Oath Keepers: Not on our watch!

Watch this moving video:



Here's the Oath Keepers website, which I'm adding to my blogroll.

You should know that there's already a fairly sizeable controversy brewing over this fledgling little organization. And not necessarily from a quarter that you'd initially suspect. That is, unless you have a pretty good understanding of the difference between small-c conservatism and large-C Conservatism. I admit that the lines of distinction between the two are sometimes difficult to discern. But by the same token they're sometimes pretty darn clear, as in the case that I'm about to present.

Now, I'm not a follower of "Red State." I've been to the site no more than two or three times, and that was at least a year ago, probably longer. I don't even recall, to be quite honest, why the site didn't appeal to me to begin with. But judging by what I read at the site earlier, I think it's safe to assume that it turned me off primarily because it is, at best, small-c conservative, which I regard as part of the problem, not the solution.

In any event, certain particulars of the forthcoming Red State article by Streiff have already been addressed by the Oath Keepers. Nonetheless, the article is copied and pasted below in its entirety. Without further comment from me. We can discuss it in the comment section if you like.

The Malignant Nature of the Oath Keeper Movement

Oath Breakers Not Oath Keepers

Posted by Streiff (Profile)

Wednesday, October 21st at 2:22PM EDT

321 Comments

Truly malignant ideas crop up in a democracy with the frequency of toadstools after a summer rain storm. Most of these ideas are dismissed by the great majority of citizens after public debate in one fashion or another. Some of the ideas hang on despite evidence to the contrary (sorry Texas was readmitted to the Union and the Income Tax was ratified by the requisite number of states) but attract no real following.

Truly pernicious ideas, however, seem benign at first glance but in truth strike at the heart of our system of government. The “Oath Keeper” movement is one of those ideas.


At first blush, who can object to the 10 orders they say they will not obey. Until you start examining each of them in detail (we’ll put aside for now the mindboggling assertion in Lexington/Concord was precipitated by an attempt to “disarm” Americans).

1. We will NOT obey any order to disarm the American people.

2. We will NOT obey any order to conduct warrantless searches of the American people, their homes, vehicles, papers, or effects — such as warrantless house-to house searches for weapons or persons.

3. We will NOT obey any order to detain American citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants” or to subject them to trial by military tribunal.

4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a “state of emergency” on a state, or to enter with force into a state, without the express consent and invitation of that state’s legislature and governor.

5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty and declares the national government to be in violation of the compact by which that state entered the Union.

6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.

7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.

8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to “keep the peace” or to “maintain control” during any emergency, or under any other pretext. We will consider such use of foreign troops against our people to be an invasion and an act of war.

9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies, under any emergency pretext whatsoever.

10. We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

In the case of a smallpox, or similar, outbreak it would not be unreasonable for any government to direct that a municipality or geographic area be put under quarantine. I would think most everyone would agree that would be a good thing. If there was an armed insurrection in some area of the country, I’d find it hard to object to warrantless searches of homes and the disarming of persons in the area of operations. We need look no farther than the actions of Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to see the utter imbecility of the federal government waiting for a state governor to declare an emergency before intervening. The nonsense purveyed by this group would have prevented Lincoln from opposing Secession and, more recently, it would have prevented Eisenhower from integrating public schools in Little Rock.

These principles, if they deserve to be called that, are nonsense and against the American tradition of government as it has been understood since the Whiskey Rebellion was suppressed by George Washington.

Were flogging bad history the only issue at hand, I wouldn’t be writing this. I’d be encouraging them to get a degree in education and teach civics in junior high. But it isn’t. On one hand the oath these people take is meaningless as they seem to be people who aren’t currently bound by an oath anyway. But as a career infantry officer I am gravely offended that they could be encouraging some number of military members to break rather than keep their oath of office. As a conservative I am offended that anyone on my side of the political spectrum would support such un-American nonsense.

When you take the oath of office as a member of the Armed Forces you do not take on the character of a freelance constitutional scholar.

As a commissioned officer you are appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate (yes, this is true for even second lieutenants), and you serve at the pleasure of the President.

Your oath reads:

“I, _____ (SSAN), having been appointed an officer in the Army of the United States, as indicated above in the grade of _____ do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God.”

