Writes Scott Evans:

What an excellent link! That scene from “All Quiet on the Western Front” is one of the most memorable in film history. In every society, in every age throughout human history, war has been sustained by the jingoistic arrogance and ignorance of hordes of armchair warriors like Herr Professor Kantorek on the “home front” who have never experienced a taste of actual war (German civilians only a generation later, however, would get their fill of war, up close and personal, which is why today’s generation of Germans is the most pacifist in that people’s history).

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, as painful and distasteful as it may sound: If the majority of Amoricons were given even a small taste of what they’ve dished out militarily to other nations over the past century, if the average “support the troops” sticker-bearing soccer mom or beer-sotted, flag pin-wearing pseudo-patriot was forced to spend even an hour amid the wreckage of a burned-up HUMVEE in Baghdad’s Green Zone or amid the wreckage of homes and mangled bodies in an Afghan village that was the result of an Amerikan bombing, there would be an armed one hundred million-man march on Rome-on-the-Potomac DEMANDING and end to ALL Amerikan militarism, at home and abroad. Sadly, soldiers like Paul Baumer who have actually lived through the horrors of war and who persist in sharing their experiences with the ignorant masses will continue to be ridiculed and ignored. As a matter of fact, if Paul’s contemporary equivalent were to even attempt to make such a speech in one of Amerika’s state-run schools today, he would be shown the door before the first paragraph finished leaving his lips (assuming that he was even allowed in the classroom at all).

Here in Amerika, nothing will change until a sufficient percentage of the civilian population has tasted the ravages of war first-hand, enough to attest to the truth of a Paul Baumer’s testimony as to make it completely unnecessary.

Meanwhile, how about a charter air service giving mandatory tours of Baghdad and Baghram (among other places) to Amoricon citizens selected by random lottery?

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.