Why I Cannot Kill
By Rev.
April 25, 2005
Ever since I was a small boy, I have had no ability to comprehend why one man would or could kill another. I grew up with the Vietnam War. I watched the gruesome scenes every night alone on my thirteen inch black and white. I observed dozens, scores, hundreds, and eventually thousands of boys, not much older than I, lying on the ground only distinguishable by the tattered, blood soaked uniforms they wore.
Body counts were as common as weather reports. Although I never thought about it in 1968, my mind must have perceived some connection between the dead boys on the ground and the boys like me watching the TV. Who were these boys? Why were they dead? What will their family and friends think when they don’t come home? What was their last thought as they lay bleeding in pain, alone in a swamp on the other side of the world?
I can almost see through their eyes, hear through their ears, and think their thoughts. They don’t bother much me in times of peace, but whenever our government starts sending more boys and now girls off to some distant land to kill other people and be killed, they rise up and shout: Why are you sitting there? Why are you not doing anything to stop the killing? We need you to tell our brothers and sisters the truth about war!
I cannot help but feel a duty to allow them to live on through me in some way. Every last one of them is screaming: No more war, let me go home, I want to hug my mom, my wife, my girlfriend, my baby!
As long as I have a voice, I will proudly stand as an American, as a father, and as a man of peace. I will speak out for those boys who never had a chance to grow up and enjoy their full lives. Thankfully, I cannot kill because the part of me that could have been misled into thinking war was acceptable, was killed as I gazed at the motionless, blood covered bodies of boys just like me. This is exactly why the government and mass media no longer show us the reality of war on TV anymore.
I can’t bring them home, but I can tell my younger brothers and sisters to think long and hard about the truth and the reality of war, right now, before they march off to a sandy grave. My purpose here is not to convert, but to enlighten. Because “Being All That You Can Be” or becoming a “One Man Army” are great and twisted commercial advertising slogans designed for one reason. That reason is to attract young people with no real knowledge or information about war, politics, and economics and who have few visible choices for a good future in America to sign on the bottom line. Few kids from well off families think a second about joining the front-line, they think about which ivy league school and which fortune 500 company they will work for.
I have known several military men who had not seen death and destruction and had not felt a bullet. None have told a story of being “all they could have been.” Most told of a bloated, antiquated, and wasteful bureaucracy that could barely house, clothe, and feed them. I have known several military men that did feel a bullet; that did kill other people and even young children. I have known military men who knew and later watched those boys that I only saw laying on the ground on television actually get killed. None of these men told a story of “being all they could have been” or felling like a “One Man Army.” They only told a story of great sadness, disappointment, anger, frustration, guilt, and shame. Those who didn’t come back from their tour of duty have been silenced for eternity. What would they have to say about war if they could rise up and come back today?
Fortunately for me, the war ended when I was eighteen and only once when I was sixteen did I truly feel the fear of what my older brothers felt as they pondered their fate in the draft lottery. That was the day when the military came to my school and called all students who were eighteen and over to the office. I will never forget the face of the one boy in my class who stood up and the absolute silence as he walked out the door.
Over 57,000 of my brothers died and over 300,000 were wounded and untold millions were scarred mentally for life. If you didn’t live through that era, the only way to connect to the reality of it would be to visit the Vietnam Wall in Washington DC. If you go around sun down, the stored energy of grief held in that place is simply overwhelming. Then you too will hear and see the boys calling out for their loved ones.
We have but one life to live on this planet. Nobody has the right, neither by approval of their gods or their governments to take the one, non-replaceable life we have to live.
Bombing and killing Muslims will not cease the extremist’s hatred for America. It will only add fuel to their fires for countless generations. The root cause of this hatred is ignorance due to generations of misinformation, and the lack of the appropriate tools, resources, infrastructure, and education to build a better future. We are just as much a group of demons to be eliminated to some Muslims as they are to some Christians. Our destruction of an entire country’s infrastructure and the murder of over 100,000 Iraqi people is frankly much much much worse than the act of a nineteen Saudi Arabian madmen who managed to take down our a few office towers and a small section of the Pentagon.
The Saudi terrorists managed to kill 3,000 American’s, put a ripple in our world economy and induce fear in hundreds of millions of people. Now we are invoking World War III, at a cost of millions of our tax dollars per day. This is of course precisely what the Saudi terrorists, the defense industry, the reconstruction industry, and the oil industry wanted and we are giving it to them with the blood of our children.