Read the oath carefully. There is not an Obama Exception to the oath. There isn’t a proviso that this oath is subsidiary to some grander more important oath you’ve taken. You agree to “well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office.” To men of honor and integrity — which, in an ideal world, should be the minimum requirement to hold a commission — your word is your bond, if you’ve taken this oath with mental reservations about the intentions of the President, you’ve already violated your oath. So you aren’t an “oath keeper” but an “oath breaker.”

For enlisted men the rules are even more clear.

“I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”

Read it again, slowly and carefully:

I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me

You’ll note there aren’t ten exceptions here. The Uniform Code of Military Justice places a significant burden off proof on anyone who disobeys an order on the grounds that the order wasn’t lawful. And once you’ve made the effort, the system doesn’t treat full-time soldiers and part-time constitutional scholars like Michael New with great deal of respect.

As a conservative I’m truly offended by this nonsense. This type organization, seemingly equal parts Walter Mitty and the black helicopter crowd, enables the left to lump all opponents of Obama together into a lunatic fringe that will then be studiously ignored. The Tea Parties were taken seriously by lots of members of Congress precisely because they were not lunatics. Polls show we are winning people over to our ideas. Why would anyone opposed to the Obama regime think this organization is a good idea?

In 1783, we were at a critical point in our struggle for nationhood. We had won independence but the form of government which would succeed the British monarchy was clearly up for grabs. There were calls for General George Washington to lead the nation either as a monarch or military dictator. In response, Washington went before the Continental Congress on December 23, 1783 and resigned his commission. That action, captured in a painting by John Turnbull on display in the Capitol Rotunda, paved the way for our republican system of government and our tradition of the civil supremacy in civil-military relations.

My advice to the “oath keepers” is just that. Keep your oath. If you want to make political decisions about how the military and police are used in this country, resign your position and agitate to your heart’s content. If you remain in uniform your oath binds you to the government and absent clear reason to the contrary, and none of the ten reasons set forward by the Oath Keeper organization meet that standard, you have a legal and moral obligation to faithfully carry out the duties given to you.

We are in a tough fight with this administration for very high stakes. The stakes, however, do not justify us checking our brain and our sanity at the door and signing onto truly bizarre and un-American ideas like those set out by the Oath Keepers.

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The (real) Spirit of '87

In a nice article posted at the Tenth Amendment Center, Timothy Baldwin (son of Chuck Baldwin) writes the following,

[T]o suggest that state sovereignty always give way to the national power is to completely do away with the line. It is in fact to destroy even the natural law of self-preservation. If you accept Corwin’s proposition of “getting back to the constitution”, you might as well throw the tenth amendment in the dump, along with the freedom it protects.

which concepts are of intense interest to me, witnessed by the fact that I've written about them numerous times at this blog including at least one entry in which I suggested (tongue in cheek, of course) that we make this false and dangerous doctrine of federal authority always trumping state authority official amending it into the constitution and settling the issue once and for all time. Indeed, we could simply scrap the entirety of the U.S. Constitution and replace it with this simple doctrine, for as I've also said before, to scrap the 9th and 10th amendments is the same thing, for all intents and purposes, as scrapping the entirety of the constitution.

In a comment directed at Mr. Baldwin's above statements, I wrote the following:

To suggest that state sovereignty always give way to the national power is to completely do away with the line.

Precisely correct! It is, in point of fact, a contradiction in terms the suggestion that state sovereignty can in any way exist alongside an all powerful central authority to which the states must always yield. One of the fundamental laws of logic is the law of non-contradiction (A cannot be non-A), which such a concept palpably violates and is therefore of no legitimate authority whatsoever, which is to say that rational people are in no way bound to observe it nor anyone who propagates such blatantly false illogical conceptions.

It is in fact to destroy even the natural law of self-preservation.

