You can find the following article, written by Steve Young for the the Argus Leader, at: http://www.argusleader.com/article/20100117/NEWS,1170325/1001/news. The article highlights how American Greg Mortenson was able to win the trust of villagers in remote parts of northeast Aganistan and northwest Pakistan, and, with donations from individuals and groups in the US, to build schools for children and youth, with special attention to increasing educational opportunities for girls. It is a remarkable story. And, above all else, it humanizes Afghan and Pakistan villagers. In the last analysis, they are basically like us, though, as a result of historical and geographical circumstances, with far fewer opportunities. In this story the villagers are not the passive recipients of government or international aid; rather, they are active in all vital decisions and in providing their skills and labor for the school and other projects. The work of Greg Mortenson provides examples of how there are peaceful alternatives to military interventions.
There is a caveat that comes to mind. The success of Greg Mortenson and the villagers with whom he worked, may be unusual in some ways. In these villages, there were respected elders, and then the villages as a whole, who came to trust Mortenson. This was a key factor. It may not be so easy to achieve these accomplishments in villages and areas that are already dominated by warlords or fundamentalist Taliban. Time will tell. What is clear, though, is that Mortenson has proven to be an inspiration for those who want, and believe in, peaceful change.
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Greg Mortenson left USD dreaming of the world’s tallest mountains and found his calling in education
Greg Mortenson’s advice is sought by world leaders, America’s top generals and the warriors trekking over from South Dakota as National Guardsmen to fight al-Qaida and the Taliban.
Few other Americans can offer his unique perspectives on one of Earth’s most volatile regions. The University of South Dakota graduate has twice been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and has just released his second book, “Stones into Schools.” The book, like his earlier one, “Three Cups of Tea,” is a best-seller on the New York Times book list.
The struggle in Afghanistan, Mortenson says, isn’t about flexing America’s military might.
It’s about listening, he says, about teaching and, when asked, about extending a helping hand. Sixteen years of building schools and relationships in the most desolate reaches of Afghanistan and Pakistan have taught him that. And now many in positions of influence across America are starting to see it, too.
“He has a very innate knowledge of the culture from being exposed to it for so many years,” Capt. John Kirby, spokesman for Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said by phone from Washington, D.C. “We have come to learn from Greg just how important things like education and literacy are. It has helped shape how we do our jobs.”
And this from Yankton native Tom Brokaw, the former news anchor for NBC: “You’re not going to win this war in the barrel of a gun. A lot of what we have to do in Afghanistan, and have been doing, involves efforts of people like Greg.
“He knows the culture. He knows that when you go out into the villages, it’s not 19th century, it’s 17th century. So the idea then that you can have education and a little bit of hope is an important component if we’re ever going to move forward in that part of the world. That’s why I think he is an important voice for people to hear.”
Mortenson’s voice has reached millions worldwide through his books, which chronicle his work in Central Asia.
It has found an audience in places such as Sioux Falls as well, where children at Hawthorne, Eugene Field, Discovery and other elementary schools have collected thousands of coins together with students at Augustana College to help build Mortenson’s schools through his “Pennies for Peace” program.
The effort at Hawthorne, which raised $1,200, particularly connected with Mortenson when he visited there in fall 2008, because more than 80 percent of its diverse student population comes out of poverty. “I visit lots of schools,” he said. “And Hawthorne was one of the most inspired, determined bunch of kids that wanted to help other kids. That really struck me.”
How Mortenson got the idea
Mortenson’s own decision to improve education and literacy in Central Asia was born of a chance encounter with a village in Pakistan in 1993.
At the time, he had a sister, Christa, who was an epileptic. She died of a massive seizure in July 1992, on the eve of a trip to visit Dyersville, Iowa, where the movie “Field of Dreams” was filmed in a cornfield. To honor her memory, Mortenson, an avid climber, resolved to take an amber necklace of Christa’s to the summit of Pakistan’s K2, the second-highest mountain on earth.
“It’s a mountaineer’s mountain, one of the most dangerous,” Mortenson, 52, explained. “I thought it would be an awesome thing … to dedicate that climb to my sister.”
Just a few years removed from his days in the halls at USD, working as an orderly at Dakota Hospital in Vermillion and, soon after, in health care at Deadwood and Rapid City, Mortenson spent 78 days on the mountain before the rigors stopped him 2,000 feet beneath the 28,261-foot peak.
He stayed behind as two friends tried for the summit. He would be their safety net if they needed help down the mountain. “I probably could have made it,” Mortenson said. “In my mind, I could have made it and died, and it would have been perfectly fine.”
But after weeks above 16,000 feet, oxygen deprived and their bodies struggling against the high altitude, Mortenson and his friends headed down the mountain. He stopped in his descent in a little village, Korphe, to recover from his emaciation and exhaustion.
During his 10-day recovery, he met a little girl, Cho Cho, 9 years old and handicapped. He watched her writing with a stick in the dirt, along with the other children of the village. They had no classrooms, and their teacher was gone half the week because they couldn’t afford his daily $1 salary.
So to repay the villagers’ kindness to him – and because of the resolve of Cho Cho, like his sister, to persevere despite her disability – Mortenson promised to return one day and build them a school.
Back in America, he wrote letters to 580 celebrities, asking for help in building the school. He got one response, a $100 check from Brokaw.
“My daughter has always said, ‘It’s outrageous that you get credit just because of that $100,’ ” Brokaw said, chuckling. “I can’t remember exactly if I’d been given a heads-up about Greg. We have a couple of mutual friends. He was a climber and had Midwestern roots. I thought it was a good idea.”
