Civil War Civilian Quotes

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE AND THANK EVERYONE WHO TRIES TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN THE LIVES OF VULNERABLE CIVILIANS

1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. 2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times.... 3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions. 4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred. 5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth. It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.

ISIS BEHEADS CIVILIANS WHILE WORLD KEEPS FORGETTING WHAT VICTIMS' SOULS R BEGGING: HUMANITY SAVE KOBANE

Looking back at the recent history of the world, I find it amazing how far civilization has retrogressed so quickly. As recently as World War I—granted the rules were violated at times—we had a set of rules of warfare in which armies didn’t make war against civilians: Soldiers fought soldiers. Then came World War II and Hitler’s philosophy of total war, which meant the bombing not only of soldiers but of factories that produced their rifles, and, if surrounding communities were also hit, that was to be accepted; then, as the war progressed, it became common for the combatants simply to attack civilians as part of military strategy. By the time the 1980s rolled around, we were placing our entire faith in a weapon whose fundamental target was the civilian population.

Raiding parties of young men had their own laws and their own universe in which the niceties of civilized warfare did not count and an old man and a young girl were fair game to them, for in the Indian Wars there were no civilians.

Britain’s civil defense experts, fearing a “knock-out blow,” predicted that the first aerial attack on London would destroy much if not all of the city and kill two hundred thousand civilians. “It was widely believed that London would be reduced to rubble within minutes of war being declared,” wrote one junior official.

The West has to take a critical look at itself and examine the apparent double standards at work that allow it to attack Iraq for possessing weapons of mass destruction but not North Korea, whose leader shared Saddam Hussein's megalomaniacal qualities; that permit it to rail against Iran about nuclear weapons but be silent about Israel's arsenal; that allow it to only selectively demand enforcement of UN resolutions. The West has to own up to the mistakes it has made: such as with Abu Ghraib and the torture in Afghan prisons; in the errant attacks on civilians; in its disregard for the basic precept of a civilized legal system, which maintains that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty.

They fulfilled their mission of scaring the locals into submission by annihilating more than eight hundred people, half of them children, with an average age of six. There were many operations similar to this one in the eighties. The civil war left more than seventy-five thousand dead, almost all civilians, almost all of them murdered by their own country’s military.

Praise be to Allah, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: 'But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)'; and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-'Abdallah, who said: I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but Allah is worshipped, Allah who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders. ...All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims. And ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries. This was revealed by Imam Bin-Qadamah in 'Al- Mughni,' Imam al-Kisa'i in 'Al-Bada'i,' al-Qurtubi in his interpretation, and the shaykh of al-Islam in his books, where he said: 'As for the fighting to repulse [an enemy], it is aimed at defending sanctity and religion, and it is a duty as agreed [by the ulema]. Nothing is more sacred than belief except repulsing an enemy who is attacking religion and life.' On that basis, and in compliance with Allah's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims: The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, 'and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,' and 'fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.' ...We -- with Allah's help -- call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson. ...Almighty Allah also says: 'O ye who believe, what is the matter with you, that when ye are asked to go forth in the cause of Allah, ye cling so heavily to the earth! Do ye prefer the life of this world to the hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the hereafter. Unless ye go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place; but Him ye would not harm in the least. For Allah hath power over all things.' Almighty Allah also says: 'So lose no heart, nor fall into despair. For ye must gain mastery if ye are true in faith.' [World Islamic Front Statement, 23 February 1998]

warfare would be waged west of the Mississippi as it had been earlier against the Abenakis, Cherokees, Shawnees, Muskogees, and even Christian Indians. In the Civil War, these methods played a prominent role on both sides. Confederate regular forces, Confederate guerrillas such as William Quantrill, and General Sherman for the Union all engaged in waging total war against civilians. The pattern would continue in US military interventions overseas, from the Philippines and Cuba to Central America, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The cumulative effect goes beyond simply the habitual use of military means and becomes the very basis for US American identity. The Indian-fighting frontiersmen and the “valiant” settlers in their circled covered wagons are the iconic images of that identity. The continued popularity of, and respect for, the genocidal sociopath Andrew Jackson is another indicator. Actual men such as Robert Rogers, Daniel Boone, John Sevier, and David Crockett, as well as fictitious ones created by James Fenimore Cooper and other best-selling writers, call to mind D. H. Lawrence’s “myth of the essential white American”—that the “essential American soul” is a killer.

The rank and file members of the guerrillas and their civilian sympathizers paid some of the heaviest prices during the war and a recurrent theme running through their testimonials is an uncertainty about whether the costs were worth the rewards. 41 They certainly celebrate their role in democratizing El Salvador, but they wonder what good is democracy in the midst of ongoing economic hardship and inequality.

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war’s brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the “hat trick” with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers’ knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table. It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise. Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground. The contrast between That and This was devastating. It was, in an enormous world-shaking way, like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morning coat, creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slipping on a piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, with silk hat flying, in a filthy gutter. The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled. So we laughed merrily, I remember, when a military chaplain (Eton, Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon a weapon which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore’s club in the pictures of a fairy-tale. So we laughed at the adventures of a young barrister (a brilliant fellow in the Oxford “Union”) whose pleasure it was to creep out o’ nights into No Man’s Land and lie doggo in a shell-hole close to the enemy’s barbed wire, until presently, after an hour’s waiting or two, a German soldier would crawl out to fetch in a corpse. The English barrister lay with his rifle ready. Where there had been one corpse there were two. Each night he made a notch on his rifle three notches one night to check the number of his victims. Then he came back to breakfast in his dugout with a hearty appetite.

It is hard to realize today that “government” during the American Civil War a hundred years ago meant the merest handful of people. Lincoln’s Secretary of War had fewer than fifty civilian subordinates, most of them not “executives” and policy-makers but telegraph clerks. The entire Washington establishment of the U.S. government in Theodore Roosevelt’s time, around 1900, could be comfortably housed in any one of the government buildings along the Mall today.

The girls were screaming in Tamil, except for one, who was repeating the word "epa" like a loud and shrill chant. That was not how the Sinhala word was usually used, but it was an expression Mugil had ofen heard Sinhalese policeman and the army lob at civilians. Epa! when they didn't want you to sell apples by the road in Jaffna. Epa! when you tried to drive on at the checkpoint at Vavuniya. Epa! Don't! The girl's voice seemed to ring through all of Kilinochchi.

The transformation from "community policing" to "military policing," began in 1981, when President Reagan persuaded Congress to pass the Military Cooperation Law Enforcement Act, which encouraged the military to give local, state, and federal police access to military bases, intelligence, research, weaponry, and other equipment for drug interdiction. That legislation carved a huge exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, the Civil War--era law prohibiting the use of the Military for civilian policing.

