Remember that "Peace In Our Time" banner I linked about on Sunday? Some suggested it was a joke. It wasn't a fake, and it wasn't a joke. I never really did think it was. The phrase still crops up now and then from people who believe peace is always better than war, no matter what the circumstance or price.
The fact that I found this:
...right on a prominent "anti-war" site should demonstrate the relative lack of introspection or irony in too many of these folks.
It hurts me to be mean to them. Some of my oldest friends were probably at those rallies. I have a great love for that world, which is full of some very gentle and laid back souls. I'm a hippy at heart and have been since I was a teenager. But an old song's refrain keeps running through my mind when I read about these people protesting war on a monster:
"When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?"
Bonus Hippy Geek points if you can name song and artist. Yes, we will taunt you mercilessly if you can.
(LGF link courtesy of Joe Katzman.)
If memory serves that's from Blowin' in the Wind, peformed by Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Yes, the secret's out. I'm so ashamed!
God, I love GOOGLE!!!
Pete Seeger, "Where have all the flowers gone."
Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the flowers gone?
Gone to young girls, every one!
When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the young girls gone, long time passing?
Where have all the young girls gone, long time ago?
Where have all the young girls gone?
Gone to young men, every one!
When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the young men gone, long time passing?
Where have all the young men gone, long time ago?
Where have all the young men gone?
Gone to soldiers, every one!
When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?
And where have all the soldiers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the soldiers gone, a long time ago?
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards, every one!
When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?
And where have all the graveyards gone, long time passing?
Where have all the graveyards gone, long time ago?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Gone to flowers, every one!
When will they ever learn, oh when will they ever learn?
I've been rereading William Shirer's classic "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich". I highly recommend the chapter titled "The Road to Munich". Talk about deja vu all over again.
Read it if you dare! It's scaring me right out of my shorts. Had Chamberlain not been willing to let Hitler march on the Sudetenland, thereby drawing England and France into a war, WWII would have been avoided! The occupations of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Yugoslavia and Greece would have been avoided. The Austrian Anschluss would have been reversed. General Halder's putsch would have removed Hitler from within. The world would've been rid of him right then and there. This is not baloney. The Generals of the OKW testified at Nuremberg after the war that they were terrified at the prospect of a campaign in Czechoslovakia. The Czech frontier was heavily fortified and any assault in the east would've left the west outnumbered by at least 10 to 1. The French had about 100 divisions on the Maginot line. Germany had less than 10.
I hope President Bush can muster the resolve to attack no matter how much political momentum he loses. The peaceniks are operating with the same advantage that Saddam has, in that time is on their side. Let's not give either one of them any more time.
Jim
Casey got the artist right, but not the song. Jerry wins. :-)
I appeal!! Jerry cheated, using Google! [waaannnhh]
Dean, does that song show up on Album 1700? There was something about Wind that bugged me, but I just couldn't dredge up Flowers from my memory.
Jim: what's scary is that I'm re-reading Shirer, too. Any else here ever read his Berlin Diary, or his work on the fall of France in 1940?
And if those peacenuts want some real nightmares about what happens if you let thing slide too far, let them try Ryan's The Last Battle...
Well, maybe you're right. How about this one?
If you gotta hear "Where Have All the Flowers Gone", let Johnny Rivers do it. It actually swings, it loses nothing in the translation to Rivers' Whiskey-a-Go-Go style, and it was a fair-sized pop hit.
I checked my copy of PP&M's Album 1700, and it contains no Seeger songs whatever. You'll find it on their very first album (Peter, Paul and Mary, 1962).
"Lesbians against Bush?" Hee!
See, that's the trouble with trying to be ironic...it's too hard to stay ahead of reality.
But what you all fail to grasp is the most important question:
Do the Japanese Lesbian Monkeys oppose Bush?
The future of the free world may hinge upon that question.
Is there a paralell gay men's group: Gays against Dick (as in Cheney)?
Just asking
Perhaps these people are Fabians as were Neville Chamberlin and Ramsay McDonald.
