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Take Your Place


The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. They know the lies the victors often do not acknowledge, the lies covered up in stately war memorials and mythic war narratives, filled with words of courage and comradeship. They know the lies that permeate the thick, self-important memoirs by amoral statesmen who make wars but do not know war.

The vanquished know the essence of war – death. They grasp that war is necrophilia. They see that war is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction. They know how war fosters alienation, leads inevitably to nihilism, and is a turning away from the sanctity and preservation of life. All other narratives about war too easily fall prey to the allure and seductiveness of violence, as well as the attraction of the godlike power that comes with the license to kill with impunity.
-Chris Hedges

On this Veterans Day, 2008, some wise words from Chris Hedges about seeing and words and death and morality and power and violence and human life and killing and deception and mythology and greed, and winners and losers and most of all about

I L L U S I O N.
I can say thank you to all living vets, I can say remember the dead. I will. I will say step back, think, think again, the great mandala approaches.

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