It must be said here that ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ is not an attribute of patriotism, but of deep patriarchy. Extreme mother-love is a camouflage for extreme misogyny. Over the past few years in India, the nature of the violence inflicted on women during rapes, riots and caste retributions is of an order seldom witnessed before in any part of the world, except perhaps, in Bosnia during the civil war, or in the Congo, or in Sri Lanka during the final moments of the pogrom against the civilian Tamil population there. From the barbarity of the jawans of the Assam Rifles on Manorama Devi, to incessant mass rapes by soldiers in Kashmir, to the graphic and horrific brutalities (that were videotaped) on even pregnant women in Gujarat in 2002, to the Nirbhaya case in Delhi, there is no evidence to prove that devotion towards an abstract ‘Bharat Mata’ translates into even a semblance of affection or respect for real flesh-and-blood women. Indeed, here it is only literally the flesh and blood that seems to matter. Add

The Revolution and the Founders’ Constitution chose unity over justice, but the Civil War and Reconstruction put justice ahead of unity. The heroes and villains are different. The Founding reveres paramilitary organizations like the Sons of Liberty. The army of the national government is viewed suspiciously—the Founders did not want a standing army. In Reconstruction, US Army troops, including many Black soldiers, are the heroes, and paramilitary organizations like the Klan and the White League are the villains. The presence of a standing army within a civilian population, dreaded by the Revolutionaries, is what protects the freedpeople

The civil war rages on, and the foreign correspondent Allan Little watches as a procession of forty thousand civilians emerges from a forest. They've been trudging through the woods for forty-eight hours straight, fleeing an attack. Among them is an eighty-year-old man. He looks desperate, exhausted. The man approaches Little, asking whether he's seen his wife. They were separated during the long march, the man says. Little hasn't seen her but, ever the journalist, asks whether the man wouldn't mind identifying himself as Muslim or Croat. And the man's answer, Little says years later, in a gorgeous BBC segment, shames him even now, as he recalls it across decades. "I am," said the old man, "a musician.

Unspoken Truths (The Sonnet) Democracy is people-approved dictatorship, Military is people-approved genocide. Atom bombs are people-approved armageddon, In conscience-court all guilty of homicide. There is no time left, for there never was time, Time begins with the beginning of civilization. And civilization is something we are yet to find, Hence, there is no question of clock progression. Nationalist chimps sell war in the name of security, Stoneage civilians rush to bulk-buy graveyard plots. Merchant of murder, you, yell about peacekeeping, While you feast on nationalism like wet little cods! When cavemen take pride in their national glory of death, Sanctuary becomes asylum for the lunatic walking dead!

The previous ten years had been a cavalcade of American-made tragedy: the forever war in Afghanistan, catastrophic regime change in Iraq, indefinite detentions at Guantánamo Bay, extraordinary renditions, torture, targeted killings of civilians—even of American civilians—via drone strikes. Domestically, there was the Homeland Securitization of everything, which assigned a threat rating to every waking day (Red–Severe, Orange–High, Yellow–Elevated), and, from the Patriot Act on, the steady erosion of civil liberties, the very liberties we were allegedly fighting to protect. The cumulative damage—the malfeasance in aggregate—was staggering to contemplate and felt entirely irreversible, and yet we were still honking our horns and flashing our lights in jubilation.

MAN AS “NIGGER”? In the early years of the women’s movement, an article in Psychology Today called “Women as Nigger” quickly led to feminist activists (myself included) making parallels between the oppression of women and blacks.29 Men were characterized as the oppressors, the “master,” the “slaveholders.” Black congresswoman Shirley Chisholm’s statement that she faced far more discrimination as a woman than as a black was widely quoted. The parallel allowed the hard-earned rights of the civil rights movement to be applied to women. The parallels themselves had more than a germ of truth. But what none of us realized was how each sex was the other’s slave in different ways and therefore neither sex was the other’s “nigger” (“nigger” implies a one-sided oppressiveness). If “masculists” had made such a comparison, they would have had every bit as strong a case as feminists. The comparison is useful because it is not until we understand how men were also women’s servants that we get a clear picture of the sexual division of labor and therefore the fallacy of comparing either sex to “nigger.” For starters . . . Blacks were forced, via slavery, to risk their lives in cotton fields so that whites might benefit economically while blacks died prematurely. Men were forced, via the draft, to risk their lives on battlefields so that everyone else might benefit economically while men died prematurely. The disproportionate numbers of blacks and males in war increases both blacks’ and males’ likelihood of experiencing posttraumatic stress, of becoming killers in postwar civilian life as well, and of dying earlier. Both slaves and men died to make the world safe for freedom—someone else’s.

The most insidious of our country, the greediest and highest rung of our socioeconomic ladder, line their pockets with misappropriated funds as military personnel and hordes of civilians are maimed or killed. It’s not their children out there, blinded by manufactured patriotism or lured into the service with the promise of economic stability, all with the sanctimonious blessings of misguided public consent by way of corporate, state-sponsored media. It won’t be their children who are terrorized by Wahabbist insurgents tearing through city blocks and rural areas as only an ever-devouring plague could. It won’t be any of their loved ones watching thousands of years of civilization unraveling like an old sweater as each thread of wool is lit on fire or stolen to sell on the black market for greedy consumers with a fetish for hijacked Mesopotamian artifacts.

The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship. After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)

My assignment as the post’s adjutant and personnel officer (I ended the war a captain) put me in close contact with the civilian bureaucrats and it didn’t take long for me to decide I didn’t think much of the inefficiency, empire building, and business-as-usual attitude that existed in wartime under the civil service system. If I suggested that an employee might be expendable, his supervisor would look at me as if I were crazy. He didn’t want to reduce the size of his department; his salary was based to a large extent on the number of people he supervised. He wanted to increase it, not decrease it. I discovered it was almost impossible to remove an incompetent or lazy worker and that one of the most popular methods supervisors used in dealing with an incompetent was to transfer him or her out of his department to a higher-paying job in another department. We had a warehouse filled with cabinets containing old records that had no use or historic value. They were totally obsolete. Well, with a war on, there was a need for the warehouse and the filing cabinets, so a request was sent up through channels requesting permission to destroy the obsolete papers. Back came a reply—permission granted provided copies are made of each paper destroyed.

Statement on Hamas (October 10th, 2023) When Israel strikes, it's "national security" - when Palestine strikes back, it's "terrorism". Just like over two hundred years ago when native americans resisted their homeland being stolen, it was called "Indian Attack". Or like over a hundred years ago when Indian soldiers in the British Army revolted against the empire, in defense of their homeland, it was called "Sepoy Mutiny". The narrative never changes - when the colonizer terrorizes the world, it's given glorious sounding names like "exploration" and "conquest", but if the oppressed so much as utters a word in resistance, it is branded as attack, mutiny and terrorism - so that, the real terrorists can keep on colonizing as the self-appointed ruler of land, life and morality, without ever being held accountable for violating the rights of what they deem second rate lifeforms, such as the arabs, indians, latinos and so on. After all this, some apes will still only be interested in one stupid question. Do I support Hamas? To which I say this. Until you've spent a lifetime under an oppressive regime, you are not qualified to ask that question. An ape can ask anything its puny brain fancies, but it's up to the human to decide whether the ape is worthy of a response. What do you think, by the way - colonizers can just keep coming as they please, to wipe their filthy feet on us like doormat, and we should do nothing - just stay quiet! For creatures who call themselves civilized, you guys have a weird sense of morality. Yet all these might not get through your thick binary skull, so let me put it to you bluntly. I don't stand with Hamas, I am Hamas, just like, I don't stand with Ukraine, I am Ukraine. Russia stops fighting, war ends - Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. Israel ends invasion, war ends - Palestine ends resistance, Palestine ends. However, I do have one problem here. Why do civilians have to die, if that is indeed the case - which I have no way of confirming, because news reports are not like reputed scientific data, that a scientist can naively trust. During humankind's gravest conflicts news outlets have always peddled a narrative benefiting the occupier and demonizing the resistance, either consciously or subconsciously. So never go by news reports, particularly on exception circumstances like this. No matter the cause, no civilian must die, that is my one unimpeachable law. But the hard and horrific fact of the matter is, only the occupier can put an end to the death and destruction peacefully - the resistance does not have that luxury.

