From: Stan Penner (stanp@mts.net) Subject:
Peace Now or Never! Date: 8 Jan 2008
Violence causes dehumanization,
and, as we all know, a lot of violence is happening in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in
many other places on this planet of ours. In a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip,
young Calvin questions his father, "Dad, how do soldiers killing each other
solve the world's problems?" Calvin's Dad has no answer. Killing people,
soldiers or not, can be extremely difficult. A soldier wrote home, "It's so hard
when I am up close. When I see the faces of the people, I can't bring myself to
kill them. But when I am farther away just shooting artillery shells then I can
do it, as long as I don't see their faces." Sad to say, young men, and now
sometimes women, too, often not past their teens, are expected to be hardened
killers. As George McGovern, during his 1972 presidential campaign put it, "I'm
sick and tired of old men dreaming up wars in which young men do the dying." Or
let's listen to some words from the book Soldiers by John Keegan, et al., "Old
soldiers never die, but ninety-nine soldiers in a hundred are pitiably young,
and they die in their millions, without beginning to guess why it is that life
asks that of them." Who speaks for them? MOTHERS OF THE WORLD, DON'T ALLOW THAT!
SPEAK UP! Don't let your children die in their millions, and when they're
pitiably young yet, and, according to Keegan, most don't even know why they're
fighting, killing, and dying. Make friends with mothers in other countries than
yours, join Mothers Against War (M.A.W.) and other
like-minded groups, let your politicians know
that you want international disagreements settled without the horrors of war (As
Winston Churchill put it, "To jaw, jaw, is better than to war, war.), etc., etc.
Fathers, of course, too, should speak up but if fathers can't, or won't stop
wars, maybe the women will. When Dan Rather was on a hospital ship off the coast
of Vietnam during the Vietnam War, he went into the hold of the ship and heard
only one word from the lips of those wounded young soldiers, some with multiple
amputations. What was the word? you may well ask. It was "Mother." As Dan Rather
puts it, "None called for father, or for doctor or nurse. Only mother." Mothers,
the world over, are you listening?
Yours sincerely,
Stan
Penner
P.S. Editor: Dan Rather's words are from "THE CAMERA NEVER BLINKS
TWICE" by Dan Rather with Mickey Herskowitz in a Reader's Digest book "Today's
Best Nonfiction."
"As far as I am concerned, war itself is immoral," Omar
Bradley, U.S. five star general, known as the "GI's" general, and field
commander of 1.3 million men in World War II.
"A memory of fallen
comrades whose deaths show there is absolutely no glory in war."
- Val
Werier, former soldier and now editorial writer (Winnipeg Free
Press)
"More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all
wars."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
I dream of giving birth to a child
who will ask, "Mother, what was war?"
- Eve Merriam
All the arms
we need are for hugging.
- Author Unknown
"You can no more win a
war than you can win an earthquake."
- Jeanette Rankin
"In war,
there are no unwounded soldiers."
- José Narosky
"The tragedy of
war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst."
- Henry
Fosdick
"The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never
starts."
- Omar Bradley
"The military don't start wars.
Politicians start wars."
- William Westmoreland
"Man has no right
to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds
the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley,
"A Declaration of Rights"
"To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but
to kill a man."
- Michael Servetus
"If you can find money to kill
people, you can find money to help people."
- Tony Benn
"Anyone
who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield
will think hard before starting a war."
- Otto Von Bismark
"War
hath no fury like a noncombatant."
- Charles Edward Montague,
Disenchantment
"If you wish to be brothers, drop your weapons."
-
Pope John Paul II
"A day of battle is a day of harvest for the
devil."
- William Hooke
"O Lord our God, help us 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; help us to turn them out
roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their
desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer
and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee
for the refuge of the grave and denied it."
- Mark Twain, "The War
Prayer"
"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
"The loud little
handful will shout for war. The pulpit will warily and cautiously protest at
first. The great mass of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes, and will try to
make out why there should be a war, and they will say earnestly and indignantly:
'It is unjust and dishonorable and there is no need for war.' Then the few will
shout even louder. Before long you will see a curious thing: anti-war speakers
will be stoned from the platform, and free speech will be strangled by hordes of
furious men who still agree with the speakers but dare not admit it... Next,
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."