The other side of tragedy.

Darrell "Shifty" Powers, Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment.

In the second-to-last episode of "Band of Brothers," an HBO miniseries that documented Easy Company's wartime exploits, Powers spoke on camera about the soldiers he fought and also hinted at the intrinsic tragedy of combat.

"We might have had a lot in common. He might've liked to fish, you know, he might've liked to hunt," Powers said. "Of course, they were doing what they were supposed to do, and I was doing what I was supposed to do.

"But under different circumstances, we might have been good friends."


Vernon Hunter, Vietnam veteran and devout Christian.

Folks,

I want y'all to read this and I'll have comments on the other side.

Family, friends gather at home of missing man

Vernon Hunter was devout Christian, gave to others, friends say.

By Jeremy Schwartz and Melissa B. Taboada

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Published: 10:57 p.m. Friday, Feb. 19, 2010

Neighbors say Vernon Hunter was the kind of guy who offered trash collectors Gatorade on hot summer days.

"He was a very spiritual man, kind of the life of the neighborhood," said Darren McDaniel, who has lived two houses away since their homes were built in 1996. "We were all sort of like his kids."

Hunter, who public records show is 68, is believed to have been killed in Thursday's attack on a Northwest Austin building that housed Internal Revenue Service offices. Andrew Joseph Stack III is suspected of flying his single-engine plane into the building.

On Friday , Hunter's neighbors and co-workers expressed their grief and shock, remembering him as an exceptionally kind man who was the glue both in his neighborhood and at work.

"He always put his people first," said co-worker Chris Matz of Hunter, a collection manager at the IRS. "Most of the people in our group are very affected, very traumatized. It's a close-knit group. We are a family."

Michiko Robinson called Hunter an excellent supervisor. "He was a very genuine human being," she said.

Loved ones gathered at the Hunter home in Cedar Park Friday morning as a steady stream of neighbors, family and friends brought food and drinks and offered comfort.

A family representative said the family has not heard from the medical examiner's office and was advised by authorities not to comment until a confirmation has been made. Some relatives had not yet been notified of the tragedy, he added.

Meanwhile on Friday, the most seriously injured victim of the crash continued to recuperate at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where he was listed in stable condition. Shane Hill, an investigator with the criminal investigation division of the Texas comptroller's office, received second-degree burns to his back.

Comptroller officials said Hill was in good spirits Friday. "He told me he is anxious to get back to work," his supervisor Max Westbrook said.

Throughout the day Friday, television news trucks parked along the quiet street of the Hunters' two-story, red-brick home. At one point, H-E-B employees went to the home to donate a couple of boxes of food.

"We were shocked and saddened to hear of the unnecessary loss of Vernon Hunter," said company spokeswoman Leslie Lockett. "We want to help the Hunter family in any way we can, and sending food to the family and relatives today was our first step in helping them through this tragedy."

Earlier, police delivered Hunter's Chevy Silverado truck, emblazoned with Vietnam Veteran and POW MIA emblems, to the home. Hunter served in Vietnam and often spoke of his time during the war, neighbors said.

Robert Foster, who has lived near Hunter for about 10 years, said that he knew Hunter was a veteran and wanted to honor him with his American flag. "Out of respect to him, when I came out this morning, I put my flag out," Foster said. "You could talk to him about anything. He always had a smile."

He was known to friends, co-workers and relatives as the one who gave. Hunter is also described as a devout Christian and father of six grown children who loved his white cowboy hat. At Greater Mount Zion Baptist Church in East Austin, where Hunter served as a lead usher, news of the tragedy weighed heavily.

"We're devastated," said Brian Balque, facilities manager at the church.

Balque said that Hunter had set up the church's tax ministry, helping members and local residents with their taxes. "He had a servant's heart," Balque said. "He represented what we stand for as a church, a kind word and a warm spirit."

Balque said Hunter's wife, who also works at the same IRS building and was there when the plane struck, called the church in the minutes afterward asking for prayers for her husband.

McDaniel said their street won't be the same with Hunter gone.

"Everybody loved him in the neighborhood," McDaniel said. "He's in a better place, but the neighborhood is going to seem a little empty without him."


People tend to think of other people with whom they disagree in terms of cartoon characters. This dehumanizes them and makes them easier to hate. The other side in our struggle to restore the Founders' Republic is especially guilty of this. But we do it too. It is a thing humans do naturally. As previously stable societies polarize and fragment toward civil war, such a process is a necessary predicate to the the commencement of the killing.

The fact that no one (well, hardly anyone) ever wants a war is immaterial. Wars usually happen because people do not believe they will happen, or that if they do happen ("the other side will HAVE to back down because we say so") they will turn out to be without too much cost to them. The pay-off of war is always viewed by the men who start them as worth the risk, but it hardly ever is.

The problem is that such folks DO NOT THINK. This is what Hannah Arendt was getting at with her description of Adolf Eichmann as representing "the banality of evil."