Thus, in the course of the civil war the Palestinian Arabs, besides killing the odd prisoner of war, committed only two large massacres-involving forty workers in the Haifa oil refinery and about iso surrendering or unarmed Haganah men in Kfar `Etzion (a massacre in which Jordanian Legionnaires participated-though other Legionnaires at the site prevented atrocities). Some commentators add a third "massacre," the destruction of the convoy of doctors and nurses to Mount Scopus in Jerusalem in mid-April 1948, but this was actually a battle, involving Haganah and Palestine Arab militiamen, though it included, or was followed by, the mass killing of the occupants of a Jewish bus, most of whom were unarmed medical personnel. The Arab regular armies committed few atrocities and no large-scale massacres of POWs and civilians in the conventional war-even though they conquered the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and a number of rural settlements, including Atarot and Neve Ya`akov near Jerusalem, and Nitzanim, Gezer, and Mishmar Hayarden elsewhere. The Israelis' collective memory of fighters characterized by "purity of arms" is also undermined by the evidence of rapes committed in conquered towns and villages. About a dozen cases-in Jaffa, Acre, and so on-are reported in the available contemporary documentation and, given Arab diffidence about reporting such incidents and the

[E]ven on the issues that are put up to democratic vote, we are saddled with a two-party system in which the liberal democratic party might be one of the most criminal orginizations in modern history. If you think I am exaggerating, consider that it's the democrats who: Fought the civil war on the side of slavery, created Jim Crow segregation after they lost that war, dropped the only nuclear weapons on a civilian population in history, stole a third of Mexico's land, and forced the Cherokee and other tribes on the infamous Trail of Tears, killed millions in the wars of Korea and South East Asia, doubled the country's prison population under Bill Clinton, deported over 2 million immigrants under Barrack, you get the picture. The point is not that there's anything better about Republicans: Many of whom probably look at the list above and sigh with envy, but that both major US parties are completely devoted to the priorities of the tiny class that runs this country. Each party may be paid to look out for a particular industry, republicans get lots of oil money, while democrats are preferred by the tech industry. But sometimes they propose different strategies to achieve the same ends: such as whether the United States should destroy Middle-Eastern countries with or without the approval of the United Nations. More often, their differences are even less substantial and are almost entirely about how to get a different voting block to support the same policies.

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war’s brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the “hat trick” with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers’ knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table. It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise. Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground. The contrast between That and This was devastating.

The war against ISIS in Iraq was a long, hard slog, and for a time the administration was as guilty of hyping progress as the most imaginative briefers at the old “Five O’Clock Follies” in Saigon had been. In May 2015, an ISIS assault on Ramadi and a sandstorm that grounded U.S. planes sent Iraqi forces and U.S. Special Forces embedded with them fleeing the city. Thanks to growing hostility between the Iraqi government and Iranian-supported militias in the battle, the city wouldn’t be taken until the end of the year. Before it was over we had sent well over five thousand military personnel back to Iraq, including Special Forces operators embedded as advisors with Iraqi and Kurdish units. A Navy SEAL, a native Arizonan whom I had known when he was a boy, was killed in northern Iraq. His name was Charles Keating IV, the grandson of my old benefactor, with whom I had been implicated all those years ago in the scandal his name had branded. He was by all accounts a brave and fine man, and I mourned his loss. Special Forces operators were on the front lines when the liberation of Mosul began in October 2016. At immense cost, Mosul was mostly cleared of ISIS fighters by the end of July 2017, though sporadic fighting continued for months. The city was in ruins, and the traumatized civilian population was desolate. By December ISIS had been defeated everywhere in Iraq. I believe that had U.S. forces retained a modest but effective presence in Iraq after 2011 many of these tragic events might have been avoided or mitigated. Would ISIS nihilists unleashed in the fury and slaughter of the Syrian civil war have extended their dystopian caliphate to Iraq had ten thousand or more Americans been in country? Probably, but with American advisors and airpower already on the scene and embedded with Iraqi security forces, I think their advance would have been blunted before they had seized so much territory and subjected millions to the nightmare of ISIS rule. Would Maliki have concentrated so much power and alienated Sunnis so badly that the insurgency would catch fire again? Would Iran’s influence have been as detrimental as it was? Would Iraqis have collaborated to prevent a full-scale civil war from erupting? No one can answer for certain. But I believe that our presence there would have had positive effects. All we can say for certain is that Iraq still has a difficult road to walk, but another opportunity to progress toward that hopeful vision of a democratic, independent nation that’s learned to accommodate its sectarian differences, which generations of Iraqis have suffered without and hundreds of thousands of Americans risked everything for.

ISIS was forced out of all its occupied territory in Syria and Iraq, though thousands of ISIS fighters are still present in both countries. Last April, Assad again used sarin gas, this time in Idlib Province, and Russia again used its veto to protect its client from condemnation and sanction by the U.N. Security Council. President Trump ordered cruise missile strikes on the Syrian airfield where the planes that delivered the sarin were based. It was a minimal attack, but better than nothing. A week before, I had condemned statements by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who had explicitly declined to maintain what had been the official U.S. position that a settlement of the Syrian civil war had to include Assad’s removal from power. “Once again, U.S. policy in Syria is being presented piecemeal in press statements,” I complained, “without any definition of success, let alone a realistic plan to achieve it.” As this book goes to the publisher, there are reports of a clash between U.S. forces in eastern Syria and Russian “volunteers,” in which hundreds of Russians were said to have been killed. If true, it’s a dangerous turn of events, but one caused entirely by Putin’s reckless conduct in the world, allowed if not encouraged by the repeated failures of the U.S. and the West to act with resolve to prevent his assaults against our interests and values. In President Obama’s last year in office, at his invitation, he and I spent a half hour or so alone, discussing very frankly what I considered his policy failures, and he believed had been sound and necessary decisions. Much of that conversation concerned Syria. No minds were changed in the encounter, but I appreciated his candor as I hoped he appreciated mine, and I respected the sincerity of his convictions. Yet I still believe his approach to world leadership, however thoughtful and well intentioned, was negligent, and encouraged our allies to find ways to live without us, and our adversaries to try to fill the vacuums our negligence created. And those trends continue in reaction to the thoughtless America First ideology of his successor. There are senior officials in government who are trying to mitigate those effects. But I worry that we are at a turning point, a hinge of history, and the decisions made in the last ten years and the decisions made tomorrow might be closing the door on the era of the American-led world order. I hope not, and it certainly isn’t too late to reverse that direction. But my time in that fight has concluded. I have nothing but hope left to invest in the work of others to make the future better than the past. As of today, as the Syrian war continues, more than 400,000 people have been killed, many of them civilians. More than five million have fled the country and more than six million have been displaced internally. A hundred years from now, Syria will likely be remembered as one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the twenty-first century, and an example of human savagery at its most extreme. But it will be remembered, too, for the invincibility of human decency and the longing for freedom and justice evident in the courage and selflessness of the White Helmets and the soldiers fighting for their country’s freedom from tyranny and terrorists. In that noblest of human conditions is the eternal promise of the Arab Spring, which was engulfed in flames and drowned in blood, but will, like all springs, come again.