In 1994, Mortenson founded Pennies for Peace, engaging schoolchildren to donate their spare change to help pay for his first school. The children responded with 62,400 pennies.Village gives the land and the labor
Since then, through his Montana-based Central Asia Institute he co-founded, Mortenson has built or established 49 schools in Afghanistan and 82 schools in Pakistan, mainly for girls. His budget has grown to $3.5 million annually, funded 94 percent through private donations, such as Pennies for Peace, and the other 6 percent through corporations and foundations. He relies on a group he calls “the Dirty Dozen” to oversee his school building and management efforts.
It costs about $50,000 to establish a school, Mortenson said. Roughly $15,000 to $25,000 pays for the brick and mortar, supplies and furniture. Then there’s teacher training and support. The village then must provide land and labor.
“If they want a school in their village, that providing of land and labor ensures the buy-in,” Mortenson said. “That’s one of the reasons the Taliban haven’t destroyed any of our schools. The community has such a fierce support for the school.”
That’s important to note, Mortenson said, when you consider that the Taliban have bombed, destroyed or shut down more than 1,000 schools in Afghanistan and over 850 schools in Pakistan, 90 percent of which were girls schools.
The Taliban fears education, especially for young girls, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in a July 2009 New York Times piece on Mortenson. The war on terror is really a war of ideas within Islam, Friedman wrote. On the one side are the religious zealots who glorify martyrdom, who want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, and who want to keep women disempowered.
On the other side are those who embrace modernity, who want to open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men, Friedman said.Educated women can destroy the Taliban
Mortenson has come to understand that very well. He has seen that when girls are educated, health improves, infant mortality drops and overpopulation falls.
Since the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan’s education system has changed dramatically, with far more girls now being educated. In 2000, when the Taliban was in power and education for girls was discouraged, there were 800,000 schoolchildren in Afghanistan, almost all of them boys. Today, he said, there are 8.4 million students in school, and 2.5 million of them are girls.
When those girls learn to read and write, their mothers very carefully unfold the newspapers used to wrap meat and vegetables in the market and ask their daughters to read the news to them, Mortenson said.
“To finally hear the news, those mothers can get involved in political issues, or can understand about exploitation of women,” he said.
When women are educated, they are less likely to encourage their sons to get into the Taliban or extremist groups, he said.
“The Taliban, their primary recruiting ground is illiterate, impoverished society,” Mortenson said. “Most educated women will refuse to allow their sons to join the Taliban.”
That’s the message he has shared with Mullen and other military leaders, such as Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and Gen. David Petraeus, former commander in Iraq.
Kirby, the spokesman for Mullen, said Mortenson’s book, “Three Cups of Tea,” is required reading for the Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., and encouraged for other units. As part of his work, Mortenson often briefs military units.
“We have come to realize over the course of these last eight years that we in the military can’t do it alone,” Kirby said. “In fact, what we have come to appreciate is that we shouldn’t try to do it all alone. There are certain things other people are more proficient at. Greg has helped us see that.”
The inroads are made, Mortenson said, when America builds relationships with village elders in Afghanistan – people he calls “shura” – who have risen in their communities to positions of respect and leadership.
“We have to put the elders back in charge,” he said. “And we must learn that we have to talk with and get to know each other before decisions are made.
“The elders tell me, their No. 1 complaint is, ‘Don’t bomb and kill our civilians.’ If there is any way we antagonize people, it’s when we bomb or kill civilians. The shura say, ‘If you don’t like someone, we’ll go and kill them ourselves.’ ”
For his 16 years of building schools and peace in Central Asia, Mortenson has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008 and 2009. Last year, he received Pakistan’s highest civil award, the Sitarae-Pakistan, or “Star of Pakistan.”
That comes as no surprise to those back in South Dakota and the Midwest who know him.
Brookings native Don Birkeland, a retired organizational psychologist, said Mortenson’s mother, Jerene, tells about 2-year-old Greg when the family was living in Tanzania and doing missionary work.
“She would look out her window, and there was Greg with the cookie jar, sharing it with a beggar,” Birkeland said.
That image of giving to the less fortunate resonated with her schoolchildren, said Cheryl Larson, principal at Hawthorne Elementary.
“Greg brought a great lesson to our children, that they could sense the value of their education, could sense the value of peace, and could learn the value of making a difference no matter how small we are,” Larson said. “We can still contribute and make a positive contribution to the global community. That’s what he showed us.”
Mortenson connects with the college crowds as well, said Julie Ashworth, an education professor at Augustana. In reading his books, her students learn that he struggled in college – first at Concordia College and later at USD – both with his studies and what he wanted to be.
“In that way, he’s not so different from many of them,” Ashworth said of her students. “But like him, they can choose to lead if they so choose. I think his is such a remarkable story of an ordinary person doing extraordinary things.”
It’s not so difficult, Mortenson said. That’s what he would tell the more than 300 South Dakota National Guardsmen in Afghanistan today with the 211th Engineer Co. of De Smet and Madison, and the 196th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade of Sioux Falls.
That’s what he would tell those who haven’t left yet, either.
“To those from South Dakota or anywhere, I would say the same thing,” he said. “Listen to the elders when you get there. Be a teacher. Lend a hand when it’s asked for. That’s how we’ll win this war.”
Reach reporter Steve Young at 331-2306.
Showing posts with label Greg Mortenson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greg Mortenson. Show all posts
Monday, April 26, 2010
Friday, April 23, 2010
Quotes about war and alternatives
The following quotes about war are from http://www.quotegarden.com/war.html There are other lists of quotes at this website. The quotes about war overwhelmingly reflect the ugly side of our species. There are quotes about the injuries and deaths of war, the disproportionate number of civilians that are the casualties of war, the sheer waste of war, the irrationality of war, the inevitable damnable consequences of war for everything in its wake, the rationalizations of generals after they have led soldiers into war, but who grasp in some belated sense its horror.