Otto Adolf Eichmann, March 19, 1906 – May 31, 1962, sometimes referred to as "the architect of the Holocaust", was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer (equivalent to Lieutenant Colonel). Because of his organizational talents and ideological reliability, he was charged by Obergruppenführer (General) Reinhard Heydrich with the task of facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe. -- Wikipedia.

Arendt's first reaction to Eichmann, "the man in the glass booth," was — nicht einmal unheimlich — not even sinister." She argues that "The deeds were monstrous, but the doer ... was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous." Arendt's perception that Eichmann seemed to be a common man, evidenced in his transparent superficiality and mediocrity left her astonished in measuring the unaccounted evil committed by him, that is, organizing the deportation of millions of Jews to the concentration camps. Actually, what Arendt had detected in Eichmann was not even stupidity, in her words, he portrayed something entirely negative, it was thoughtlessness. Eichmann's ordinariness implied in an incapacity for independent critical thought: "... the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think." (emphasis added) Eichmann became the protagonist of a kind of experience apparently so quotidian, the absence of the critical thought. Arendt says: "When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence."

Eichmann had always acted according to the strict limits allowed by the laws and ordinances. Those attitudes resulted in the clouding between virtues and vices of a blind obedience. In fact, it was not only Eichmann, as an isolated person, who was normal, whereas all other bureaucrats were sadist monsters. One was before a bureaucratic compact mass of men who were perfectly normal, but whose acts were monstrous. Behind such terrible normality of the bureaucratic mass, who was able to commit the greatest atrocities that the world has even seen, Arendt addressed the question of the banality of evil. This normality opened up the precedent regarding the possibility that some attitudes commonly repudiated by a society — in this case the Nazi German attitudes — find as a locus of manifestation the common citizen, who has not reflected on the content of the rules.Richard Bernstein highlights this "normal and ordinary behavior" of the bureaucratic mass in not thinking about the real meaning of the rules themselves, in the sense that they would behave in the same manner in the manufacturing of either food or corpses. "We may find it almost impossible to image how someone could 'think'(or rather, not think) in this manner, whereby manufacturing food, bombs, or corpses are 'in essence the same' and where this can become 'normal', 'ordinary' behavior. This is the mentality that Arendt believed she was facing in Eichmann... ." Eichmann has brought up the radical danger of "such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness." -- Eichmann, the Banality of Evil, and Thinking in Arendt's Thought by Bethania Assy.


Don't get me wrong. Vernon Hunter was no Adolf Eichmann. I rather suspect that if the country were to move into a shooting war with itself, between the people and the government, that Vernon Hunter, had he been given the chance, would have sided with the people.

Yet, in his way, Vernon Hunter (on an admittedly very small scale and in different circumstances) is representative of the same sort of "thoughtlessness" Arendt assigns to Eichmann.

Tell me the functional difference between this:

The massacre of Lidice by Nazi troops in retribution for the assassination of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich

And this?:

The massacre of the Davidians at Waco in retribution for killing 4 raiding ATF agents in what a Texas jury later ruled was lawful self-defense.

And what is the difference between this:

German killers posing in front of the ruins of Lidice.

And this?:

FBI killer posing in front of Waco.

You want to know the difference? One happened in war and the perpetrators were later punished. The other happened in peacetime and the perpetrators were later promoted. Those are the only functional differences.

So I say to you that at least since 1993, every employee of the federal government should know that this is a government estranged from its people, acting at odds with the Founders' rules set down for it. Indeed, every Federal employee and most state employees either know or have every reason to know that their government employer idly and unthinkingly wages a low-intensity war with its own people. Thus, these government employees today cannot deny two essential facts:

1) The murderous nature of the Leviathan master they serve every day, and

2) That these are not ordinary, peaceful times when such service -- and such thoughtlessness -- has no larger consequence, either to the nation or themselves.

Many of these employees today, including Vernon Hunter, took an oath at some point in their lives to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic. It was an oath they took before God.

The German policemen who hated Hitler but dutifully arrested his opponents and sent them to Dachau or worse were "law enforcement officers." They were, in every sense "obeying the law." This was later an insufficient defense from a charge of war crimes. Most, of course, ultimately faced no punishment. However, they did -- all of them, I will guarantee you -- have to face their Maker on the same charges.

Vernon Hunter was by all accounts a good man, a Christian man, a patriot who had risked his life for his country and dutifully served it. There is no evidence that he ever did anything to harm another person. His death typifies the infinite tragedy of all wars throughout history -- otherwise good men are killed in bad causes.

But do you know who I blame? The dirty, stinking, power-grasping bastards who lay the groundwork for the killing. Today, these are the politicians who give a wink and a nod to murderous FBI agents, rogue ATF gun cops or oppressive IRS tax enforcers. For they took an oath too, these politicians. It was an oath that they forgot even in the utterance.

But there is such a thing as karma and there certainly is a Law of Unintended Consequences, and there is also an Almighty God who will judge them, if not in this world, then in the next.

The fact that murderous federal government misconduct has motivated a whole bunch of otherwise law-abiding people who are now willing, if given sufficient additional motivation, to make the introduction between these unthinking, banally evil politicians and God should not be surprising.