During the thirty-plus-year civil war in Guatemala that “ended” in 1996 with the “Peace Accords,” many Kaibiles left as mercenaries seeking other “opportunities” or were decommissioned into civilian life. Over 250,000 civilians were dead in a war that left the country in a collective state of post-traumatic stress.

The Commission’s report noted with dismay the tendency of the warring peoples to portray their enemies as subhuman and the all-too-frequent atrocities committed against both enemy soldiers and civilians. “In the older civilizations,” the report said, “there is a synthesis of moral and social forces embodied in laws and institutions giving stability of character, forming public sentiment, and making for security.”120 The report was issued early in the summer of 1914, just as the rest of Europe was about to learn how fragile its civilization was.

Civilians arrived daily to pick through a grisly array of corpses in vain hopes of finding a son, husband, or brother. That horrific sight would linger in his mind until he moldered in his own grave. “Breakfast, sir?

Errors in diplomacy, stemming from faulty understanding of the origins of intergroup alliances and the causes of within-group instability, have undoubtedly led to the perpetuation of these wars and resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.

It is a lesson of the sixties: liberals get in the biggest political trouble—whether instituting open housing, civilian complaint review boards, or sex education programs—when they presume that a reform is an inevitable concomitant of progress. It is then that they are most likely to establish their reforms by top-down bureacratic means. A blindsiding backlash often ensues.

From the Civil War through his two battles on the Yellowstone, he proved decisive, not reckless; shrewd, not foolish. In every other regard, he danced along the emerging modern world, unable to adapt to it. He failed in the new sphere of finance, rejected new thinking about equality, and wrote antiquated prose. He offended his military superiors, mismanaged subordinates, alienated civilian authorities, meddled inappropriately in politics, endangered his marriage, and gambled away his estate. Again and again he saved himself through his ability to fight. And yet, ironically, we now remember him as a bad commander.

The residents [of Vicksburg] spent much of their time, as one of them said, watching the incoming shells "rising steadily and shiningly in great parabolic curves, descending with ever-increasing swiftness, and falling with deafening shrieks and explosions." ...Children observed the uproar with wide-eyed evident pleasure, accepting it as a natural phenomenon, like rain or lightning, unable to comprehend that men could do such things to one another and to them... Some took to it better than others, in and out of uniform. There was for instance a Frenchman, "a gallant officer who had distinguished himself in several severe engagements," who was "almost unmanned" whenever one of the huge mortar projectiles fell anywhere near him. Chided by friends for this reaction, he would reply: "I no like ze bomb: I cannot fight him back!" Neither could anyone else "fight him back", least of all the civilians, many of whim took refuge in caves dug into the hillsides. Some of these were quite commodious, with several rooms, and the occupants brought in chairs and beds and even carpets to add to the comfort, sleeping soundly or taking dinner unperturbed while the world outside seemed turned to flame and thunder. "Prairie Dog Village," the blue cannoneers renamed the city on the bluff. (pp. 411-412).

Civil Liberty (The Sonnet) Policy is not the precursor to civil liberty, Civic duty is the precursor to civil liberty. If there is no civic duty, there is no civil liberty, If there is no civic duty, civilians are but catastrophe. Contrary to unwritten political law of abuse, Civilians are not the doormats of democracy. Civilians are the doors, civilians are the buildings, Civilians are the whole of the social anatomy. Problem is, it's more convenient to live life as doormat, Than take responsibility and turn politicians obsolete. The war-mongers know this uncivilized tenet of the apes, Hence they can turn living beings into moronic nationalist. So I repeat, civic duty is the alpha and omega of civil liberty. Till we realize this, there is no peace, justice and equality.

Disarmament must take place at every level of democracy - not just at the civilian level, but all the way to top - at the state level. If gun violence is a civil defense issue, so is nuclear armament.

Key Apache Adversaries—U.S. Military Figures and Civilian Apache Agents Clum, John P.—born 1851. Civilian Apache agent at the San Carlos and Fort Apache reservations. Nicknamed “Turkey Gobbler” by the Apache for his strutting nature. Later became mayor of Tombstone, Arizona. His claim to fame was being the only person to successfully “capture” Geronimo. Died in 1932. Crook, General George—born 1828. Called America’s “greatest Indian fighter.” He was the first to use Indian scouts and was crucial in ending the Apache Wars. Called Nantan Lupan (“the Tan Wolf”) by the Apache, he advocated for Apache rights while at the same time becoming one of Geronimo’s greatest adversaries. Crook negotiated Geronimo’s “surrender” at the Cañon de los Embudos. He died in 1890. Gatewood, Lieutenant Charles B.—born 1853. A latecomer to the Apache Wars, Gatewood used scouts but failed to bring in Victorio. However, Gatewood would ultimately negotiate the terms of Geronimo’s final surrender to General Nelson A. Miles in 1886. He died in 1896. Miles, General Nelson A.—born in 1839. Civil War veteran best known for accepting Geronimo’s final surrender. Fought Sioux and Cheyenne Indians after the Battle of Little Big Horn. He died at the age of eighty-five in 1925 and was buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Sieber, Al—born 1843. A German-American, he served as the army’s chief of scouts during the Apache Wars. Died in 1907.

Zeryth shifted back to me. It was amazing how quickly and seamlessly his expression changed, his hard-edged frustration melting away. “This is not yet public knowledge, but early this morning, we received some deeply upsetting news. Our Queen Sesri had to throw another traitorous noble family out of power. This was a Ryvenai one this time. Nearly two hundred soldiers and civilians were killed in the resulting skirmish.” Gods! Two hundred. “There were Wielders involved on both sides,” Nura added. “And it will only get worse from here,” Zeryth said. “There will be retaliations. And it has become clear that a much larger rebellion against Queen Sesri is—” “Civil war is an inevitability,” Nura cut in. “We stand on the precipice of a war that stands to be as deadly as

The primary reason why civilians are injured, and collateral damage consistently occurs during gun-related NIGGERtivity, is because NIGGERS aren’t interested in their level of shooting proficiency. In fact, while holding their weapons sideways to look “gangsta,” they shoot first, aim later. Reacting to news of two violent

Some of the terrorists Gregory tried to control decided to stay rogue. They didn’t want anything to do with a heathen from America and would not be told what to do, even if he did have a lot of money. One such group was known as Islamic Jihad, who began their campaign of terror during the Civil War in Lebanon. They began with the bombing of the French Embassy in Beirut, followed by the bombing of the United States Embassy a year later, and then the bombing of a barracks containing a multinational force of French paratroopers and American Marines. The group also went after civilians, assassinated the President of the American University in Beirut, and also attempted to assassinate the Kuwaiti ruler, but that failed. Eventually, their downfall came about when they tried to abduct Soviet diplomats, but the KGB came down hard on the group, which caused some other Middle Eastern countries to enter the fray. Eventually, Islamic Jihad merged with Hezbollah.

