Bhagdad Boondoggle

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Baghdad Boondoggle

"We cannot let terrorists and rogue nations hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile."

George W. Bush

8/21/2000

Harold Pinter's War

"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.  That is easy.  All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."

               Herman Goering

"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: 'Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.'"

      John Ashcroft*

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

Samuel Johnson


"When shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never.   All the armies of Europe and Asia could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years.  If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher.     As a nation of free men we will live forever, or die by suicide."

Abraham Lincoln

"If we do not come to see that the evil we fight is in the depths of our own soul,  whatever fathom we believe it buried,  then there is little hope that buried it will remain."

From M.C. Gardner's  Buddha Boogie

"When you eight-year olds kill Evil here in Nuremberg be sure to bury it at a crossroads and drive a stake through its heart - or you just might see it again at the next full moon."

From Vonnegut's Jailbird

 

"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."                                                                    


--Gaius Julius Caesar
 

What threatens us today is fear. Not the atom bomb, nor even fear of it because if the bomb fell on Oxford tonight, all it could do would be to kill us which is nothing, since in doing that it will have robbed itself of its only power over us. Our danger is the forces in the world today which are trying to use man's fear to rob him of his individuality, his soul, trying to reduce him to an unthinking mass of fear and bribery.


--William Faulkner, commencement speech at his daughter's high-school graduation, 1951

 

* Augmentation to the "Patriot's Act."