September 23, 2002....
it was 57 years since I landed at Nagasaki with the 2nd Marine Division in the original occupation of Japan following World War II. This time every year, I have watched and listened to the light- hearted "peaceniks" and their light-headed symbolism-without-substance of ringing bells, flying pigeons, floating candles, and sonorous chanting and I recall again that "Peace is not a cause - it is an effect."
In July, 1945, my fellow 8th RCT Marines [I was a BARman] and I returned to Saipan following the successful conclusion of the Battle of Okinawa. We were issued new equipment and replacements joined each outfit in preparation for our coming amphibious assault on the home islands of Japan.
B-29 bombing had leveled the major cities of Japan, including Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Yokosuka, and Tokyo.
We were informed we would land three Marine divisions and six Army divisions, perhaps abreast, with large reserves following us in. It was estimated that it would cost half a million casualties to subdue the Japanese homeland.
In August, the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima but the Japanese government refused to surrender. Three days later a second A-bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. The Imperial Japanese government finally surrendered.
Following the 1941 sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese admiral said, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant..." Indeed, they had. Not surprisingly, the atomic bomb was produced by a free people functioning in a free environment. Not surprisingly because the creative process is a natural human choice- making process and inventiveness occurs most readily where choice-making opportunities abound.
Tamper with a giant, indeed! Tyrants, beware: Free men are nature's pit bulls of Liberty! The Japanese learned the hard way what tyrants of any generation should know: Never start a war with a free people - you never know what they may invent!
As a newly assigned member of a U.S. Marine intelligence section, I had a unique opportunity to visit many major cities of Japan, including Tokyo and Hiroshima, within weeks of their destruction. For a full year I observed the beaches, weapons, and troops we would have assaulted had the A-bombs not been dropped. Yes, it would have been very destructive for
all, but especially for the people of Japan.
When we landed in Japan, for what came to be the finest and most humane occupation of a defeated enemy in recorded history, it was with great appreciation, thanksgiving, and praise for the atomic bomb team, including the aircrew of the Enola Gay. A half million American homes had been spared the Gold Star flag, including, I'm sure, my own.
Whenever I hear the apologists expressing guilt and shame for A-bombing and ending the war Japan had started (they ignore the cause-effect relation between Pearl Harbor and Nagasaki), I have noted that neither the effete critics nor the puff-adder politicians are among us in the assault landing-craft or the stinking rice paddies of their suggested alternative, "conventional" warfare. Stammering reluctance is obvious and continuous, but they do love to pontificate about the Rights that others, and the Bomb, have bought and preserved for them.
The vanities of ignorance and camouflaged cowardice abound as license for the assertion of virtuous "rights" purchased by the blood of others - those others who have borne the burden and physical expense of Rights whining apologists so casually and self-righteously claim.
At best, these fakers demonstrate a profound and cryptic ignorance of causal relations, myopic perception, and dull I.Q. At worst, there is a word and description in The Constitution defining those who love the enemy more than they love their own countrymen and their own posterity. Every Yankee Doodle Dandy knows what that word is.
In 1945, America was the only nation in the world with the Bomb and it behaved responsibly and respectfully. It remained so until two among us betrayed it to the Kremlin. Still, this American weapon system has been the prime deterrent to earth's latest model tyranny: Seventy years of Soviet collectivist definition, coercion, and domination of individual human beings.
The message is this: Trust Freedom. Remember, tyrants never learn. The restriction of Freedom is the limitation of human choice, and choice is the fulcrum-point of the creative process in human affairs. As earth's choicemaker, it is our identity on nature's beautiful blue planet and the natural premise of man's free institutions, environments, and respectful relations with one another. Made in the image of our Creator, free men choose, create, and progress - or die.
Free men should not fear or envy the oppressor nor
choose any of his ways. Recall with a confident Job and a victorious David, "Know ye not that you are in league with the stones of the field?"
Semper Fidelis
James F. Baxter
Sgt. USMC
WW II and Korea
Job 5:23 Proverbs 3:31 I Samuel 17:40