The scale of the cruelty and suffering and loss was beyond my comprehension. The most famous number, of course, was six million: the number of Jews killed by the Nazis as they implemented the madness of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” But tens of millions more had died, too—another forty million civilians, by some reckonings, and twenty-five million soldiers. Although some four hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were killed in three and a half years of fighting—a dreadful toll, to be sure—American losses represented only a tiny fraction of the war’s total. In China, the war dead totaled nearly four million soldiers and sixteen million civilians as Japan’s armies cut a deadly swath through China. The Soviet Union lost twenty million people as well, almost equally divided between soldiers and civilians, as the German army ground itself down in a prolonged and bloody eastern campaign. Seventy-two million deaths, by bombings, firestorms, massacres, diseases, starvation. How was it possible, I wondered, for so many people to die in such a short time without the very fabric of civilization collapsing? And

The kind of killing perpetrated by civilian vigilantes – often called the “hot repression” – tended to be what happened in the period immediately after rebels took control of a specific town or village.

In principle, rememberance of the War could be a way to probe these scars, many of which trailed back to the 1860's. But reenactments did precisely the opposite, blandly reconciling North and South in s grand spectacle that glorified battlefield valor and the stoicism of civilians.

this was a war waged predominantly upon civilians;5 moreover millions of them were killed not by invaders and strangers, but by their own compatriots, including their own neighbours.

vigilantes. What occurred was a massacre of civilians by other civilians.

described as a “reconquest”, it effected a mass limpieza, laying waste to civilian sectors opposed to the coup – in particular the rural landless – thereby also reversing by force of arms the Republic’s agrarian reform.

Franco’s coalition was driven by a very particular desire: that of both the colonial military elite and its civilian supporters to subject social change to court martial and restore their ideal of a static society.

public declarations were made by local civilian elites in the rebel zone – whether bosses of the fascist Falange or people associated with the mass Catholic party, CEDA, or monarchist landowners or businessmen or clerics. These were made independently of each other and of the military authorities. But they were remarkably similar. Their message was that Spain needed to be purged or purified.

The fascist Falangist or clerical Carlist militia and other volunteers of the right could at any time have been disciplined by the military authorities that underwrote public order from the beginning. Not only did this not happen, but instead the military actively recruited thousands of civilian vigilantes to carry out a dirty war.11

The military rebels and their civilian supporters were thus redefining “the enemy” as entire sectors of society that were perceived as “out of control

Civil-military relations in modern America are characterized more by paradox than by consistency: ordinary Americans support the military more than ever but know less about it than ever. In Washington, senior government policymakers simultaneously overestimate the military’s capabilities and mistrust the military leadership. The US military is widely viewed as the strongest military in the history of the world, but military leaders view conventional military tools as less and less useful for dealing with the complex security threats we face today. Meanwhile, although the military itself is more professional than ever, its internal structures—from recruiting, training, and education to personnel policies—lag badly behind those in most civilian workplaces, making it difficult for the military to change from within. These paradoxes both reflect and contribute to an underlying conundrum. In today’s world, where security challenges increasingly stem from nonstate actors, the cyber domain, the diffuse effects of climate change, and similar nontraditional sources, it is growing ever more difficult to clearly define the US military’s role and mission. We no longer have a coherent basis for distinguishing between war and “not war,” or between military force and other forms of coercion and manipulation. In such a context, we no longer know what kind of military we need, or how to draw sensible lines between civilian and military tasks and roles.

Widespread violence against civilians also demonstrated that the Spanish Civil War was, sadly enough, not a unique case in modern history: such terror has been a common component in many civil wars, including those in twentieth-century Russia, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Finland.

That legislation carved a huge exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, the Civil War–era law prohibiting the use of the military for civilian policing. It was followed by Reagan’s National Security Decision Directive, which declared drugs a threat to U.S. national security, and provided for yet more cooperation between local, state, and federal law enforcement. In the years that followed, Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton enthusiastically embraced the drug war and increased the transfer of military equipment, technology, and training to local law enforcement, contingent, of course, on the willingness of agencies to prioritize drug-law enforcement and concentrate resources on arrests for illegal drugs. The incentives program worked. Drug

Isaac, the black body servant of Colonel John Nisbet of the Sixty-sixth Georgia, joined his master in the breastworks from time to time to try his hand at shooting Yankees. Amos Rucker was technically a body servant in another Georgia regiment, but it was "well known that he was in the fights around Atlanta on several occasions". When Rucker died many years later, his former comrades-in-arms saw to it that he was laid to rest in the uniform of the Confederate States Army.

The Battle of Atlanta was an unusually confusing engagement for those who fought in it , with assaults coming from unexpected directions and the fortunes of battle changing directions from one moment to the next. Arkansas troops, pinned down in front of the Sixteenth Iowa's works, came in and surrendered, but before they could be moved to the rear other Confederate troops appeared from that very direction; the Iowans tried to put their prisoners between this new threat and themselves, but the Arkansans became belligerent and began to take up arms again. There was a period of total confusion; in the press an Iowa soldier asked an Arkansas which side was surrendering, and the Rebel answered with a laugh: "I'll be damned if I know". In the end it was the Sixteenth Iowa that went off in captivity.

War is Expensive (The Sonnet) War is expensive, peace is free, Yet war is petty, peace is priceless. War is childish, peace is for adults, Yet war is complex, peace is child's play. War is for fools, peace is for the sage, Yet sages sustain war, deeming peace foolish. War is strain on the brain, peace only needs love, Yet intellectuals justify war, calling peace rubbish. War is good for maintaining control over the people, Hence imperialists peddle war in the name of justice. But all imperialists are the fault of the civilians, All wars are a failure of our civilized citizenship. No war is tougher than the civilians of the world. Exercise that potential to abolish all imperial gall.

The Spanish Civil War was the first fought in Europe in which civilians became targets en masse, through bombing raids on big cities.

Whenever there is a breakdown in...stability, as has happened frequently in Pakistan, the military translates its potential into the will to dominate, and we have military intervention followed by military rule,’ states former army chief General Jehangir Karamat. ‘But,’ he states, ‘As far as the track record of the military as rulers in the past is concerned, I am afraid it is not much better than the civilians.

