WHY WARS? DF0 1326 3/3/80
(After watching an old silent film on WW1:)
1. I THINK THE WAY THE YOUTH FEEL IS, "WHY ARE WE TO BLAME? Why should we die for our parents? Why should we die & let them live when they caused it? They might as well die with us!" (Maria: Instead of only them having to go to war, they might as well all die in the nuclear holocaust!) Rather than fight the politicians' & the militarists' & the war-mongers' & their parents' battles & give their lives to save their parents. What a travesty, what a horror!
2. WHY SHOULD THE CHILDREN GO & DIE FOR THEIR PARENTS? IT'D BE BETTER FOR THE PARENTS TO DIE FOR THE CHILDREN! It shows the parents don't love those boys, don't love the children, or they'd never send them to war. Better to surrender & be slaves than to go through such horrors as that, mangled bodies! War is Hell! Everybody from General Grant to Rommel said war is Hell! (Maria: What are they doing it for?--Just out of pride?) Yes, pride & greed! Pride & greed. (Maria: How can the poor kids find one good reason for going?)
3. WELL, THEIR PARENTS TELL THEM IT'S FOR FREEDOM: "So we won't be oppressed & enslaved by the enemy! Blah blah!" Isn't that a joke? Oppressed & enslaved! How more oppressed & enslaved could you be than to have them send you into the Hell of war? It's the worst oppression & enslavement possible--almost sure death!
4. BETTER TO BE A SLAVE, THAT WAS THE BIBLE PHILOSOPHY! When God sent the enemies on them to punish them for their sins, He told them it was better to yield to the hand of the enemy, to take their yoke upon them & become slaves than to die. Jeremiah said, "Why will ye die, O Jerusalem? Why do you want to die rather than go into slavery?" In other words, if you refuse to go into slavery, refuse to surrender, you're going to die. And what do you suppose they chose? (Maria: To die.) Their parents chose, of course, to send their sons to death. Horrors of death, He said, by fire & by sword & by famine. How horrible! "Why will ye die, O Jerusalem?" (Jer.27:13)
5. THAT'S THE WAY ISRAEL'S ACTING TO THIS VERY DAY! Rather than give the Palestinians just a little bit of land, their own land, they'd rather fight & die. Pride & greed! Pride & greed! They don't want to have to admit that the land belongs to the Palestinians & they aren't willing to share it with them--think of it!--Too greedy to give it up. They'd rather have the Hell of another war, & that's what they're going to have! And this time they're going to get it & deserve it! How horrible!
6. IT WAS QUITE A FILM FOR AN OLD SILENT FILM, YOU KNOW, PORTRAYING THE HORRORS OF WW1. Oh, it just dawned on me, they didn't have any speech but they did have sound effects that they must have added later, the explosions & the rat-a-tat-tat of the machine guns & the bombs & all of that. Oh, it was horrible, horrible, horrible! But it had a happy ending. The guy's two buddies got killed, & of course it was a sad ending in some ways!
7. HE LOST A LEG, BUT HE'D FALLEN IN LOVE WITH A FRENCH GIRL & he went back to try to find her. He got out of the hospital, & their village had been overrun & the farm was deserted & almost destroyed & she & the family & everybody there were gone & he was broken-hearted, he didn't know what had happened to her. Then the war was over & he was shipped back home & it showed his big proud businessman father greeting him with a big smile, "So proud of you, Son!"--And the boy was kind of disgusted.
8. I MEAN, IT WAS REALLY A MESSAGE! He was disgusted in a father like that who wanted to send him into war & everything just to preserve their system. The boy wasn't happy about it at all. The father said, "Oh Son, we're so proud of you! Blah blah!" In other words, "We're so thankful you went & suffered & lost a leg to save our necks & to keep us from getting what we deserve!" And his mother was so sad to see that her little boy had lost a leg. The flashback was really touching where she saw him as a little baby again & a little boy & a toddler & on up through the different stages, & here he was a wreck, ruined by war!
