WHY THE UNITED STATES, LIKE EVERY HISTORICAL EMPIRE, HAS REACHED THE EDGE OF THE PROVERBIAL CLIFF:
**NOTE: THis is Part 1. It was written by me sometime between 2005 and 2007
1. EMPIRE BUILDING---The entanglement of the U.S. government in the affairs of sovereign nations, resulting in the current 750 military bases in 130 countries, at an exorbitant cost of money, has alienated population segments in those countries whose governments we prop up and protect---all of which directly generates the ever increasing formation of anti-American terrorist groups. This presence of a foreign influence and control which we would not tolerate in our own country should not be imposed on other countries. Period. It moves us one step closer to the cliff.
Associated quotations:
"Power, like the diamond, dazzles the beholder, and also the wearer; it dignifies meanness; it magnifies littleness; to what is contemptible, it gives authority; to what is low, exaltation." (Charles Colton)
"To robbery, slaughter, plunder they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it peace." (Cornelius Tacitus)
"Onward Christian Soldiers, rip and tear and smite!
Let the gentle Jesus bless your dynamite."(Joe Hill)
"A tyrant is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader" (Plato) Remind you of any President or any Presidential candidate?
"Rule your desires lest your desires rule you" (Publilius Syrus)
"History is the propaganda of the victors" (Ernst Toller)
"The remedy in the United States is not less liberty but real liberty---and end to the brutal intolerance of churchly hooligans and flag waving corporations and all the rest of the small but bloody despots who have made the word Americanism a synonym for coercion and legal crime." (Archibald MacLeish)
"For de little stealin' dey gits you in jail soon or late. For the big stealin' dey makes you emperor and puts you in de Hall o' Fame when you croaks" (Eugene O'Neil)
2. THE VIETNAM AND IRAQ WARS----These senseless, counterproductive, ill-advised wars generated by an out of control military industrial complex/political cabals, the cabals now camouflaged as 'think tanks', are responsible for the most destruction of property and life since Hitler. Both provided (especially Iraq) a training ground for terrorists to hone their methods and skills to kill Americans some way some how---where ever Americans can be found. Take another step toward the cliff.
Associated quotations:
"I shall give a propangandist cause for starting the war. Never mind whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked, later on whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war, it is not Right that matters but Victory. Have no pity. Adopt a brutal attitude....Right is on the side of the Strongest." (Adolf Hitler)
"They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet or fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason." (Ernst Hemingway.)
"You will kill ten of our men, and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it" (Ho Chi Minh)
"The enemy advances, we retreat
The enemy halts; we harass
The enemy tires, we attack
The enemy retreats, we pursue." (Mao Zedong)
"Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come" (Carl Sandburg)
"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets" (Voltaire)
"We are always making God our accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benediction for any victorious enormity." (Henri Frederic Amiel)
"They create a desolation and call it peace" (Calgacus) I guess this means peace will come to Iraq and Afghanistan when the desolation is complete and the freedom imposed more a case of nothing left to lose.
"No nation is wise enough to rule another." (Helen Keller)
"The enthusiasm for war, and the predatory temper of which it is the index, prevail in the largest measure among the upper classes, especially among the hereditary leisure class." (Thorstein Veblen)
"A soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can." (Jonathan Swift) This would not apply to any soldier defending his own country against attack or defending another country from external attack.
"Man is a very strange animal. In much of the world half the children go to bed hungry and we spend a trillion on rubbish---steel, iron, tanks. We are all criminals. There is an old Hungarian poem, 'If you are among brigands and you are silent, your are a brigand yourself." (Albert Szent-Gyorgyi)
"It is sad that man is not intelligent enough to solve problems without killing.....The present world crisis can be solved only by a general human revolution against outdated concepts---Man is not a blood thirsty animal, and war is only due to the greed and lust for power of relatively small groups, the conspiracy of the few against the many." (Albert Szent-Gyorgyi)
"The sectaries of a religion, which preaches in appearance, nothing but charity, concord, and peace, have proved themselves more ferocious than cannibals or savages, whenever their divines excited them to destroy their brethren. There is no crime which men have not committed under the idea of pleasing the Divinity or appeasing his wrath." (Paul Henri Thiry)
"O lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle---be Thou near them!....O lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells, help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead: help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief....For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage , make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it in the spirit of love, of Him who is the Source of Love, and who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all who are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen." (No, not George Bush speaking from his heart, this is by Mark Twain, tongue in cheek)
"You believe you are dying for the fatherland---you die for some industrialists." (Antole France)
"I have always given it as my decided opinion that no nation has a right to intermeddle in the internal concerns of another; that every one had a right to form and adopt whatever government they liked best to live under themselves; and that if this country could, consistently with its engagements, maintain a strict neutrality and thereby preserve peace, it was bound to do so by motives of policy, interest, and every other consideration" (George Washington)
"Compromise does not mean cowardice" (John Kennedy)
"We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders, but what of war and the much vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?" (Lucius Annaelus Seneca)
"But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the habits of the military? The aim of war is murder; the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country's inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class are absence of treedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And in spite of all this, it is the highest class, respected by everyone---and he who kills the most people receives the highest awards." (Count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy)
"Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in." (Michel Montaigne)
"If there is another war there will be no victors, only losers." (Richard Nixon after the Vietnam War)
"We must repudiate one of the two, either Christianity with its love of God and one's neighbor, or the State with its armies and wars." (Leo Tolstoy)
"If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject, because doctrines get inside a man's reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines." (William Graham Sumner)
"Morality will conquer war, even as it has conquered human sacrifices, slavery, feuds, head-hunting and cannibalism."
"These solid people of capital, the press, the pulpit----where have they ever fought? They are accustomed to find out by telegraph and telephone the results of the battles which settle their fate." (Leon Trotsky)
"All through history it's the nations that have given the most to the generals and the least to the people that have been the first to fall." (Harry Truman)
