Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Do Not Accept Islamic Terrorism and Islamism as the “New Normal” by Jan Wójcik
Wednesday, May 31, 2017
GoV : After the Manchester attack it is clear that yet another
act of terror moves us less than previous attacks. We discuss less, we
are less outraged, there are fewer expressions of solidarity. We start
accepting it as the “new normal”.
Accommodation to an existing situation is a human habit. We could
observe it in even such extreme conditions as German Nazi death camps.
The same thing also happens in media outlets. After the invasion in
Iraq, every suicide bombing was noticed. But as months passed by and
there was yet another, and another, the number of casualties got…
boring.
On the one hand terrorists want us to be shocked, outraged; they want
to provoke conflict. So one might claim that less excitement about
another attack will make the achieving of their goals harder. But that
can also mean that they will try to find something more attractive for
the media, which means more violent.
But
there is also another side. Politicians, security officials, and
journalists want to convince us that terrorist atrocities are part of
the risk connected with life. We hear London’s mayor Sadiq Khan saying
it is “a part and parcel of living in a big city” to risk becoming a
terrorist’s victim. We hear that those lone wolves are unpredictable and
impossible to spot, even though they are on police watch lists.
Convincing us to believe it will make politicians’ lives easier. And
that is exactly the opposite of what we should do.
In that sense it is worth noticing Maajid Nawaz kicking lazy bottoms
which hide their ineffectiveness behind the freshly coined phrase “lone
wolf”. Politicians who use it to say that there is no good solution.
Security officials who say that they are unable to monitor the whole of
society. Finally Muslim communities, who can claim that there is no
general problem with radicalization; there are just isolated cases.
However, there is another “new normal” being accepted — Islamism and
Salafism. Specialists and security officers are not targeting
anti-democratic groups. They claim they are unable de-radicalize them.
They are focused on ‘disengagement’, meaning they want to pull radicals
away from being violent. Ultimately, they are afraid that targeting
those groups will lead to an escalation of violence.
So, as a result, we have various Muslim organizations labeled by
security services as fundamentalists, extremists, but they operate
without obstacles. For instance IGD (the Islamic Community of Germany),
which BfV (the Federal Bureau for the Protection of the Constitution)
believes to be a part of the Islamist movement, but at the same time it
is one of the major partners in dialogue between the government and
Muslim communities.
If we are going to accept that as a new normal presence, we also must
accept that kind of future. With the current demographics and
immigration patterns it means we must accept the end of democratic
states.