If you wanted revenge, I think we have it. We have already killed thirty times the number of non-Americans and over 1,500 more of our own people. Unfortunately, we didn’t attack Saudi Arabia, the country that sent fifteen of the nineteen hi-jackers.
I grew up near the George Washington Bridge, I attended college classes in downtown Manhattan and I have enjoyed the view from the top of the World Trade Center several times. I have felt deep sadness for all the innocent people who have lost their lives and feel the grief of their loved ones. However, at no time did my mind focus on revenge or retaliation against the innocent people who happen to look like the suspected masterminds or who happened to temporarily reside in their country or region. In fact, the United States of America supported Osama Bin Laden as a Freedom Fighter against the Russians just a short time ago. Shouldn’t we be punishing ourselves for also being supporters of terrorism? The Islamic fanatics nearly took the Twin Towers down from the ground in 1993. Shouldn’t our leaders have been thinking they were going to try again?
The rapid deployment of our war machine against an unknown enemy almost seems well rehearsed. We have immediate backing of 99% our ever-disagreeing congress and a horribly skewed poll of 1,000 American’s that concludes 90% of over 200 million American adults agree we should immediately declare war and spend hundreds of billion of dollars to start it and keep it going.
As of this writing, we have sent over 1,500 American soldiers and scores of civilian’s to their deaths in Iraq and over 11,000 have been “officially” wounded. The long-term psychological and physical issues of having to kill, and to witness killings is never tabulated. In twenty years, those boys will be standing on corners looking for your spare change, holding signs that say: “Iraq Veteran, God Bless America.” You will think to yourself; “another drunk or drug addict is using the war, god and country as a way to sucker me out of a quarter.”
I could no more drive a bayonet through the heart of a misguided, undernourished, uneducated Arab than I could drive it though a loved family pet or my own child. Life is precious and sacred. No amount of patriotic propaganda, flag waiving, and statements of God Bless America can ever convince me to take up that bayonet against another man. Regardless of how much another man hates me or what I represent; no matter how many of my brothers tell me I am a coward or un-American; I could not take a life in the name of God or Country or economic prosperity. I believe the vast majority of American’s and human beings in general share this innate sense of maintaining peace with our fellow man.
I was raised to believe that all men are created equal and our Declaration of Independence clearly establishes that all American’s have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Taking up my bayonet against another man in a foreign county is in no way in alignment with these inalienable rights.
The first amendment of the Bill of Rights allows me to speak and publish what ever I think regardless of its popularity among the TV audience or the Politicians, the Theologians, the FBI, or the guys in the tavern on the corner. It is this Right that I test here and now. It is my deepest belief that most of my brothers agree with me in spirit, but fear what others may think of them should they voice a thought not first hatched by the corporate mass media, the church, the public school system, or the politician. Many are too confused by the propaganda and fearful of more terrorist attacks to stop and question what our leadership is doing.
Should hoards of barbarians invade our shores, I will raise my bayonet and take as many souls as my strength allows me. Until that day, please join me in taking a stand against war. This is America, I am a third generation American; I don’t want anymore of my young brothers to die for me, I want the soldiers to stay home and hug their mom’s, wives, and babies.
Don’t be afraid to speak up for peace and the fair and equitable treatment of all people in the global economy. Only together can we hold back the well-financed billionaire corporate warmongers around the world who cry out for more weapons of mass destruction and more contracts to rebuild the places they force us to destroy and die for in the name of freedom and democracy. As I write this the Asian Development Bank has concluded that funding pipelines in Afghanistan is now “viable and feasible.” This and Iraq’s vast oil reserves is what corporate America wanted all along and they paid their lobbyists and funded their supporters election funds to get exactly what they wanted. When will we wake up as a people and put a stop to this sickening manipulation of our citizens and soldiers?
By now you have formulated an opinion of my character as a person. If you label me a Pacifist, Socialist, Communist, or Anti-American; you have entirely missed my point and the point of the American Revolution, our Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. I am not a corporate public relations manager, a TV news producer, or political speech writer. I care nothing about left or right or Democrat or Republican. I am your brother, your neighbor, your coworker, and your fellow American. An American who knows freedom cannot exist in a society based on the overwhelming single source of controlled, filtered, and biased information we find on our TV sets.
Turn off the TV and mainstream radio, put down the major daily papers. Their messages are designed for maximum acceptance of their advertisers and owners. The elites need maximum division of the masses. Maximum division ensures confusion and distrust and allows the “enlightened few” to control the masses. Study the history of American and British involvement with Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Pakistan, Israel, and other Middle Eastern countries over the last 60 years. You will be amazed at the level of involvement of America and Great Britain in the structuring of the Middle East.
