"If any question why we died
Tell them because our fathers lied." Kipling.
My daughter is applying for her first job teaching.
She has even shown interest in the Combined Cadet Forces of our Public Schools.
At present we are all accessories to a terrible war crime. I cannot bare the thought of my daughter endorsing a system that, in the case of my own house in my own school, encouraged us to think "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."
The thought of her actively encouraging our youth to be part of an active part of a state that invades other countries on the back of a conspiracy of lies is utterly sickening.
The Americans are moving fast on this one now.
As usual we are lagging.
"How Do We Honor Our Fallen Troops in a Wrongful War?
By Paul Rockwell
t r u t h o u t | Book Review
Friday 25 November 2005
A review of Cindy Sheehan's uplifting and soulful book.
The agony of war can transform any human being.
In 1914, at the outset of World War I, Rudyard Kipling, the bellicose poet of the British empire who coined the infamous phrase 'white man's burden,' urged his own son to join the British military. One week after his son enlisted, he was dead. Overwhelmed with grief, Kipling wrote two 'Epitaphs for War.' In the first, dead soldiers speak:
If any question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied.
In the second, 'The Dead Statesman,' a statesman speaks:
And now all my lies are proved untrue.
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young.
There are many kinds of betrayal in human affairs - forgery, embezzlement, adultery, murder. But in the affairs of state, there is no greater disloyalty, no greater act of betrayal, than to send young men and women to their deaths on the basis of fraud.
To lie is to murder."
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