Saturday Quote-a-thon: War

All this discussion of bad guys and villains and Hitler, it seems like a valid subject. So, here we go...

No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making other bastards die for their country.
--George Patton

Nothing is so exhilarating in life as to be shot at with no result.
--Winston Churchill

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
- Julius Caesar

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
--George Orwell

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.
- Desmond Tutu

Strange that we all defend our wrongs with more vigor than we do our rights.
- Kahlil Gibran, 1883 - 1931

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
- Sun Tzu

The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
- Winston Churchill, 1874 - 1965

There has never been a just one, never an honorable one - on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful - as usual - will shout for the war. The pulpit will - warily and cautiously - object - at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and here is no necessity for it." Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will out shout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers - as earlier - but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation - pulpit and all - will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
-Mark Twain in “The Mysterious Stranger”

The responsibility of the great states is to serve and not to dominate the world.
-Harry S. Truman

Let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE.
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.
-Aristotle

When war is not just it is subsequently justified; so it becomes many things. In reality, an unjust war is merely piracy. It consists of piracy, ego, and, more than anything, money. War is our century’s prostitution.
-T.S. Elliot

Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.
-John F. Kennedy

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get.
- Frederick Douglass

The first casualty when war comes is truth.
- Hiram Johnson

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
- Gore Vidal

When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick."
-Mikhail Bakunin

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Classic M*A*S*H

You know, when people talk to me about influences, I have quite a few. Not news or most commentators out there. I hate the news. I read it but I tend to read through the hype and just get what data out I can. When I listen to "newsmen" I just hear the hype and sensationalism. Too many people out there have such an axe to grind. Admittedly, I often have an axe to grind, but I've never pretended this is an objective blog.

People I've known, of course, have influenced me, but more what I learned about being a parent from my own family. Really, compared to much of my family, I don't think like most of them.

But I can readily trace many of my attitudes and thought processes to books I've read, characters I identified with, movies I loved and a few select TV shows that really shaped my youth and, eventually, my adulthood.

The list of pivotal shows that really affected my outlook is short. Star Trek is one, of course, with it's anti-discrimination attitude and higher purposes. And occasional references to vaguely scientific stuff.

But another that has never lost its luster to me, that still reflects many of my attitudes, is M*A*S*H. I remember watching it as a kid. Remembered watching it again in syndication. Now I own them on DVD. It never gets old.

It's not just that it's funny, though it's frequently hilarious. It's not that it's military. That's very rarely appealing to me. It's not that it's medical. Again, that's rarely something I look for.

It's the humanity, an island of decency, in the midst of a huge atrocity. It was about caring about people, first, foremost, always. Race didn't matter. Language didn't matter. Ideology didn't matter. Politics didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was need. The only thing most of the characters cared about was minimizing the horror, saving lives, preventing pain. Their hatred and anger was reserved for those causing pain, standing in their way. And it was indiscriminate.

When I went to college, Larry Linville came to talk to our class. Admittedly, he didn't play one of the characters I liked, but it was fascinating. He said, when they first started the show, a woman came to talk to the crew who had been a nurse in a MASH unit in Korea. For days, he said, she told story after story about what happened. Dozens. And most of those stories, according to Mr. Linville, became the source for show after show.

So, if you want to know how I became the way I am, you have your culprit. Or, at least, one of them.

I'd go on, but, hey, I have shows to watch.

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Thieving Thursday: Making the World Better

Joel Klebanoff again has provided me a venue to steal a good comment this week. He wrote a blog this week about how cool (but unlikely) it would be if we could all get along, stop warring and treating people with intolerance, stop killing and raping, stop beating up the old lady and kicking puppies (I'm paraphrasing). Then, he noted the terrible unemployment that would result from all those jobs in the army, in the military contractor venue, in crime fighting, etc that would be lost and horror would lay across the land. He meant it all in fun (and I knew it), but, around here, that kind of thinking is considered just short of gospel.

I don't get it.

Yes, military contractors would have to change focii or go out of business. Horse drawn cart builders did, too. And we survived. So did milkmen and ice deliverers and door-to-door brush salesmen. But they did so because the money still gets spent. People scream at the money the government spends BUT it largely goes back into the economy here. That's working against my argument but bear with me. See, let's say we had a balanced budget and a reasonable deficit (pause for uncontrollable laughter). Chances are, the bulk of the money not spent on ugliness, spent to support police and federal prisons and federal courts and FBI and CIA and the military and all the military contractors would be spent another way. Heck, shutting everything down would probably eat a chunk, at least the first year, and that money would be spent on jobs. But what about next year? Same thing. Or it could be spent to support universal health care that would allow more businesses to do their own hiring and would allow regular people to have more money to spend on other things rather than medical care/coverage. The money still goes out into the economy. Or it could be spent on rebuilding architecture. Or putting those technical minds to NASA or inventions or green energy or ...

