The Allies at Yalta
My thanks to Mikhail for corrections.
At the Tehran conference in World War II, Russian Premier Josef Stalin joked that, at the end of the war, 50,000 Germans must be shot.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill shot a glance at him. Stalin repeated himself.
Churchill rose to his feet and exclaimed:
“I would rather be taken out into the garden here and now, and be shot myself, than sully my own and my country’s honor with such infamy!”
Roosevelt, who wanted to placate Stalin, from whom he was trying to extract a promise to join the war against Japan, joked that, yes, it should be only 49,000. Churchill stormed out of the room.
I’m not the only one flabbergasted by what I hear. I’ve been sitting back and saying to myself, the military have the situation completely in hand. Trust Q. Trust the Plan.
What is the plan? Executing Harrison Ford, Jennifer Anniston, Demi Moore, Bruce Willis, etc.? Is that the plan? And yet documents circulate with long lists of the supposedly dead.
What will a generation do and say when it wakes up to the orgy of bloodshed just engaged in.
What will that make us?
I draw the line here. Like Churchill, I’d rather be taken out into the garden here and now, and be shot myself, than sully my own and my country’s honor with such infamy.
Protesting against the people I support is the last thing I want to be doing. But it feels like something I must do. For my own honor.
Killing our enemies en masse is not part of democracy’s way of handling its foes or its problems. We don’t bury our mistakes, do we? President Kennedy said that’s what the cabal does, not us.
Killing our enemies is a statement of our own bankruptcy in terms of rehabilitation. We don’t know how to work with people so evil and so we kill them.
What’s the difference between us and them at that point? We’re a little more polite about it. We hear them out before we pronounce sentence. But they’re dead just the same.
- I believe we’re emphasizing dispatch in these proceedings – getting them done quickly. That risks perverting justice.
- How can we be so sure that our sentences in all cases are just? We are after all doing something final, something that cannot be undone – we’re killing someone. Why the rush?
- A judicial proceeding has safeguards to protect against a perversion of justice. The right of appeal is one of them. We seem to be dispensing with safeguards.
We’re losing sight of the long view. We’re acting like empirical materialists, who see only this physical life, failing to see that life has eternal continuity and a larger purpose. (1)
Jesus knew that and, because he did, he didn’t say kill your enemies. If you were living in his times, he’d be standing between you, with your swords drawn, and these condemned prisoners. That is not the way.
Yes, they’re guilty. Yes, they did heinous, heinous things. But life in prison, where they can ponder their crimes, is enough.
It represents our failing as a people that we must exterminate our enemies, that there is no other way to handle this than killing, that we have no conception of rehabilitation.
George H.W. Bush once joked to his secretary that, when we find out what the cabal has done, we’ll lynch them from the nearest lamppost. We all laughed. We wouldn’t do such a thing. But evidently he was right.
Human history is a history of war. War is the business of killing. Human history is the history of killing. Haven’t we had enough?
Footnotes
(1) See The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment at http://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Purpose-of-Life-is-Enlightenment.pdf