9. MY GOD, THOSE AMERICANS! WHEN ARE THEY GOING TO GET IT?--Especially their elders, the ones that send them to war. You would have thought having gone through the horrors of it themselves in the First World War they would have never done it again! At least the children who had had to go through the war, those men that had to go through the Hell would never have wanted to send their children into war again, but they did! It doesn't seem to take them long to forget the horrors & Hell of war!
10. SO ANYHOW, THE BOY GOT HOME & found out his girlfriend to whom he was trying to be true by going back home had already fallen in love with some other guy, of course, & the mother knew it too. So he finally confessed to his mother, "Mom, there's a girl in France" & his mother said, "Well, Son, you should go out & find her, by all means!" I thought that was certainly wise, a mother's love!
11. SO THEN IT SHOWS HIM GOING BACK TO FRANCE, you know, all dressed up now, apparently well off, his father looked like he was rich. It shows the girl on her farm, the men all gone & dead, apparently, & the mother & the daughter out there trying to plough with an ox & big heavy plough. The girl's trying to plough, working real hard, you know, trying to restore the wreck & the ruin of the old farm that was ruined by the war.
12. AND IT'S A BEAUTIFUL SCENE! He comes walking over the hill in the sunset, limping on a wooden leg looking for her, & she sees him at a distance & she just seems to know it's he. She drops her plough & runs, & he almost runs on his wooden leg, stumbles a little, & they run toward each other & embrace & kiss, all happy, happy ending!
13. BUT, OH, THAT HELL OF THE WAR THEY PORTRAYED HERE IN THIS FILM! I mean, they did a tremendous job of it. I'm sure they used a lot of the real actual war scenes, they couldn't have had that many men & trucks & all without it being real war scenes, but then they interspersed it with the dramatised scenes of the movie. But even some of those were pretty colossal because they had to have the stars moving out there in the battlefield. You see shell holes & machine gun fire & bombs falling. It's amazing how well they were able to simulate it. It was horrible, too realistic!
14. I THINK IN SOME WAYS EVEN WW2 WASN'T AS BAD AS WW1! WW1 they came so much closer to each other & even hand-to-hand conflict with bayonets, horrible! It shows how he gets so mad & so angry because some of his buddies get killed, he just runs across no-man's land & throws grenades into the machine gun nests & jumps in on top of them stabbing them with his bayonet--horror!
15. AND THEN HE JUMPS INTO THIS ONE SHELL HOLE THAT'S ALREADY GOT A GERMAN IN IT, a wounded German boy lying there, & he takes his bayonet & puts it to his throat & starts to kill him, he's so angry! But the poor German boy looks at him & pleas for mercy, & he just can't do it. The German boy is dying anyhow so he asks him for a cigarette, & he gives him a cigarette, puts it in his mouth & lights it for him & the boy thanks him & dies.
16. IT WAS KIND OF TOUCHING, SHOWING THAT WHEN THEY'RE REALLY FINALLY FACE-TO-FACE, WHY SHOULD THEY HAVE ANYTHING AGAINST EACH OTHER? I mean, there's no personal animosity. It's their God-damned parents & politicians & militarists that send them into battle against each other! Face-to-face, why shouldn't they be friends? They're both suffering the same evils, the same horrors that they never invented or thought up themselves at all.
17. HOW MANY OF THE SOLDIERS WHO ARE SENT INTO BATTLE ARE TO BLAME FOR THE WAR? Let's face it, very few. Right? (Maria: Yes.) It's their parents who are to blame, the politicians, militarists & greedy rich. Proud politicians, selfish parents. How horrible! How horrible! But I think this younger generation is fed up with the war. They've seen the horrors & heard the wars & some of them have been through the horror or war already, Vietnam & whatnot. I think that they're just going to flatly refuse to fight, flatly refuse to go to war!
18. (MARIA: AND I THINK WITH THE THREAT OF THE DRAFT RIGHT NOW it's going to give a lot of them time to get out, you know, a lot of them are going to really be prodded to leave.) Right. That's going to be another instrument the Lord's going to use to get the poor kids out of the country & away from the destruction that their parents are going to deserve & suffer.