Well, the law itself cannot be destroyed. It can, however, be undermined to the extent that for all intents and purposes (governmentally speaking) it is non existent. And that’s what it invariably comes down to, now isn’t it. Indeed, the law of self-preservation applies as well to the national government as it does to the states and to the people. In asserting unlimited arbitrary power over them, the national government, in point of fact, is destroying itself and the reason for its existence. And we all know what the Declaration says about that — “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [the preservation of the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it…”

In the end, and as I think Mr. Baldwin intimates further down the article, it all comes down to a clash of worldviews (doesn't it always?). Worldview A holds that there are certain inviolable principles perpetually at work in the physical universe and, acknowledging that these principles and laws exist, seeks to operate within the boundaries therein prescribed insofar as they can be dileneated, while Worldview B rejects the idea that these principles and laws really exist as anything more than the false conceptions and inventions of [lesser-evolved] minds led astray. Worldview B seeks, therefore, to ignore them, everything being to such people "relative" except, of course, the idea that "everything is relative" which is not relative but a fixed and immutable law of the universe. Setting aside the contradiction here, is this the one and only fixed and immutable law of the universe, this idea that everything is relative? I don't know, it gets a bit confusing given that such people also palpably contradict themselves in dogmatically asserting that "we can't legislate morality" while at the very same moment, and in fact in the very issue itself, pushing intensely for the ... well, ahem ... the legislation of morality.

Anyway, do read the article in full. Baldwin helpfully lists at least twelve instances in which the Articles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution contain the same principles. Not that it really serves our purposes since the constitution establishes an all-powerful central authority designed to eventually suck all other state and local authority into its ever-growing, ever more violently destructive vortex.

Them founding fathers, they was a shifty bunch, wasn't they!

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The Foundation

Noah Webster, who has gone down in history as America's Schoolmaster, once wrote that:

These United States present the first example in modern times of a government founded on its legitimate principles...

Mr. Webster was, of course, a contemporary of the founding fathers, and in point of fact was a founding father, albeit he does not get the same recognition as do some of the premier founding fathers such as Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Washington, et al. Indeed, I've often said of Webster that he is one of the most under-quoted and under-appreciated of our founding generation, which is to say the real "greatest generation," what's-his-name's book title notwithstanding. But there's not a single person in American History who contributed as much to the proper education of American youth as Mr. Webster, who also once stated that "the education of youth is of more consequence than the making of laws or preaching of the Gospel, because it is in a good education that the foundation for law and Gospel rests for its success." And accordingly another epithet that has attended his name throughout the course of our history is that of The Father of American Education. Read that again: The Father of American Education. Yes, American Education should be distinctive from all others. That is, if we want to keep our Constitutional Republican form of government.

Getting back to the intial quote above, Mr. Webster did not simply leave it at that. He was a voluminous writer who spoke 26 languages. As I've written numerous times before he denominated the United States a Federal Representative Republic, each term in the descriptive having a particular meaning and the terms combined having its own distinctive meaning, of course. I'll be writing more about this in upcoming entries.

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In the Immortal Words of our Forbears

In Provincial Congress,

Concord, April 15, 1775.

Whereas it has pleased the righteous Sovereign of the Universe, in just indignation against the Sins of a People long blessed with inestimable Priveleges, civil and religious, to Suffer the Plots of wicked Men on both sides of the Atlantick, who for many Years have incessantly laboured to Sap the Foundation of our public Liberties, So far to Succeed that we See the New England Colonies reduced to the ungrateful alternative of a tame Submission to a State of absolute Vassalage to the Will of a despotic Minister--or of preparing themselves Speedily to defend, at the Hazard of Life, the unalienable Rights of themselves and Posterity, against the avowed Hostilities of their Parent State, who openly threatens to wrest them from their Hands by Fire and Sword.

In Circumstances dark as these it becomes us, as Men and Christians, to reflect that, whilst every prudent Measure should be taken to ward off the impending Judgments, or prepare to act a proper Part under them when they come; at the Same Time all Confidence must be withheld from the Means we use; and reposed only on that GOD who rules in the Armies of Heaven, and without whose Blessing the best human Counsels are but Foolishness--and all created Power Vanity;

It is the Happiness of his Church that, when the Powers of Earth and Hell combine against it, and those who should be Nursing Fathers become its Persecutors--then the Throne of Grace is of the easiest Access--and its Appeal thither is graciously invited by the Father of Mercies, who has assured it, that when his Children ask Bread he will not give them a Stone.