Did it ever dawn on you to wonder why so many people around the world hate “us” so much? Do you really think it has anything to do with our lifestyle or political and legal systems here at home? Have you ever lived in these other places?
Formulate your own deep questions and demand fact based logical answers. My fear is that many of my fellow American’s no longer has the capacity, the time, the energy, and the appropriate information sources to see clearly through the cloud of emotion based propaganda. I see only small groups of radicals trying in desperation to attract our attention. The vast majority of us are simply on auto-pilot, watching for the next corporate news report.
American government and global corporations have changed the signs on the doors of the Afghan and Iraqi capitols. Other small countries that happen to have some valuable natural resources or strategic geographical position will also fall by American force over time. The truth is that America is totally dependent on the whims of the Saudi Oil Sheiks. If the Saudi’s want to raise prices (which is now at an all time high), we have to pay or our economy will grind to a halt.
Instead of launching a full scale national emergency to develop alternate energy sources, we allow the oil industry billionaires to use our poor and minority children’s lives to secure some more crude reserves. Oil will inevitably run dry at some point between thirty and seventy years from now. If things continue to be managed they way they are today, our greedy leaders will hold off spending a penny on new energy until it’s too late and we will collapse into a long depression. This won’t matter to massive global conglomerates as they don’t depend on any one county. Maintaining our livelihoods and American way of life is of no special importance to globalists.
Terrorists are small groups of extremists who have been conditioned to believe that murder is necessary to gain attention to their causes. Terrorists have existed throughout history and will continue to exist for all time.
Armies are large groups of people who have been conditioned to believe that murder is necessary to advance the agenda of their national leaders. The agenda is never spelled out in detail for the soldier or the citizen. The only thing that matters is that we all follow the leader. If you want war, please report to the front line for duty and show us some real American moral and ethical behavior, anything less is clearly a sign of insincerity and reaffirms the power of the weapons of mass media over otherwise good, decent American people.
Don’t worry, people like me will disappear and TV land will take great care in formulating your opinions for you. I don’t let somebody else do my thinking and speaking for me, why do you let others do it for you?
“Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
The above comment was made to Gustave Gilbert by Hermann Goering, a high ranking Nazi officer, during his Nuremberg war crimes trial.
By Rev.
April 25, 2005
Ever since I was a small boy, I have had no ability to comprehend why one man would or could kill another. I grew up with the Vietnam War. I watched the gruesome scenes every night alone on my thirteen inch black and white. I observed dozens, scores, hundreds, and eventually thousands of boys, not much older than I, lying on the ground only distinguishable by the tattered, blood soaked uniforms they wore.
Body counts were as common as weather reports. Although I never thought about it in 1968, my mind must have perceived some connection between the dead boys on the ground and the boys like me watching the TV. Who were these boys? Why were they dead? What will their family and friends think when they don’t come home? What was their last thought as they lay bleeding in pain, alone in a swamp on the other side of the world?
I can almost see through their eyes, hear through their ears, and think their thoughts. They don’t bother much me in times of peace, but whenever our government starts sending more boys and now girls off to some distant land to kill other people and be killed, they rise up and shout: Why are you sitting there? Why are you not doing anything to stop the killing? We need you to tell our brothers and sisters the truth about war!
I cannot help but feel a duty to allow them to live on through me in some way. Every last one of them is screaming: No more war, let me go home, I want to hug my mom, my wife, my girlfriend, my baby!
As long as I have a voice, I will proudly stand as an American, as a father, and as a man of peace. I will speak out for those boys who never had a chance to grow up and enjoy their full lives. Thankfully, I cannot kill because the part of me that could have been misled into thinking war was acceptable, was killed as I gazed at the motionless, blood covered bodies of boys just like me. This is exactly why the government and mass media no longer show us the reality of war on TV anymore.
I can’t bring them home, but I can tell my younger brothers and sisters to think long and hard about the truth and the reality of war, right now, before they march off to a sandy grave. My purpose here is not to convert, but to enlighten. Because “Being All That You Can Be” or becoming a “One Man Army” are great and twisted commercial advertising slogans designed for one reason. That reason is to attract young people with no real knowledge or information about war, politics, and economics and who have few visible choices for a good future in America to sign on the bottom line. Few kids from well off families think a second about joining the front-line, they think about which ivy league school and which fortune 500 company they will work for.
