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 : Yang Jisheng powerfully chronicled this experience. A member of the
Chinese Communist Party, he worked for Xinhua News Agency for more than
three decades. He was traumatized by the Tiananmen Square massacre,
which encouraged him to explore the reality of CCP rule.
In 2008, he
also became deputy editor of Yanhuang Chunqiu, a liberal historical journal later seized by President Xi Jinping’s minions and turned into a mouthpiece of dictatorship. Yang used his Xinhua position to travel about the country, unearthing a
history that many people knew of but not well. He benefited from good
timing, researching and writing while China was liberalizing after
exiting the Maoist era.
He completed his project before Xi Jinping
reestablished suffocating censorship and tight controls over everything
political. Yang published in Hong Kong while the rule of law, civil
liberties, and press freedom remained intact. Mao intended to spur development with an intense program of rural
industrialization and agricultural collectivization. The result,
however, was dislocation, disruption, devastation, and starvation.
Yang became the premier chronicler of Mao’s most catastrophic fantasies. For instance, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine: 1958-1962,
published in 2008, is a compelling, often mind-numbing read. It runs
629 pages, with 87 devoted to notes and bibliography. It can be
summarized as the story of what happens when the world’s most populous
nation anoints one person as a secular god and turns his ideological
nightmares into national policy.
Insulated from reality, Mao denied
overwhelming evidence of failure and treated critics as class traitors.
His cowardly colleagues competed with one another to more completely and
quickly enforce his arbitrary will, irrespective of human cost.
This depressing story is repeated throughout the book. Mao made
manifestly inane, impractical, and impossible demands to implement real
communism. Other party leaders, even those who foresaw the disaster to
come, joined in a CCP chorus praising the new proposals and sending them
across the nation. Local apparatchiks implemented the directives,
despite the obvious stupidity in doing so.
Crop production dropped while
provincial leaders falsely informed Beijing of increasingly bountiful
harvests, leading to ever-greater national requisitions. As farmers and
their families starved, cadres looted supplies for themselves. Officials
who reported failure and hardship were denounced as rightists and
punished accordingly. This general routine was repeated again and again
in province after province with ever more gruesome results.
