Bowe Bergdahl's Moral Odyssey

     I make no secret that the readers of this site, while quite international in location, are quite few in number.  But many of them are people whom I know personally.  It is to them that I write this.

    The following post -- a guest post -- is one of the most important, I think, that I have published here, because the issues discussed in this article are crucial to us, politically, personally and spiritually.  The post is quite lengthy, but I urge you to take the time to read it in its entirety.  It was written by William N. Grigg, who blogs regularly at his Pro Libertate website (where I, and many others, have learned much), and he graciously gave permission for me to post it here.

*

Guest post by William N. Grigg.

"The Future is Too Good to Waste on Lies": 

 Bowe Bergdahl's Moral Odyssey

"I can't make up my mind to put the damn thing on again.  I feel so clean and free.  It's like voluntarily taking up filth and slavery again.

 . . . I think I'll just walk off naked across the fields."

John Andrews, a U.S.soldier in World War I who went AWOL, discusses his uniform in Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos

Trying to find their footing amid a gale-force outpouring of largely manufactured outrage, officials in Hailey, Idaho canceled their long-planned homecoming for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. They were understandably intimidated by the prospect of dealing with thousands of protesters who planned to besiege the tiny central Idaho town to demand the blood of a young man they now regard to be a deserter, and a father they consider a terrorist sympathizer.

To understand the kind of welcome the War Party has been preparing for Bowe and his family, it's useful to consider the treatment given to the family of World War I-era conscientious objector John Witmer.

A Mennonite from Colombiana, Ohio who was denied a deferment by the local draft board, Witmer died from the Spanish Flu while stationed at Camp Sherman, Ohio.  Witmer's lifeless body was returned to his hometown on October 10, 1918, where the family -- his father Dan, his siblings, and his fiance, Nola -- was greeted by a silent crowd heavy with sullen disapproval for the "slacker" and his family.

Like thousands of others who shared his faith, John had been kidnapped at gunpoint from his family farm through the evil practice of conscription.  The local draft board had turned down John's appeal for Conscientious Objector status, dishonestly assuring him that once he had taken the oath of enlistment he would be recognized as a CO and be given a non-combatant assignment.

As with everything else of consequence that emerges from the lips, pen, or keyboard of a government functionary, those assurances were lies.

During wartime, explained Bernard Baruch, the head of the Wilson Regime's War Industry Board, all "men, money and things" within the government's claimed jurisdiction "suddenly become a compact instrument of destruction . . . [T]he entire population must suddenly cease to be a congeries of individuals, each following a self-appointed course, and become a vast unitary mechanism."

Read the rest of the post, with its accompanying photographs and links, at the Pro Libertate website.