THEREFORE, in Compliance with the laudable Practice of the People of GOD in all Ages, with humble Regard to the steps of Divine Providence towards this oppressed, threatened and endangered People, and especially in Obedience to the Command of Heaven, that binds us to call on him in the Day of Trouble----

RESOLVED, That it be, and hereby is recommended to the good People of this Colony, of all Denominations, That THURSDAY the Eleventh Day of May next be set apart as a Day of Public Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer; that a total Abstinence from Servile Labor and Recreation be observed, and all their religious Assemblies solemnly convened, to humble themselves before GOD under the heavy Judgments felt and feared, to confess the Sins that have deserved them, to implore the Forgiveness of all our Transgressions, and a Spirit of Repentance and Reformation--and a Blessing on the Husbandry, Manufactures, and other lawful Employments of this People ; and especially that the Union of the American Colonies in Defense of their Rights (for which hitherto we desire to thank Almighty GOD) may be preserved and confirmed,--that the Provincial and especially the Continental CONGRESSES may be directed to such Measures as GOD will countenance.--That the People of Great Britian, and their Rulers, may have their Eyes open'd to discern the Things that shall make for the Peace of the Nation and all its Connections----And that AMERICA may soon behold a gracious Interposition of Heaven, for the Redress of her many Grievances, the Restoration of all her invaded Liberties, and their Security to the latest Generations.

By Order of the Provincial Congress,

JOHN HANCOCK, President

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Who was William (Bill) Cooper, and what is the significance of his untimely death?

(Note: I wrote the draft form of this entry about a week ago, and have just gotten around to adding the relevant links and making the proper corrections.)

Call me "out of the loop", a Johnny-come-lately, or whatever, but the fact is that I've only recently discovered the great wealth of videos archived on the internet. There are, I've discovered, quite literally millions of You Tube videos of various lengths and covering a great variety of subjects, and that's just You Tube. It was in the process of my personally discovering and delving into this unbelievably massive archive of accessible You Tubes that I ran across, for the first time, the interesting story of an eccentric sort of a fellow by the name of William Cooper.

Without going into a lot of detail about him (you can check it out further if that is your desire), Bill Cooper was a conspiracy theorist who was quite convinced that there's a very real and present shadow government in existence which operates behind the scenes and which really controls what goes on in our society moving us ever closer towards a one world government, or, The New World Order. While everyone else (all other nation-states) is basically already on board with this plan, and/or, too weak and slavish to effectively resist it, so the theory goes, we Americans have been slow to join the party thus thwarting the evil designs of the shadow government that really, in spite of all (external) appearances to the contrary, rules over us, albeit not yet completely.

William Cooper made it his life's purpose beginning around the late 1980s up until his untimely violent death on Nov. 5th, 2001, at the hands of Apache Co. law enforcement officers, to, via printed media and low-band radio primarily, to inform the general public of what he believed to be, as I said, the real existence of a shadow government controlling events in the U.S. and elsewhere for the purpose of convincing Americans primarily that a little bit of temporary security in exchange for essential liberties was/is increasingly necessitous in the modern world, thus ushering in the final push by this shadow government towards American acceptance of, and acquiescence to the NWO; to government of, by, and for secret societies.

Now, early in these endeavors of Cooper's he made some wild claims that are simply scientific impossibilities and utterly ridiculous. For instance, during one of his early presentations in 1991 Cooper claimed, among other things, that the moon has an atmosphere and that human beings have colonized the moon for decades, showing pictorial "evidence" of the fact, no less. First of all, if naked eye observations of the moon aren't enough to convince you that the moon has no atmosphere to speak of, let me suggest that you purchase yourself a moderate sized telescope and spend hours and hours, as I've done, observing it that way; up close and personal as they say (a telescope capable of resolving Casini's Division clearly should suffice). There are no cloud formations on the moon, ever, period. If there were, it stands to reason I would have seen them at some point during at least one of my hundreds of observing sessions. Second, due to this lack of atmosphere on the moon the environment there is so utterly hostile to life in general, and human life in particular, that it would be impossible to sustain colonization of the satellite. Such a costly, idiotic endeavor would it be that it would soon be abandoned if anyone ever had the notion to attempt it in the first place. But of course if Plebians exist as some folks seem to believe, then that opens up a whole other realm of possibilites. ;-) That's all beside the point except that it establishes that any claim Bill Cooper made during the last ten to twelve years of his life is at least questionable on these grounds, even though it seems that he later backed away from making such ridiculous assertions as these, focusing rather on claims that are more plausible. It was a good move on his part if his purpose was for serious people to be able to take him seriously.