19. THEY'RE JUST GOING TO REFUSE, THAT'S ALL, & THEY CAN'T MAKE'M! They'd have to put them all in jail. If I was them I'd say, "Well, why should I go into the battle & the trenches & the horror of the battle field? I didn't ask for the war! I didn't make it!" (Maria: If the system wants war why don't they just use all their nuclear weapons that they've been working on so long.) "Why not just let'm use their nukes & die with me?" After all, that's what they deserve. It takes two to make a fight! It's horrible!
20. IT'S ALMOST UNBELIEVABLE MEN COULD CONCEIVE OF ANYTHING SO HORRIBLE AS WAR AT ALL, much less a nuclear war, literally knowing that they're contriving the deaths of millions--not just soldiers, but every body!--Men, women, children, old folks. Horrors! How can a leader be a Christian & order billions to be spent on such nightmare armaments? How can he be a Christian & order boys to the battle?
21. "CAUSE THEIR CHILDREN TO PASS THROUGH THE FIRE," THE LORD SAYS. (Lev.18:21; Deut.18:10; 2Kg.17:17.) That's the thing that horrified God in the days before the Flood, & He talks about it afterward too, how they caused their children to pass through the fire. In other words, on their way out of this life they threw them into the fire! The horrors of those war scenes!
22. IN THAT THING BEFORE THE WAR, they had the war college & it showed the pictures of little children & babies all covered with sores because of the chemical warfare, gasses & stuff. Horrible! I think maybe the Lord just allows that so people will see it & so it will get them under conviction & be conscience-stricken to realise here are the innocent suffering for your horrible sins & merciless cruelty!
23. WHY SHOULD THEY SUFFER? WHY SHOULD THEY DIE? I mean, they'd be better to be the children of slaves. After all, if God sent a power that's stronger than your power, He must have done it for a purpose, probably to punish a nation for its sins, just like He did in the Bible. There He told them to submit, "Submit yourselves under the yoke of the King of Babylon. Why will ye die, O Jerusalem?" He said, "Submit & live, other wise you're going to die: A third by the sword & by fire & a third by famine & a third shall go into captivity anyway." (Jer.27:8) (Maria: All pretty grim prospects!)
24. WHEN THE JERUSALEMITES WOULDN'T SURRENDER & WOULDN'T FLEE, Jeremiah advised them to even go over to the camp of the enemy! It was safer & better. (Maria: So they would've received them, huh?) Apparently, yes, surrendering; every war accepts prisoners of war. They are held in their war prisoner camps. He said, "And live! Why will ye die, O Jerusalem?" And then since the Jerusalemites wouldn't obey him & wouldn't hear, he told the poor to flee into the country, out into the hills away from the city so they'd be safe.
25. (MARIA: IN THE CASE OF CERTAIN DESTRUCTION LIKE NUCLEAR WAR instead of being one of the "living dead", like in the Letter, you said you'd wish you were dead, it would be better to be dead than to be left in the horror.) Well, warfare today, of course, is more of a horror. Warfare today just destroys nearly everything. But warfare in those days, it was hand-to-hand conflict, & as soon as that stopped it was over. It didn't destroy the whole land & the farms & the villages & the soil & the trees & everything, you know?
26. HE TOLD THE POOR TO GO HIDE IN THE COUNTRY, IN THE HILLS, & so on, because as soon as the war was over, the enemy was gone. They'd slaughtered the rich & rebellious in Jerusalem & taken the rest of them away prisoners, & the poor had the whole country to themselves, so what's wrong with that? (Maria: I mean like today.)
27. WELL, TODAY IS A DIFFERENT STORY. Well,if America with all its God-damned hellish weapons would surrender before they had the war to destroy the World, they'd be far better off. I'm sure if the Americans, of course, were righteous & fair & honest--not so God-damned proud & greedy--God wouldn't send such enemies on them. That's the point!