Chris Hedges finishes his book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, with these words:
"To survive as a human being is possible only through love. And, when Thanatos is ascendant, the instinct must be to reach out to those we love, to see in them all the divinity, pity, and pathos of the human. And to recognize love in the lives of others - even those with whom we are in conflict - love that is like our own. It does not mean we will avoid war or death. It does not mean that we as distinct individuals will survive. But love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures. It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love has power both to resist, and to affirm what we know we must affirm. And love, as the poets remind us, is etneral" (pp. 184-185).
All of the quotes and comments in this post have application to the specific US-led occupation in Afghanistan. They suggest that much more could be accomplished through peaceful and negotiated means than through bombs, drones, Special Forces, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, breaking down doors, blowing up villages, prisons, torture, creating refugees, working with corrupt warlords against oppressive Taliban, attempts at buying the loyalty of Afghan men for police and military work under the pretense that loyalty and lives can be purchased. There is much to be undone before we can turn in a different direction. However, we do get a sense of how it would work from the courage of Malalai Joya, whose commentaries appear on this site and from her book, A Woman Among Warlords. We also get intimate glimpses of a better way, and of the humanity of ordinary Afghans, from the books of Greg Mortenson, including Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools.
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Quotations about War
Related Quotes Veterans Day Peace Support Troops Memorial Day
Give me the money that has been spent in war and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire of which kings and queens will be proud. I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth. I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to peace. ~Charles Sumner
War does not determine who is right - only who is left. ~Bertrand Russell
It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers. ~Author unknown, quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs
I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, "Mother, what was war?" ~Eve Merriam
The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. ~Albert Einstein
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations. ~David Friedman
"There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes. ~James Morrow
Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him. ~M*A*S*H, Colonel Potter
All the arms we need are for hugging. ~Author Unknown
A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon. ~Napoleon
If we do not end war - war will end us. Everybody says that, millions of people believe it, and nobody does anything. ~H.G. Wells, Things to Come (the "film story"), Part III, adapted from his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come, spoken by the character John Cabal (Thanks Bill!)
A great war leaves the country with three armies - an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves. ~German Proverb
The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living. ~Omar Bradley
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 clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953
The most persistent sound which reverberates through men's history is the beating of war drums. ~Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up
What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world. ~Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife, 1864
Everyone's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals. ~Colman McCarthy
You Said a Mouthful, Ronald D. Fuchs, ed.-->Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both. ~Abraham Flexner
Draft beer, not people. ~Attributed to Bob Dylan
The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower
War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today. ~John F. Kennedy
In Flanders fields the poppies grow
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.~John McCrae
What this planet needs is more mistletoe and less missile-talk. ~Author Unknown
Join the Army, see the world, meet interesting people - and kill them. ~Pacifist Badge, 1978
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. ~Ernest Hemingway
War makes thieves and peace hangs them. ~George HerbertYou can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. ~Jeanette Rankin
You are not going to get peace with millions of armed men. The chariot of peace cannot advance over a road littered with cannon. ~David Lloyd George
Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come. ~Carl Sandburg
In war, there are no unwounded soldiers. ~José Narosky
We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage. ~James Russell Lowell
If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war. ~Pentagon official explaining why the U.S. military censored graphic footage from the Gulf War
I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy.... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago. ~Sir George Porter, quoted in The Observer, 26 August 1973
War would end if the dead could return. ~Stanley Baldwin
War! that mad game the world so loves to play. ~Jonathan Swift
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. ~Voltaire,
WarWe need a new law that owners of SUVs are automatically in the military reserve. Then they can go get their own goddamn oil. ~Jello Biafra, quoted in The Guardian, 3 November 2007
If it's natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn how? ~Joan Baez,
"What Would You Do If....?"I couldn't help but say to [Mr. Gorbachev], just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet. [We'd] find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together. ~Ronald Reagan, 1985
[John] Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war. ~Isaac Asimov
The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst. ~Henry Fosdick
All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones. In my opinion, there never was a good war or a bad peace. When will mankind be convinced and agree to settle their difficulties by arbitration? ~Benjamin Franklin
In war, truth is the first casualty. ~Aeschylus (Thanks, Dan)
Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself. ~Francis Meehan
Only the dead have seen the end of war. ~Plato
No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theater of war. ~Ambrose Bierce
Man, in his sensitivity, does not give names to animals he intends to eat but goes on giving names to children he intends to send to war. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man. ~Napoleon Hill
We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace. ~Jeane J. Kirkpatrick
Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" - with his mouth. ~Mark Twain
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country. ~Bertrand Russell, attributed
It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate. ~George McGovern
I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in. ~George McGovern
When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die. ~Jean-Paul Sartre
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. ~Albert Einstein, "Atomic War or Peace," Atlantic Monthly, November 1945
You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time. ~Albert Einstein
We kill because we are afraid of our own shadow, afraid that if we used a little common sense we'd have to admit that our glorious principles were wrong. ~Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart, 1941
The refuge of the morally, intellectually, artistically and economically bankrupt is war. ~Martin H. Fischer
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. ~Ernest Hemingway
The ability and inclination to use physical strength is no indication of bravery or tenacity to life. The greatest cowards are often the greatest bullies. Nothing is cheaper and more common than physical bravery. ~Clarence Darrow, Resist Not Evil
