Sunday, April 1, 2007

Veterans For Non-Violence

{ image credit }

As a past post indicated, I'm deep into a study of the means and principles of non-violence. I've found a wonderful Serious video game called A Force More Powerful and the Director of the Dayton International Peace Museum and I are planning to take it to local high schools and help the kids learn that non-violence is much more powerful than violence (no matter what the media would have us believe...).

That man on the left is General Douglas MacArthur. I've heard rumors that he was a warmonger and a completely horrible man. In a second, I'll give you some of his words that surely seem to falsify that rumor but first I want to show the path that led to this post.

Not everyone who visits here knows how stories happen and there are, in reality, many ways and means. The particular one for this post was one of the more circuitous: I have an alert with Google to find any news, or blog posts, or other web pages that have the words "spiritual" or "spirituality" in them. Today, as I began to ready myself for blogging, I hadn't had any of the more synchronistic methods occur so I went to my storage for those alerts. I entered the word "war" and the first e-mail that popped up was:

WAR AND SPIRITUAL PROGRESS
By chenquestion
Wow! Just found a terrific quotation from warrior of legendary stature, over at the InsideAwake blog: http://insideawake.blogspot.com/ . Among other goodies.
Chen.quest.ion - http://chenquestion.wordpress.com

That led me to War and Spiritual Progress on another blog called, insideawake (which is pretty cool since "inside" and "awake" together make "idea" pop out!). This blog had a quote from a speech made by MacArthur and the link-out led me to The American Experience section of the PBS site where I found the whole speech and this quote (the emphasised words are my doing...):

"Men since the beginning of time have sought peace. Various methods through the ages have been attempted to devise an international process to prevent or settle disputes between nations. From the very start workable methods were found in so far as individual citizens were concerned, but the mechanics of an instrumentality of larger international scope have never been successful. Military alliances, balances of power, Leagues of Nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be 'by way of the crucible of war. The utter destructiveness of war now blocks out, this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we will not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature and all the material and cultural developments of the past 2000 years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh."

Sound like a warmonger to you.........?