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Texas suicide pilot left ‘communist’ manifesto
Violence is the only answer writes Stack, before flying headlong into IRS building
Joseph Andrew Stack, the software developer who flew his single-engine Piper Cherokee plane into the offices of the US tax authorities in Austin, Texas yesterday, left a 3,000-word suicide ‘note’ – or manifesto - on the internet.
Stack, 53, apparently set fire to his house before boarding his plane and flying “full throttle” at the third floor of the Internal Revenue Service building. IRS employee Peggy Walker was sitting at her desk in the building when the plane crashed: “It felt like a bomb blew off, she said. “The ceiling caved in and windows blew in. We got up and ran.”
Aviation experts suspect Stack may have carried some kind of inflammable liquid in the plane, since the intensity of the explosion is inconsistent with the small amount of fuel such a plane could carry in its tank.
The attack, which killed two IRS employees, appears to have been the culmination of a 30-year tax dispute. The US authorities have ruled out terrorism as a motive, yet Stack’s actions bear all the hallmarks of militancy. In his suicide note-cum-manifesto, which seems likely to see him branded as a communist, Stack rails against elected representatives for taking tax money and giving nothing in return.
“I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician [who] cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind,” he writes. He specifically mentions the banking bailouts and the failure to tackle America’s health care system and goes into great detail regarding his tax disputes which appear to have left him without any pension or savings.
Stack writes of his hope that his actions will provoke “the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions” and that the “American zombies wake up and revolt”. He concludes: “Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.”
His sign-off appears to compare communism favourably with capitalism: “The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.”
It’s a sign of where America is at the moment that an article on Business Insider calling Stack’s manifesto “insane” has been heavily criticised. Comments such as “This is just the start of things like this. I DISAGREE with the way this guy rebelled, but i fully understand his frustration!!!” reflect a surprisingly sympathetic mood.
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What the "authorities" mean when they say it wasn't 'terrorism' is that it was a lone, WHITE, nut. Imagine if it'd been carried out by a muslim, or anyone of the tinted persuasion, there'd be dire warnings of 'fifth columnists', 'stabs in the back on the home front' (any ahistorical younger readers might try googling those phrases for their origins...).
When McVeigh destroyed the kindergarten/FBI building, the jet fighters & srategic bombers were warming up, ready to blow the bejasus outa sumwher foreign, until it was, rather disappointedly, announced that it was an 'inside job', just another deluded, juiced up redneck.
What a crazy double standard in america. If your name is joseph andrew stack and you fly your plane (apparently loaded with extra fuel to cause more damage) into a building because of grievences you have with the government you are not "entitled" to the label "terrorist". What title would he have earned under the same circumstances if his name had been Muhammad Abdullah or some other like sounding name.
"There is enough in the world for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed." - one of Moral Rearmament's Four Commandments. Sadly, greed rules, OK? And greed lacks vision, only sees the fluff in its collective navel. As in Anderson s fairy tale of the King who wore no clothes, Stack was the 'little boy' who saw how blind greedy people have become, what greed has done. Unlike many members of Congress or the Senate and their paymasters, he saw their blindness for what it was and, being no doctor did the only thing he could to register what he saw in public awareness.
From each according to his ability? That isn't communism. The so called 'Liberal elitists' of Westminster are mostly communist on their social outlook for how the rest of us (not themselves of course) should live and be brought up. No losers, or second places, everyones a winner. Socially engineer everything from their own parties right down into schools, not according to ability but according to a numbers game, based on gender, race, sexuality and physical ability/inability. Always seems though that the ones who end up being discriminated against in order to facilitate this false 'equality', are the same people who just happen to have the 'top' jobs that the marxist feminists who invented this sick game in the sixities want for themselves. White heterosexual able bodied males. This country has never been so ridden with division and it is these witches and their cowardly male lackeys, who, working from within the media, politics and universities have created every socio-economic problem we suffer from today. Get rid of these corrupt lying women and society would begin to heal overnight.
With all my due respect, you Brits have no clue judging by the headline and the tone of this article. You yourselves live in the â??communistâ?? country without realizing it. This is just my humble observation that you got it all wrongâ?¦
Anyone who believes that violence is any kind of an answer merely adds to the fear that prevents us from finding real answers to our problems. Many of us are frustrated but turning to extremist positions and to violence is just giving up and essentially supporting the problems themselves. Problem solving is hard work but we have to do it. How did we become so lazy and simplistic? Maybe we could begin by finding ways to help each other.
I think anyone with a brain could compare anything favourably with capitalism, you don't have to be a communist to see that the rich continue helping themselves to everything while the state grinds down the poor and robs them blind. While meagre-talented 'celebrities' get obscene money for doing very little, and bankers get paid millions for gambling with investors' money and losing it, the majority are supposed to carry on grafting, envious but cowed. This was one guy who had had enough. How can anyone blame him having read his 'manifesto' online?
His suicide note didn't read like a communist manifesto to me as this headline subliminally reports. He's railing against the socialist/communist politicos running his country in league with the banking capitalists! He's had enough of their robbing the middle classes to finance their socialist pipe dreams while enriching themselves as they run up national debt all at the same time. He's decided that reasoning with these people will never work, it didn't for him. The politicos have ruined the careers / lives of many pursuing their utopian agendas, software engineering is just one of them. Joe Stack struck back.
This is no communist - he criticising the communism of the government, in the form of the IRS, for taking and not giving back to those taken from. Just like the kulak peasant farmers under Stalin, who being unwilling to have their worldly goods stolen from them and fed the Marxist masses in the cities for nothing, were liquidated by the 'dekulakisation' program of Stalin, his own name for his own program. About one and a half million of them were executed, one way or another. An example of the early days of this pops up in the novel 'Darkness At Noon', by Arthur Koestler, a disillusioned ex-communist himself. So it seems to me that a better interpretation of this desperate act is that an American individualist and patriot was driven over the edge by the socialist tax-and-spendthrift US government.