Where is the indignation about the fact that the United States and Soviet Union have accumulated thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world? ~Norman Cousins
I think war might be God's way of teaching us geography. ~Paul Rodriguez
The era of true peace on earth will not come as long as a tremendous percentage of your taxes goes to educate men in the trades of slaughter. ~Reginald Wright Kauffman
Are bombs the only way of setting fire to the spirit of a people? Is the human will as inert as the past two world-wide wars would indicate? ~Gregory Clark
The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts. ~Omar Bradley
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. ~Thomas Mann
We have failed to grasp the fact that mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide. ~Havelock Ellis
Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen? ~Thomas Carlyle, "Sartor Resartus"
The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution. ~John F. Kennedy
War is the only game in which it doesn't pay to have the home-court advantage. ~Dick Motta
War. The dark time of valour, loss and hope where a man is controlled by his gun; where a gun is controlled by his hatred. Completely uncontrollable. ~Daniel Ha
If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "no" to war. For one does not create a human society on mounds of corpses. ~Louis Lecoin
War is fear cloaked in courage. ~William Westmoreland
War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered. ~Thomas de Quincey
No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time. ~Henry Kissinger
Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood. ~Gandhi, Non-violence in Peace and War, 1948
I would like it if men had to partake in the same hormonal cycles to which we're subjected monthly. Maybe that's why men declare war - because they have a need to bleed on a regular basis. ~Brett Butler
We saw the lightning and that was the guns and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped. ~Harriet Tubman
It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passions, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace. ~André Gide, Journals, 13 September 1938
Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner. ~Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, vol 1, book VII, chapter 4
The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars. ~William Westmoreland
I have never advocated war except as a means of peace. ~Ulysses S. Grant
We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower
In the name of peace
They waged the wars
Ain't they got no shame~Nikki Giovanni
Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity. ~Author Unknown
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood. ~Aldous Huxley
Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Declaration of Rights"
Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private individuals. ~Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1955
To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man. ~Michael Servetus
A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in museums, just as instruments of torture are now, and the people will be astonished that such a thing could have been. ~Victor Hugo
Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war. ~Otto Von Bismark
The draft is white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people. ~Gerome Gragni and James Rado, 1967
War hath no fury like a noncombatant. ~Charles Edward Montague, Disenchantment
What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war. Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat. ~Simone Weil, Ecrits historiques et politiques, 1960
War is never a solution; it is an aggravation. ~Benjamin Disraeli
The stench of the trail of Ego in our History. It is ego - ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war. ~George Meredith, Beauchamp's Career
Dress it as we may, feather it, daub it with gold, huzza it, and sing swaggering songs about it, what is war, nine times out of ten, but murder in uniform? ~Douglas Jerrold
If you wish to be brothers, drop your weapons. ~Pope John Paul II
Law never made men a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.... In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. ~Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die. ~Herbert Hoover
A day of battle is a day of harvest for the devil. ~William Hooke
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it. ~Havelock Ellis
All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. ~François Fénelon
War should belong to the tragic past, to history: it should find no place on humanity's agenda for the future. ~Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla)
Men were made for war. Without it they wandered greyly about, getting under the feet of the women, who were trying to organize the really important things of life. ~Alice Thomas Ellis
Will... the threat of common extermination continue?... Must children receive the arms race from us as a necessary inheritance? ~Pope John Paul II, speech at the UN, 1979
War is nothing less than a temporary repeal of the principles of virtue. It is a system out of which almost all the virtues are excluded, and in which nearly all the vices are included. ~Robert Hall
Traditional nationalism cannot survive the fissioning of the atom. One world or none. ~Stuart Chase
Wars usually have the effect of speeding up the process of history. ~Pieter Geyl, Debates With Historians
Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong? ~Holly Near
The pioneers of a warless world are the [youth] who refuse military service. ~Albert Einstein
O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it. ~Mark Twain, "The War Prayer"
The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic. ~Joe Stalin, comment to Churchill at Potsdam, 1945
Men like war: they do not hold much sway over birth, so they make up for it with death. Unlike women, men menstruate by shedding other people's blood. ~Lucy Ellman
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~John Stewart Mill
The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it. ~Louis Simpson
The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his. ~George Patton
The expendability factor has increased by being transferred from the specialised, scarce and expensively trained military personnel to the amorphous civilian population. American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century's major wars. In the First World War 5 per cent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 per cent, while in a Third World War 90-95 per cent would be civilians. ~Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action
You can't say civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way. ~Will Rogers, New York Times, 23 December 1929
Organized slaughter, we realize, does not settle a dispute; it merely silences an argument. ~James Frederick Green
I recoil with horror at the ferociousness of man. Will nations never devise a more rational umpire of differences than force? Are there no means of coercing injustice more gratifying to our nature than a waste of the blood of thousands and of the labor of millions of our fellow creatures? ~Thomas Jefferson
War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals. ~Charles Evans Hughes
War is a game which were their subjects wise, kings would not play at. ~William Cowper
Borders are scratched across the hearts of men
By strangers with a calm, judicial pen,
And when the borders bleed we watch with dread
The lines of ink across the map turn red.~Marya Mannes, Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times, 1959
War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery
They should pick a dry year to fight the war. Better yet, civilize the moronic races and have no wars at all. ~Clair J. Clark, letter to wife, March 1944
I don't know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace an interlude during war. ~Georges Clemenceau
As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of exalted characters. ~Edward Gibbon
There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal DreamsWar!
