God On Our Side

Is God on the side of the US? This song is about overcoming the propaganda we all have been taught. 

A Coup?

Looking at what may happen in Greece, a coup is not out of the question. The same is true in Argentina. A million people apparently protested the government. Could the same be true in America? There have been several such threats in America’s history. Here is the Wikipedia summery of one such plot. 

The Business Plot was an alleged political conspiracy in 1933. Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler claimed that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans’ organization and use it in a coup d’état to overthrow United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Butler as leader of that organization. In 1934, Butler testified to the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Congressional committee (the “McCormack-Dickstein Committee”) on these claims. In the opinion of the committee, these allegations were credible. No one was prosecuted.

General Butler is one of my personal heroes and wrote one of my favorite books on war, War is a Racket. While I think there was a plot, its chance of success was not high and may not been much more than good ole boy wishful thinking. 

Could there be a coup in the US? I doubt it. But it must be admitted that some very strange things are going on with our military. General McCrystal, Afghan commander, was removed from command because of his obvious dislike of his ultimate commander President Obama that was revealed in a Rolling Stone article.

General Petraus (who replaced McCrystal), former head of the army in Iraq and now CIA director, was forced to resign over an affair. Petraus’ replacement, General Allen, is now in trouble and will be relieved as well as it appears that Allen’s  girlfriend and General Petraus’ girl friend were in a cat fight. It really sounds like many of our top generals are part of some bizarre sex club. 

Rear Admiral Gaouette was relieved of his command of the carrier attack group in the Middle East for “insubordination,” and General Ham, commander responsible for Libya, is mysteriously retiring. The rumors he was relieved are false. 

More strangeness: Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s chief assistant has strong ties to the Moslem Brotherhood. And Valerie Garrett was born in Iran. Garrett is the most important person in the Obama administration apart from Obama. (Garrett being born in Iran is not significant. Her father, a doctor, was in Iran to help Iran with medical issues. Both Garrett’s parents were Americans.)

Coincidence is a funny thing and does happen. That is all this may be, in fact that is the most likely explanation. I hope. 

Seven Days in May is an old movie about a potential coup of a ‘weak” anti-war president by a popular military leader. It is worth watching again for us “old folks,” and worth a look for those that may never have seen it. The whole movie seems to be available on YouTube. Here is part 1. 

Behold He Comes In Judgment

Fox News Sunk in GriefDo I want the disasters I perceive as coming to occur? I do not. While I usually try to avoid clichés like the plague, I’m still convinced that “the handwriting is on the wall,” “the die is cast,” “we have been rode hard and put away wet,” “in the long run we are all dead,” or whatever cliché one might wish to proclaim.

I was rereading Vox Day’s Return of the Great Depression and he quoted a Japanese poem written on the death of the God Emperor’s son over 1000 years ago:

     My Prince’s Palace
     Would for truly a thousand years
     Be glorious;
     So thought I,
     Now sunk in grief.

No, I do not look forward to this “return” of Jesus. But God is not mocked, what a nation sows, that it shall also reap. I too am sunk in grief.

Behold He Comes ...

Living by the Sword

As I wend toward my conclusion on the series where I note that the US is overdue for some divine retribution, or as one minister put it, “the chickens coming home to roost,” I thought I would talk about military spending. 

Romney has been surprising me lately with some of his statements. He has announced that he wants to increase defense spending to 4% of GDP, gross domestic product. What makes this statement surprising is that right now we spend 4.7%. Limiting defense spending to 4% actually makes a lot of sense, but this is another example of Romneyspeak. (We will leave Obamaspeak for another day.) What Romney has done is to ignore the part of our national defense that is spent in other departments—the Energy department pays for nuclear weapons, the CIA budget, and the Veterans department for example. In fact I would guess that if all the hidden parts of the defense budget were brought to the light and consolidated it would be more than 4.7% of GDP. 

Jesus said this about the sword in Matt 26:

^50-51 Jesus said, “Friend, why this charade?”

Then they came on him—grabbed him and roughed him up. One of those with Jesus pulled his sword and, taking a swing at the Chief Priest’s servant, cut off his ear.

^52-54 Jesus said, “Put your sword back where it belongs. All who use swords are destroyed by swords. Don’t you realize that I am able right now to call to my Father, and twelve companies—more, if I want them—of fighting angels would be here, battle-ready? But if I did that, how would the Scriptures come true that say this is the way it has to be?”

I have heard similar things said in seriousness. We need to be careful not to over-interpret what Jesus is saying here. Jesus was not a pacifist. There is a time and a place for self-defense at the individual, and yes, even the national level. What he said, based on the King James, has become a proverb for the English culture, “Those that live by the sword, die by the sword.” That is what Jesus was saying. 

