The soldier was engaged in no ordinary protest. Over five days earlier this month, around 200 veterans, military families and survivors of hurricane Katrina walked 130 miles from Mobile, Alabama, to New Orleans to mark the third anniversary of the Iraq war. At its vanguard, Iraq Veterans Against the War, a group formed less than two years ago, whose very name has aroused intense hostility at the highest levels of the US military.
Mobile is a grand old southern naval town, clinging to the Gulf Coast. The stars and stripes flutter from almost every balcony as the soldiers parade through the town, surprising onlookers. As they begin their soon-to-be-familiar chants - "Bush lied, many died!" - some shout "traitor", or hurl less polite terms of abuse. Elsewhere, a black man salutes as a blonde, middle-aged woman, emerging from a supermarket car park, cries out, "Take it all the way to the White House!" and offers the peace sign.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12550.htm
Why do some young people think that going into the military, into a foreign country, and possibly killing a complete stranger will be an "adventure"? 4Canada
Note: http://www.informationc...
"If You Start Looking At Them As Humans, Then How Are You Gonna Kill Them?&
Posted on Thursday, March 30 at 12:08 by 4CanadaContributed By
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Ed Deak.
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Fiat lux # 161 March 17, 2006
If there's one thing that never ceases the amaze me, it is the incredible gullibility of people. Especially, when it comes to ideological, or religious beliefs and superstitions. I very much believe in the freedom of thought and expression for the individual, but when it comes to the brainwashing of children to follow the idiocies of their parents, or of some faith based community, the so called “freedom”, designed and implanted to enslave minds becomes highly questionable.
Since the beginning of history, billions have been killed and wealth that could have provided good life for all, destroyed in the service of the most asinine beliefs. Always forced on humanity by some self appointed aristocracy and their ideological priesthoods as the “will of the gods”. The minute some crooks invoke God's name for their wealth creating activities all traffic must stop and people are supposed to kowtow and die for the slave masters.
I started school in Hungary in 1933 , with 94 kids in a mixed grade 1. It was a parochial school, as the only ones available in our community of about 5,000. Of what religion, is of no importance, because the brainwash was the same in all. Love thy neighbour, as long as he's of the same faith. If not, hate his guts and we did. The walls of our schoolrooms were covered with medieval battle scenes. Swords flashing, heads rolling, blood squirting out, lances through chests, people climbing scaling ladders, with the defenders pouring rocks, and hot water on their heads, or tossing them off the walls with swords and spears. Just what the school rooms of 6 or 8 year old children should be featuring for their good education.
Of course, we never thought much about it at the time, and took it for granted that, that's what life was all about. For us boys, it was killing others and dying in battle, for the girls to produce more cannon feed. Children are very adaptable and we were proud, when we started to march in platoon formation at the age of 6, singing military songs on how we were going to kill all Czechs and Romanians, who stole parts of our country, given to them by the Treaty of Versailles after World War ll. While on the other side, the Czech and Romanian kids were also marching and singing on how they were going to exterminate us, starting with their millions of Hungarian minorities, with my wife one of them in Romania, getting beat up by bullies, with the teachers' approval.
God must have been smiling in heaven as he must be smiling now, witnessing the execution of His plans by the faithful, killing and blowing up others to spread the faith. Especially the God ordained faith of free market economics on one side, with women dressed in bags with two holes for their eyes on the other. Because “it is written”.
The majority of those heroic battle scenes were from the Turkish wars, after the Turkish sultan Suleiman declared holy jihad against Christendom and started marching North and West, ending up in Hungary for 160 years, starting with the battle of Mohacs in 1526. Was it really a holy war to spread the faith, or rather like the Christian Crusades before, land grab for the landless aristocracy, for the second sons of the nobility, who were left out of the inheritance of daddy's loot ? Having seen a lot of crooked politics in life, I opt for the second choice.
So the Turks came and were held back by a thin line of forts across the Northern part of Hungary, with the war going on for a century and half, people bleeding, destituted and dying, so the lords on both sides could fill their pockets, blessed by the priesthoods. Then, some new Sultan got a bit too ambitious, broke through the Hungarian defenders to invade the rest of Europe, starting with the siege of Vienna. The European nobility was quite content to let the Hungarians fight to defend them, but Vienna was too precious so they raised a large, international army and beat them back into the Balkans, where they stayed for another few hundred years, with the Austrian kings claiming a bled out and depopulated Hungary as their price and colony for about 230. Until the end of World War l, with 750,000 Hungarian soldiers dead in their defence, from a population of 21 million. Proportionally the same as if over 1 million Canadian soldiers were to sent to die in Bush's “long war” by quisling politicians. .
But let's go back to the scaling ladders, invaders used all over the world to fulfill the Will of the Gods on behalf of their aristocracies. Looking at old paintings, some of those contraptions must have been 100' long, with endless rows people climbing, passed by screaming bodies on their way down. Yet, humanity has been climbing them for thousands of years, urged on by their lords and blessed by their priests.
The worst joke of the Turkish wars were the Janissaries, the elite troops of recruited, or kidnapped Christian youth, converted to the Muslim religion, claiming that those who die defending the faith will immediately go to the top, seventh layer of heaven, now practiced by the volunteer army of suicide bombers. The Janissaries had their heads shaved , with a long ponytail, top knot hanging behind, so that Allah could grab and yank them straight into heaven when they died for the faith.
On the one side there were the converted Janissaries climbing the ladders, with their own relatives on the walls sending them down, sometimes flying side by side on their way to their particular heavens. Some heroism, some faiths, some incredible stupidity that went on for hundreds and thousands of years and is still going on. But then, gullibility is what politics are based on, regardless of the symbols and flags the victims are carrying, or into what sacrificial pits they toss their children to please the gods. Or shall we say, the ever present ruling sectors who claim to represent the will of the gods, on the road to their wealth creating activities ? The more times change the more they remain the same. Will humanity ever learn?
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Expect little from life and get more from it.
<br />
By General Smedley Butler, USMC<br />
(Speech originally-delivered in 1933)<br />
<br />
<br />
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.<br />
<br />
I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns six percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.<br />
<br />
I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes, and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.<br />
<br />
There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.<br />
<br />
It may seem off for me, a military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.<br />
<br />
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.rense.com/general28/warisaRacket.htm">http://www.rense.com/general28/warisaRacket.htm</a><br />