When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill? ~Guy de Maupassant, Sur l'Eau
The bomb that fell on Hiroshima fell on America too. It fell on no city, no munition plants, no docks. It erased no church, vaporized no public buildings, reduced no man to his atomic elements. But it fell, it fell. ~Hermann Hagedorn, "The Bomb That Fell on America"
I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it. I hate war, and never again will I sanction or support another. ~Harry Emerson Fosdick
It seems like such a terrible shame that innocent civilians have to get hurt in wars, otherwise combat would be such a wonderfully healthy way to rid the human race of unneeded trash. ~Fred Woodworth
In an incredible perversion of justice, former soldiers who sprayed festeringly poisonous chemicals on Vietnam, and now find today that they themselves have been damaged by them, appeal to the people for sympathy and charity. The effects of the defoliant "Agent Orange" are discussed at length, but not one single newspaper article or hearing that we are aware of has even mentioned the effects of the people who still live in those regions of Vietnam. It's as outlandish as if Nazis who gassed Jews were now to come forward and whine that the poisons they utilized had finally made them sick. The staggering monstrousness goes unlaughed at and even unnoticed, as in a Kafka novel. ~Fred Woodworth, The Match, No. 79
A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war. ~Herbert V. Prochnow
Studies by Medical Corps psychiatrists of combat fatigue cases... found that fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure, and that fear of failure ran a strong second. ~S.L.A. Marshall
You're an old-timer if you can remember when setting the world on fire was a figure of speech. ~Franklin P. Jones, referring to the atomic bomb
Chris Hedges finishes his book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, with these words:
"To survive as a human being is possible only through love. And, when Thanatos is ascendant, the instinct must be to reach out to those we love, to see in them all the divinity, pity, and pathos of the human. And to recognize love in the lives of others - even those with whom we are in conflict - love that is like our own. It does not mean we will avoid war or death. It does not mean that we as distinct individuals will survive. But love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures. It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love has power both to resist, and to affirm what we know we must affirm. And love, as the poets remind us, is etneral" (pp. 184-185).
All of the quotes and comments in this post have application to the specific US-led occupation in Afghanistan. They suggest that much more could be accomplished through peaceful and negotiated means than through bombs, drones, Special Forces, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, breaking down doors, blowing up villages, prisons, torture, creating refugees, working with corrupt warlords against oppressive Taliban, attempts at buying the loyalty of Afghan men for police and military work under the pretense that loyalty and lives can be purchased. There is much to be undone before we can turn in a different direction. However, we do get a sense of how it would work from the courage of Malalai Joya, whose commentaries appear on this site and from her book, A Woman Among Warlords. We also get intimate glimpses of a better way, and of the humanity of ordinary Afghans, from the books of Greg Mortenson, including Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools.
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Quotations about War
Related Quotes Veterans Day Peace Support Troops Memorial Day
Give me the money that has been spent in war and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire of which kings and queens will be proud. I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth. I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to peace. ~Charles Sumner
War does not determine who is right - only who is left. ~Bertrand Russell
It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers. ~Author unknown, quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs
I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, "Mother, what was war?" ~Eve Merriam
The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. ~Albert Einstein
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations. ~David Friedman
"There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes. ~James Morrow
Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him. ~M*A*S*H, Colonel Potter
All the arms we need are for hugging. ~Author Unknown
A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon. ~Napoleon
If we do not end war - war will end us. Everybody says that, millions of people believe it, and nobody does anything. ~H.G. Wells, Things to Come (the "film story"), Part III, adapted from his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come, spoken by the character John Cabal (Thanks Bill!)
A great war leaves the country with three armies - an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves. ~German Proverb
The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living. ~Omar Bradley
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 clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953
The most persistent sound which reverberates through men's history is the beating of war drums. ~Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up
What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world. ~Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife, 1864
Everyone's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals. ~Colman McCarthy
You Said a Mouthful, Ronald D. Fuchs, ed.-->Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both. ~Abraham Flexner
Draft beer, not people. ~Attributed to Bob Dylan
The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower
War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today. ~John F. Kennedy
In Flanders fields the poppies grow
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.~John McCrae
What this planet needs is more mistletoe and less missile-talk. ~Author Unknown
Join the Army, see the world, meet interesting people - and kill them. ~Pacifist Badge, 1978
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. ~Ernest Hemingway
War makes thieves and peace hangs them. ~George HerbertYou can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. ~Jeanette Rankin
You are not going to get peace with millions of armed men. The chariot of peace cannot advance over a road littered with cannon. ~David Lloyd George
Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come. ~Carl Sandburg
In war, there are no unwounded soldiers. ~José Narosky
We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage. ~James Russell Lowell
If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war. ~Pentagon official explaining why the U.S. military censored graphic footage from the Gulf War
I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy.... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago. ~Sir George Porter, quoted in The Observer, 26 August 1973
War would end if the dead could return. ~Stanley Baldwin
War! that mad game the world so loves to play. ~Jonathan Swift
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. ~Voltaire,
WarWe need a new law that owners of SUVs are automatically in the military reserve. Then they can go get their own goddamn oil. ~Jello Biafra, quoted in The Guardian, 3 November 2007
If it's natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn how? ~Joan Baez,
"What Would You Do If....?"I couldn't help but say to [Mr. Gorbachev], just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet. [We'd] find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together. ~Ronald Reagan, 1985
[John] Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war. ~Isaac Asimov
The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst. ~Henry Fosdick
All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones. In my opinion, there never was a good war or a bad peace. When will mankind be convinced and agree to settle their difficulties by arbitration? ~Benjamin Franklin
In war, truth is the first casualty. ~Aeschylus (Thanks, Dan)
Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself. ~Francis Meehan
Only the dead have seen the end of war. ~Plato
No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theater of war. ~Ambrose Bierce
Man, in his sensitivity, does not give names to animals he intends to eat but goes on giving names to children he intends to send to war. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man. ~Napoleon Hill
We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace. ~Jeane J. Kirkpatrick
Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" - with his mouth. ~Mark Twain
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country. ~Bertrand Russell, attributed
It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate. ~George McGovern