Notwithstanding all of that (yes, even the bit about cloud formations and human colonies in old photographs of the moon), I find this man and his life to be very fascinating indeed. But the circumstances which surround his death are what really intrigue me about the man and his efforts to widely disseminate his beliefs. Can it be true that Bill Cooper was really gunned down by county law enforcement people late one November night in 2001 according to the official story? Why wasn't local law enforcement informed of what was going to happen on Bill's hill that night; why did they only find out about it after the initial gun battle ensued and Bill lay dead a few feet from the front door to his house on his front lawn? The whole episode and the official story explaining the incident resulting in Bill's death stinks to high heaven of the distinctive odor of an elaborate, collaborative, government cover-up.

Consider:

We know from the happenings at Waco and Ruby Ridge, and other such incidents that federal agents have successfully infiltrated various groups and organizations passing themselves off within the given group or organization as just one of them, sympathetic and friendly towards their views. It happened at Waco, it happened at Ruby Ridge, no question about it. With respect to Ruby Ridge, for instance, there's no question that had one of these agent-infiltrators not befriended Randy Weaver and his family and coerced him into selling the agent illegal firearms, the incident that happened on Ruby Ridge in which Weaver's 14 yr. old son and wife were both cold-bloodedly murdered by (federal) law enforcement thugs would never have occured. I'm not saying Weaver was right in following the instructions of the officer, or that it was in any way a wise choice to make, I'm simply saying that he who committed the greater sin ought to be made an example of, which would never happen, but nonetheless. There's no shortage of unprincipled jackasses out there willing and eager to follow orders to the "t", particularly when there's little to no chance they'll ever be held personally accountable for their following orders and special rules of engagement. And if you believe that Vicki Weaver was not the ultimate target of FBI snipers at Ruby Ridge, let me say with respect that you've been duped. The FBI profile of Vicki tells the whole story on that point.

At Waco the ATF had agent-infiltrators who had befriended the Branch Davidians for the sole purpose of taking the group down in a show of federal power rivaling that of jackboot Nazi storm troopers. The element of surprise was lost, of course, and the rest is history. You've all seen the videos of these jackboot thugs having their rear ends handed to them during the initial assault on the Branch Davidian "compound." After which the federal thugs in the ATF and sister agencies declared vengeance to be theirs, indiscrimately killing men, women and children in the most brutal way imaginable to any decent human being, all to save face and avenge the blood of their comrades in arms. The extent of human depravity and to which it has taken over unaccountable federal government "law enforcement" agencies is, in a word, sickening almost beyond belief. Which brings me to my point.

As we've seen in the examples of Waco and Ruby Ridge and others less publicized but no less brutal, cowardly, terroristic, and abjectly immoral, it is not uncommon at all for federal agents to infiltrate various local groups and organizations with the ultimate goal in mind of justifying their existence and the extent of their powers, and increasing upon them at the expense, of course, of our constitutional liberties. And this with virtual impunity, not to mention a surprising amount of public sympathy towards these rogue federal mercenaries, which is the same thing essentially as tacitly consenting to their goal of creating a real despotism in which there can be no such thing as unalienable rights.

In Bill Cooper's case it is officially reported that Apache county law enforcement coerced him out of his house operating under the disguise of rowdy yougsters whooping it up down the road from his home, a problem Bill had dealt with on numerous occasions before at the request of his land-owning neighbors. Bill's own high alert level and refined paranoia regarding the deceptive power of federal law enforcement was not enough to prevent his being duped into believing what he was seeing and hearing on his hill that fateful night.

