Some thoughts for Inauguration Day 2005

"We will not walk in fear, one of another. We are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular. This is no time . . . to keep silent." - Edward R. Murrow

"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." ~~ Teddy Roosevelt

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children....This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 4/16/1953

"Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty." - George Washington in his Farewell Address of September 1796

War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them. . . .

Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.

"If any occupation lasts too long, or is not carefully watched from the start, one party becomes slaves and the other masters...History teaches, too, that almost every military occupation breeds new wars of the future." - Gen. Douglas MacArthur

"There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their neighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third is by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry. " - Benjamin Franklin

"Lead this people into war, and they'll forget there was ever such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of national life, infecting the Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street." - Woodrow Wilson

In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted." - President Dwight D. Eisenhower Farewell Address (1961)

''The creation of crimes after the commission of the fact . . . and the practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny'' -- Alexander Hamilton

"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it," said Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, a U.S. representative to the International Conference on Military Trials at the close of World War II. He added that "no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."

"A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility," said the president of the United States. "I don't believe there is such a thing, and frankly I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing." -- President Eisenhower

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."-- James Madison, Federalist Paper 47

"Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will (America's) heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. ... The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force." -- Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, 1821

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?" - Mahatma Gandhi, "Non-Violence in Peace and War"

"In war," Madison wrote, "the discretionary power of the Executive [President] is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war...and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

"Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion. " Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954

As Jefferson pointed out in a December 26, 1825 letter to William Giles, economic powers will always seek to gain political power and thus threaten to create "a single and splendid government of an aristocracy, founded on banking institutions, and moneyed incorporations under the guise and cloak of their favored branches of manufactures, commerce and navigation, riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry [working class]."

"All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be extended in this direction. " -- Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler,Volume One - A Reckoning , Chapter VI: War Propaganda

"Air bombardment is state terrorism, the terrorism of the rich. It has burned up and blasted apart more innocents in the past six decades than have all the anti-state terrorists who have ever lived. Something has benumbed our consciousness against this reality." - C. Douglas Lummis (political scientist and ex-marine )

"Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience," the Nuremberg tribunal stated. "Therefore, [individual citizens] have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring."

A 90-year-old man in Dubai offered this wisdom: "War is the violent rejection of words in favor of weapons. It eliminates debate and negotiation by offering only death and submission. War is the tool of weak men to make themselves appear strong."

During one of Adlai Stevenson's unsuccessful campaigns against Dwight Eisenhower, someone is said to have called out, "Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!"

"The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on them in slogans, until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand ... As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material." Hitler - Mein Kampf

"Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher," he wrote. "For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself." -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis

"We must drive the special interests out of politics. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being. There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains." - Teddy Roosevelt

"Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens." - William H. Beveridge, 1944

"There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community." Oscar Wilde

In this hour I would ask of the Lord God only this: that, as in the past, so in the years to come He would give His blessing to our work and our action, to our judgement and our resolution, that He will safeguard us from all false pride and from all cowardly servility, that He may grant us to find the straight path which His Providence has ordained for the German people, and that He may ever give us the courage to do the right, never to falter, never to yield before any violence, before any danger....

I am convinced that men who are created by God should live in accordance with the will of the Almighty.... If Providence had not guided us I could often never have found these dizzy paths....

Thus it is that we National Socialists, too, have in the depths of our hearts our faith. We cannot do otherwise: no man can fashion world-history or the history of peoples unless upon his purpose and his powers there rests the blessings of this Providence.

This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. Franklin Roosevelt

"Wretched excess always accompanies war fever -- in World War I, "patriots" used to go around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that they were "German dogs." As I have noted elsewhere, people like that do not go around kicking German shepherds." - Molly Ivins

"The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public. . .American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information. . . ,"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, the New York Times, April 9, 1944

"The United Nations is an imperfect institution that is a reflection of an imperfect world. Its purpose is not to lead us into an ascent to heaven but to prevent us from going into a descent to hell." -- Churchill

"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us." --Justice William O.Douglas

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." -- Harry S. Truman, 33rd president of the U.S.

Franklin Roosevelt, in his second Inaugural Address, told a rain-soaked crowd, "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

"The national government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life." Adolf Hitler's proclamation of his "New World Order" to the German nation in Berlin, on February 1, 1933

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." - H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)



