Lest We Forget ........

The world shall never know those who have gone into silence nor ever remember the millions who have been blotted out in history's slaughters.Close to two million plus died under Mao Ze Dong's land reforms in the early 1950s.For pure unspeakable evil 100 million died under communist rule in recent times. The Nazis grissly horrid cleansing buried eleven million innocents.In 1930s Ukraine seven million people were starved to death on 'government' orders.In a space of 4 years 1.5 million Cambodians were buried in mass graves at the hands of their own countrymen. These figures do not include the living dead - maimed , disfigured , those driven mad , wasted to dependence on drugs and alcohol , disoriented by fear , torture and terror. As we shift thru' media , let's observe REMEMBERANCE DAY in a new way as another chapter of time , a new year , rolls in for whoever has died under inquisitions , killed as heretics, murdered by the ustashi , fascism , crusades etc etc : thrown into unnamed , unmarked , mass graves ,in city squares , under trees continuing even up to today in civilisation's most enlightened age - in Darfur ( >500,000 killed ) ,Sri Lanka(Dead:70,000;Refugees:1,000,000), Armenia (1,000,000 WWW1), Ethiopia ( 500,000 young people 1977-78) and everywhere else where lives are being snuffed and sent into oblivion over ideology , creed , religion and race. War has never left Mankind's hearth though leaders' have vowed after each war to never grind again their war machines. History has been staggering along with it's hands dripping with blood ... With the declining 'prescence'/waning leadership of US and British power in world affairs dark terrors lurking in ancient cultures and rivalries will again bounce back from their closets and graves and savage this age.

HANAOKA, Japan - Townspeople here cheered when the Chinese slave laborers, dressed in rags, eyes wild with hunger, were paraded back from the mountains after a failed rebellion and escape.At the time, July 1945, many in this northern mining town thought the 800 slaves got what they deserved for killing several Japanese guards in their revolt: They were beaten, forced to kneel on the floor for days, and denied food and water. Scores were tortured to death. At the end of the war, only half the slaves were alive.Yet the perpetrators got off lightly.Yasuo Togashi remembers the bone-thin captives eating weeds as they were marched from the train station to their mining camp( MSNBC )

The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.[ Hannah Arendt , Crises Of The Republic , 1972 ]

"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 . . . Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." Dwight D. Eisenhower , The Chance For Peace , April 1963

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. General Robert E.Lee in a letter to his wife,1864