Simply Politics & News

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With appreciation for (and apologies to) America's fallen patriots I pen these thoughts:

Memorial Day 2015
Have we "broken faith" with those who died in "Flanders Field"?
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
(WWI poem)



Memorial Day was originally a day set aside to memorialize fallen soldiers from America's "Civil War"
One has to have the highest respect for those who have died defending their family, community and country.
But it seems that all too often, politicians use war as a means to enrich themselves.
Even Soldier/President General Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that we should beware of the growing military/industrial complex.
Today Washington is awash with lobbyist's selling billion dollar weapons under the guise of "defense" as one area of the Middle East is taken over and then later surrendered, only to be repeated later.
Thus wars in that area have been called a "War for Oil".
To those fallen young men, and now women, I apologize.

Memorial Day was originally a day set aside to memorialize fallen soldiers from America's "Civil War".
We often hear the phrase "War for Oil" but a "War for Cotton"?
Yes, America's deadliest war was a "War for Cotton".
And it was actually not a civil war where one side attempts to take over a government, rather it was a war for succession from the northern United States, even as the Revolutionary War was a war for independence from Britain.
Both were really the result of oppressive taxation and a desire for freedom.
War is almost always about taking the wealth of others by using young men as slaves or cannon fodder to get wealthy (or resisting those oppressors).
See "The War for Cotton"