Voices past and present

In the struggle of Good against Evil, it's always the people who get killed.: Eduardo Galeano

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty and democracy?: Mohandas Gandhi.

Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder! Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings! Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction! Helen Keller. - Source: Told to an audience at Carnegie Hall one year before the United States entered World War I.

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. -George Orwell

"Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly and wickedness of the government may engage itself? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden, which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and baleful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest right of personal liberty? Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life, itself, whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it? ... A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men." -- Daniel Webster (1782-1852), US Senator Source: Speech in the House of Representatives, January 14, 1814

The powerful have invoked God at their side in this war, so that we will accept their power and our weakness as something that has been established by divine plan. But there is no god behind this war other than the god of money, nor any right other than the desire for death and destruction. Today there is a "NO" which shall weaken the powerful and strengthen the weak: the "NO" to war: Subcomandante Marcos - Source: No to war, 2/16/03

Statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting 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 - Source: Chronicle of Young Satan

Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child. Each of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of their screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were humiliated. The U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq - mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from small towns and poor urban neighborhoods - are victims just as much as the Iraqis of the same horrendous process, which asks them to die for a victory that will never be theirs: Arundhati Roy - Source: Arundhati Roy, "Tide? Or Ivory Snow? Public Power in the Age of Empire," 8/24/04

God gave the savior to the German people. We have faith, deep and unshakeable faith that he was sent to us by God to save Germany. Hermann Goering, speaking of Hitler

Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this: Lt Gen William Boykin, speaking of G. W. Bush, New York Times, 17 October 2003

There have been periods of history in which episodes of terrible violence occurred but for which the word violence was never used.... Violence is shrouded in justifying myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was. The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed: ~Gil Bailie

"When shall it be said in any country of the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance or distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes not oppressive; the rational world is my friend because I am friend of its happiness. When these things can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and government ." - Thomas Paine

For more voices from our past, visit http://hughman2.blogspot.com "Our Fathers Call Across the Years.

I end this with a poem from the ‘Book of Counted Sorrows.’ …

To see what we have never seen,
To be what we have never been’
To shed the chrysalis and fly,
Depart the earth and touch the sky,
To be reborn, be someone new;
Is this a dream, or is it true?

Can our future be cleanly shorn…?
From a future to which we are born?
Is each of us a creature free…?
Or trapped at birth by destiny?
Pity those who believe the latter.
Without freedom, nothing matters.

In the real world as in dreams
Nothing is quite what it seems.




The end…or perhaps the beginning. You decide, We, the people.