28. THAT'S WHAT THE PACIFISTS TEACH, the Quakers teach, that it takes two to make a fight. If you refuse to fight, then your enemy has nothing to fight about & there wouldn't be any wars, if you just flatly refused to fight. The Quakers teach if the enemy wants to take over, let them take over.
29. THE PLIGHT OF THE POOR ISN'T MUCH DIFFERENT BETWEEN ONE OPPRESSOR & THE OTHER!--In other words, their own government or the so-called enemy! Besides, if they were righteous people, the Lord wouldn't allow it! That's what the Quakers teach. If nations are wicked & sinful & God sends enemies upon them, then they deserve it!
30. THE LORD DEFINITELY TOLD THEM NOT TO RESIST!--NOT TO FIGHT, BUT TO SURRENDER!--That if they surrendered they would live. And the captivity in Babylon wasn't so bad. It was the greatest nation on the face of the Earth at the time, greatest civilisation, all the advantages of a great advanced civilisation & wealth, & under the Babylonian captivity they lived pretty well. They even had their own villages & governments & everything! They were just subjected people, that's all, they just had to work for the enemy.
31. HE SAYS "SUBMIT TO THE POWER", & who's the power? The most powerful, right? If those stubborn rebellious damned Afghans hadn't been so cantankerous & rebellious & incalcitrant, they wouldn't be having all this trouble they're having right now. Why did the Russians have to send a whole army down there?--To quell the revolution & rebellion against their government. They weren't submitting to their government.
32. LET'S FACE IT, NO GOVERNMENT REALLY WANTS WAR IF THEY CAN GET WHAT THEY WANT WITHOUT IT. So if the people surrender & go to work for the government & behave them selves, they don't have to shoot them. Look at Iran! They traded one monster for another & now they're worse off than they were before! At least under the Shah they had prosperity, although they worked like slaves & there was cruelty & torture for those who were rebels, of course, & those who rebelled & fought back & refused to obey.
33. OF COURSE A TOUGH GOVERNMENT HAS TO BE TOUGH WITH THE DISOBEDIENT & THE REBELLIOUS, but the rest of the people had a very good prosperity. They had jobs, they had money, they had industry & he was really trying to bring their country out of the back-woods. Now what have they got? I mean, they've wrecked the country, wrecked its industry, wrecked its economy, wrecked its government & they're just in chaos! I mean, they're worse off now than they were before.
34. LOOK AT CAMBODIA! The Cambodians were fighting first against the French & then against the Americans & finally against the Vietnamese. Cambodia was one of the most beautiful peaceful countries in all of the Far East--beautiful cities, beautiful climate, beautiful people, peaceful, free, peace-loving people.
35. THEY WEREN'T THE KIND THEMSELVES THAT WANTED WAR, IT WAS THEIR OPPRESSORS. The rebellious, the stubborn, the recalcitrants, the stubborn revolutionaries, the Khmer Rouge, they're the ones who kept fighting & fighting till finally they won. They won because the U.S. really helped them win. The U.S. just nearly destroyed the country with its saturation bombings.
36. SO FINALLY THEY WON & WHAT GOOD DID THE REVOLUTION DO? This maniac Pol Pot took over & almost totally destroyed the country!--Murdered half its people, wrecked its buildings & businesses, its education, totally destroyed anything that even smacked of development or advancement or civilisation or industrialisation or Western culture or anything & did his best to simply slaughter'm all & drive the remnant back to the land. So they were worse off in the long run than they were in the beginning. Enslavement under a tyrant is bad enough! But my God, war is Hell, worse than anything!
37. MY GOD, HOW MANY WARS HAVE BEEN FOUGHT IN THE NAME OF FREEDOM?--Freedom from one enslavement to another! American people are slaves too, total slaves of their government. Taxes & burdens are so heavy that they're working totally for the government half the time just to pay their taxes. So what's the difference between the American slaves or the Russian slaves or any of them? We're all slaves! Whose slave are you? All fools! Whose fool are you?