If you are a Christian, do you agree with Jesus that those that live by the sword will die by the sword? If you do, then ask yourself, “Does the US live by the sword?” Look at the chart at the top of this blog post. No—meditate on it. Is 46% of all worldwide military expenditures an indication that the US does live by the sword? 

You might argue that it is needed to fight the Soviet menace. Oh wait, there is no Soviet menace. (If you want to understand why Romney is so bellicose against Russia, it is to justify the enormous defense spending he advocates. The Russian Federation cannot even control the Ukraine anymore!)  You might argue that the defense budget is needed to fight terrorists. How many aircraft carriers does al Qaida have? 

President Eisenhower said this in his farewell address: 

I suppose he could have been wrong. But looking at our situation today, it seems he could not have been more right. This is one reason why I refuse to vote for either Romney or Obama—they are both toadies of the “military industrial complex.” 

I ask you to meditate on what Jesus said. If the US lives by the sword, it will die by the sword. 

For those interested, here is the full Eisenhower speech. 

Just to Prove a Point

General Curtis LeMay was a controversial general who served during WWII and was important in the Cold War period as well. His life is an interesting read. I was too young to vote for him in 1968 when he was the American Independent Party vice-presidential running mate of George Wallace. But I did vote for that party in 1972 in my first election—voting for either Nixon or McGovern filled me with horror. (LeMay was not a candidate for that election.)

But LeMay should have filled me with horror. 

LeMay commanded subsequent B-29 Superfortress combat operations against Japan, including massive incendiary attacks on 64 Japanese cities. This included the fire-bombing of Tokyo on March 9–10, 1945, the most destructive bombing raid of the war. For this first attack, LeMay ordered the defensive guns removed from 325 B-29s, loaded each plane with Model E-46 incendiary clusters, magnesium bombs, white phosphorus bombs, and napalm, and ordered the bombers to fly in streams at 5,000 to 9,000 feet over Tokyo.

The first pathfinder airplanes arrived over Tokyo just after midnight on March 10. Following British bombing practice, they marked the target area with a flaming “X.” In a three-hour period, the main bombing force dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs, killing some 100,000 civilians, destroying 250,000 buildings and incinerating 16 square miles (41 km2) of the city. Aircrews at the tail end of the bomber stream reported that the stench of burned human flesh permeated the aircraft over the target.

Lemay was well known for his rather colorful statements over the years. Here are some of them from Brainy Quote: 

Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.

We should bomb Vietnam back into the stone age. 

Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.

Not exactly what you would call a man of peace. 

So you would expect that he was in favor of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to save millions of American lives. 

The war would have been over in two weeks. . . . The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.

As for what the bomb was for, you will have to continue reading. 

General Douglas MacArthur was the head of the Pacific front. What was his position? 

MacArthur’s views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed …. When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.  Norman Cousins Pathology of Power pg 56, 70-71.

(Note that all these quotes are from the Washington Blog’s much longer article on this subject. I highly recommend it. The number of generals, scientists (including Einstein) and members of the government that opposed the use of nuclear weapons was large.) 

My guess is that MacArthur was well known enough that what he thought would have been already known to the “powers that be.”  

The military head of the war in Europe was future president Dwight Eisenhower. He stated this is his memoirs, page 380. 

In [July] 1945… Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. …the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude….

Why then was the bomb dropped on two cities that had never been bombed because they lacked military targets of any importance? History.com tells us. 

In the years since the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, a number of historians have suggested that the weapons had a two-pronged objective …. It has been suggested that the second objective was to demonstrate the new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union. By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had deteriorated badly. The Potsdam Conference between U.S. President Harry S. Truman, Russian leader Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill (before being replaced by Clement Attlee) ended just four days before the bombing of Hiroshima. The meeting was marked by recriminations and suspicion between the Americans and Soviets. Russian armies were occupying most of Eastern Europe. Truman and many of his advisers hoped that the U.S. atomic monopoly might offer diplomatic leverage with the Soviets. In this fashion, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan can be seen as the first shot of the Cold War.

If you wonder why I think that America is headed down the wrong path, and has for generations, think on these bombs. 

Over 200,000 were killed, just to prove a point. 

In order to keep my reputation for whimsy here is a short scene from the first direct-to-video music/comedy show, Michael Nesmith’s (yes, he of Monkees fame) Elephant Parts. I actually have this DVD. I used to think the meme, “just to prove a point,” was funny. I am not laughing now.