WAR/HISTORY

Actually all of them are under construction aren't they? Ok never mind, but that looks neat doesn't it, the under construction sign?  I  think so, ok, go read about war and history.  Go on, yeah i know they're long, just read em, you might learn something.
 

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and will never be."

[talking about Okies]  What if sometime an army of them marches on the land as the Lombards did in Italy, as the Germans did on Gaul and the Turks did on Byzantium?  They were land-hungry, ill-armed hordes too, and the legions could not stop them.  Slaughter and terror did not stop them.  How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretches bellies of his children?  You can't scare him--he has know a fear beyond every other.
                                                ~GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck

And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact:  when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away.  And that companion fact:  when a majority of people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need.  And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history:  repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.  The great owners ignored the 3 cries of history.
                                                         ~Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

We'll start over.  But you can't start.  Only a baby can start.  You and me--why, we're all that's been.  The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that's us.  This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us.  We can't start again.  The bitterness we sold to the junk man--he got it alright, but we have it still.  And when the owner men told us to go, that's us; and when the tractor hit the house, that's us until we're dead.  To California or any other place--every one a drum major leading a parade of hurts, marching with our bitterness.  And some day--the armies of bitterness will all be going the same way.  And they'll all walk together, and there'll be a dead terror from it.

                                                    ~GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck

"The greatest things are begun with insignificant  acts...A smile begins a marriage, a loving act begets a tribe, a dream can alter history."
                                                                    -From A Time of Darkness by Sherryl Jordan

    "Mr. Wakatsuki, if I have to repeat each question we will be here forever.  Who do you want [to win World War 2, he is asking this to a Japanese-American]
    "When your father and mother are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other?  Or do you just want them to stop fighting?"
              ~Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston & James D. Houston

Yet neither did he entirley give up.  One of the amazing things about America is the way it can both undermine you and keep you believing in your own possibilities, pumping you with hope.
                ~Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston & James D. Houston

THE FOLLOWING QUOTES ARE FROM THE BOOK ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT BY ERICH MARIA REMARQUE, A BOOK SET IN WORLD WAR 1.  some are really long, but they really touched me.

    There were thousands of Kantoreks [one of their teachers who convinced them to go to war], all of whom were convinced that there was only one way of doing well, and that way was theirs.
    And that is just why they let us down so badly.
    For us lads of 18 they ought to have been mediators & guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress--to the future.  We often made fun of them & played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them.  The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a manlier wisdom.  But the first death we saw shattered this belief.  We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs.  They surpassed us only in phrases and cleverness.  The first bombardment showed us our mistake, & under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.
    While they continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and dying, while they taught that duty to one's country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death throes are stronger.
    But for all that we were no mutineers, no deserters, no cowards-they were very free with all these expressions.  We loved our country as much as they, we went courageously into every action; but we also distinguished the false from the true, we had suddenly learned to see.  And we saw there was nothing of their world left.  We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.

...we became hard, suspicous, pitiless, vicious, tough and that was good;  for these attributes had been entirely lacking in us...we did not break down, but endured;  our 20 years which had made many another thing so grievous helped us in this.  But by far the most important was that it awakened in us a strong, practical sense of espirit de corps, which in the field developed into the finest thing that arose out of the war, comradeship.

    He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance tickets and bands, like a bull fight.  Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the 2 countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves.  Whoever survives, his country wins.  That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangment, where the wrong people were doing the fighting.

Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades--words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.

    How long has it been?  Weeks, months, years?  Only days.  We see time pass in the colourless faces of the dying, we cram food into us, we run, we throw, we shoot, we kill, we lie about, we are feeble and spent, and nothing supports us but the knowledge that there are still feebler, still more spent, more helpless ones there who, with staring eyes, look upon us as Gods that escape death many times.
 

    He looks ghastly, yellow, and wan.  In his face there are already the strained lines that we know so well, we have seen them now hundreds of times.  they are not so much lines as marks.  Under the skin the life no longer pulses, it has already pressed out to the boundaries of the body.  Death is working through from within.  It already has command in the eyes.  Here lies our comrade...
 
 

    To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool.  Though I am in still water away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking me slowly, irresistably, inescapably into itself.
    From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us--mostly from the earth.  To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier.  When he presses himself down upon her long & powerfully, when he buries his face & his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother;  he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security;  she shelters him & gives him a new lease of 10 seconds of life, receives him again and often for ever...
 

    And if you give a man a little bit of authority...he behaves just the same way, he snaps at it too.  The things are precisely the same.  In himself man is essentially a beast, only he butters it over like a slice of bread witha little decorum.  The army is based on that;  one man must always have power over the other.  The mischief is merely that each one has too much power...Now I ask you:  Let a man be whatever you like in peace-time, what occupation is there in which he can behave like that witout getting a crack on the nose?