Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes
A man goes and fights for his country, gets his inside gassed out, and loses his job, and all they give him is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph once a year and paying four shillings in the pound income-tax.
The Centograph is a war memorial monument in London. On Remembrance Day, a British Patriotic Holiday, veterans march past the Centograph. The quotation is text uttered by one of her characters.
Dorothy L. Sayers, 1893–1957, British Writer & Christian Humanist, The Unpleasantness at The Bellona Club, 1928
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The George W. Bush Administration had gone to war against Iraq for reasons that turned out not to be true, and then after a military victory with few casualties, botched the occupation of the country and a vicious insurgency developed bogging down the nation in its longest war in history. The major burden fell on the armed forces and their families. The hearings were in part examining the Bush Administration policies.
The poem was written for and inscribed upon a monument. The Atheists in Foxholes Monument was donated to Alabama Freethought Association, Inc. by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. It is located adjacent to the Willa Mae Whatley Auditorium, in Fearn Park at Lake Hypatia, Alabama.
There is a , romantic American myth about the Militiamen in Colonial and Revolutionary America—the citizen soldiers who would leave their farms and rise to the military necessity of the day. However, not only were the militia very hard to muster to duty, but most actually didn’t own or have experience with firearms, and the prevailing opinion of knowledgeable military leaders from George Washington on down was that the militia were not very good soldiers. See {613015}, {613016}, {613022}, {613027}, {621987}, {621988}, {613030}, {613033}, & {613056}.
This quotation is a wonderful illustration of the change that has taken place in the American military. The young man who was not skilled enough for anything else was meant to be a soldier. By 2010 only one in four high school graduates would be skilled and intelligent to be qualified for the Untied States Navy. The other services also had high requirements in order to function with the high technology, of the modern military.
Ataturk was a young major at the time commanding troops of a weak and corrupt Ottoman regime. However a combined English and French (the strongest military powers in Europe) invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula threatened to capture the Turkish capital, Constantinople. Ataturk alone rallied the Turkish defenders and fought the invaders to a standoff in long drawn out battle with huge casualties on both sides. Ataturk became a national hero. Although Ataturk thereafter was very reluctant to use military force or endanger troops, the thing he always thought worth the supreme sacrifice (including his own) was the independence and sovereignty of the nation. See {584502} for his continuing belief in this type of sacrifice.
The founder was Charles E. Coughlin, 1891-1979, a demagogic Catholic Priest who drafted the principles and invited others to join him. Hundreds of thousands did in this organization which began in idealism, and ended in scandal and hate mongering, so much so that Father Coughlin was ordered off the radio and out of politics by the Catholic Church. The National Union in 1936 had morphed into the Union Party which ran Presidential candidates in the 1936 election. In this principle there were two purposes: First to have the wealthy sacrifice something in time of war. Historically wealth could keep a man from the draft if he so wanted. Second, when the company went to war the argument went it was the rich who could profit who had more political influence and could make the war. This way, they would pay a high price and might oppose war. Many of Coughlin’s followers were pro-German and wanted to keep the country out of the European war.
Dorothy Leigh Sayers was an English crime writer and poet. She was also a student of classical and modern languages.