I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in. ~George McGovern
When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die. ~Jean-Paul Sartre
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. ~Albert Einstein, "Atomic War or Peace," Atlantic Monthly, November 1945
You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time. ~Albert Einstein
We kill because we are afraid of our own shadow, afraid that if we used a little common sense we'd have to admit that our glorious principles were wrong. ~Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart, 1941
The refuge of the morally, intellectually, artistically and economically bankrupt is war. ~Martin H. Fischer
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. ~Ernest Hemingway
The ability and inclination to use physical strength is no indication of bravery or tenacity to life. The greatest cowards are often the greatest bullies. Nothing is cheaper and more common than physical bravery. ~Clarence Darrow, Resist Not Evil
Where is the indignation about the fact that the United States and Soviet Union have accumulated thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world? ~Norman Cousins
I think war might be God's way of teaching us geography. ~Paul Rodriguez
The era of true peace on earth will not come as long as a tremendous percentage of your taxes goes to educate men in the trades of slaughter. ~Reginald Wright Kauffman
Are bombs the only way of setting fire to the spirit of a people? Is the human will as inert as the past two world-wide wars would indicate? ~Gregory Clark
The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts. ~Omar Bradley
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. ~Thomas Mann
We have failed to grasp the fact that mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide. ~Havelock Ellis
Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen? ~Thomas Carlyle, "Sartor Resartus"
The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution. ~John F. Kennedy
War is the only game in which it doesn't pay to have the home-court advantage. ~Dick Motta
War. The dark time of valour, loss and hope where a man is controlled by his gun; where a gun is controlled by his hatred. Completely uncontrollable. ~Daniel Ha
If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "no" to war. For one does not create a human society on mounds of corpses. ~Louis Lecoin
War is fear cloaked in courage. ~William Westmoreland
War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered. ~Thomas de Quincey
No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time. ~Henry Kissinger
Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood. ~Gandhi, Non-violence in Peace and War, 1948
I would like it if men had to partake in the same hormonal cycles to which we're subjected monthly. Maybe that's why men declare war - because they have a need to bleed on a regular basis. ~Brett Butler
We saw the lightning and that was the guns and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped. ~Harriet Tubman
It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passions, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace. ~André Gide, Journals, 13 September 1938
Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner. ~Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, vol 1, book VII, chapter 4
The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars. ~William Westmoreland
I have never advocated war except as a means of peace. ~Ulysses S. Grant
We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower
In the name of peace
They waged the wars
Ain't they got no shame~Nikki Giovanni
Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity. ~Author Unknown
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood. ~Aldous Huxley
Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Declaration of Rights"
Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private individuals. ~Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1955
To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man. ~Michael Servetus
A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in museums, just as instruments of torture are now, and the people will be astonished that such a thing could have been. ~Victor Hugo
Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war. ~Otto Von Bismark
The draft is white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people. ~Gerome Gragni and James Rado, 1967
War hath no fury like a noncombatant. ~Charles Edward Montague, Disenchantment
What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war. Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat. ~Simone Weil, Ecrits historiques et politiques, 1960
War is never a solution; it is an aggravation. ~Benjamin Disraeli
The stench of the trail of Ego in our History. It is ego - ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war. ~George Meredith, Beauchamp's Career
Dress it as we may, feather it, daub it with gold, huzza it, and sing swaggering songs about it, what is war, nine times out of ten, but murder in uniform? ~Douglas Jerrold
If you wish to be brothers, drop your weapons. ~Pope John Paul II
Law never made men a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.... In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. ~Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die. ~Herbert Hoover
A day of battle is a day of harvest for the devil. ~William Hooke
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it. ~Havelock Ellis
All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. ~François Fénelon
War should belong to the tragic past, to history: it should find no place on humanity's agenda for the future. ~Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla)
Men were made for war. Without it they wandered greyly about, getting under the feet of the women, who were trying to organize the really important things of life. ~Alice Thomas Ellis
Will... the threat of common extermination continue?... Must children receive the arms race from us as a necessary inheritance? ~Pope John Paul II, speech at the UN, 1979
War is nothing less than a temporary repeal of the principles of virtue. It is a system out of which almost all the virtues are excluded, and in which nearly all the vices are included. ~Robert Hall
Traditional nationalism cannot survive the fissioning of the atom. One world or none. ~Stuart Chase
Wars usually have the effect of speeding up the process of history. ~Pieter Geyl, Debates With Historians
Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong? ~Holly Near
The pioneers of a warless world are the [youth] who refuse military service. ~Albert Einstein
O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it. ~Mark Twain, "The War Prayer"
The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic. ~Joe Stalin, comment to Churchill at Potsdam, 1945
Men like war: they do not hold much sway over birth, so they make up for it with death. Unlike women, men menstruate by shedding other people's blood. ~Lucy Ellman
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~John Stewart Mill
The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it. ~Louis Simpson
The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his. ~George Patton
The expendability factor has increased by being transferred from the specialised, scarce and expensively trained military personnel to the amorphous civilian population. American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century's major wars. In the First World War 5 per cent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 per cent, while in a Third World War 90-95 per cent would be civilians. ~Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action
You can't say civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way. ~Will Rogers, New York Times, 23 December 1929
Organized slaughter, we realize, does not settle a dispute; it merely silences an argument. ~James Frederick Green
I recoil with horror at the ferociousness of man. Will nations never devise a more rational umpire of differences than force? Are there no means of coercing injustice more gratifying to our nature than a waste of the blood of thousands and of the labor of millions of our fellow creatures? ~Thomas Jefferson
War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals. ~Charles Evans Hughes
War is a game which were their subjects wise, kings would not play at. ~William Cowper
Borders are scratched across the hearts of men
By strangers with a calm, judicial pen,
And when the borders bleed we watch with dread
The lines of ink across the map turn red.~Marya Mannes, Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times, 1959
War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery
They should pick a dry year to fight the war. Better yet, civilize the moronic races and have no wars at all. ~Clair J. Clark, letter to wife, March 1944
I don't know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace an interlude during war. ~Georges Clemenceau
As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of exalted characters. ~Edward Gibbon
There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal DreamsWar!
