WAR CRIMINAL
Saturday, March 26th, 2022
March 26, 2022From historian Michael Beschloss:
FDR gave “Four Freedoms” speech to Congress on eve of US entry in World War II, 1941–here are his changes on the fifth draft:
Eleanor Roosevelt:
‘At all times, day by day, we have to continue fighting for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom from want—for these are the things that must be gained in peace as well as in war.’
April 15, 1943 My Day ❀
From her 1963 book, Tomorrow is Now:
‘In a sense, nearly all great civilizations that perished did so because they had crystallized, because they were incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions, new methods, new points of view. It is as though people would literally rather die than change.’
History will no doubt consider this to be his finest speech at a moment it was needed most. -dayle
President Biden:
“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
“Their brave resistance is part of a larger fight for essential democratic principles that unite all free people. We stand with you. Period.”
Posted by Michael Marquardt, appointed by President Biden to the US Comm. Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad:
‘Take it from this Berliner who was there when the Iron Curtain started falling in 1989, this is one of the most consequential speeches from an American president in decades. Thank you.’
Indeed.
Garry Kasparov, Chairman of the Human Rights Foundation:
‘No free world leader should hesitate to state plainly that the world would be a far better place if Putin were no longer in power in Russia. A good way to make that come about is to say exactly that. Russia will be a pariah until Putin is gone.
As I Worte today, Putin’s war in Ukraine and against the world order will not end as long as he is in power. Either the war criminal is isolated or he isn’t. No more half-measures.’
Humanity with all its fears,
with all its hopes of future years,
is hanging breathless on thy fate.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
‘I don’t mean to ruin the ending for you, sweet child, but life is one long headwind. To make any kind of impact requires self-will bordering on madness. The world will be hostile, it will be suspicious of your intent, it will misinterpret you, it will inject you with doubt, it will flatter you into self-sabotage. My god, I’m making it sound so glamorous and personal! What the world is, more than anything? It’s indifferent.’
-Maria Semple, Today Will Be Different, p. 96
Wednesday, March 16th, 2022
March 16, 2022
[Church of the Voyager, Coronado, California.]
Ukraine’s colors remind us of light, in so much darkness.
Marianne Williamson:
Pave a way for me out of darkness into l i g h t.
‘Great people are not those who have never fallen down. Great people are those who, when they do fall down, dig deep within themselves and find the strength to get back up. Today may I be someone who rises from the ashes of (the) past.’
#StandingWithUkraine
‘I’m with Meduza’
Defend the Truth
Independent Russian news.
From Meduza:
“We need your help. Right now.
The Kremlin is doing everything in its power to hide the truth about its war against Ukraine. Russia is under military censorship. The authorities prohibit the press from calling this full-scale invasion of Ukraine a war, and they threaten journalists who publish independently verified information about the conflict with up to 15 years in prison.
Meduza was launched in Europe in 2014, shortly after Russia annexed Crimea. For eight years, we have worked to produce independent journalism under the most unfavorable conditions. Millions of people in Russia now rely on our reporting. But a few days ago, our journalists were forced to leave the country.
Since the outbreak of this war, transferring money from Russia to Europe has been impossible. We lost 30,000 donators. At the moment, we get no money from Russia at all.
In this situation, we turn to you. We ask you to take the place of our dedicated supporters in Russia. Save Meduza for our Russian readers — and for yourself.
We have a duty to tell the truth. We have millions of readers in Russia who need us. Without independent journalism, it will be impossible to stop this monstrous war.”
“We are, like Dante, lost in a dark forest, with no sense of orientation. An increasing process of abstraction has demolished our human values, leaving in total command that ultimate abstraction which is the general exchange value for all goods and services: money.
And it may well be that, like Dante, we will have to go through hell and purgatory in order to access our true nature, which is, all wisdom traditions teach us, love.
It will not be an easy journey. It is our collective spiritual task and It will require that we recognize not just the evil which is out there, visible and obvious, but the subtler forms of its inner counterpart, the subtle ways in which we are all partaking of the collateral damage.
We need to be inner and outer warriors, so that pure love may shine, l’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle (the love which moves the sun and the other stars).”
Shantena Sabbadini, Director
The destruction and murder deepens today.
“More bodies will come, from streets where they are everywhere and from the hospital basement where adults and children are laid out awaiting someone to pick them up. The youngest still has an umbilical stump attached.”
From British journalist Carole Cadwalladr:
Oh my god. You can see the words written perfectly clearly, both in front & back of the building: “DETI” = “CHILDREN”
From AP News:
By MSTYSLAV CHERNOV, EVGENIY MALOLETKA and LORI HINNANT
MARIUPOL, Ukraine (AP) — The bodies of the children all lie here, dumped into this narrow trench hastily dug into the frozen earth of Mariupol to the constant drumbeat of shelling.
There’s 18-month-old Kirill, whose shrapnel wound to the head proved too much for his little toddler’s body. There’s 16-year-old Iliya, whose legs were blown up in an explosion during a soccer game at a school field. There’s the girl no older than 6 who wore the pajamas with cartoon unicorns, among the first of Mariupol’s children to die from a Russian shell.
They are stacked together with dozens of others in this mass grave on the outskirts of the city. A man covered in a bright blue tarp, weighed down by stones at the crumbling curb. A woman wrapped in a red and gold bedsheet, her legs neatly bound at the ankles with a scrap of white fabric. Workers toss the bodies in as fast as they can, because the less time they spend in the open, the better their own chances of survival.
“The only thing (I want) is for this to be finished,” raged worker Volodymyr Bykovskyi, pulling crinkling black body bags from a truck. “Damn them all, those people who started this!”
More bodies will come, from streets where they are everywhere and from the hospital basement where adults and children are laid out awaiting someone to pick them up. The youngest still has an umbilical stump attached.
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#PUTINSWAR
From President Zelensky’s address to the U.S. Congress this morning:
‘Peace is more important than income.’
‘It’s about freedom. It’s about the right of people to determine their own future.’
‘Being the leader of the world means being the leader of peace.’
From Pope Francis:
