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Post by Torence on Jan 11, 2013 9:38:26 GMT 10
It seems to me that this organization of ours aspires to be one to promote a Plan for Universal Peace and International Brotherhood. Therefore, would you agree that, 21st Century FreeMasonry should come out for the Abolition of War as our good cause and divest itself of any reference which would indicate a Love of War or for Military things? Or is this notion about us not a shared dream between FreeMasons?
Torence Evans Ake
Secretary - Auburn Park Lodge No. 789 - Crete, Illinois
Chaplain - Triluminar Lodge No. 767 - Lansing, Illinois
MIGS - Illinois Lodge of Research
PM - Arcadia Lodge No. 1138 - Lansing, Illinois
City and Country Steward
torenceake@aol.com
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Post by Tamrin on Jan 11, 2013 10:30:21 GMT 10
It seems to me that this organization of ours aspires to be one to promote a Plan for Universal Peace and International Brotherhood. Therefore, would you agree that, 21st Century FreeMasonry should come out for the Abolition of War as our good cause and divest itself of any reference which would indicate a Love of War or for Military things? Or is this notion about us not a shared dream between FreeMasons? I believe Just War Theory needs to be applied. Certainly the Iraq War is an obscenity. However, consider WWII: Do you think it needed to be fought? It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of
vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion
W.R. Inge The difficulty comes with defence against an aggressor: When is it genuine and when is it just a pretext for one's own aggression? When is a peremptory strike justified, if ever? Does one need to wait until a decisive attack, to which any response may be too late? I suggest similar rules should apply between nations as apply to individuals acts of aggression. As for a love of war!? In Australia our fallen servicemen and women are remembered on ANZAC Day (25 April), it is a day which commemorates a defeat, when we grieve over the folly of war. Some lodges conduct special services at their meeting that month. Some of the fallen are remembered as heroes (chiefly those who gave their lives saving others) but most are lamented as tragic, naïve youths, cut down before their prime. Any hints of martial celebrations are quickly scotched as being in bad taste. Some ex-servicemen and women deserve respect for their actions; for some it was just an employment option; and others deserve condemnation. For me, the default position, unless otherwise demonstrated, is one of respect. Perhaps it would be better if Freemasonry were silent on such matters. |
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Post by Smithee on Jan 11, 2013 12:49:19 GMT 10
We can try.
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Post by Tamrin on Jan 11, 2013 13:37:01 GMT 10
War is a Racket by Smedley Butler
It's not the naïve foot soldiers Freemasonry from whom Freemasonry should withhold its regard (better them than sports and movie stars) but from those in on the dirty racket. Sadly these "pillars of society" often find preferment within the Craft and elsewhere. We need to hold them to account and regard them as amoral pariahs.
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Post by Torence on Jan 12, 2013 0:28:36 GMT 10
No, every War of the twentieth Century was a Race War from the Boxer Rebellion and the Phillipine Conquest to Kuwait. We should have known that we were in trouble with this generation of man when rather than give the next conflict its own name, we decided to just start numbering this week's flavor of the week, the next Big War to End All Wars; and my how it is that we seem to continue to hunger to wake up to WWIII.
Rather than allow Y2K to be a moment of promise, we chose instead at the Millennium to embarrass ourselves with fearful and unfounded ignorance about an imaginary attack by our machines. Once that episode was over and we felt a little lost, we next chose to get behind a philosophy of expediting apocalypse.
We chose to make an attempt to reintroduce Religious War as a "Just" Cause for the 21st. If Jesus were alive then would He have support us in this course? I think that He would have been asking for a step stool so that He could climb back onto the Cross. Talk about a major step backward in thought! What a missed opportunity.
But with any luck we have averted this trouble, not by any benefit from some hard fought battle; but because we are smart enough to complain about the abuse of the old Grandfather Lawyers from the olden times who lay a false claim to representing us and our sensibilities and go along with the schemes of Millionaires who desire for us to agree to Live like Slaves and Produce Sons and now-a-days Daughters, to surrender to them so that they can make themselves into Billionaires.
Had we grown up as Creatures along with our Technology, our trouble today would be that there would be ten billion people or more with whom to work; we would probably be placing the overflow to live upon our neighboring planets. If genius occurs once in a billion people, then we would have at least three more of them here to help us in our quest to make things better for this century.
As a Secretary of one Lodge and Chaplain of another, I wish that I had them on hand to petition our fraternity. The intellectual landscape in our fraternity at the start of this Century seems to be nothing but a dry lake bed. Who here would be equal to the caliber of Masons we admire from our collective past?
For America, WWII was only a four year experience and one which we knew straight away that we could not win by meeting the enemy on equal terms and by relying on righteousness to win the day. In America, we think ourselves superior to the societies which require a Monarch. But when Kings went to Battle an Enemy they were at the forefront of the fight. Want to avert the next one for your Commonwealth? Tell Charles that his place has been made ready at the head of some legion. Or better yet, send Granny, Who could go forward into battle against her, holding onto her hat and clutching her purse?
Our "Leadership" stays home and run things from the safety of plush and very expensive offices, dropping bombs on family weddings on the other side of the World by robot as if we were playing some video game. Did they not see the movie that would have told them that "The only winning move is to not play the game."