I have known several military men who had not seen death and destruction and had not felt a bullet. None have told a story of being “all they could have been.” Most told of a bloated, antiquated, and wasteful bureaucracy that could barely house, clothe, and feed them. I have known several military men that did feel a bullet; that did kill other people and even young children. I have known military men who knew and later watched those boys that I only saw laying on the ground on television actually get killed. None of these men told a story of “being all they could have been” or felling like a “One Man Army.” They only told a story of great sadness, disappointment, anger, frustration, guilt, and shame. Those who didn’t come back from their tour of duty have been silenced for eternity. What would they have to say about war if they could rise up and come back today?
Fortunately for me, the war ended when I was eighteen and only once when I was sixteen did I truly feel the fear of what my older brothers felt as they pondered their fate in the draft lottery. That was the day when the military came to my school and called all students who were eighteen and over to the office. I will never forget the face of the one boy in my class who stood up and the absolute silence as he walked out the door.
Over 57,000 of my brothers died and over 300,000 were wounded and untold millions were scarred mentally for life. If you didn’t live through that era, the only way to connect to the reality of it would be to visit the Vietnam Wall in Washington DC. If you go around sun down, the stored energy of grief held in that place is simply overwhelming. Then you too will hear and see the boys calling out for their loved ones.
We have but one life to live on this planet. Nobody has the right, neither by approval of their gods or their governments to take the one, non-replaceable life we have to live.
Bombing and killing Muslims will not cease the extremist’s hatred for America. It will only add fuel to their fires for countless generations. The root cause of this hatred is ignorance due to generations of misinformation, and the lack of the appropriate tools, resources, infrastructure, and education to build a better future. We are just as much a group of demons to be eliminated to some Muslims as they are to some Christians. Our destruction of an entire country’s infrastructure and the murder of over 100,000 Iraqi people is frankly much much much worse than the act of a nineteen Saudi Arabian madmen who managed to take down our a few office towers and a small section of the Pentagon.
The Saudi terrorists managed to kill 3,000 American’s, put a ripple in our world economy and induce fear in hundreds of millions of people. Now we are invoking World War III, at a cost of millions of our tax dollars per day. This is of course precisely what the Saudi terrorists, the defense industry, the reconstruction industry, and the oil industry wanted and we are giving it to them with the blood of our children.
If you wanted revenge, I think we have it. We have already killed thirty times the number of non-Americans and over 1,500 more of our own people. Unfortunately, we didn’t attack Saudi Arabia, the country that sent fifteen of the nineteen hi-jackers.
I grew up near the George Washington Bridge, I attended college classes in downtown Manhattan and I have enjoyed the view from the top of the World Trade Center several times. I have felt deep sadness for all the innocent people who have lost their lives and feel the grief of their loved ones. However, at no time did my mind focus on revenge or retaliation against the innocent people who happen to look like the suspected masterminds or who happened to temporarily reside in their country or region. In fact, the United States of America supported Osama Bin Laden as a Freedom Fighter against the Russians just a short time ago. Shouldn’t we be punishing ourselves for also being supporters of terrorism? The Islamic fanatics nearly took the Twin Towers down from the ground in 1993. Shouldn’t our leaders have been thinking they were going to try again?
The rapid deployment of our war machine against an unknown enemy almost seems well rehearsed. We have immediate backing of 99% our ever-disagreeing congress and a horribly skewed poll of 1,000 American’s that concludes 90% of over 200 million American adults agree we should immediately declare war and spend hundreds of billion of dollars to start it and keep it going.
As of this writing, we have sent over 1,500 American soldiers and scores of civilian’s to their deaths in Iraq and over 11,000 have been “officially” wounded. The long-term psychological and physical issues of having to kill, and to witness killings is never tabulated. In twenty years, those boys will be standing on corners looking for your spare change, holding signs that say: “Iraq Veteran, God Bless America.” You will think to yourself; “another drunk or drug addict is using the war, god and country as a way to sucker me out of a quarter.”
I could no more drive a bayonet through the heart of a misguided, undernourished, uneducated Arab than I could drive it though a loved family pet or my own child. Life is precious and sacred. No amount of patriotic propaganda, flag waiving, and statements of God Bless America can ever convince me to take up that bayonet against another man. Regardless of how much another man hates me or what I represent; no matter how many of my brothers tell me I am a coward or un-American; I could not take a life in the name of God or Country or economic prosperity. I believe the vast majority of American’s and human beings in general share this innate sense of maintaining peace with our fellow man.
I was raised to believe that all men are created equal and our Declaration of Independence clearly establishes that all American’s have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Taking up my bayonet against another man in a foreign county is in no way in alignment with these inalienable rights.
