Crimes

582 quotes found

"Violence, contrary to popular belief, is not part of the anarchist philosophy. It has repeatedly been pointed out by anarchist thinkers that the revolution can neither be won, nor the anarchist society established and maintained, by armed violence. Recourse to violence then is an indication of weakness, not of strength, and the revolution with the greatest possibilities of a successful outcome will undoubtedly be the one in which there is no violence, or in which violence is reduced to a minimum, for such a revolution would indicate the near unanimity of the population in the objectives of the revolution. … Violence as a means breeds violence; the cult of personalities as a means breeds dictators--big and small--and servile masses; government--even with the collaboration of socialists and anarchists--breeds more government. Surely then, freedom as a means breeds more freedom, possibly even the Free Society! To Those who say this condemns one to political sterility and the Ivory Tower our reply is that 'realism' and their 'circumstantialism' invariably lead to disaster. We believe there is something more real, more positive and more revolutionary to resisting war than in participation in it; that it is more civilised and more revolutionary to defend the right of a fascist to live than to support the Tribunals which have the legal power to shoot him; that it is more realistic to talk to the people from the gutter than from government benches; that in the long run it is more rewarding to influence minds by discussion than to mould them by coercion."

- Violence

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"The record clearly shows that jihadists see the run-up to an election and the months just afterward as an opportune time to act. Everyone remembers the Bin Laden video that was released days before the 2004 presidential election and the Madrid train-station bombings that occurred 72 hours before Spain’s national elections in March of that year. When the conservative government of José María Aznar mistakenly attributed the attacks to Basque separatists, the public punished his party, which was felt to be pretending that its unpopular support for the war in Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks. The socialists, led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, had been trailing in the polls, but after the government’s blunder, they thumped the conservatives by a five-point margin. Those are only the best-known jihadist interventions. Alongside them should be added the first bombing of the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, a little more than a month after Bill Clinton took office, and the attack on the USS Cole on Oct. 12, 2000, three weeks before that year’s Bush-Gore matchup. Last year, radicals attempted multiple car bombings in London and Glasgow, Scotland, three days after Gordon Brown’s June 27 installation as Britain’s prime minister. And let’s not forget the murder of Benazir Bhutto while she was campaigning in Pakistan or the September 2004 bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, which preceded the Australian elections by a month. What makes elections and transitions so attractive to terrorists? After the October 2004 Bin Laden video was released, I wrote here about jihadists’ need to leave their fingerprints on big events. These are the seam moments, the points of inflection in history, and the terrorists want to demonstrate that they are central players in determining outcomes. They especially want to show their Muslim audience that they are having a powerful impact on the world stage and are the global actors they claim to be. Do they try to tilt events to help preferred candidates or parties? There isn’t much evidence to support that—and the terrorists seem to have some regard for the law of unintended consequences, so I don’t think they believe they can act with sufficient precision to ensure, for example, a victory for McCain or Obama. (The outcome of the 2004 Spanish election was a freak event; no one could have predicted that Aznar’s government would have botched its reaction to the bombings.)"

- Terrorism

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"Questions about what motivates the terrorist have been asked for a long time and the answers have varied enormously. This is hardly surprising, for terrorism has appeared in many different guises and has varied greatly in character from age to age and from country to country. Any explanation that attempts to account for all of its many different manifestations is bound to be either exceedingly vague or altogether wrong. It has been said that highly idealistic and deeply motivated young people have opted for terrorism when they faced unresolved grievances and when there was no other way of registering protest and effecting change. Dostoyevski and many others would hardly have agreed. It has also been said that terrorists are criminals, moral imbeciles, mentally deranged people or sadists (or sado-masochists). Sweeping definitions of this kind are bound to provoke skepticism. Terrorist movements are usually youth movements of sorts, and to dwell upon the idealistic character of youth movements is only stressing the obvious: they are not out for personal gain and they always oppose the status quo. But political goals are not necessarily wholy altruistic, idealism and interest may coincide. Nor are personal ambitions absent; terrorists have also been driven by impatience and a kind of machismo (or, more recently, its female equivalent). Terrorism has occurred with increasing frequency in societies in which peaceful change is possible. Grievances always exist, but at certain times and in certain places major grievances have been borne without protest, whereas elsewhere and at other times relatively minor grievances have resulted in violent reaction. Nor is the choice of terrorism as a weapon altogether obvious, for frequently there are other ways of resistance, both political and military."