Do you see where I'm going with this? Are you beginning to get suspicious? You should be. Ask yourself the following questions:

First, why would county officers choose this particular means to lure Bill from his home, and all that that implies assuming they didn't just get lucky and hit on the right combination by chance? Second, why wasn't local law enforcement notified as to what was about to go down, if for no other reason than as a way of preventing its unanticipated interference with the designs of the sherriff's office, potentially causing a clash between local and undercover, plain dressed county law enforcement officers ... or was it informed contrary to the official story? Third, has Apache Co., Arizona Sherriff's dept. been infiltrated by undercover federal officers otherwise acting as normal members of the local community? Have your State, county, or local law enforcement agencies been infiltrated by undercover feds? Have your local, county and state law enforcement officers become the willing agents of federal law enforcement; the veritable arms of federal usurpation of power against U.S. citizens? And what does this portend as pertains to the defense, and the means of defense of your liberties? Did the feds learn a good lesson in the high profile cases cited above, thus altering their strategy in pursuit of the same goal? What of value can we learn from Bill Cooper's death?

I'm personally not inclined to believe that it's at all necessary for secet societies operating as the real movers and shakers to control, through events and sets of events, the opinions of Americans at any given moment at this particular juncture of our history. After all, why do in secret what you can do openly with the tacit consent of a largely dependent governed? On the other hand, our founding fathers warned us in writing about the existence then of secret societies, secret clubs, and secret intrigues attempting to effect laws and policies extraneous to the legislature, and that if this ever became the rule in America we could bid a fond farewell to our Constitution. At this point in the game nothing can be lightly dismissed.

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Test your knowledge

(Note: The VFR entry linked below now contains a discussion concerning several questions on the quiz. If you wish to avoid the temptation to read the discussion altogether prior to taking the test, click here.)

I encourage readers to test your civic knowledge by taking a 33 question multiple choice quiz which requires just a few minutes of your time. The link to the quiz is posted in this VFR entry.

I'm not asking that you share your score unless that is your desire. I will say that my score was 90% or above answered correctly.

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The Bible and the election

I realize that the contemporary view is that religion and politics do not, and should not, mix. The whole of modern American society is infused with this false belief, but people don't actually believe it anyway when you get down to where the rubber meets the road. One's religion does, and forever will, inform one's politics. True, we can't legislate morality ... as long as it's Christian morality. All other versions of morality (non-Christian morality) is not only acceptable but encouraged in modern American politics. As I've said so many times before (and I invite anyone to refute the principle with a good argument), all laws are founded on morality, someone's morality.

Matthew Fontaine Maury once observed that "the Bible is authority for everything it touches." I agree. So, since I agree, I offer the following opinion. If the Bible says anything on politics, then it is authority for that particular aspect of political philosophy. If it says anything about what our standards should be for choosing our rulers, then it is authority for the making and observing of those standards.

So does the Bible have anything to say about choosing our rulers; about what standards and principles we should apply to their selection? Indeed it does, and we're wise to pay particularly close attention to the details, especially in this farce of a presidential election:

Take you wise men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you.

The elective franchise carries with it a heavy burden of responsibility and of duty. The two candidates we're offered in this election in no way, so far as I can tell, meet these simple, reasonable qualifications (If you think either of them does, I should like to hear why.), therefore, since no other candidate for the presidency is included on the Oklahoma ballot, and since the Oklahoma ballot does not make accomodation for a write-in candidate, I shall abstain in the presidential election.

For those of you who know the scriptures, you're encouraged to offer others, Old and New Testament, which speak to this issue. The scripture I've posted above serves very well the purpose of this post, and that is why I chose it.

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The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

There's an interesting discussion going on over at VFR today concerning whether or not it is widely known among the American populace that indeed the United States dropped leaflets warning the Japanese inhabitants of the targeted cities concerning what was about to happen, and instructing them on what to do to avoid being eviscerated themselves.

Probably what intrigues me the most about the post and the comments to it is the lack of knowledge about these facts concerning America's handling of the war against Japan. As far back as I can remember I've always known about this very relevant fact, but I did not learn it in school or from a book, I learned these facts from my dad who imparted them to me at a fairly young age. And I just assumed, very wrongly it appears, that this was indeed common knowledge among the American citizenry. I guess it all goes back to what I've said numerous times before here and elsewhere: "never assume nothin'."

But I've learned this morning that LA has started an informal poll on the subject, so y'all go over and participate. I should like to see just how wide-spread this lack of knowledge of these facts is. And I'll be keeping track of the results.

-DW

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