“To those who have called me a coward I say that they are
wrong, and that without knowing it, they are also right. They are wrong when
they think that I left the war for fear of being killed. I admit that fear was
there, but there was also the fear of killing innocent people, the fear of putting
myself in a position where to survive means to kill, there was the fear of
losing my soul in the process of saving my body, the fear of losing myself to
my daughter, to the people who love me, to the man I used to be, the man I
wanted to be. I was afraid of waking up one morning to realize my humanity had
abandoned me.” - Sgt. Camilo Mejia, who served one year in prison for refusing
to return to fight in Iraq.
He was released from prison Feb. 15, 2005.
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the
ceremony of innocence is drowned.” ~ William Butler Yeats
“We have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. Our minimal expectation is
to occupy it as an American colony and maintain social stability for our
investments. This tells why American helicopters are being used against
guerrillas in Colombia and Peru.
Increasingly the role our nation has taken is the role of those who refuse to
give up the privileges and pleasures that come from the immense profits of
overseas investment.” - Martin Luther King, Jr. from ‘A Time to Break the
Silence’ speech given at Riverside Church New York City on April 4, 1967.
“Strike against war, for without you no battles can be
fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools
of murder! Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions
of human beings! Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be
heroes in an army of construction!” ~ Helen Keller - Source: Told to an
audience at Carnegie Hall one year before the United States entered World War I.
“The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be
continuous.” ~ George Orwell.
Following the Holocaust, the International Military Tribunal
at Nuremberg called the waging of aggressive war “essentially an evil thing . .
. to initiate a war of aggression . . . is not only an international crime; it
is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that
it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” ~ Marjorie Cohn
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