38. IT'S SO RIDICULOUS TO SAY IT'S BETTER TO HAVE WAR, suffer the Hell & bring Hell & torment & torture & misery & agony & suffering on people that weren't even responsible for it. And to say that there's an excuse for that--to save the World for democracy, freedom! What kind of freedom did they get out of it this time? The World lives in terror now of being destroyed any minute. That's freedom? Freedom from fear is one of the greatest freedoms of all. Freedom from fear is faith. Now the people have lost faith & they live in terror, all because they have refused to yield to the will of God.
39. LET'S FACE IT: SOCIALISM, EVEN COMMUNISM, IS MORE FAIR THAN THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM where people suffer under Capitalism worse than they do under Communism. There's no unemployment in Russia. There's free education. There's socialism, there's total medical care, total care, everything! They take good care of their slaves. After all, it's to their advantage to take care of them & to keep them healthy so they can work hard.
40. BUT UNDER CAPITALISM WHERE SELFISHNESS & GREED OF THE RICH IS GIVEN A LICENSE & they run the government & they make the laws, what chance do the poor have? They supposedly vote, so what? They vote for one greedy capitalist or another. Every one of the men running for office are rich men, what are they going to do for the poor? Throw'm out a few crumbs? A few bones to pacify the dogs?
41. RUSSIA'S NOT SUFFERING NEAR THE ECONOMIC PROBLEMS THE U.S. IS with their messed up money system & their unemployment & their inflation & all the rest. I'm not advocating Communism--especially not its anti-Christ anti-God doctrines--but its economic system is certainly a lot more fair & more sensible & logical than the greedy selfish dog-eat-dog war-mongering Capitalism of America & the West--which is what causes most of the troubles & the wars.
42. I DON'T BELIEVE THE RUSSIANS WANT A WAR! They'd be insane to want a war. I don't believe they want to fight. I don't believe they enjoy spending all those billions on armaments & planes & tanks & missiles & keeping hundreds of thousands of soldiers under arms & in uniform & unproductive labour. No government in its right mind really wants that, but what are they going to do? The Americans threaten to destroy them! They don't want to be the Americans' slaves, the Americans don't want to be their slaves, it takes two to make a fight & they both would rather fight!
43. IT'S A TYPE OF INSANITY, THIS WAR-CRAZE! I really think it's insanity inspired by the Devil that they'd actually rather throw their countries into war & self-destruction than to submit in their pride & their greed. And of course it's God's way of punishing the people for their sins, punishing nations for their wickedness & sinfulness & rebellion & rejection of Him & unmercifulness, atrocities & crimes against the poor.
44. THANK GOD, MOST OF THE POOR USUALLY ESCAPE, they live too far back in the hills & they don't have anything anybody wants. Of course, under the latest system they draft the sons of the poor to fight their wars. What's that but forced labour?--Of the worst kind! What's that but slavery?
45. BOY, I TELL YOU, WHEN I WAS IN THE ARMY IT WAS ALMOST UNBELIEVABLE! I THOUGHT, "MY GOD, WHAT SLAVERY!" You're total slaves day & night. You live in a slave camp & you can't do a thing on your own, you're under total orders to be a total slave day & night, 24 hours a day. Of course, you're kept nice fat slaves & well-fed & well-clothed & fairly well-housed & kept in good shape. (Maria: But you almost died there!) Well, I was just a physical weakling, I couldn't take the cold, that's the only trouble, & the Lord let it happen to get me out. (Maria: Yes, but it shows how cruel they are! It shows what they do to you, you know?) Yes.
46. THAT'S WHEN I GOT PNEUMONIA when they kept us standing out that morning four hours in the snow, just standing there, & a lot of the guys who were bigger & stronger than me were just standing there shaking & shivering & teeth chattering! A lot of them came down sick from it--just to give us a lecture on military equipment & the weapons of war!
47. THEY HAD ALL THESE TANKS & GUNS & MILITARY EQUIPMENT parked up & down the drill field in rows & the officers took us from machine to machine to explain it, blah blah blah. They were talking & getting up a little energy anyhow, but we were just standing there in foot-deep snow & below-zero weather in some of the worst weather Washington had had in years. We were just freezing! And then, of course, we had to go out to rifle & target practice in the same kind of horrible weather & I froze both of my Achilles tendons & had to stay home for three days.
