Enduring Freedom

'I wonder what Americans would say if they were shown graphic footage of the results of US drone attacks, some of the many wedding parties or funerals we mistook for gatherings of terrorists and reduced to “bug splats,” in the parlance of those dispatching our missiles.'

---Charles Simic.

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They had been, according to Major General Curtis Lemay, who was in charge of the fire bombing operations, "scorched and boiled and baked to death". President Franklin Roosevelt's son and confidant said that the bombing should continue "until we have destroyed about half the Japanese civilian population." 

A few days before the bombing of Hiroshima, Vice Admiral Radford boasted that "Japan will eventually be a nation without cities - a nomadic people". 

---J. Berger.

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We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

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'Betty, do you believe that apart from you, somewhere beyond all the people who only seem to be people, there truly are still some people left, real people?'

--Derek Raymond.

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'Much of what I have experienced in the wide world has vanished completely from my head over the years. It was three in the afternoon, a rainy day.

I felt a compulsion ..above all to be one with myself again. ..I resolved to carefully detach myself from an existence in which I could not place my trust and to return.'

---Walser.