War is both intensely horrible and exquisitely pleasurable. It is horrible because of the danger and suffering that soldiers and civilians endure, and the unavoidable guilt that comes with killing. It is pleasurable because -like all pleasures- it is something that benefited our ancient ancestors who were victors in the bloddy struggle for resources.

Pro Government or Pro Human Rights (Earth Administrative Service, Sonnet 1304) Either pro government or pro human rights, A civilized human cannot be both. Doesn't mean you're always anti government, It means you pledge no one blanket support. Gaza has made it more evident than ever, No politician got the guts to rock the boat. When the chips are down and balloon goes up, Politicians hide behind the diplomacy door. World leeches masquerading as world leaders, Would sell their mothers if the price is right. Sheeply civilians don't do much to change things, So they seek comfort in snobbish arguments on AI. Dump all autocratic nonsense of law-abidance, Tell the right from wrong by conscience rule. If you want human rights to reign supreme, Wake up and be the world leader of your hood.

Israel claimed to have invaded Lebanon to root out the PLO, only withdrawing in 2000, and it was a central player in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. Between 1975 and 1990, an estimated 200,000 people were killed in the Lebanese civil war, with 17,000 more missing. “We arrested countless people [Palestinians] for no reason,” said Israeli Haim Rubovitch, who was then a junior case officer in the country and rose to become the internal security service Shin Bet’s number three.

The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 triggered a renewal of forces in Hawaiʻi. This happened again when the Empire of Japan waged an undeclared war against China in 1937. Signs of impending war with Japan were looming, and all sorts of pressures were building up to an eventual outbreak of conflict. Such pressures would be materially reflected in the lives of Hawaiians as well, including annual blackout drills and exercises for Hawaiian civilians in Honolulu. Civil defense units and outposts began to spring up in rural areas and surrounding military installations. Further, emergency disaster preparations began in 1940, with Honolulu women being tasked with surgical dressing and wound bandage production. There were also first-aid training sessions held by the local Red Cross. Honolulu saw the establishment of a blood bank, and the city’s Schofield Barracks would grow to become one of the largest US Army installations in the world, hosting and fielding over forty thousand troops by 1941. The primary objective of such a large force was to hold and defend Pearl Harbor and, by extension, Hawaiʻi from Japanese raiders and invaders. Incidents like the bombing of the SS President Hoover, the flagship Augusta, and the sinking of the USS Panay were strong indicators that Hawaiʻi was going to be sandwiched between two political and military bulldozers.

World First, Nation Never (Denationalizing Sonnet) No government wants to manufacture terror, But they do want to manufacture control. In doing so they end up manufacturing terror, Thus they end up manufacturing war. There is no such thing as war on terrorism, The whole narrative is rigged to peddle fear. Citizens without fear are citizens without border, Democratic autocracy thrives on civilian fear. Ceasefire only postpones war, What’s needed is demilitarization. Till borderly apes wake apart national pride, Democracy only sustains a paradigm of poison. World first and forever, nation never; Till then, all blood is on your hands. Either you are a nation’s simian citizen, or you are planet earth’s civilized human.

Topnut, DOD Sonnet Take a fancy celebrity, put them in military uniform, suddenly everybody is a patriot. That's how primitive this world is, everybody yells about world peace, while living in militarist gutter. The best propaganda is one that, does not feel like propaganda; Best way to legally recruit terrorists, is to portray terrorism as valor. Best way to sustain the revenues of war, is to showcase war as peace-intervention. Till you grow up and denounce all militarism, don't you dare call yourself a civilized human! We scientists, doctors, nurses and teachers, forget self-preservation for life-preservation, while primitive civilians of a primitive planet, throw all that away, hypnotized by patriotism.

At the height of the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), France found itself bankrupt, unable to rely on mercenaries and proxy forces, and in possession of a corrupt and moribund army. The government solved this problem through the creation of a modern civil service to administer the army, organize and regulate it, and better support it through regular management and logistics. The result, by the end of the seventeenth century, was the most powerful, professional, and advanced military in Europe.

To the noncombatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement; but to those who entered the meat grinder itself, the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines—service troops and civilians.

The Chinese government’s controversial policy of “Civil Military Fusion,” an effort to apply advanced civilian technology to military systems, looks like it’s working.

To the noncombatans and those on the periphery of action, the war meant boredom or occasional excitement; but to those in the meat grinder itself, the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines - service troops and civilians.

The Syrian civil war was raging at this time. When we faced the press in the prime minister’s residence, Obama was asked point-blank about reports that the Syrian government had possibly used chemical weapons against opponents of Assad’s regime a day earlier. “Is this a red line for you?” a journalist asked. “I have made clear that the use of chemical weapons is a game changer,”1 he said, a reaffirmed threat heard round the world. He had first drawn a red line on this issue a few months earlier in a White House statement. Would he make good on it if it were proven that chemical weapons were actually used in Syria? Time would tell. And it did. Five months later, Assad’s forces carried out a horrific chemical attack that killed 1,500 civilians. Obama called it “the worst chemical weapons attack of the twenty-first century.”2 The entire world was shocked by the footage of little children suffocating to death. All eyes were on Obama. He was scheduled to make a dramatic announcement. Minutes before going on-air, he called me. “Bibi,” he said, “I’ve decided to take action but I need to go to Congress first.” I was astonished. American law did not require such an appeal. Syria was not about to go to war with the United States but Congress was unlikely to approve military action anyway. I hid my disappointment and rebounded with an idea that Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz had raised earlier with Ron Dermer and me in the event that Obama wouldn’t attack. The Russian military was in Syria to shore up the Assad regime and protect Russian assets in Syria, such as the strategic Russian naval base in Latakia. That was a fact we could do little to change. But Putin shared with us and the United States a desire to prevent chemical weapons from falling into the hands of Islamic terrorists who posed a threat to Russia, too. “Why don’t you get the Russians with your approval to take out the chemical stockpiles from Syria?” I suggested to the president. “We would back that decision.” This is in fact what transpired in the coming months, though some materials for chemical weapons were still left in Syria. Yet, despite these positive results, the lingering effect of Obama’s last-minute turn to Congress was the impression that red lines can be crossed with impunity and that Obama would not employ America’s massive airpower even when the situation warranted it. I should have expected this. The second important and telling exchange between Obama and me during his visit to Israel happened in private, and gave me a heads-up on how he viewed the use of American power. The day after the intimate dinner at the prime minister’s residence we met at a King David Hotel suite overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem.

It was not thought too unusual during the 1973 war for the army to issue a booklet (with a preface by General Yona Efrati of the central command) written by the central command’s rabbi, Abraham Avidan, containing the following key passage: When our forces encounter civilians during the war or in the course of a pursuit or a raid, the encountered civilians may, and by Halachic standards even must be killed, whenever it cannot be ascertained that they are incapable of hitting us back. Under no circumstances should an Arab be trusted, even if he gives the impression of being civilized.32

Military is Legal Terrorism (Ceasefire Sonnet) Any planet that confuses guns with gallantry is a planet of apes. Prioritizing military over education, we only build a world full of terrorists. Military is just legal terrorism, To fathom this you gotta be human. What do monkeys know of peace and love, When guns are their emblem of patriotism! We don't need civilian disarmament, We need absolute universal disarmament. Only a worldwide ban on firearms production, Can facilitate a paradigm of peaceful coexistence. Let's see which nation has the heart and backbone, To legislate absolute ban on firearms manufacture! Let's see who are the first civilized people, Let's see which nation is the first peacemaker! What's the point of one ceasefire, Let's pull the plug on all war. Let's disband all military, and siphon those funds to housing, education and healthcare.

