We Gave them the Weapons...

Indeed, even as President Bush castigates Saddam's regime as "a grave and gathering danger," it's important to remember that the United States helped arm Iraq with the very weapons that administration officials are now citing as justification for Saddam's forcible removal from power.

- Chris Bury, A Tortured Relationship, ABC, Sept. 18, 2002

War Perverts Patriotism

"Warlike peoples pervert patriotism. We are a warlike people, easily distracted from our assignment of preparing for the coming of the Lord. When enemies rise up, we commit vast resources to the fabrication of gods of stone and steel - ships, planes, missiles, fortifications - and depend on them for protection and deliverance. When threatened, we become anti-enemy instead of pro-kingdom of God; we train a man in the art of war and call him a patriot, thus, in the manner of Satan's counterfeit of true patriotism, perverting the savior's teaching: 'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that despitefully use you, and persecute you;' we forget that if we are righteous the Lord will either not suffer our enemies to come upon us - and this is the special promis to the inhabitants of the land of the Americas - or he will fight our battles for us."

- Spencer W. Kimball, Teaching of Spencer W. Kimball, p. 414-418

WW II

"Then as the crowning savagery of the war we Americans wiped out hundreds of thousands civilian population with the atom bomb in Japan, few if any of the ordinary citizens being any more responsible for the war than were we, and perhaps most of them no more aiding Japan in the war than we were aiding America. Military men are now saying that the atom bomb was a mistake. It was more than that: it was a world tragedy... And the worst of this atomic bomb tragedy is not that no only did the people of the United States not rise up in protest against this savagery, not only did it not shock us to read of this wholesale destruction of men, women, and children, and cripples, but that it actually drew from the nation at large a general approval of this fiendish butchery."

- J. Reuben Clark, October 1946 General Conference

Blinded by Patriotism

"Power and control are more easily accepted by a citizenry when they are "infused with fear and blinded by patriotism.""

- Jack Monnett, Awakening to our Awful Situation, p. 151

Debt Clock Keeps Ticking

Here is an interesting link that keeps the running tally of the national debt and various other statistics: www.brillig.com/debtclock

War

"War has become the most useful tool of the secret combination."

- Jack Monnett, Awakening to our Awful Situation, p. 141