It tolls for thee!
I have been particularly conscious of all our wars since WW1 -- when I was a child it was still vividly detailed in the American consciousness -- my father as a young lieutenant had barely missed fighting in it, as it was concluded just as he was about to be shipped out.
As a teen driver for the chaplain to the princes, Tubby Clayton, co-founder of TOC H http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toc_H I visited the trenches in Belgium and viewed those thousands upon thousands of crosses marking the slaughter at that grim scene where the war stalled and a generation was "lost." Tubby explained how a young officer had to lead his troops over the top against the opposing trenches of the enemies and how thousands would be slaughtered each time such a hapless attack was launched. We derived our concept of triage from there -- slightly wounded in the upper body could walk back to the field hospitals, less wounded in the legs would be carried, and those gut shot would be left to die. TOC H was a Christian organization dedicated to NEVER AGAIN!
Needless war came again when I was an eight-year-old enlisted in helping run our front yard aircraft warning station after 12/7/41 The end of WW2 came too soon for me to fight as all us near teens had hoped to do, but I vividly remember the horror of the Life Magazine portrayals of the survivors of the death camps -- and later the same of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo which we had pretty well annihilated with great glee along with their mainly civilian populations -- burned to death or left scarred for life, physically and psychologically.
One need not run through our subsequent killing games. Korea would have been my own fighting war, but Eisenhower ended it just in time for me to resign from further NROTC training at Yale. I was too ancient for Viet Nam which began to turn me off war as a means for solving human conflicts. I spoke out at an anti-war rally at Vassar College and helped our students a few years later organize another at Hunter where John Bennett, President of Union Theological Seminary and WW1 pacifist, was keynote speaker. I counseled students who wanted to to protest the war not to refuse but to volunteer for conscientious objector status -- one faced up to five years in jail then for resisting the draft. A peak year came in 1969-70 when the draft was extended to college students for the first time on a lottery basis and all hell broke out at my 3 campuses that year when I was visiting at Barnard (philosophy), Columbia (gradate religion), and moonlighting my philosophy of law course at CCNY. War had become real at last for our students.
It was, thus, with horror that I watched the Bush administration stumble into the Neocon-induced chaos of Iraq. Perhaps Afghanistan was justified -- although not the use of that brutal daisy cutter there:
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/blu-82.htm
We owed the Afghanis much, having participated with the Soviets in disrupting their poor nation over several decades -- a debt that we apparently have determined not to repay with solid reconstruction of the destroyed facilities there.
No, we had to carry out the Neocon dream of dominating the Middle East and all its oil and imposing free enterprise on people still recovering from the depredations of European and American 'free enterprise' exploitation! Let us not forget that our CIA drove Mossadeq out of office and brought in the brutal Shah to keep the Iranian oil securely in our hands:
http://www.iranonline.com/newsroom/Archive/Mossadeq/
Certainly the Iranians haven't forgotten!
So it is not with Rumsfeldian glee that I greeted the dead face of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi displayed with full gore on Fox News yesterday. Yes, he was a vicious and destructive man, but . . .
"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." John Donne
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net
As a teen driver for the chaplain to the princes, Tubby Clayton, co-founder of TOC H http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toc_H I visited the trenches in Belgium and viewed those thousands upon thousands of crosses marking the slaughter at that grim scene where the war stalled and a generation was "lost." Tubby explained how a young officer had to lead his troops over the top against the opposing trenches of the enemies and how thousands would be slaughtered each time such a hapless attack was launched. We derived our concept of triage from there -- slightly wounded in the upper body could walk back to the field hospitals, less wounded in the legs would be carried, and those gut shot would be left to die. TOC H was a Christian organization dedicated to NEVER AGAIN!
Needless war came again when I was an eight-year-old enlisted in helping run our front yard aircraft warning station after 12/7/41 The end of WW2 came too soon for me to fight as all us near teens had hoped to do, but I vividly remember the horror of the Life Magazine portrayals of the survivors of the death camps -- and later the same of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo which we had pretty well annihilated with great glee along with their mainly civilian populations -- burned to death or left scarred for life, physically and psychologically.
One need not run through our subsequent killing games. Korea would have been my own fighting war, but Eisenhower ended it just in time for me to resign from further NROTC training at Yale. I was too ancient for Viet Nam which began to turn me off war as a means for solving human conflicts. I spoke out at an anti-war rally at Vassar College and helped our students a few years later organize another at Hunter where John Bennett, President of Union Theological Seminary and WW1 pacifist, was keynote speaker. I counseled students who wanted to to protest the war not to refuse but to volunteer for conscientious objector status -- one faced up to five years in jail then for resisting the draft. A peak year came in 1969-70 when the draft was extended to college students for the first time on a lottery basis and all hell broke out at my 3 campuses that year when I was visiting at Barnard (philosophy), Columbia (gradate religion), and moonlighting my philosophy of law course at CCNY. War had become real at last for our students.
It was, thus, with horror that I watched the Bush administration stumble into the Neocon-induced chaos of Iraq. Perhaps Afghanistan was justified -- although not the use of that brutal daisy cutter there:
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/blu-82.htm
We owed the Afghanis much, having participated with the Soviets in disrupting their poor nation over several decades -- a debt that we apparently have determined not to repay with solid reconstruction of the destroyed facilities there.
No, we had to carry out the Neocon dream of dominating the Middle East and all its oil and imposing free enterprise on people still recovering from the depredations of European and American 'free enterprise' exploitation! Let us not forget that our CIA drove Mossadeq out of office and brought in the brutal Shah to keep the Iranian oil securely in our hands:
http://www.iranonline.com/newsroom/Archive/Mossadeq/
Certainly the Iranians haven't forgotten!
So it is not with Rumsfeldian glee that I greeted the dead face of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi displayed with full gore on Fox News yesterday. Yes, he was a vicious and destructive man, but . . .
"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." John Donne
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net
posted by Ed Kent at 7:58 AM
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