When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill? ~Guy de Maupassant, Sur l'Eau
The bomb that fell on Hiroshima fell on America too. It fell on no city, no munition plants, no docks. It erased no church, vaporized no public buildings, reduced no man to his atomic elements. But it fell, it fell. ~Hermann Hagedorn, "The Bomb That Fell on America"
I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it. I hate war, and never again will I sanction or support another. ~Harry Emerson Fosdick
It seems like such a terrible shame that innocent civilians have to get hurt in wars, otherwise combat would be such a wonderfully healthy way to rid the human race of unneeded trash. ~Fred Woodworth
In an incredible perversion of justice, former soldiers who sprayed festeringly poisonous chemicals on Vietnam, and now find today that they themselves have been damaged by them, appeal to the people for sympathy and charity. The effects of the defoliant "Agent Orange" are discussed at length, but not one single newspaper article or hearing that we are aware of has even mentioned the effects of the people who still live in those regions of Vietnam. It's as outlandish as if Nazis who gassed Jews were now to come forward and whine that the poisons they utilized had finally made them sick. The staggering monstrousness goes unlaughed at and even unnoticed, as in a Kafka novel. ~Fred Woodworth, The Match, No. 79
A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war. ~Herbert V. Prochnow
Studies by Medical Corps psychiatrists of combat fatigue cases... found that fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure, and that fear of failure ran a strong second. ~S.L.A. Marshall
You're an old-timer if you can remember when setting the world on fire was a figure of speech. ~Franklin P. Jones, referring to the atomic bomb
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Building schools for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan
The fascinating and courageous story of how Greg Mortenson has helped Afghan villagers finance the construction of schools for their children, especially for their girls, in the remote northeast area and other parts of Afghanistan and in Pakistan is told in Mortenson's two books, Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools. For the most part, local villagers designed and built the schools with their own imagination and labor.
The key to Mortenson's efforts has been his ability, along with luck, to create relationships with, and win the trust of, important leaders in the villages where he worked. His deep commitment also led him to learn the local language and appreciate and abide by local norms. His early successes brought him to the attention of other village elders and so the saga unfolded.
Mortenson has raised money for a 131 schools that have benefited 58,000 students. The schools have been financed by payments for Mortenson's hundreds of speechs across the US, from organizations of mountain climbers (Mortenson was once as accomplished mountiain climber), and a few large individual donors.
The money he raises is channeled through the Central Asia Institute, which Mortenson helped establish. It is an extraordinary story.
Top US general have sought out Mortenson to learn from his experience. And he has spoken to many military audiences in the US along the way. His first book is required reading at military academies.
There are two points of relevance about these military connections. Mortenson has never taken money from any military sources, or for that matter any government or corporate sources. More importantly, the military may marvel at Mortenson's accomplishments, but they are unlikely to be able to duplicate them. Afghans don't like foreign occupiers, especially when they have for so long do so much damage to their country and its people. The military does not have the resources, does not have the language or cultural knowledge, and does not have the tenacity to build relationships in the patient way that Mortenson has done. And, underlying the military's occupation, the principal goals are not "democracy" and "reconstruction." Rather, it is what is in the geopolical interests of the US.
The reader of his most recent book, Stones Into Schools, would have also noted the sub-title: "Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan." Hardly a militaristic sentiment.
Bob
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The website for Stones Into Schools is: http://www.stonesintoschools.com/
Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan was released on December 1, 2009. Over the past sixteen years, Greg Mortenson, through his nonprofit Central Asia Institute (CAI), has worked to promote peace through education by establishing more than 130 schools, most of them for girls, in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The story of how this remarkable humanitarian campaign began was told in his bestselling 2006 book, Three Cups of Tea. Mortenson’s philosophies about building relationships, empowering communities, and educating girls have struck a powerful chord. Hundreds of communities and universities, as well as several branches of the U.S. military, have used Three Cups of Tea as a common read.
Just as Three Cups of Tea began with a promise—to build a school in Korphe, Pakistan—so too does Mortenson’s new book. In 1999, Kirghiz horsemen from Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor rode into Pakistan and secured a promise from Mortenson to construct a school in an isolated pocket of the Pamir Mountains known as Bozai Gumbad. Mortenson could not build that school before constructing many others, and that is the story he tells in this dramatic new book. Picking up where Three Cups of Tea left off in late 2003, Stones into Schools traces the CAI’s efforts to work in a whole new country, the secluded northeast corner of Afghanistan. Mortenson describes how he and his intrepid manager, Sarfraz Khan, barnstormed around Badakhshan Province and the Wakhan Corridor, moving for weeks without sleep, to establish the first schools there.
Those efforts were diverted in October 2005 when a devastating earthquake hit the Azad Kashmir region of Pakistan. Under Sarfraz’s watch the CAI helped with relief efforts by setting up temporary tent schools and eventually several earthquakeproof schools. The action then returns to Afghanistan in 2007, as the CAI launches schools in the heart of Taliban country and as Mortenson helps the U.S. military formulate new strategic plans as a road map to peace. As the book closes, the initial promise to the Kirghiz is fulfilled.