	The Old Time Music & Dance Pages will return before the weekend. For those who are disappointed I have two short words for you. To read them CLICK HERE Some thoughts for Inauguration Day 2005 "We will not walk in fear, one of another. We are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular. This is no time . . . to keep silent." - Edward R. Murrow "The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." ~~ Teddy Roosevelt "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children....This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 4/16/1953 "Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty." - George Washington in his Farewell Address of September 1796 War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them. . . . Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war. --RICHARD M. NIXON, "REAL PEACE" (1983) "If any occupation lasts too long, or is not carefully watched from the start, one party becomes slaves and the other masters...History teaches, too, that almost every military occupation breeds new wars of the future." - Gen. Douglas MacArthur "There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their neighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third is by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry. " - Benjamin Franklin "Lead this people into war, and they'll forget there was ever such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of national life, infecting the Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street." - Woodrow Wilson "More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars." - President Franklin D. Roosevelt "The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted" -- James Madison -- "All wars are popular for the first 30 days." - Arthur Schlesinger In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted." - President Dwight D. Eisenhower Farewell Address (1961) ''The creation of crimes after the commission of the fact . . . and the practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny'' -- Alexander Hamilton "We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it," said Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, a U.S. representative to the International Conference on Military Trials at the close of World War II. He added that "no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy." "We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home." Edward R. Murrow "I don't know what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -- Albert Einstein "A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility," said the president of the United States. "I don't believe there is such a thing, and frankly I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing." -- President Eisenhower "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."-- James Madison, Federalist Paper 47 "Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man." - Thomas Paine "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will (America's) heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. ... The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force." -- Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, 1821 Satan rings up St. Peter and challenges heaven to a baseball game. "You've gotta be kidding," says Peter. We've got all the great baseball players. "You forget," replies Satan, "we've got all the umpires." "What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?" - Mahatma Gandhi, "Non-Violence in Peace and War" "In war," Madison wrote, "the discretionary power of the Executive [President] is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war...and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." "Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion. " Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954 As Jefferson pointed out in a December 26, 1825 letter to William Giles, economic powers will always seek to gain political power and thus threaten to create "a single and splendid government of an aristocracy, founded on banking institutions, and moneyed incorporations under the guise and cloak of their favored branches of manufactures, commerce and navigation, riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry [working class]." "All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be extended in this direction. " -- Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler,Volume One - A Reckoning , Chapter VI: War Propaganda "Air bombardment is state terrorism, the terrorism of the rich. It has burned up and blasted apart more innocents in the past six decades than have all the anti-state terrorists who have ever lived. Something has benumbed our consciousness against this reality." - C. Douglas Lummis (political scientist and ex-marine ) "Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience," the Nuremberg tribunal stated. "Therefore, [individual citizens] have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring." Groucho Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies. George Mason: When the same man, or set of men, holds the sword and the purse, there is an end of liberty. Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. - Thomas Jefferson Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. - William Pitt Great liars are also great magicians... How fortunate for leaders that men do not think. - Adolf Hitler "The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." - Plato "When even one American -- who has done nothing wrong -- is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril." ~ Harry Truman A 90-year-old man in Dubai offered this wisdom: "War is the violent rejection of words in favor of weapons. It eliminates debate and negotiation by offering only death and submission. War is the tool of weak men to make themselves appear strong." During one of Adlai Stevenson's unsuccessful campaigns against Dwight Eisenhower, someone is said to have called out, "Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!" Stevenson's memorable response: "That's not enough, madam. We need a majority." "The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on them in slogans, until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand ... As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material." Hitler - Mein Kampf "Any nation's attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible," Dwight D. Eisenhower The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them -- Einstein "In every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations." -- The Iroquois Confederacy "He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death." - Thomas Paine "The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." -- Marcus Aurelius "Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher," he wrote. "For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself." -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis "Know yourself. Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful." - Ann Landers "We must drive the special interests out of politics. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being. There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains." - Teddy Roosevelt "Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens." - William H. Beveridge, 1944 "There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community." Oscar Wilde In this hour I would ask of the Lord God only this: that, as in the past, so in the years to come He would give His blessing to our work and our action, to our judgement and our resolution, that He will safeguard us from all false pride and from all cowardly servility, that He may grant us to find the straight path which His Providence has ordained for the German people, and that He may ever give us the courage to do the right, never to falter, never to yield before any violence, before any danger.... I am convinced that men who are created by God should live in accordance with the will of the Almighty.... If Providence had not guided us I could often never have found these dizzy paths.... Thus it is that we National Socialists, too, have in the depths of our hearts our faith. We cannot do otherwise: no man can fashion world-history or the history of peoples unless upon his purpose and his powers there rests the blessings of this Providence. -Adolf Hitler, in a speech at Wurzburg on 27 June 1937 This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. Franklin Roosevelt "Wretched excess always accompanies war fever -- in World War I, "patriots" used to go around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that they were "German dogs." As I have noted elsewhere, people like that do not go around kicking German shepherds." - Molly Ivins "The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public. . .American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information. . . ,"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, the New York Times, April 9, 1944 "I hate war as only a soldier who lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity." Dwight D. Eisenhower "The United Nations is an imperfect institution that is a reflection of an imperfect world. Its purpose is not to lead us into an ascent to heaven but to prevent us from going into a descent to hell." -- Churchill "Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us." --Justice William O.Douglas "Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." -- Harry S. Truman, 33rd president of the U.S. "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." -- Milan Kundera "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities," Voltaire "A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive, will not long be safe companions to liberty," - James Madison Native American leader Powhatan, pleading with the white settler in the year 1607: "Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love?" Franklin Roosevelt, in his second Inaugural Address, told a rain-soaked crowd, "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." "The national government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life." Adolf Hitler's proclamation of his "New World Order" to the German nation in Berlin, on February 1, 1933 "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." - H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) "My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober." G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936) 'How can you say you love God, who you have not seen, if you do not love your brother and sister, who you have seen?'1 John - Revelation "Love thy neighbor as thyself." - God. "Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy." - Jesus.