PLEASE VISIT THE HOME PAGE OF THE
NATIONAL RELIGIOUS CAMPAIGN AGAINST TORTURE
http://www.nrcat.org/
"War
determines its own end, - victory, and government crushes out automatically
all forces that deflect, or threaten to deflect, energy from the path of
organization to that end. All governments will act in this way, the most
democratic as well as the most autocratic. It is only “liberal” naiveté that
is shocked at arbitrary coercion and suppression. Willing war means willing
all the evils that are organically bound up with it. A good many people
still seem to believe in a peculiar kind of democratic and antiseptic war.
The pacifists opposed the war because they knew this was an illusion, and
because of the myriad hurts they knew war would do the promise of democracy
at home. For once the babes and sucklings seem to have been wiser than the
children of light.
Randolph Bourne,
A War Diary
"...power tends to confuse itself with
virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its
power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility
for other nations, to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake
them, that is, in its own shining image."
J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power
"For the United States the pursuit of freedom, as
defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence - on
imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people, whether
they admit it or not, is that nothing should disrupt their access to goods,
oil, and credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that
desire, which it does in part through the distribution of largesse at home
(with Congress taking a leading role) and in part through the pursuit of
imperial ambitions abroad (largely the business of the executive branch)."
Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American
Exceptionalism, p. 173
"The function of education has never been to free the mind and spirit of man, but to bind them; and to the end that the mind and spirit of his children should never escape Homo sapiens has employed praise, ridicule, admonition, accusation, mutilation, and even torture to chain them to the culture pattern . . . for where every man is unique there is no society, and where there is no society there can be no man. Contemporary American educators think they want creative children, yet it is an open question as to what they expect these children to create. And certainly the classrooms - from kindergarten to graduate school - in which they expect it to happen are not crucibles of creative activity and thought. It stands to reason that were young people truly creative the culture would fall apart, for originality, by definition, is different from what is given, and what is given is the culture itself. From the endless, pathetic, "creative hours" of kindergarten to the most abstruse problems in sociology and anthropology, the function of education is to prevent the truly creative intellect from getting out of hand."
"...Tocqueville spoke of a necessary 'apprenticeship of liberty' which he called the most arduous of all apprenticeships. It points to the core meaning - now lost to most educational institutions in America - of public schooling in the 'liberal arts.' The liberal arts are the arts of liberty necessary to the exercise of citizenship in a free republic."
Ben Barber, Consumed
 "To the general everything was so simple. The road to military glory ran according to the recipe: at 6 p.m. the soldiers get goulash and potatoes, |
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LAST UPDATED ON
Friday, May 10, 2013 |