(crossposted from the frontpage of
My Left Wing)
Thou shalt not kill.
~ Exodus 20:13
Requite evil with good and he who is your enemy will become your dearest friend.
~ The Koran
Warmongers suck!
~ OPOL
I don't care what side you're on. I don't care how long your list of grievances or how many thousands of years old they are. There is No justification for bombing civilians and killing babies. The Israelis are WRONG! The Palestinians are WRONG! Hezbollah is WRONG! Bush supporters are WRONG! And anyone who argues for war is WRONG!
(more over the fold)
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
And what the hell are progressive liberal Democrats doing in the sleazy rightwing war business anyway? How the hell did we come to the point where so many in our community of otherwise unusually intelligent people are supporting the savagery in Lebanon if not the lunacy in Iraq? You might as well just join the Republican Party and quit pretending to have good sense.
The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.
~ Omar Bradley
Otto and Omar both knew what the hell they were talking about when it came to war. But you don't have to be a combat veteran to know better.
In the name of peace
They waged the wars
Ain't they got no shame
~ Nikki Giovanni
You warmongers are pissing me off! Have you lost your minds? You're falling right into George's back pocket. Hating someone enough to drop bombs on their babies is good for Republicans. They have a program just for you - I think it's called, "How I learned to love the bomb."
War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals.
~ Charles Evans Hughes
Liberal Democrats supporting a vicious and ugly war that has the potential of starting WWIII is not something I can easily swallow. What is progressive or enlightened about the cold-blooded murder of innocent civilians: grandmothers, grandfathers, young children, and babies? What in the name of all that is sacred makes it okay to do such a terrible thing? Don't answer that.
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. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953
I know all you pro-Israeli warmongers, and all you pro-Palestinian warmongers, and all you pro-Republican warmongers are all going to jump on this post and flame me to hell and back - but I don't give a flying fuck! You're all stinking up this wonderful community with your self-serving bigotry and bloodthirsty bullshit, with your flimsy rationalizations, and your racist hatreds.
Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" - with his mouth.
~ Mark Twain
I don't want to hear another fucking word about how it's okay to murder people - ANY people! I've had a bellyful of horror and savagery - and I blame the people who make excuses for it.
If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war.
~ Pentagon official explaining why the U.S. military censored graphic footage from the Gulf War
Imagine that! "There would never again be any war!" If only we could make that come true - but the warmongers among us are not helping.
War should belong to the tragic past, to history: it should find no place on humanity's agenda for the future.
~ Pope John Paul II
J'accuse! You war supporters are the ones who make it possible for war pigs to operate without interference. You are the slimeballs who excuse and justify their crimes against humanity. You have blood on your hands just as surely as if you personally dropped the bombs or issued the order. There will never be peace as long as there are people willing to stand on the sidelines and cheer the carnage. You are despicable and an enemy of humanity.
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
~ Thomas Mann
Where are the peace lovers? Where are the pacifists? Where are the enlightened ones who see the terrible tragedy, the injustice, the wanton inexcusable killing and cry out, "Why?" Where are the noble ones among us to stand up and say, "STOP this madness?"
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
~ Ernest Hemingway
It's complicated they say. You don't understand the history they argue. You just don't know what those people are like they insist. I say it's time for a clean break from such a fucked up history. If your understanding of history or the awful characteristics of "the others" is such that it leads you to accept and promote the bloody murder of innocents and children then you've got something wrong inside your head. You need to flush the backed-up toilet of your mind. You need to free yourself from such shitty thinking in whatever way you can; if not for your own sake, then for the sake of all the rest of us. We'd sure appreciate it. We need a break from the nightmare you wish to perpetuate.
The refuge of the morally, intellectually, artistically and economically bankrupt is war.
~ Martin H. Fischer
Yes! War is the refuge of the morally, intellectually, artistically and economically bankrupt.
I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.
~ Abbie Hoffman
Say what you want about Abbie Hoffman - the man knew how much war sucks!
Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.
~ John F. Kennedy, 1961
John F. Kennedy might well have been our greatest President had he not been murdered by warmongers.
If we don't end war, war will end us.
~ H.G. Wells, Things to Come, 1935
If you have the slightest impulse to support, excuse, or explain away what is happening in the Middle East right now, you have some soul-searching to do. That is a fact whether you agree with it or not. There is flatly something wrong with anybody who supports such inhuman madness.
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"
Add to the tragic loss of life and limb, the disastrous waste of national treasure, and the sum total is a brutal rip-off of mankind.
Give me the money that has been spent in war and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire of which kings and queens will be proud. I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth. I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to peace.
~ Charles Sumner
Add to that all of the personal tragedies visited upon us by war and the cost can't possibly seem worth it to anyone but the bloodthirsty or the greedy war profiteers.
What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.
~ Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife, 1864
It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood...War is hell.
~ General William Tecumseh Sherman
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
War is the business of barbarians.
~ Napoleon Bonaparte
For me war has become a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit.
~ Ernie Pyle
I've been immersed in it too long. My spirit is wobbly and my mind is confused. The hurt has become too great.
~ Ernie Pyle
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.
~ General Smedley Butler
Take it from men who have fought in wars. They are horrible things, unjustifiable in all but the rarest circumstances - and the outrage in Lebanon does NOT qualify. Such excess and attacks on civilians cannot be called legitimate self-defense. And I don't care who doesn't like me saying so.
We all need to demand an immediate cease-fire and a return to the peace process, and that process should be pursued in earnest however long it may take.
And all you warmongers need to just check yourselves.