- Terrorism

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"Terrorism is as old as human civilization… and as new as this morning’s headlines. For some, it seems obvious that individuals and organizations have used terrorism for millennia, while others insist terrorism has only been around for decades. Both camps are right – up to a point. The weapons, methods, and goals of terrorists constantly change, but core features have remained since the earliest times. Clodius Pulcher, the Roman patrician who used murderous gangs to intimidate his opponents; the dagger-wielding Sicarii of Judea, who hoped to provoke a war with the Romans; twelfth-century assassins who killed and terrorized their Muslim rivals; medieval scholars who quoted scripture to justify killing rulers – all these are examples of terrorism, and all predate the advent of the word “terrorism” in revolutionary France. Since the 1790s, terrorism has been used by Italian secret societies hoping to establish a liberal democratic state, Russian revolutionaries eager to introduce socialism, and European anarchists eager to abolish all governments. American workers intimidated industrialists with terrorism, while German fascists used it to open the way to a semi-legal seizure of power. Zionists and Arabs alike have employed it in attempts to win themselves states in Palestine. Cults have hoped to trigger the apocalypse, and environmental extremists have sought to save the wilderness. More recently, an American blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City out of disgust for his government. And nineteen Arabs so loved death that they piloted planes into American landmarks, killing three thousand people. All of these actors and events are unique, but every single one of them belongs to the history of terrorism."

- Terrorism

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"You know, the media and the politicians would have us believe that there's something inherently immoral about terrorism. That is, they would have us believe that it's not immoral for us to destroy a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan with cruise missiles, but it is immoral for someone like Bin Laden to blow up a government building in Washington with a truck bomb. It's okay for us to take out an air-raid shelter full of women and children in Baghdad with a smart bomb, but it's cowardly and immoral for an Iraqi or Iranian agent to pop a vial of sarin in a New York subway tunnel. Really, what should we expect? They don't have aircraft carriers and cruise missiles and stealth bombers. So should we expect them to just sit there and take their punishment when we wage war on them? I think that it is the most reasonable thing in the world for them to hit back at us in the only way they can. It actually takes more courage to be a terrorist behind enemy lines than it does to push the firing button for a cruise missile a hundred miles away from your target. And yet we certainly will see Bill Clinton and every other Jew-serving politician in our government on television denouncing as a "cowardly act" the first terrorist bomb which goes off in the United States as a result of a war against Iraq. And don't be surprised when the FBI and the CIA announce that they have studied the evidence carefully and have determined that it was Iranian terrorists who built the bomb, so that the Jews will have an excuse for expanding the war to take out Iran as well as Iraq."

- Terrorism

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"If you look into the history of what is called the CIA, which means the US White House, its secret wars, clandestine warfare, the trail of drug production just follows. It started in France after the Second World War when the United States was essentially trying to reinstitute the traditional social order, to rehabilitate Fascist collaborators, wipe out the Resistance and destroy the unions and so on. The first thing they did was reconstitute the Mafia, as strikebreakers or for other such useful services. And the Mafia doesn't do it for fun, so there was a tradeoff: Essentially, they allowed them to reinstitute the heroin production system, which had been destroyed by the Fascists. The Fascists tended to run a pretty tight ship; they didn't want any competition, so they wiped out the Mafia. But the US reconstituted it, first in southern Italy, and then in southern France with the Corsican Mafia. That's where the famous French Connection comes from. That was the main heroin center for many years. Then US terrorist activities shifted over to Southeast Asia. If you want to carry out terrorist activities, you need local people to do it for you, and you also need secret money to pay for it, clandestine hidden money. Well, if you need to hire thugs and murderers with secret money, there aren't many options. One of them is the drug connection. The so-called Golden Triangle around Burma, Laos and Thailand became a big drug producing area with the help of the United States, as part of the secret wars against those populations."

- Organized crime

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"A subtler analogue occurs in treatments of murder and abortion in twentieth-century fiction. Both are the objects of real and urgent moral, emotional, and legal concerns among American citizens. Yet murder is depicted vastly more often than abortion: it is the single most common plot device in whole genres of imaginative literature-novels, movies, and television. Abortion occurs much less often as a plot device even in novels, and almost never in movies or on television. Is this because murder is a familiar part of most Americans’ lives and abortion is not? Or because Americans are more likely to be affected by a murder than by an abortion? Or because murder is less horrible and disapproved than abortion? On the contrary: there are enormously more abortions in the United States than murders, and vastly more members of the reading public are affected by abortion than by homicide (unless, of course, one categorized abortions as “murders,” but it is still not the act on which the bulk of mystery or action plots turn). Moreover, although substantial elements of the population are categorically opposed to it, many Americans do not regard abortion as immoral. Precisely because murder, although a real social problem is horrible enough and sufficiently removed form everyday life to provide the excitement of the extreme and perverse, it makes a useful subject for fiction, whereas abortion raises problems which are too familiar, too troubling, too ambivalent, and not sufficiently exotic to afford the same satisfaction in reading."