Given, of course, that we won't be seeing a balanced budget any time soon or a deficit that isn't frightening, if this happened say, tomorrow, it might just go toward debts we're making or have already made. What about that? Well, everything we pay toward the principal is something we don't have to pay toward the interest, don't have to pay back later. Which means, in the long term it will do the same thing, put that money back into the system, our system, for our benefit.

It's really not complicated.

So, for our economic health, we're supposed to buy that war and violence and intolerance and nastiness in general are a small price to pay? This Rocket Scientist calls BS.

What is unfathomable to me is how the US public is brainwashed into thinking we owe whole industries a living. We're supposed to protect the profits of big oil and the auto industry and the military contractors and the...well, you name it.

Take for instance health insurance. Health insurance is screaming that the government can't be trusted to be a middle man between people and the ones that actually do the healing, that cutting out their incredible profits will somehow do the general populace a disservice and leave them paying more for less. Uh. How? The government doesn't have to make a profit. Hell, breaking even would be great. How could those using it not benefit? And, if there were only a one payer system, every doctor would be on it (thereby providing more assurance of choice, not less), but he wouldn't have to pay half his staff to do only filing for insurance because there'd be only one organization to deal with instead of eleventy dozen - so he could instead hire staff that would, I don't know, help people get well instead of shuffle forms.

And health insurance knows this which is why they're busting a gut trying to convince us we don't need a public option along with all of their private options. If government were really going to do such a crappy job, they'd be pushing for it. But, since they live and die by profit, they will lose in a head to head every time. Good riddance as far as I'm concerned. I have no sympathy for any company that profits on the pain and suffering of others. Maybe they can do something useful now. Or work for the government.

Of course, no one does this like big oil. "You need to keep buying oil and forgo those useless green technologies because they're too expensive." Oil is indeed cheaper. Today. Investing and more research can change that, though not necessarily overnight. However, conservation today saves the consumer money, no matter what oil costs (or green energy sources too, for that matter). And having solar or wind power available does the consumer only good. Every drop of oil they don't spend not only makes the world a better place, but also keeps further off the day when unavoidable skyrocketing oil prices sky high. It also limits our need to poke our noses where it doesn't belong militarily to protect our oil interests.

That, of course, brings us back to war. Shouldn't we be smart enough to know better by now? I've used this quote before but I think it fits perfectly.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
-Dwight David Eisenhower, 1953, a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors

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Responsibility

So, continuing the discussion on manipulation and those that crave power, it seems naturally to move into a discussion on responsibility. If someone does a bad thing, who's responsible?

The easy answer is the individual involved. But is that always the whole answer?

I'm a big one for personal responsibility and accountability, but the truth is, there are times when that's not a sufficient answer. There are few religions out there that do not see murder as a serious sin, but what about a soldier? He is murdering others. He trained to do so, often traveled to do so, has weapons and used them against other human beings, without knowing them personally or knowing why those people stood against him. Nor are enemy soldiers the only ones who die during war. So, is every soldier that took another life evil? Is ever bomber pilot responsible for every soul lost to the bombs he dropped? I can't say they're absolved - I don't have that power- but I'm not comfortable with seeing them as simple murderers.

We can bring up self-defense, but, as we haven't fought any wars on our own soil, really, since the civil war, that's pretty specious. Wandering into someone else's nation with tanks and guns is hard to defend with "self-defense". However, we have defended others' nations and we have defended our own interests in others' nations - which should not be confused with each other.

Were all of those wars necessary? Only history will say for sure. Are there wars when soldiers did unspeakable things (often on either side)? Yes, most of them, but it's hard to define where the line of responsibility ends. War has gotten too impersonal with thousands killed without those doing the killing even seeing a face.

If you are manipulated to do something unspeakable - design the nuclear bomb, or a rocket that can rain fire on people half a continent away, or simply keep your mouth shut when someone opens a concentration camp 2 km outside your town - how much of that responsibility is yours? If you torment or torture someone but tell yourself for the greater good, who's responsible? If someone holds a gun to your daughter's head, your mother's, your wife's, how much responsibility do you have for what you do to keep someone from pulling that trigger? If you are young and impressionable, fed lies and depersonalizations to convince you to kill others on sight, who's responsible?

They are tough questions without easy answers, at least for me. In the end we all make our choices, true. And sometimes the paths we tread are not the ones we would have wanted. On the other hand, perhaps sometimes we are too easy on ourselves, finding excuses for doing the inexcusable.

In the end, we'll all have to face ourselves, and live with the choices we've made.

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