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."
Bulgaria Analytica : A while ago the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, opined publicly that Muslims were completely innocent of the sins of colonialism
and gave the example of Al-Andalus, (Andalusia) as an example of the
allegedly peaceful and equitable coexistence of the three great
religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam, under Muslim domination.
This is, of course, a long standing Muslim propaganda belied by the
simple historical fact that both Christians and Jews in Spain under
Muslim rule had to pay the infidel tax jizya as a mandatory indication of their subservient status.
For people in the Balkans, it is not necessary to go all the way to
Spain to find out that Al-Tayeb’s insinuations are nothing but a
bold-faced lie. We have the well-documented and centuries-old experience
of the Ottoman Empire to juxtapose to the likes of Al-Tayeb and even
more so, Turkish Islamist dictator Tayyip Recep Erdogan, who is trying
to convince us that the Ottoman Empire had been a paragon of tolerance.
Nothing could be further from the historical truth.
Now, it is also true that the Ottomans were far from being the worst
of Islamic overlords. For much of its existence, the empire was ruled by
an essentially secular judicial system called canun rather than the uncompromising and oppressive Islamic sharia, because
the early sultans realized that you cannot rule an empire in which
non-Muslims were a majority by blatantly discriminating against them. It
is also true that non-Muslims were often allowed to run their own
ethnic affairs in a system called millet and that the Ottomans gave refuge to Jews and other persecuted minorities during the Inquisition.
Still, none of this means that the non-Muslims were not brutally
oppressed and never allowed to forget that they were second-class
citizens at best, even when many of them played an important role in the
empire on account of their better education. To get a good sense of the
historical truth, it is perhaps best to refer to a prominent Turkish
historian, such as Halil Inalcik and his magisterial (with Donald
Quataert), “The Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300
-1600,” Cambridge University Press, 1994.
To understand the nature of this oppression it is first necessary to
come to terms with the nature of the Ottoman state, which was the
quintessential war despotism, or to use more modern terms – military
imperialism. This meant that the Empire depended on constant territorial
expansion to stay in business and when that stage ended after the reign
of Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566) it started slowly but surely to
decay and decline.
If there was one thing that proved the catalyst of the unhappiness of
the many non-Muslims, it was the highly discriminatory poll-tax. The
poll-tax or cizye (in Turkish)was not only a
traditional Islamic instrument of showing the infidels their subjugated
status, but also a vital economic necessity for the Muslim state.
According to Inalcik (pp.55-75) the poll-tax was the single most
important source (48%) of the Ottoman budget, with Rumeli (the European
part of the empire) always providing the lion’s share (81%) of the
revenues.
An additional feature of the poll-tax collection that
aggravated discontent was the Ottoman habit of imposing collective
responsibility on the village community for fugitives and the dead, a
practice that “sometimes caused the depopulation and ruin of the entire
village.” Moreover, the cizye, while supposedly a fixed amount,
constantly increased not just to reflect inflation, but also whenever
the state needed money. Thus, while it amounted to 40 aspers per person in 1574, it climbed to 70 in 1592, 150 in 1596, 240 in 1630 and 280 in 1691.
