats against our country
than existed in his time and that of the other Founders.

Americans once believed, by and large, in the
free life. A majority today prefers the values of
safety, security and equality. They will one day
discover that mass government offers dangers,
destroys personal security and, in the end, produces a
dominant class of bureaucratic tyrants in both public
and privately owned institutions. Inequality actually grows.

Yours, Larry Parr