Quote of the Day

On a previous forum a member posted the following quote in a suggestive manner that those in congress who oppose the Iraq war should be treated as Lincoln suggested.

"Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale, and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled or hanged." President Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln did arrest people who resisted his war. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Lincoln did not believe the words in our own Declaration of Independence.

Woodrow Wilson was another "great" president who had people arrested for speaking out against his war "to end all wars and spread democracy around the world". Wilson had the Espionage Act of 1917 passed, and he jailed people
who spoke out against his war. It was amended in 1918 to prohibit criticizing the government. Incredibly, the Supreme Court upheld the law by a 7-2 margin. Some of the laws have been repealed.

These two war presidents are idolized by the intellectual historians. Presidents who kept us out of war and tried to limit the power of the federal government are ignored by the intellectuals.

The leaders are afraid of dissent. They might be proven wrong in an open debate. Being wrong means you lose power. No one wants to follow someone who is wrong. It is an old policy, silence the messenger.

During war the leaders of both fighting groups have the same method, silence the messengers. Do not allow any dissent. Through war both leaders gain power, their food for living.

Alexis de Tocqueville said that nothing is so threatening to individual liberty as extended war.-- "A long war almost always places nations in this sad alternative: that their defeat delivers them to destruction and their triumph to despotism."

Randolph Bourne-"The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few
malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part." Randolph Bourne, "War is the Health of the State"
http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/bourne.htm

Bilbo Baggins