🚀 go-pugleaf

"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service in the
country's most agile military force, the Marines. I served in all 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 the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster
for capitalism."

"I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of
it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original
thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in
suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This
is typical with everyone in the military service."

"Thus I helped make Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for American
oil interests in 1914. "I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for
the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the
raping of half-a-dozen Central American republics for the benefit of
Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify
Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers and Co.
in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the sugar
interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras 'right' for American fruit
companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard
Oil went its way unmolested."

"During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a
swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotion.
Looking back on it, I feel that I might have given Al Capone a few
hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three city
districts. The Marines operated on three continents."

"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."

-Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler (former Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps)

==========================

"How is a military drilled and trained to defend freedom, peace and
ahppiness? This is what Major General O'Ryan has to say of an
efficiently trained generation: 'The soldier must be so trained that he
becomes a mere automoton; he must be so trained that it will destroy
his initiative; he must be so trained that he is turned into a machine.
The soldier must be forced into the military noose; he must be jacked
up; he must be ruled by his superiors with pistol in hand.' This was
not said by a Prussian Junker; not by a German barbarian . . . but by
an American major general. And he is right. You cannot conduct war with
equals; you cannot have militarism with free born men; you must have
slaves, automotons, machines, obedient disciplined creatures, who will
move, act, shoot and kill at the command of their superiors. That is
preparedness, and nothing else."
-Emma Goldman

==============================

"...remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have
always won. There  have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time
they can seem invincible, but in the  end they always fall..."  -
Mahatma Gandhi

=================================

"War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own
battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village,
stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like
wild beasts against each other."  -Thomas Carlyle

==================================

"Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me
because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a
quarrel with mine, though I have not quarreled with him?"
-Blaise Pascal

===================================

"Do we owe our freedom to our fighting men? To be drafted is to be
enslaved. How can we owe our freedom to slaves? They may have fought
bravely and died with courage, but they haven't given us any freedom.
We would have been in their debt if they had refused to fight
foreigners and instead freed themselves from the American politicians
who continue to enslave us."
-Allen Thornton

===================================

"YOUNG MEN: The lowest aim in your life is to become a soldier. The
good soldier never tries to distinguish right from wrong. He never
thinks; never reasons; he only obeys. If he is ordered to fire on his
fellow citizens, on his friends, on his neighbors, on his relatives, he
obeys without hesitation. If he is ordered to fire down a crowded
street when the poor are clamoring for bread, he obeys and see the grey
hairs of age stained with red and the life tide gushing from the
breasts of women, feeling neither remorse nor sympathy. If he is
ordered off as a firing squad to execute a hero or benefactor, he fires
without hesitation, though he knows the bullet will pierce the noblest
heart that ever beat in human breast.
"A good soldier is a blind, heartless, soulless, murderous machine. He
is not a man. His is not a brute, for brutes kill only in self defense.
All that is human in him, all that is divine in him, all that
constitutes the man has been sworn away when he took the enlistment
roll. His mind, his conscience, aye, his very soul, are in the keeping
of his officer. No man can fall lower than a soldier-it is a depth
beneath which we cannot go."
- Jack London
=================================

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,
signifies in a final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not
fed-those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not
spending its money alone-it is spending the sweat of its laborers,
the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-Dwight Eisenhower

====================================

"Is a young man bound to serve his country in war? In addition to his
legal duty there is perhaps also a moral duty, but it is very obscure.
What is called his country is only its government and that government
consists merely of professional politicians, a parasitical and
anti-social class of men. They never sacrifice themselves for their
country. They make all wars, but very few of them ever die in one. If
it is the duty of a young man to serve his country under all
circumstances then it is equally the duty of an enemy young man to
serve his. Thus we come to a moral contradiction and absurdity so
obvious that even clergymen and editorial writers sometimes notice it."
-H.L. Mencken

=======================================

"Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable meaning is
nothing but an instrument for the attainment of the government's
ambitious and mercenary aims, and a renunciation of human dignity,
common sense, and conscience by the governed, and a slavish submission
to those who hold power. That is what is really preached wherever
patriotism is championed. Patriotism is slavery."
-Leo Tolstoy, Christianity and Patriotism
====================================

"[D]iscipline consists in this, that the men who undergo the
instruction and have followed it for a certain time are completely
deprived of everything which is precious to a man-of the chief human
property, rational freedom-and become submissive, machine-like
implements of murder in the hands of their organized hierarchic
authorities."
-Leo Tolstoy, Patriotism and Government

=====================================

"Sure, there were lots of bodies we never identified. You know what a
direct hit by a shell does to a guy. Or a mine, or a solid hit with a
grenade, even. Sometimes all we have is a leg or a hunk of arm. The
ones that stink the worst are the guys who got internal wounds and are
dead about three weeks with the blood staying inside and rotting, and
when you move the body the blood comes out of the nose and mouth. Then
some of them bloat up in the sun, they bloat up so big that they bust
the buttons and then they get blue and the skin peels. They don't all
get blue, some of them get black. But they all stunk. There's only one
stink and that's it. You never get used to it, either. As long as you
live, you never get used to it. And after a while, the stink gets in
your clothes and you can taste it in your mouth. You know what I think?
I think maybe if every civilian in the world could smell this stink,
then maybe we wouldn't have any more wars."
-Technical Sergeant Donald Haguall

======================================

"Whether the mask is labelled Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship of
the Proletariat, our great adversary remains the Apparatus-the
bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the
frontier or the battlelines, which is not so much our enemy as our
brother's enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes
us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal
will always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to
trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in
others."
- Simone Weil

========================

Knowing and spreading the TRUTH will set us free
(from war & the insanely greedy bastards who make them).
Accepting their lies will keep us in chains.

=========================

"Without sharing there can be no justice;
without justice there can be no peace;
without peace there can be no future."
The World Teacher
http://www.share-international.org


Nobody is expected to believe the information at the above site, but
you are
hereby cordially encouraged to familiarize yourself with the story
presented there  - so you won't be taken entirely by surprise when it
breaks. A measure of scepticism is healthy and necessary,  but try to
keep an open mind!



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