The police are the civilian side of the military that wage war on the general public.

I witnessed a pathetic incident, which is yet as fresh and vivid in my memory as if it had happened only yesterday. Soon after our arrival I procured a pass for a few hours, and took a stroll through the city. While thus engaged I met two hospital attendants carrying on a stretcher a wounded Union soldier. They halted as I approached, and rested the stretcher on the sidewalk. An old man was with them, apparently about sixty years old, of small stature and slight frame, and wearing the garb of a civilian. I stopped, and had a brief conversation with one of the stretcher-bearers. He told me that the soldier had been wounded in one of the recent assaults by the Union troops on the defenses of Vicksburg, and, with others of our wounded, had just arrived at Memphis on a hospital boat. That the old gentleman present was the father of the wounded boy, and having learned at his home in some northern State of his son being wounded, had started to Vicksburg to care for him; that the boat on which he was journeying had rounded in at the Memphis wharf next to the above mentioned hospital boat, and that he happened to see his son in the act of being carried ashore, and thereupon at once went to him, and was going with him to a hospital in the city. But the boy was dying, and that was the cause of the halt made by the stretcher-bearers. The soldier was quite young, seemingly not more than eighteen years old. He had an orange, which his father had given him, tightly gripped in his right hand, which was lying across his breast. But, poor boy! it was manifest that that orange would never be tasted by him, as the glaze of death was then gathering on his eyes, and he was in a semi-unconscious condition. And the poor old father was fluttering around the stretcher, in an aimless, distracted manner, wanting to do something to help his boy—but the time had come when nothing could be done. While thus occupied I heard him say in a low, broken voice, "He is—the only boy—I have." This was on one of the principal streets of the city, and the sidewalks were thronged with people, soldiers and civilians, rushing to and fro on their various errands,—and what was happening at this stretcher excited no attention beyond careless, passing glances. A common soldier was dying,—that was all, nothing but "a leaf in the storm." But for some reason or other the incident impressed me most sadly and painfully. I didn't wait for the end, but hurried away,—tried to forget the scene, but couldn't.

If war were purely and absolutely bad in every single aspect and toxic in all its effects, it would probably not happen as often as it does. But in addition to all the destruction and loss of life, war also inspires ancient human virtues of courage, loyalty, and selflessness that can be utterly intoxicating to the people who experience them. Ellis’s story is affecting because it demonstrates war’s ability to ennoble people rather than just debase them. The Iroquois Nation presumably understood the transformative power of war when they developed parallel systems of government that protected civilians from warriors and vice versa. Peacetime leaders, called sachems, were often chosen by women and had complete authority over the civil affairs of the tribe until war broke out. At that point war leaders took over, and their sole concern was the physical survival of the tribe. They were not concerned with justice or harmony or fairness, they were concerned only with defeating the enemy. If the enemy tried to negotiate an end to hostilities, however, it was the sachems, not the war leaders, who made the final decision.

Short story: The true and incredible tale of David Kirkpatrick, a Scottish ex-boy scout, and miner, serving in WW2 with 2nd Highland Light Infantry and the legendary elite corps 2nd SAS. A man who becomes a hero playing his bagpipe during a secret mission in Italy, March 1945, where he saved the lives of hundreds just playing during the attack. After he fought in North Africa, Greece, Albania, Sicily and being reported as an unruly soldier, (often drunk, insulting superiors and so on) in Tuscany, 23 march 1945 he joined as volunteer in the 2nd Special Air Service ( the British elite forces), for a secret mission behind enemy line in Italy. He parachuted in the Italian Apennines with his kilt on (so he becomes known as the 'mad piper' ) for a mission organized with British elite forces and an unruly group of Italian-Russian partisans (code name: 'Operation Tombola' organized from the British secret service SOE and 2nd SAS and the "Allied Battalion") against the Gothic Line german headquarter of the 51 German Mountains Corps in Albinea, Italy. The target of the anglo-partisan group's mission is to destroy the nazi HQ to prepare the big attack of the Allied Forces (US 5th Army, British 8th Army) to the German Gothic Line in North Italy at the beginning of April. It's the beginning of the liberation of Italy from the nazi fascist dictatorship. The Allied Battalion guided by major Roy Farran, captain Mike Lees Italian partisan Glauco Monducci, Gianni Ferrari, and the Russian Viktor Pirogov is an unruly brigade of great fighters of many nationalities. Among them also not just British, Italian, and Russian but also a dutch, a greek, one Austrian paratrooper who deserted the German Forces after has killed an SS, a german who deserted Hitler's Army being in love with an Italian taffeta's, two Jewish escaped from nazi reprisal and 3 Spanish anti-Franchise who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War and then joined first the French Foreign Legion and the British Elite Forces. The day before the attack, Kirkpatrick is secretly guested in a house of Italian farmers, and he donated his white silk parachute to a lady so she could create her wedding dress for the Wedding with his love: an Italian partisan. During the terrible attack in the night of 27th March 1945, the sound of his bagpipe marks the beginning of the fight and tricked the nazi, avoiding a terrible reprisal against the civilian population of the Italian village of Albinea, saving in this way the life of hundreds The German HQ based in two historical villa's is destroyed and in flames, several enemy soldiers are killed, during the attack, the bagpipe of David played for more than 30 minutes and let the german believe that the "British are here", not also Italian and Russian partisan (in war for Hitler' order: for partisans attack to german forces for every german killed nazi were executing 10 local civilians in terrible and barbarian reprisal). During the night the bagpipe of David is also hit after 30 minutes of the fight and, three British soldiers of 2nd SAS are killed in the action in one of the two Villa. The morning later when Germans bring their bodies to the Church of Albinea, don Alberto Ugolotti, the local priest notes in his diary: "Asked if they were organizing a reprisal against the civilian population, they answered that it was a "military attack" and there would.

The Iroquois Nation presumably understood the transformative power of war when they developed parallel systems of government that protected civilians from warriors and vice versa. Peacetime leaders, called sachems, were often chosen by women and had complete authority over the civil affairs of the tribe until war broke out. At that point war leaders took over, and their sole concern was the physical survival of the tribe. They were not concerned with justice or harmony or fairness, they were concerned only with defeating the enemy. If the enemy tried to negotiate an end to hostilities, however, it was the sachems, not the war leaders, who made the final decision. If the offer was accepted, the war leaders stepped down so that the sachems could resume leadership of the tribe.

