The price of peace is being prepared.
isidore-of-seville.com
1stmuse.com
excerpt from The Good Soldier Svejk
by Jaroslav Hasek.
"'What's the point of taking prisoners? They all ought to be shot. No mercy. Dance among the corpses. All the civilians of Serbia should be burnt to a man and the children finished off with the bayonet...'"
"'Preparations for the slaughter of mankind have always been made in the name of God or some supposed higher being which men have devised and created in their own imagination.
Before the ancient Phoenicians cut a prisoner's throat they also performed religious ceremonies just as solemnly as did new generation some thousand years later before marching to war and destroying their enemies with fire and sword.
The cannibals of the Guinea Islands and Polynesia sacrifice to their gods and perform the most diverse religious rites before ceremoniously devouring their captives or unnecessary people like missionaries, travellers, agents of various business firms or persons who are just inquisitive. As the cultural vestments have not yet reached them they decorate the outsides of their thighs with bunches of gaudy feathers of forest birds.
Before the Holy Inquisition burnt its victims, it performed the most solemn religious service - a High Mass with singing.
When criminals are executed, priests always officiate, molesting the delinquents with their presence.
In Prussia the unfortunate victim was led to the block by a pastor, in Austria to the gallows by a Catholic priest, in France to the guillotine, in America to the electric chair by a clergyman and in Spain to a chair where he was strangled by an ingenious appliance. In Russia the revolutionary was taken off by a bearded Orthodox priest etc.
Everywhere on these occasions they used to march about with a crucifix Christ figure, as if to say: 'They're only cutting your head off, they're only hanging you, strangling you, putting fifteen thousand volts into you, but think what that chap there had to go through.'
The great shambles of the world war did not take place without the blessing of priests. Chaplains of all armies prayed and celebrated drumhead masses for victory for the side whose bread they ate.
Throughout all Europe people went to the slaughter like cattle, driven there not only by butcher emperors, kings and other potentates and generals, but also by priests of all confessions, who blessed them and made them perjure themselves that they would destroy the enemy on land, in the air, on the sea etc.
Drumhead masses were generally celebrated twice: once when a detachment left for the front, and once more at the front on the eve of some bloody massacre and carnage. I remember that once when a drumhead mass was being celebrated an enemy airplane dropped a bomb on us and hit the field altar. There was nothing left of the chaplain except some bloodstained rags.
Afterwards they wrote about him as a martyr, while our airplanes prepared the same kind of glory for the chaplain on the other side.
We had a great deal of fun out of this, and on the provisional cross, at the spot where they buried the remains of the chaplain, there appeared overnight this epitaph:
What may hit us has now hit you.
You always said we'd join the saints.
Well, now you've caught it at Holy Mass.
And where you stood are only stains.'"
passive resistance, subterfuge, native wit and dumb insolence. Entangled in red tape, pushed around by police, doctors, clergy and officers, and ever obliging, the good soldier (once discharged as a certified idiot) proceeds toward the crowning achievement of his military career -- to be captured by his own troops. |