48. APPARENTLY THEY FOUND OUT THROUGH THE WHOLE THING I HAD ALSO CAUGHT PNEUMONIA & wound up with a high fever, 106, & landed in the hospital! I reported sick to the clinic & the nurse took my temperature--she could hardly believe her eyes when she saw it! They got all excited & rushed the medics in, put me on a stretcher & rushed me in an ambulance to the hospital!--Ha!
49. BY THAT TIME I FELT PRETTY GOOD, I WAS PRACTICALLY UNCONSCIOUS! It was just like I was living in a dream. And I tell you, that hospital was Heaven compared to the rest of the Army!--The next best thing to going to Heaven! Oh, I was so glad to get out of it all! They didn't realise how thankful I was to be so sick, to be in a nice warm bed in a nice warm ward that they kept the temperature up to about 80 all the time.
50. I'LL BET THE TEMPERATURE OF THAT BARRACKS WE LIVED IN WAS 60 MOST OF THE TIME! I wore two suits of long underwear, & then my fatigues, & then my dress uniform on top of that, & then a sweater, & then a heavy overcoat! And I slept in all that at night, except for my overcoat & my dress uniform. I slept in two suits of heavy winter long wool underwear & my fatigues--that's the work clothes you wear. It didn't matter what they looked like, they were always a mess anyhow.
51. SO I SLEPT IN THOSE UNDER TWO OR THREE BIG HEAVY THICK WOOL ARMY BLANKETS & IT WAS STILL FREEZING! I mean, you could see your breath at night sleeping in that barracks. It was ice-cold! Literally ice-cold! (Maria: How cruel! How could they do that?) They were trying to toughen us up! Only the fittest survived! It's horror! Oh boy! Then we'd be out all day in that weather.
52. I THINK THE ONLY THING I LIKED ABOUT THE ARMY & really enjoyed, believe it or not, was the close-order drill, the marching on the drill field. That was really a skill which you developed & you really enjoyed, at least I enjoyed it. You had music to go with it, for one thing, & you marched in patterns & designs & it was really exciting & thrilling to see all those men. You know how a band marches & everything? And that music really inspired you to march!
53. I REALLY ENJOYED THAT! Besides, it kept you warm, which was a great thing, & you were out in a nice open drill field where sometimes it was sunny. I really enjoyed close-order drill & I was pretty good at it. Some of those poor guys, they had two left feet, stumble-bums! They never could get it right! And one guy, you know, would just mess up the whole works!
54. I DIDN'T EVEN MIND THE KITCHEN WORK SO MUCH--K.P.! At least you had a nice warm place & you could sit down & peel potatoes & chew the fat & exchange all the latest latrine rumours & gab while you're sitting there together in the kitchen working. Even doing dishes was a nice warm job, you had your hands in nice warm water.
55. OH, TO GET WARM & KEEP WARM WAS SO WONDERFUL! I mean, I just lived in the freezing cold all the rest of the time. It was cold in the barracks & colder outside & there just wasn't any place to get warm. The toilet was about the warmest place in the whole thing. They had a little heat in there because that's where you had to take showers.
56. COME TO THINK OF IT, I DON'T THINK I EVER TOOK A SHOWER THE WHOLE TIME I WAS IN THE ARMY!--Ha! (Maria: I don't blame you!) I never took a bath till I got to the hospital! Ha! (Maria: How long were you in?) Well, never mind! I'm ashamed to confess it! (Maria: Not very long.) Well, it was a few months, it was all Winter. That was bad enough. Even in the shower room it was so cold I was afraid for sure I was going to catch pneumonia & flu or something if I took my clothes off. I can understand why those poor guys in the trench warfare in WW1 got all kinds of cooties & lice & everything, what chance did they ever have to take a bath?--Even if they had a bathtub & hot water it would have been too cold.
