Interesting bit of history is provided by the National Lancers on what Paul Revere was really up to on his ride:
Contrary to popular belief, Paul Revere did not set out on the night of April 18th, 1775 to alert the countryside to the impending British march. His specific goal was to ride to Lexington to warn two prominent Colonial leaders, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, that their lives might be in danger. Having departed Boston by boat across the Back Bay, and narrowly averting notice by the H.M.S Somerset anchored there; he procured a strong, quick Yankee horse and rode west toward Lexington.
They go on to describe his capture by soldiers and how he told them that people were taking up arms, which led a heavily armed group of British soldiers to search for munitions in Lexington and eventually fire their guns into “fleeing crowds”.
Father can you hear me?
How have I let you down?
I curse the day that I was born…
And all the sorrow in this world…
Let me take you to the hurting ground
Where all good men are trampled down
Just to settle a bet that could not be won
Between a prideful father and his son
Will you guide me now, for I can’t see
A reason for the suffering and this long misery
What if every living soul could be upright and strong
Well, then I do imagine…
There will be Sorrow
Yeah there will be Sorrow
And there will be Sorrow, no more
When all soldiers lay their weapons down
Or when all kings and all queens relinquish their crowns
Or when the only true messiah rescues us from ourselves
It’s easy to imagine…
There will be Sorrow
Yeah there will be Sorrow
And there will be Sorrow, no more
Here is an interesting report on militant American forces operating in Iraq and elsewhere:
The former New York Times Mideast Bureau chief warns that the radical Christian right is coming dangerously close to its goal of co-opting the country’s military and law enforcement.
The drive by the Christian right to take control of military chaplaincies, which now sees radical Christians holding roughly 50 percent of chaplaincy appointments in the armed services and service academies, is part of a much larger effort to politicize the military and law enforcement. This effort signals the final and perhaps most deadly stage in the long campaign by the radical Christian right to dismantle America’s open society and build a theocratic state. A successful politicization of the military would signal the end of our democracy.
The parallels with historic militarist movements are obvious:
“Contracting out security to groups like Blackwater undermines our constitutional democracy,â€? said Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Their actions may not be subject to constitutional limitations that apply to both federal and state officials and employees—including First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights to be free from illegal searches and seizures. Unlike police officers they are not trained in protecting constitutional rights and unlike police officers or the military they have no system of accountability whether within their organization or outside it. These kind of paramilitary groups bring to mind Nazi Party brownshirts, functioning as an extrajudicial enforcement mechanism that can and does operate outside the law. The use of these paramilitary groups is an extremely dangerous threat to our rights.”
I was thinking more about the Taliban or the Spanish Civil War, but point taken. It’s no longer sufficient to understand what’s the matter with Kansas, it’s becoming necessary to observe moderate Christians being swept out of public office by militant, organized, rich and highly political radical fringe groups claiming to fight secular bogeyman, or terrorists, or Muslims, or whatever else they can stand on to justify their supremacy in a time of “need”. The clear irony is that fundamentalists always end up quietly moving towards a police-state on a platform that says they must intervene to prevent any movement towards a police-state.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995