The first amendment of the Bill of Rights allows me to speak and publish what ever I think regardless of its popularity among the TV audience or the Politicians, the Theologians, the FBI, or the guys in the tavern on the corner. It is this Right that I test here and now. It is my deepest belief that most of my brothers agree with me in spirit, but fear what others may think of them should they voice a thought not first hatched by the corporate mass media, the church, the public school system, or the politician. Many are too confused by the propaganda and fearful of more terrorist attacks to stop and question what our leadership is doing.
Should hoards of barbarians invade our shores, I will raise my bayonet and take as many souls as my strength allows me. Until that day, please join me in taking a stand against war. This is America, I am a third generation American; I don’t want anymore of my young brothers to die for me, I want the soldiers to stay home and hug their mom’s, wives, and babies.
Don’t be afraid to speak up for peace and the fair and equitable treatment of all people in the global economy. Only together can we hold back the well-financed billionaire corporate warmongers around the world who cry out for more weapons of mass destruction and more contracts to rebuild the places they force us to destroy and die for in the name of freedom and democracy. As I write this the Asian Development Bank has concluded that funding pipelines in Afghanistan is now “viable and feasible.” This and Iraq’s vast oil reserves is what corporate America wanted all along and they paid their lobbyists and funded their supporters election funds to get exactly what they wanted. When will we wake up as a people and put a stop to this sickening manipulation of our citizens and soldiers?
By now you have formulated an opinion of my character as a person. If you label me a Pacifist, Socialist, Communist, or Anti-American; you have entirely missed my point and the point of the American Revolution, our Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. I am not a corporate public relations manager, a TV news producer, or political speech writer. I care nothing about left or right or Democrat or Republican. I am your brother, your neighbor, your coworker, and your fellow American. An American who knows freedom cannot exist in a society based on the overwhelming single source of controlled, filtered, and biased information we find on our TV sets.
Turn off the TV and mainstream radio, put down the major daily papers. Their messages are designed for maximum acceptance of their advertisers and owners. The elites need maximum division of the masses. Maximum division ensures confusion and distrust and allows the “enlightened few” to control the masses. Study the history of American and British involvement with Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Pakistan, Israel, and other Middle Eastern countries over the last 60 years. You will be amazed at the level of involvement of America and Great Britain in the structuring of the Middle East.
Did it ever dawn on you to wonder why so many people around the world hate “us” so much? Do you really think it has anything to do with our lifestyle or political and legal systems here at home? Have you ever lived in these other places?
Formulate your own deep questions and demand fact based logical answers. My fear is that many of my fellow American’s no longer has the capacity, the time, the energy, and the appropriate information sources to see clearly through the cloud of emotion based propaganda. I see only small groups of radicals trying in desperation to attract our attention. The vast majority of us are simply on auto-pilot, watching for the next corporate news report.
American government and global corporations have changed the signs on the doors of the Afghan and Iraqi capitols. Other small countries that happen to have some valuable natural resources or strategic geographical position will also fall by American force over time. The truth is that America is totally dependent on the whims of the Saudi Oil Sheiks. If the Saudi’s want to raise prices (which is now at an all time high), we have to pay or our economy will grind to a halt.
Instead of launching a full scale national emergency to develop alternate energy sources, we allow the oil industry billionaires to use our poor and minority children’s lives to secure some more crude reserves. Oil will inevitably run dry at some point between thirty and seventy years from now. If things continue to be managed they way they are today, our greedy leaders will hold off spending a penny on new energy until it’s too late and we will collapse into a long depression. This won’t matter to massive global conglomerates as they don’t depend on any one county. Maintaining our livelihoods and American way of life is of no special importance to globalists.
Terrorists are small groups of extremists who have been conditioned to believe that murder is necessary to gain attention to their causes. Terrorists have existed throughout history and will continue to exist for all time.
Armies are large groups of people who have been conditioned to believe that murder is necessary to advance the agenda of their national leaders. The agenda is never spelled out in detail for the soldier or the citizen. The only thing that matters is that we all follow the leader. If you want war, please report to the front line for duty and show us some real American moral and ethical behavior, anything less is clearly a sign of insincerity and reaffirms the power of the weapons of mass media over otherwise good, decent American people.
Don’t worry, people like me will disappear and TV land will take great care in formulating your opinions for you. I don’t let somebody else do my thinking and speaking for me, why do you let others do it for you?
“Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
The above comment was made to Gustave Gilbert by Hermann Goering, a high ranking Nazi officer, during his Nuremberg war crimes trial.
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