Rocket Scientist

Today, of course, is the day I steal my own comment from (usually) someone else blog and make a post about it.  Kudos to Relax Max of Clarity2009 for giving me a doozy.  He wrote a blog , actually, in response to a quote I’d given on Saturday: 

“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. The 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.” -Dwight David Eisenhower, 1953, a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

He noted that, though he thought he poor should be fed, he also saw a use for defense.  Actually, he said a great deal of useful thoughtful things, some of which I agreed with.  But I was intrigued by the implication that Eisenhower, although he may have said this is in a speech, was unlikely to have really felt this way.  I’m not so sure.

Now, let me be clear.  I am not objective.  I am mostly pacifist by nature and I won’t pretend otherwise.  If the draft included women and I were drafted, I would have to be a contientious objector because I could never kill someone for wearing a different uniform (though I recognize it is necessary in war, I could not do it).  That doesn’t make me strictly nonviolent, mind you.  I can think of several circumstances where I could kill, probably with a clean conscience, but it would be personal and I would know that the individual I was killing was a monster, not presuming it.  But I digress.  

I also think, personally, that this country spends far too much on defense and, worse, spends the money poorly.  I’m of the opinion that warfare as we knew it in WWII has long outlived it’s usefulness and and that carpet bombing civilians and attacking with hordes of impressionable young people is no longer useful.  No, I was not a fan of the Iraq war or even the one in Afghanistan.  In my opinion, war is an action of last resort, when you have exhausted every alternative  and you are faced with a future even worse than war if no action is taken.  War, even when well justified (as we were in WWII) is horrible.  In my opinion, if war is used for anything less than absolute necessity, it is treason, it is a betrayal not only of the the trust our soldiers who signed up for our military put in their leadership and a the people of this nation, but also a crime against those killed.  Note, I don’t say you have to agree with me.  But it’s how I feel about it.

This nation spends more than the entire rest of the world on defense.  That it spends more than 10X what more weapons for our infantry and bigger and better conventional weapons when we’re already tops on this is nothing but a gravy train for contractors.  Better to spend it on training for our most elite corps and using intelligence and brains to deal with threats surgically rather than with blunt force; we’d be doing ourselves a favor.

Anyway, back to my original point.  As most of you know, I gather quotes.  One day when I was trolling through Wikiquote, I stumbled upon the topic of “war” and was surprised by the views of so many I would have expected to be warmongers or were involved in war, how much my own thinking reflects their own.   OK, there are some pacifists in here, too.

I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
–Albert Einstein

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
–Russell Baker

History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.
–Ronald Reagan

They serve so that we don’t have to. They offer to give up their lives so that we can be free. It is, remarkably, their gift to us. And all they ask for in return is that we never send them into harm’s way unless it is absolutely necessary. Will they ever trust us again?
–Michael Moore

What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women — not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.
–John F. Kennedy

We are defined by how we use our power.
–Gerry Spence

When war is declared, truth is the first casualty.
–Arthur Ponsonby

The sons of torture victims make good terrorists.
–André Malraux

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.
–Jimmy Carter

Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.
–John F. Kennedy

No nation is fit to sit in judgement upon any other nation.
–Woodrow Wilson

Look, there is one statement that bothers me more than anything else, and that’s the idea that when the troops are in combat everybody has to shut up. Imagine if we put troops in combat with a faulty rifle, and that rifle was malfunctioning and troops were dying as a result. I can’t think anyone would allow that to happen, that would not speak up. Well, what’s the difference between a faulty plan and strategy that’s getting just as many troops killed?
–Gen. Anthony Zinni, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.), former CENTCOM Commander-in-Chief, 2004-05-21, television interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes”

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.
–What Is Man? (1906) by Mark Twain

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle-be Thou near them! With them, in spirit, we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to 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-for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
–The War Prayer by Mark Twain [Twain, as you know, was a sarcastic ass, but apparently a pacifist]

Göring: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
– Interview in Göring’s jail cell during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (18 April 1946) [did anyone else think this sounded familiar?]

A pre-emptive war in ‘defense’ of freedom would surely destroy freedom, because one simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian, because one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend.
–J. William Fullbright

I have concluded, there is no war, in the history of man, that could not have been avoided by 15 minutes of honest diplomacy.
–Andrew Mutton

I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.
–Franklin Delano Roosevelt

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.
–Douglas MacArthur

It is a tribute to the humanity of ordinary people that horrible acts must be camouflaged [with words] like security, peace, freedom, democracy, the ‘national interest’.
–Howard Zinn, Boston U professor & former WWII bomber pilot, USA.

Let no one ever, from henceforth say one word in any way countenancing war. It is dangerous even to speak of how here and there the individual may gain some hardship of soul by it. For war is hell, and those who institute it are criminals. Were there even anything to say for it, it should not be said; for its spiritual disasters far outweigh any of its advantages.
–Robert Nichols

Peace cannot be achieved by force, only by understanding.
–Albert Einstein

War in our time has become an anachronism. Whatever the case in the past, war in the future can serve no useful purpose. A war which became general, as any limited action might, would only result in the virtual destruction of mankind.
–General Dwight David Eisenhower

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
–Mahatma Gandhi

There never was a good war, or a bad peace.
–Benjamin Franklin

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.
–Desiderius Erasmus

When the rich make war it’s the poor that die.
–Jean-Paul Sartre

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. … Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
–Martin Luther King, Jr.

Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.
–Ronald Reagan

You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can’t sit on it for long.
–Boris Yeltsin

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a “necessary evil,” it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.
–Sydney J. Harris

 Just sayin’.

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