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."
President Trump has offended pretty much the entirety of Britain’s political and media establishment up to and including the Prime Minister, the Mayor of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury. As a result, the Special Relationship is once more in jeopardy, and Trump has decided to cancel a planned working visit to the United Kingdom. In a moment I shall explain why the president is right and his
critics are wrong. But first a brief recap of what the fuss is all
about.
Trump’s critics objected violently – or so they have publicly claimed – to three of his Twitter retweets. These retweets showed videos, purportedly of members of the Religion of Peace (TM) behaving less than peacefully. One depicted a bearded Muslim destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary. One showed an Islamist mob pushing a teenage boy off a roof and then beating him to death. One
showed a white Dutch boy on crutches being gratuitously beaten up by a
man described in the video caption as a “Muslim migrant”.
Prime Minister Theresa May; Mayor of London Sadiq Khan; and many
other politicians professed themselves to be appalled by this. As was
BBC news, which made this horror its lead story. But it wasn’t the sadistic brutality on any of the videos that
bothered them. It was the fact that the person whose tweets the
President had retweeted, Jayda Fransen, is the deputy of
a nationalistic, anti-immigration political party highly critical of
Islam called Britain First. According to Prime Minister Theresa May this was a grave mistake.
I am very clear that retweeting from Britain First was the wrong thing to do. “Britain First is a hateful organisation. It seeks to spread division
and mistrust in our communities. It stands in fundamental opposition to
the values that we share as a nation – values of respect, tolerance
and, dare I say it, common decency.”
Some politicians went further.
London’s Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, sought to use Trump’s tweet as an
excuse to promote his ongoing campaign to prevent the President being
granted a State Visit to London.