Stones into Schools brings to life both the heroic efforts of the CAI’s fixers on the ground—renegade men of unrecognized and untapped talent who became galvanized by the importance of girls’ education—and the triumphs of the young women who are now graduating from the schools. Their stories are ones you will not soon forget.
“ What Greg understands better than most—and what he practices more than anyone else I know—is the simple truth that all of us are better off when all of us have the opportunity to learn, especially our children. By helping them learn and grow, he’s shaping the very future of a region and giving hope to an entire generation.” —Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff
“ This week . . . I watched Greg Mortenson, the famed author of Three Cups of Tea, open one of his schools for girls in this remote Afghan village in the Hindu Kush mountains. I must say, after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write, ‘Let’s just get out of here.’” —Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times
“ Sometimes the acts of one individual can illuminate how to confront a foreign-policy dilemma more clearly than the prattle of politicians. Such is the case with Greg Mortenson, whose work gives insights into an essential element of fighting terrorism.” —Trudy Rubin, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“ Mortenson’s story serves as a reminder of the power of a good idea and the strength inherent in one person’s passionate determination to persevere against enormous obstacles.” —Marilyn Gardner, The Christian Science Monitor
The key to Mortenson's efforts has been his ability, along with luck, to create relationships with, and win the trust of, important leaders in the villages where he worked. His deep commitment also led him to learn the local language and appreciate and abide by local norms. His early successes brought him to the attention of other village elders and so the saga unfolded.
Mortenson has raised money for a 131 schools that have benefited 58,000 students. The schools have been financed by payments for Mortenson's hundreds of speechs across the US, from organizations of mountain climbers (Mortenson was once as accomplished mountiain climber), and a few large individual donors.
The money he raises is channeled through the Central Asia Institute, which Mortenson helped establish. It is an extraordinary story.
Top US general have sought out Mortenson to learn from his experience. And he has spoken to many military audiences in the US along the way. His first book is required reading at military academies.
There are two points of relevance about these military connections. Mortenson has never taken money from any military sources, or for that matter any government or corporate sources. More importantly, the military may marvel at Mortenson's accomplishments, but they are unlikely to be able to duplicate them. Afghans don't like foreign occupiers, especially when they have for so long do so much damage to their country and its people. The military does not have the resources, does not have the language or cultural knowledge, and does not have the tenacity to build relationships in the patient way that Mortenson has done. And, underlying the military's occupation, the principal goals are not "democracy" and "reconstruction." Rather, it is what is in the geopolical interests of the US.
The reader of his most recent book, Stones Into Schools, would have also noted the sub-title: "Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan." Hardly a militaristic sentiment.
Bob
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The website for Stones Into Schools is: http://www.stonesintoschools.com/
Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan was released on December 1, 2009. Over the past sixteen years, Greg Mortenson, through his nonprofit Central Asia Institute (CAI), has worked to promote peace through education by establishing more than 130 schools, most of them for girls, in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The story of how this remarkable humanitarian campaign began was told in his bestselling 2006 book, Three Cups of Tea. Mortenson’s philosophies about building relationships, empowering communities, and educating girls have struck a powerful chord. Hundreds of communities and universities, as well as several branches of the U.S. military, have used Three Cups of Tea as a common read.
Just as Three Cups of Tea began with a promise—to build a school in Korphe, Pakistan—so too does Mortenson’s new book. In 1999, Kirghiz horsemen from Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor rode into Pakistan and secured a promise from Mortenson to construct a school in an isolated pocket of the Pamir Mountains known as Bozai Gumbad. Mortenson could not build that school before constructing many others, and that is the story he tells in this dramatic new book. Picking up where Three Cups of Tea left off in late 2003, Stones into Schools traces the CAI’s efforts to work in a whole new country, the secluded northeast corner of Afghanistan. Mortenson describes how he and his intrepid manager, Sarfraz Khan, barnstormed around Badakhshan Province and the Wakhan Corridor, moving for weeks without sleep, to establish the first schools there.
Those efforts were diverted in October 2005 when a devastating earthquake hit the Azad Kashmir region of Pakistan. Under Sarfraz’s watch the CAI helped with relief efforts by setting up temporary tent schools and eventually several earthquakeproof schools. The action then returns to Afghanistan in 2007, as the CAI launches schools in the heart of Taliban country and as Mortenson helps the U.S. military formulate new strategic plans as a road map to peace. As the book closes, the initial promise to the Kirghiz is fulfilled.
Stones into Schools brings to life both the heroic efforts of the CAI’s fixers on the ground—renegade men of unrecognized and untapped talent who became galvanized by the importance of girls’ education—and the triumphs of the young women who are now graduating from the schools. Their stories are ones you will not soon forget.
“ What Greg understands better than most—and what he practices more than anyone else I know—is the simple truth that all of us are better off when all of us have the opportunity to learn, especially our children. By helping them learn and grow, he’s shaping the very future of a region and giving hope to an entire generation.” —Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff
“ This week . . . I watched Greg Mortenson, the famed author of Three Cups of Tea, open one of his schools for girls in this remote Afghan village in the Hindu Kush mountains. I must say, after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write, ‘Let’s just get out of here.’” —Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times
“ Sometimes the acts of one individual can illuminate how to confront a foreign-policy dilemma more clearly than the prattle of politicians. Such is the case with Greg Mortenson, whose work gives insights into an essential element of fighting terrorism.” —Trudy Rubin, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“ Mortenson’s story serves as a reminder of the power of a good idea and the strength inherent in one person’s passionate determination to persevere against enormous obstacles.” —Marilyn Gardner, The Christian Science Monitor
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