- Homicide

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"Particularly where it is associated with the more prosperous countries, or those that see themselves as bringers of civilization, torture may wear a humane, almost kindly face. It goes under euphemisms such as 'pressure', 'shock', 'stress' and 'duress'; and the perpetrators themselves will see a distinction between what they do and what they consider to be torture. However, this is as vicious a form of torture as any: it can leave people mentally and physically disabled—indeed, the practitioners acknowledge the potential to render people psychotic, in hours or days. The victim is typically subjected to physical punishments that do not leave obvious scars, and this means that, should the case ever come under legal scrutiny, physical evidence of torture may be lacking. However, many ways of causing extreme pain remain possible. The subject will be tightly handcuffed and restrained, often in a way that damages nerves and muscles; he may be suspended in painful postures, or forced to assume them himself, with damage to muscles and joints; he may be subjected to electric shocks. Typically, he will be kept in a small, dark, bedless cell, with inadequate food and variable toilet facilities, so that his own filth stains the floor and dampens his clothes. He may be exposed to extreme heat or cold, and perhaps forced to stare at the sun. Beatings with rifle butts and kicking with military boots can cause lasting damage; lashing on the soles of the feet can make walking painful for years. A doctor may well be present, persuading the prisoner that he is in the wrong and that all he must do is recant. The doctor may even provide medication—as a symbol of civilization, or to keep the patient alive (deaths in custody can be inconvenient), or to cause pain or disability."

- Torture

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"In 2004, Transparency International listed the ten worst kleptocratic rulers of recent times. Mobutu came in third, followed by Sani Abacha (Nigeria, 1993-98; stole US$2-5 billion); Slobodan Milošević (Serbia/Yugoslavia, 1989-2000, US$1 billion); Jean-Claude Duvalier (Haiti, 1971-86, US$300-800 million); Alberto Fujimori (Peru, 1990-2000, US$600 million); Pavlo Lazarenko, Ukraine (1996-7, US$114-200 million); Arnoldo Aleman (Nicaragua, 1997-2002, US$100 million); and Joseph Estrada (Philippines, 1998-2001, US$78-80 million). Second was Ferdinand Marcos, Philippine president from 1965 to 1986, who with his wife Imelda — famed for her vast collection of shoes — plundered the Philippine economy through a system of ‘crony capitalism’, amassing a vast fortune while ordinary Filipinos went hungry. Opponents were arrested by the military — over 60,000 from 1972 to 1977 —- and many tortured and murdered, including opposition leader Benigno Aquino. A popular rebellion in 1986 finally forced him from office and he fled with his wife to Hawaii. Transparency International put his stolen wealth at US$5-10 billion, others much higher. Marcos died in 1989 before he could stand trial. The worst kleptocrat was Mohamed Suharto, Indonesian president from 1967 until 1998 but virtual military ruler from 1957. His brutal regime saw 2 million massacred following an attempted Communist coup in 1965, 250,000 killed in his 1975 invasion of East Timor and hundreds of thousands tortured and murdered during his dictatorship."

- Corruption

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"There had been fearful slaughters of soldiers in the First World War, and much of the accumulated treasure of the nations was consumed. Still, apart from the excesses of the Russian Revolution, the main fabric of European civilisation remained erect at the close of the struggle. When the storm and dust of the cannonade passed suddenly away, the nations despite their enmities could still recognise each other as historic racial personalities. The laws of war had on the whole been respected. There was a common professional meeting-ground between military men who had fought one another. Vanquished and victors alike still preserved the semblance of civilised states. A solemn peace was made which, apart from unenforceable financial aspects, conformed to the principles which in the nineteenth century had increasingly regulated the relations of enlightened peoples. The reign of law was proclaimed, and a World Instrument was formed to guard us all, and especially Europe, against a renewed convulsion. In the Second World War every bond between man and man was to perish. Crimes were committed by the Germans, under the Hitlerite domination to which they allowed themselves to be subjected, which find no equal in scale and wickedness with any that have darkened the human record. The wholesale massacre by systematised processes of six or seven millions of men, women, and children in the German execution camps exceeds in horror the rough-and-ready butcheries of Genghis Khan, and in scale reduces them to pigmy proportions. Deliberate extermination of whole populations was contemplated and pursued by both Germany and Russia in the Eastern war. The hideous process of bombarding open cities from the air, once started by the Germans, was repaid twenty-fold by the ever-mounting power of the Allies, and found its culmination in the use of the atomic bombs which obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We have at length emerged from a scene of material ruin and moral havoc the like of which had never darkened the imagination of former centuries. After all that we suffered and achieved, we find ourselves still confronted with problems and perils not less but far more formidable than those through which we have so narrowly made our way."

- War crimes

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