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."
BCF : ...........…Let me begin with a notorious instance. At Midsummer, 1631, Barbary pirates from North Africa raided the Irish village of Baltimore, and took several hundred local people into lifelong captivity.
Such a distant projection of Islamic power might seem extreme and even bizarre, but it was no such thing. Although that reality is forgotten today, the danger of Arab and Turkish assault remained a nightmare for the vast majority of Europeans throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and well beyond that date in some regions.
If you have any European ancestors whatever, then they shared a common nightmare of such slaving enterprises. Americans and Europeans naturally focus on the horrors of the Transatlantic trade, for the excellent reason that their ancestors were (at least) complicit in that, and to varying degrees, their societies were built on that deeply tainted wealth. But in paying so much attention to that particular aspect of slavery, we lose the fact that such ventures were very common worldwide, and that many or most early societies depended on some form of slavery, and a slave trade.
Over the centuries, the Islamic nations of the Middle East took millions of captives from black Africa, and those campaigns lasted until they were stopped forcefully by European powers in the late nineteenth century. That intervention, of course, does not in any sense make up for earlier European misdeeds or atrocities.
