If reality is inconvenient, ignore it

If Reality Is
Inconvenient,
Ignore It

Since last month's "Great Las Vegas Anthrax Caper" turned out to be a false alarm, a combination of the FBI going off half-cocked and the press happily lapping up any libel they're handed (so long as it supposedly involves "white supremacist militia" types), the government couldn't possibly use the now-discredited "threat" of an anthrax attack by a bunch of Nevada Mormon bishops to justify, say, setting up a new police paramilitary training academy, teaching cops how to dress up like Army Special Forces and accustoming them to launching SWAT raids against domestic "terrorist" targets INSIDE THE UNITED STATES ... could they?
Brett Davis of the Newhouse News Service reported in early March:
"WASHINGTON -- Justice Department

officials could get the nod as early as this week to begin setting up a domestic terrorism training center at Fort McClellan in Anniston, Ala.
"The $2 million in start-up funding for the National Center for Domestic Preparedness, as it is called, has already been approved by Congress.
"As soon as Attorney General Janet Reno decides which Justice Department office will have jurisdiction over the school ... federal and local officials will begin setting it up. It could begin its first classes by June.
" 'The timing could not be better,' said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., a chief sponsor of the new school.
"This new mission at Fort McClellan, which is closing as a military base at the end of next year, is intended to train the 'first responders' at sites of terrorist attacks, including incidents involving chemical or biological weapons.
"The recent arrest of two men in Las Vegas accused of planning an anthrax attack on the New York subway system has heightened interest in defending against such attacks.

That case was a false alarm -- the anthrax in question turned out to be a harmless anthrax vaccine.

"Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who has oversight of the Justice Department through his seat on the Judiciary Committee, said real attacks are probably just a matter of time. ...

"The base's tunnels and other structures can be used to simulate subways, shopping malls or other urban settings, giving the training added realism.

"Firefighters, police and emergency medical technicians from around the country are expected to enroll in the five-day training sessions. ...

At first, the only question here would appear to be: Does this training constitute a sensible enough precaution to justify allowing senators Sessions and Shelby to rig up yet another permanent federal jobs program in the heart of the Pellagra Belt?

But that analysis ignores the ancient adage that if all you have is a hammer, pretty soon everything starts to look like a nail.

Once these new "anti-terror" squads and their trainers are in place, civil disobedience in this country, in the form of non-cooperation with the new federal ID cards and new federal data bases designed to track us and our assets -- even folks displaying "anti-social

attitudes" by refusing to patronize the government schools and government-regulated banks, or exercising their Second Amendment rights by "stockpiling arms" -- will be quickly redefined as "terrorism," adequate to keep the new "anti-terrorist" storm troopers busy and guarantee their ongoing funding.

# # #

Meantime, at the conclusion of the Steven Spielberg film "Amistad," the African protagonist is seen aboard another ship, as land rises to the east.
The irony of Cinque's return to Africa, the viewers are informed, is that he learned upon his arrival that a civil war had been going on there for some time, and that many of his countrymen had, themselves, been captured and sold away.
But just as Mr. Spielberg, for all his artistic brilliance, decided to rewrite history to match the prejudices of today's urban liberal audience in his "Schindler's List" (Oscar Schindler ARMED his Jewish employees when he moved them to Czechoslovakia, so they could PROTECT THEMSELVES ... though that politically significant fact was carefully deleted from the film), it turns out that was not the real irony of Cinque's return to his native land.

As the distinguished American historian Samuel Eliot Morrison wrote in his "Oxford History of the American People," (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), page 520:

"The most famous case involving slavery, until eclipsed by Dred Scott's, was that of the Amistad in 1839. She was a Spanish slave ship carrying 53 newly imported Negroes who were being moved from Havana to another Cuban port. Under the leadership of an upstanding Negro named Cinque, they mutinied and killed captain and crew. Then, ignorant of navigation, they had to rely on a white man whom they had spared to sail the ship.

"He stealthily steered north, the Amistad was picked up off Long Island by a United States warship, taken into New Haven, and with her cargo placed in charge of the federal marshal.

"Then what a legal hassle! ... Lewis Tappan and Roger Sherman Baldwin, a Connecticut abolitionist, undertook to free them by legal process, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court.

John Quincy Adams, persuaded to act as their attorney, argued that the Negroes be freed, on the ground that the slave trade was illegal both by American and Spanish law, and that mankind had a natural right to freedom.
"The court with a majority of Southerners, was so impressed by the old statesman's eloquence that it ordered Cinque and the other Negroes set free, and they were returned to Africa.
"The ironic epilogue is that Cinque, once home, set himself up as a slave trader."
If history is more interesting than fiction, perhaps it's because the people now in charge of doctoring up our fiction have no real taste for the delicious ironies of history, which are so often at odds with the pompous simple-mindedness of propaganda.

Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Readers may contact him via e-mail at vin@lvrj.com.

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