May God take Vernon Hunter into His arms and console his family. And may God damn the arrogant, power-hungry men and women who set up the predicate for his death. I am afraid there will be a lot more unnecessary, tragic deaths before this is over.

Mike
III

"It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The freeman of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthen itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle." --James Madison,"A Memorial and Remonstrance", 1785: Works 1:163

Maybe it is the fact that I never got persecuted by the IRS that has me thinking that I am not going to put a major comparison between human rights violations and prickly bureaucrats who screw people financially.

I may have fiddled my income numbers a few times but I never made a grandstand issue of not wanting pay any taxes. Even according to the people who are against the income tax, the actual tax rates would not go down, just get calculated and administered differently. IE, just about everything made in China would go up in price due to import taxes, but in a national splitup scenario, where the "free zone" has no income tax, but more costly imported goods, how much of the population do you think would practice the patriotism of living in the "free zone" yet traveling to an income tax zone with MFN status for China to buy consumer goods?

Actually, this is not about the Illegal Ripoff Service.

Rather it is about good people serving an abusive, totally corrupt beast system. Much like 70 years ago, there are many "good" people serving a system that seeks to enslave all. This makes them just like the Nazi's who claimed they were merely following orders and obeying the law. That is NO excuse. These people are GUILTY of the same crimes they help the state perpetrate against the people. If you support evil, then you are evil; no matter how "good" a person you may be. And, you will suffer the unintended consequences of your acts.

If you work for an agency that shoots children in the back, shoots mothers in the head while holding their child and burns women and children in a church; don't be surprised when someone does the same to you and yours. Eventually, you will reap what you sow.

Folks, there is no such thing as, "Too Big To Fail" other than "God" Himself. For He is never oppressive, even in His most basic nature or attributes.

If 'too big to fail' for any corporation, company, nation, or government, were actually true... then the USSR would never have broken up into satalite nations, the sun would never have set on the British Flag, the Nazis would never have been overthrown, and the Roman Empire would still be in power to this day!

...

All Glory be to God and our Lord and King Jesus, and God's and our King's true Government.

.

Michael

It is sad when we lose any countrymen, be they wise and righteous in their fury or mislead and ignorant of the evil they do. War is an orphan to those caught in it's cold grasp, wanting not to claim it as their own. It's better to wave off any ownership of the blood on our hands. The reality is brothers, we are all responsible for every life that will be claimed in years to come. Our fears, hesitation and outright apathy are the most vile of weapons. Let us not weep for those who fall before us, but instead let their and our sacrifices carry our people to liberation.

The Nazis never sought to "enslave all", they had figured it that 10% of the population were to be exterminated, and only about another 10% to 15% enslaved by the state, and then their labor contracted to corporations which in turn, paid the state for their labor. It was in part based on a government system that would be supported by slavery, but the non-government portion of the population would be fairly "normal" by most standards. As a matter of fact, the Nazis were shooting for a lower peacetime incarceration rate than the US. Eugenics, the concentration camp system, and a lot of other theories were learned and exchanged between US criminal justice authorities and Herman Goring in the early 1930s. In fact, the Nazis in general had a distaste for using prisoners for fatal medical experiments like what was being done to black prisoners at the time, and infamously by the Japanese. Mengele was more of a sick puppy than an exception to the rule, but fatal wartime experiments were done on a limited basis by the Nazis after everyone but the Japanese had dropped the idea. In fact, technologically, the Germans were at the back of the pack when it came to Germ warfare and it was the threat of anthrax and Germ warfare that really got them to back off from finishing off Great Britain.

A majority, even under Nazi rule, would benefit from it. Once productivity and public need reached a certain equilibrium, both the military and slave worker populations would be reduced. Slave worker attrition would be faster than their birth rates while military numbers would be reduced and former military personnel divided between the labor force, and administering conquered territory.

Much of the Holocaust had as much to do with screwball Nazi occult beliefs as everything else, but the idea of "ethnic hygiene" predated the Nazis. In fact, it was more openly done in the US in the early 1900s.

The question is when that rule is maintained and expanded through aggressive war and terror.

I just would not have a problem paying taxes as long as the people collecting the paychecks from it were not focusing so much effort on taking away our freedoms.

Why the hell can't they do something smart with the money that people can visibly see and use, like roads and bridges? Heck for that matter even public housing, but straight infrastructure, that is a good legacy and shows that any administration that was into building actual concrete infrastructure had the public good at heart.

Notice how few people were bitching about paying taxes during the Eisenhower era when so much stuff, including the interstate highway system, was getting built.

No matter if most people benefited from Nazi rule or not. They were still living under a form of slavery; just as we do today. In our own country many of the old folks look at FDR as if he is some kind of god. Why? Because his socialist policies such as the public works programs benefited them. But, socialism is still socialism no matter what kind of pretty labels one puts on it.

But, like I said...unconstitutional income taxes aren't the subject of this thread. The point is ...that ALL government workers need to seriously consider just who they work for and what they do; otherwise those "good people" may suffer the wrath of an outraged public. And, they will have no one to blame but themselves.