I’m putting this letter behind a cut so that people have a choice of whether they want to read this. If you click on the cut, you are choosing to listen to me and what I believe. If you don’t like it, deal with it. My blog = my choice of content.
–The Management
Secretary Rumsfeld:
In your speech to the American Legion in Salt Lake City, you made a few remarks that I find interesting. Allow me to address them.
It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among Western democracies. When those who warned about a coming crisis, the rise of fascism and nazism, they were ridiculed or ignored. Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated or that it was someone else’s problem. Some nations tried to negotiate a separate peace, even as the enemy made its deadly ambitions crystal clear. (Source: DefenseLink News)
This government you speak of is England under the leadership of Neville Chamberlain. He repeatedly ignored the threat of Nazi Germany, claiming to have intelligence that Germany was not rebuilding its forces and that all was peaceful. Apparently, he knew that there was no threat.
Chamberlain ridiculed “warmongers” such as Winston Churchill who was the one who led England during the war that resulted in 163 million pounds of Luftwaffe bombs being dropped on London.
Secretary, forgive my “moral confusion” and “cynicism” but hasn’t it been proven that your intelligence on the Weapons of Mass Destruction was faulty? And your assertion that we would be welcomed as conquering heroes in Iraq? According to the code on which I base my morals (the 10 Commandments — you might have heard of them?), that counts as bearing false witness. Maybe you are the one who is “morally confused”?
As I recall, our president’s vigilance 5 years ago included ignoring warnings in the months surrounding 9/11 that there was something nefarious in the works. I recall that there was also the ignoring of the IAEA’s report that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (By the way, we were the ones who provided those in this first place so you can thank everyone who armed Saddam in the ’80s when he was “our friend” in the war against Iran.)
Perhaps we subscribe to different sets of morals? I seem to recall peacemakers being “the children of God” (Matt 5:9). How is it that people like me have gone from being “the children of God” to being “morally confused”? I’d love an explanation on that.
One could speculate that the reason I post this letter is that I am a Keith Olbermann fan and he took you to task for your speech at the end of his Wednesday broadcast. While the broadcast alerted me to the content of the speech, it my outrage at the state of this country where we are so cloaked in fear that someone wearing a shirt with Arabic writing gets thrown off a plane because of someone’s paranoia and on other flights, passengers refuse to get on a plane with someone of Middle Eastern descent.
As I love the passage of Murrow that Olbermann quoted, I will repeat it:
â??œWe must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.
We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.â???
Fear is not of the God I worship — it is of the devil. Love casts out fear and in turn, our compassion in the world, not our overvigilance, will be what solves this crisis. At some point, we *will* have to talk to our enemies. Let us do it in the confidence that God is with us and that our God is a God of justice and mercy, and not in the false assertion that we serve a God that condones unprovoked attacks and an atmosphere of fear and suspicion.
I’ll close with these words from Isaiah 2:
Now it will come about that in the last days The mountain of the house of the LORD will be established as the chief of the mountains, And will be raised above the hills; And all the nations will stream to it. And many peoples will come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, To the house of the God of Jacob; That He may teach us concerning His ways And that we may walk in His paths.” For the law will go forth from Zion And the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. And He will judge between the nations, And will render decisions for many peoples; And they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, And never again will they learn war. (Isaiah 2:2-4)