Shoutings From The Grave...
Embedded Americans Speak Out
Compiled by Douglas Herman
3-9-5
My country is the world, and my religion is to do good. Our defense is in the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon. To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men. Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.
If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue? Youíre not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you canít face reality. Wrong is wrong no matter who does it or who says it. I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.
Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it. An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war. War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrongs and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses. What is human warfare but just this: an effort to make the laws of God and Nature take sides with one party. There never was a good war or a bad peace. It is soldiers who pay most of the human cost.
Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world. In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. Overgrown military establishments are, under any form of government, inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. While we are guarding the country, we must accept being the guardian of the finest ethics. The country needs it and we must do it. Statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked. But wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. To be a patriot, one had to keep on saying ìour country, right or wrongî, and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity. The people of the world want peace. Some day the leaders of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them.
The above quotations were provided by the following embedded Americans: Tom Paine, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Ben Franklin, Generals Creighton Abrams, George Washington, and Dwight D. Eisenhower
Douglas Herman is an amateur historian and USAF veteran. You may reach him at douglasherman7@yahoo.com for questions about any quote.