57. SLAVERY?--YOU TALK ABOUT SLAVERY?--THERE'S NO WORSE SLAVERY HARDLY THAN THE ARMY! They talk about, "You're going to fight for freedom, Boys, but first of all we're going to make slaves out of you so you can slave away for us & go through the Hell & horror of war to fight for our freedom through your enslavement!" It's horrible!
58. I THINK THOSE KIDS BACK IN THE STATES JUST OUGHT TO FLATLY REFUSE TO BE DRAFTED! The smartest thing they could do is leave the country like we did, & our kids. We left it, got out of it. Otherwise there were plenty of guys who preferred to go to jail than be drafted. (Maria: How could they want to go to jail instead of getting out of the country?) I don't know, but they preferred to go to jail than get drafted. Well, a lot of them, I guess, were pretty dumb, they just didn't know how to get out of the country or what to do.
59. WELL, JAIL IS JUST ABOUT LIKE THE ARMY EXCEPT YOU GET OFF SOMETIMES ON WEEKENDS! It's almost like these new prisons they have where you can go home for the weekend! Only you're usually so far from home you can't go home, so you go to whores instead of home. There's not much difference between prison camps & army camps. An army camp is a prison camp--they're prisoners!
60. I'LL NEVER FORGET WHEN MY MOTHER FIRST CAME TO VISIT ME AT THE ARMY CAMP! She was waiting at the guard house & all these guys were out there in their fatigues in a big long row, what they call "policing up" the ground, picking up papers & so on. They were in these dirty old messy fatigue uniforms, which is a work uniform, you know, & it didn't matter much how they looked.
61. AND SHE SPOKE TO THE GUARD THERE & SAID, "AND WHAT ARE THOSE PRISONERS THERE DOING?" I mean, it never occurred to her that she was even saying prisoners! He said, "Madame, those are not prisoners, they are soldiers of the United States Army!"--In other words, U.S. slaves! That's army life, it's slavery! At least the war-time army was, I don't know about peace-time army. Some guys have it pretty good, don't work very hard & get to have their wives & children & homes & live at home.
62. AND NOW, OF COURSE, THEY PAY THEM NICE BIG SALARIES! When I was in the army we only got $30 a month, a dollar-a-day, & what could you do with a dollar-a-day? Most of the guys blew it every weekend. They had payday once a month & they all ran out & blew it on the next weekend. It wasn't hard to spend $30 on whores & big dinners & carfare--& freedom!--Weekend freedom from the slave camp! It's so ridiculous to say, "You're fighting for freedom, Boys, so now be a good slave & fight for our freedom!" It's the same in every country, in every government. They're all cruel, they're all horrors & systems, but it's still better than war.
63. IF YOU WERE A CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR THAT FLATLY REFUSED TO FIGHT & go to battle at all & bear arms or anything, they sent you to what amounted to a slave camp or made you a hospital slave or reforestation slave,you were made slaves! Three years we had to do it. So what's the difference? It's better than war, it's better than the Hell of the battlefront & the killing & the torturing & the destruction & the mutilation, the agony & the suffering of the battlefront in the war zone.--Besides being guilty of doing the same to other people.
64. I SAID, "I'M NOT GOING TO FIGHT & KILL PEOPLE!" I told those officers, "I've got nothing against the Japanese, why should I fight them? Why should I want to kill them? They've never done anything to me. Why should I want to kill them? I want to go preach'm the Gospel, get'm saved! I love'm! I'm supposed to love my enemies, why should I want to kill them?"--Oh, those officers got so furious at me! I mean, it was so true! I think I really got'm under conviction.
65. I MEAN, WHAT WERE WE GOING TO WAR FOR? Why should I care whether the Japs sank a bunch of our ships in Pearl Harbor? They were loaded with guys preparing to kill them, why shouldn't they? The great big battleships with huge guns that were preparing to destroy them & their cities & their loved ones, why shouldn't they want to sink'm? I had nothing against the Japs! They never did anything to me. Oh, it's such a high-powered politics & pride of the lofty ones. Wars are not made by the poor, just the rich!
Copyright (c) 1998 by The Family