Our Fundamental Righteousness had already left us by the start of WWII. We invited the attack that started it all and then lied about it to cover-up our incompetence. Similarly, the conversation on the Saturday at Camp David following the 911 attacks was an argument that our Enemy was a bunch of dress wearing loosers with no future squatting around a campfire in Afghanistan. That was the site for "War."
Bush Jr. met privately with our fellow Mason Cheney after the discussion. They then phoned his father, a WWII veteran who diverted the War effort on an invented pretense in order to settle an old score. The rest of what ensued was a fight for supremacy in future funding between the Defense Department and the CIA, and little else. Obama's War has been one to win over the hearts and minds of the occupied. Perhaps one of our returning soldiers can relate some anecdote as to how they have been successful with their mission?
We only won WWII by inventing the most deadly and pervasive poison known to man and then by not only threatening genocide; but by demonstrating our moral degeneracy by evaporating hundreds of thousands of innocents who were simply born into the wrong time and place. We were no better than them then, arguably worse; and we are no better than that Enemy now.
The Armegedon that we visited upon them killed mostly women and children and only a few troublesome men. The action left the rest to die in the most horrific manner imaginable. We thought it o.k. to do so to Asians. We could not stomach doing it to Europeans.
And an accomplished FreeMason, who I do admire, made the decision to do so in the name of Our Country. No other Nation. In this instance he made a wrong choice. And if the Japanese of the 21st Century could manage to apologize for the early 20th Century Japanese who invaded Manchuria, I think it time that we in America apologize for our response.
This episode left us with a generation, the Eisenhower Era Man, whose sensibilities our fraternity then catered for the next sixty years+; and, we continue to cater to them though as a class of Mason they are taking their turn now and are quickly winking out of existence.
I am the Secretary of my Lodge and I am wrapping up the End of Year dues process. Yesterday., I ran the Social Security Death Index and found that three of more of our members took their turn in 2012. Their Birth Years were 1918, 1920 and 1927. I seem to be alone at Work in the fraternity thinking about who we should be once the Eisenhower Man who used their success in battle to invent McCarthyism, the Cold War, The Race Riots, the Me Generation, to be fruitful and multiply exploding the Population and produce my crowd, Preppies and Yuppies; and, lastly to mortgage the future to own all the property here and not give it up and create the greatest welfare state ever known to the benefit of their class of person.
Any reader of Science Fiction for Jules Verne to H.G Wells to Bradbury, Asimov and a thousand others should know better. Even in a world populated illiterates who choose to be illiterate, they have as their lesson just about every futuristic television show or action packed movie. Allow me to state this palinly for the Neandertahals among us...
War Bad. FreeMasonry Good.
Torence Evans Ake
Secretary - Auburn Park Lodge No. 1138 - Lansing, Illinois
Chaplain - Triluminar Lodge No. 767 - Lansing, Illinois
MIGS - Illinois Lodge of Research
PM - Aracdia Lodge No. 1138 - Lansing, Illinois
City and Country Steward
torenceake@aol.com
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Post by Torence on Jan 12, 2013 0:37:39 GMT 10
That's "Plainly" not "Palinly." I must of been thinking of Sarah. My Freudian slip is showing.
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Post by Tamrin on Jan 12, 2013 7:36:33 GMT 10
No, every War of the twentieth Century was a Race War from the Boxer Rebellion and the Phillipine Conquest to Kuwait. We should have known that we were in trouble with this generation of man when rather than give the next conflict its own name, we decided to just start numbering this week's flavor of the week, the next Big War to End All Wars; and my how it is that we seem to continue to hunger to wake up to WWIII. If we did not resist Hitler, we would have acquiesced to and been complicit in genocide. Freemasons were on his hit list, as were many minorities. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb
to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth
Isiah 53:7 |
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Post by Tamrin on Jan 12, 2013 7:58:24 GMT 10
For America, WWII was only a four year experience and one which we knew straight away that we could not win by meeting the enemy on equal terms and by relying on righteousness to win the day. Americans often seem to portray themselves as having been the major and decisive player in WWII: By far the major combat was Germany versus the USSR. |
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Post by Tamrin on Jan 12, 2013 8:08:42 GMT 10
We only won WWII by inventing the most deadly and pervasive poison known to man and then by not only threatening genocide; but by demonstrating our moral degeneracy by evaporating hundreds of thousands of innocents who were simply born into the wrong time and place. We were no better than them then, arguably worse; and we are no better than that Enemy now. Japanese forces were already retreating to their home land and their government had initiated negotiations for surrender. The strategic justification for the Hiroshima mega-mega murder were highly doubtful and those for that at Nagasaki were zilch. |
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Post by Tamrin on Jan 12, 2013 8:26:33 GMT 10
War Bad. FreeMasonry Good. This is not an argument. A connection needs to be made and articulated. While Freemasonry has a voice which should be used to advocate for genuine peace, it is not representative. Perhaps we need to look at reforms giving the the United Nations some genuine powers to bring sanctions against rogue nations, even where they are members of the Security Council. |
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