In China there was a long tradition of subjugating the army to the civilian bureaucracy, so mandarins who had never held a sword often ran the wars. ‘You do not waste good iron to make nails,’ went a common Chinese saying, meaning that really talented people join the civil bureaucracy, not the army.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH for many years shall we suffered from a war in my motherland, now it’s time to say enough for five years of civil war in my motherland, enough for political instabilities. enough for ethnic discrimination. enough for corruption. enough for injustices. enough for tribalism. enough for unknown gunmen. enough for rape, torture and looting of civilian properties. enough for all these crimes. let’s give peace chance. let’s stand up for our country. lets stand up for democracy. lets stand up for equality. lets stand up for justices. let’s stand up for unity. let us stand up for love. lets stand for freedom. let freedom rings from all corns of the country. let us raise our flag with pride. let our flag waves in the air. its time for Education. its time for cultivation. its time for development. its time for togetherness. salute to Dr. John Garang. salute to all those who died for our freedom. salute to our heroes. salute to our fathers who died for the seek of our country. salute to our soldiers who fought for our freedom. let southerners be southerners again. let us get rid of all this our problems. I am proud to be a southerner. I am proud to be an African. I am proud to be black. I am proud to be born in Sudan and raise up in South Sudan as a South Sudanese. I am proud to raise our own flag for the world to see. because the time has come for us to raise the flag of our motherland under one nation one people and ultimately we say bye to War.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH for many years shall we suffered from a war in my motherland, now it’s time to say enough for five years of civil war in my motherland, enough for political instabilities. enough for ethnic discrimination. enough for corruption. enough for injustices. enough for tribalism. enough for unknown gunmen. enough for rape, torture and looting of civilian properties. enough for all these crimes. let’s give peace chance. let’s stand up for our country. let's stand up for democracy. let's stand up for equality. let's stand up for justices. let’s stand up for unity. let us stand up for love. let's stand for freedom. let freedom rings from all corns of the country. let us raise our flag with pride. let our flag waves in the air. its time for Education. its time for cultivation. its time for development. its time for togetherness. salute to Dr John Garang. salute to all those who died for our freedom. salute to our heroes. salute to our fathers who died for the seek of our country. salute to our soldiers who fought for our freedom. let southerners be southerners again. let us get rid of all this our problems. I am proud to be a south Sudanese. I am proud to be an African. I am proud to be black. I am proud to be born in Sudan and raise in South Sudan as a South Sudanese. I am proud to raise our flag for the world to see. because the time has come for us to raise the flag of our motherland under one nation one people and ultimately we say bye to War.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH for many years shall we suffered from a war in my motherland, now it’s time to say enough for five years of civil war in my motherland, enough for political instabilities. enough for ethnic discrimination. enough for corruption. enough for injustices. enough for tribalism. enough for unknown gunmen. enough for rape, torture and looting of civilian properties. enough for all these crimes. let’s give peace chance. let’s stand up for our country. let's stand up for democracy. let's stand up for equality. let's stand up for justices. let’s stand up for unity. let us stand up for love. let's stand for freedom. let freedom rings from all corns of the country. let us raise our flag with pride. let our flag waves in the air. its time for Education. its time for cultivation. its time for development. its time for togetherness. salute to Dr John Garang. salute to all those who died for our freedom. salute to our heroes. salute to our fathers who died for the seek of our country. salute to our soldiers who fought for our freedom. let southerners be southerners again. let us get rid of all this our problems. I am proud to be a south Sudanese. I am proud to be African. I am proud to be black. I am proud to be born in Sudan and raise in South Sudan as a South Sudanese. I am proud to raise our flag for the world to see. because the time has come for us to raise the flag of our motherland under one nation one people and ultimately we say bye to War.

Even before the first Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan in 1979, a movement of Islamists had sprung up nationwide in opposition to the Communist state. They were, at first, city-bound intellectuals, university students and professors with limited countryside appeal. But under unrelenting Soviet brutality they began to forge alliances with rural tribal leaders and clerics. The resulting Islamist insurgents—the mujahedeen—became proxies in a Cold War battle, with the Soviet Union on one side and the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia on the other. As the Soviets propped up the Afghan government, the CIA and other intelligence agencies funneled millions of dollars in aid to the mujahedeen, along with crate after crate of weaponry. In the process, traditional hierarchies came radically undone. When the Communists killed hundreds of tribal leaders and landlords, young men of more humble backgrounds used CIA money and arms to form a new warrior elite in their place. In the West, we would call such men “warlords.” In Afghanistan they are usually labeled “commanders.” Whatever the term, they represented a phenomenon previously unknown in Afghan history. Now, each valley and district had its own mujahedeen commanders, all fighting to free the country from Soviet rule but ultimately subservient to the CIA’s guns and money. The war revolutionized the very core of rural culture. With Afghan schools destroyed, millions of boys were instead educated across the border in Pakistani madrassas, or religious seminaries, where they were fed an extreme, violence-laden version of Islam. Looking to keep the war fueled, Washington—where the prevailing ethos was to bleed the Russians until the last Afghan—financed textbooks for schoolchildren in refugee camps festooned with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, swords, and overturned tanks. One edition declared: Jihad is a kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims.… If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim. An American text designed to teach children Farsi: Tey [is for] Tofang (rifle); Javed obtains rifles for the mujahedeen Jeem [is for] Jihad; Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. The cult of martyrdom, the veneration of jihad, the casting of music and cinema as sinful—once heard only from the pulpits of a few zealots—now became the common vocabulary of resistance nationwide. The US-backed mujahedeen branded those supporting the Communist government, or even simply refusing to pick sides, as “infidels,” and justified the killing of civilians by labeling them apostates. They waged assassination campaigns against professors and civil servants, bombed movie theaters, and kidnapped humanitarian workers. They sabotaged basic infrastructure and even razed schools and clinics. With foreign backing, the Afghan resistance eventually proved too much for the Russians. The last Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, leaving a battered nation, a tottering government that was Communist in name only, and a countryside in the sway of the commanders. For three long years following the withdrawal, the CIA kept the weapons and money flowing to the mujahedeen, while working to block any peace deal between them and the Soviet-funded government. The CIA and Pakistan’s spy agency pushed the rebels to shell Afghan cities still under government control, including a major assault on the eastern city of Jalalabad that flattened whole neighborhoods. As long as Soviet patronage continued though, the government withstood the onslaught. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, however, Moscow and Washington agreed to cease all aid to their respective proxies. Within months, the Afghan government crumbled. The question of who would fill the vacuum, who would build a new state, has not been fully resolved to this day.

Then there were the distorting effects that unremitting capitalist encirclement had upon the building of socialism. Throughout its entire seventy-three-year history of counterrevolutionary invasion, civil war, forced industrialization, Stalinist purges and deportations, Nazi conquest, cold war, and nuclear arms race, the Soviet Union did not know one day of peaceful development. In the attempt to maintain military parity with the United States, the Soviets took on crushing defense costs that seriously depleted their civilian economy. In addition, they faced monetary boycott, trade discrimination, and technological embargo from the West. The people who lived under communism endured chronic shortages, long lines, poor quality goods and services, and many other problems. They wanted a better life, and who could blame them? Without capitalist encirclement, they would have had a better chance of solving more of their internal problems.