Pax Orbis

Gun ownership is a divine right and that the second amendment was inspired by God because the US is chosen land, a place of a covenant between God and the true believers.

During the miserable trench warfare of WWI, a night of humanity offered  some hope of peace. Arthur Conan Doyle called it “one human episode amid  all the atrocities.”

After war, some soldiers become peace activists. All Quiet on the Western Front (German: Im Westen nichts Neues, lit. 'In the West Nothing New') is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers' extreme physical and mental stress during the war, and the detachment from civilian life felt by many of these soldiers upon returning home from the front. The book and its sequel, The Road Back (1930), were among the books banned and burned in Nazi Germany.

Smedley Darlington Butler was a United States Marine Corps major general, the highest rank authorized at that time, and at the time of his death the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. He wrote War is a racket.

Howard Zinn is perhaps best known for his People's History of the United States, a book that has featured in The Simpsons and was recommended by Matt Damon's character in the film Good Will Hunting. In The Bomb, Zinn puts two essays side by side, one entitled "Hiroshima, breaking the silence", the other "The bombing of Royan". As a young man eager to be demobbed, Zinn recalls celebrating the dropping of the atomic bomb; it meant the end of a war he did not wish to return to. He had taken part in the bombing of the French town of Royan just three months earlier. The essays revisit that unthinking celebration and desire to follow orders of those months in 1945. Using historical evidence, it also argues that neither mission was necessary and asks what prompted military action that would transcended military logic and moral sensibilities.

Speaking of brutal Nicaraguan dictator Somoza, Harry Truman is  supposed to have said “He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard.” This quote  is attributed to Truman, FDR, and Nixon. This is a broad chronological  range, because there were actually three Somozas: Anastasio Somoza  Garcia, who fathered Luis Somoza Debayle and Anastasio Somoza Debayle,   the Somoza dynasty that ruled Nicaragua from the mid 1930s through the  late 1970s.

The Marines invaded Nicaragua in 1912 and stayed until 1933, fighting  but never defeating the revolutionary Augusto Sandino. They created the  Nicaraguan National Guard and installed Anastasio Somoza Garcia in  power. Then Sandino, who had signed a truce and put down his arms, was  assassinated by Somoza. In 1935, General Smedley Butler, who led the Marines into Nicaragua, said:

The title “Lord of the flies” is a translation of the Hebrew Ba´alzevuv, a devil whose name suggests decay, destruction, demoralization, and panic. Golding´s Beelzebub is the anarchic, amoral driving force whose function seems to insure the survival of the individual. The tenets of civilization and intelligence from a veneer over the fury and the mire of human veins.

Nonetheless, Golding says that he does not know really where the story comes from and advices the reader that his own interpretation is the right one, even above that of the writer.

“What I think an awakening really involves is a re-examination of our common sense. We’ve got all sorts of ideas built into us which seem unquestioned, obvious. And our speech reflects them; its commonest phrases. ‘Face the facts.’ As if they were outside you. As if life were something they simply encountered as a foreigner. ‘Face the facts.’ Our common sense has been rigged, you see? So that we feel strangers and aliens in this world, and this is terribly plausible, simply because this is what we are used to. That’s the only reason.”

Alan Watts

Alan Watts is one of the most widely read philosophers of the 20th century.