Evil Politics

War Memorial

2007-05-28T11:12:54Z

Let us commemorate America's useless 40 year old war- The War On Drugs:

QUOTATIONS ON DRUGS & THE WAR ON DRUGS

"That which we call sin in others is experiment for us."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

* * *

"If the government can't keep drugs away from inmates who are locked in steel cages, surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, drug-tested, strip-searched, X-rayed, and videotaped – how can it possibly stop the flow of drugs to an entire nation?"

– Ron Crickenberger

* * *

"To me, (arresting people for simple marijuana possession is) just a huge waste of taxpayers' money. It's not educating people, not doing anything to reduce use. All it does is put people in jail, eat up police time, judges' time, right down the line. I've met a lot of people in my life who occasionally use marijuana. People who are responsible, who have jobs, who pay taxes, who raise families. Productive members of society. They shouldn't be treated like criminals."

- Mark Stepnoski, Five-time Pro Bowler, two-time Super Bowler, and new spokesman for NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, Washington Times, 1/21/03

* * *

"We have become a nation floating in a sea of Jack Daniels, punctuated by bobbing capsules of Prozac, adrift on rafts in a catatonic sea."

- Al Martin, "The Bush Cabal End Game", AlMartinRaw.com

* * *

"We are a drug-habit Nation and alcohol is only one of the many kinds that are being used to excess."

- Dr. Harvey Wiley, head of the Bureau of Chemistry in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, addressing the New York City Republican Club, February 18, 1911

* * *

"Here was a panacea . . . for all human woes; here was the secret of happiness about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered; happiness might now be bought for a penny and carried in the waistcoat pocket; portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint bottle; and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail coach."

- Thomas DeQuincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1822

* * *

"Cacaoaquauitl: This cacao, when much is drunk, when much is consumed, especially that which is green, which is tender, makes one drunk, takes effect on one, makes one dizzy, confuses one, makes one sick, deranges one. When an ordinary amount is drunk, it gladdens one, refreshes one, consoles one, invigorates one. Thus it is said: 'I take cacao. I wet my lips. I refresh myself.'"

- Bernardino DeSahagun, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva Espana, 16th century

* * *

"By any secret sleight or cunning, as Drinkes,
Drugges, Medicines, charmed Potions,
Amatorious Philters, Figures, Characters,
or any such like paltering Instruments, Devises,
or Practices."

- Thomas Newton, Tryall Man's Owne Selfe, 1602

* * *

"I am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater's heaven. I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degress of drunkenness. I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them!"

- Henry Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods, 1854

* * *

"As long as the government can arbitrarily decide which substances are legal and which are illegal, then those who remain behind bars for illegal substances are political prisoners."

- Paul Krassner, 1999

* * *

"I received instructions through military channels to provide opium for the Chinese people by establishing an opium suppression board."

- Harada Kumakichi, Japanese Military Attache at Shanghai from 1937 to 1939

* * *

"I had gotten caught with a shopping bag full of marijuana, a shopping bag full of love - I was in love with the weed and I did not for one minute think that anything was wrong with getting high. I had been getting high for four or five years and was convinced with the zeal of a crusader, that marijuana was superior to lush - yet the rulers of the land seemed all to be lushes. I could not see how they were more justified in drinking than I was in blowing the gage. I was a grasshopper, and it was natural that I felt myself to be unjustly imprisoned."

- Eldridge Cleaver, Soul On Ice, 1968

* * *

"What marriage is to morality, a properly conducted licensed liquor traffic is to sobriety."

- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1895

* * *

"I know better than to get tight oftener than once in three months. It sets a man back in the esteem of people whose opinions are worth having."

- Mark Twain, Letter to Will Bowen, August 25, 1866

* * *

"Never refuse to do a kindness unless the act would work great injury to yourself, and never refuse to take a drink - under any circumstances."

- Mark Twain's Notebook

* * *

"Evidence ... proves that prohibition only drives drunkenness behind closed doors and into dark places, and it does not cure it or even diminish it."

- Mark Twain, Letter to San Francisco, July 28, 1867

* * *

"Of the demonstrably wise there are but two: those who commit suicide, and those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied with drink."

- Mark Twain, Notebook #42, 1898

* * *

"I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side."

- Mark Twain, quoted in Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field

* * *

"It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues."

- Abraham Lincoln

* * *

"Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes at the very principles upon which our government was founded."

- Abraham Lincoln

* * *

"Republic. I like the sound of the word. It means people can live free, talk free, go or come, buy or sell, be drunk or sober, however they choose."

- John Wayne

* * *

"The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits."

- Thomas Jefferson

* * *

"I have every sympathy with the American who was so horrified by what he had read of the effects of smoking that he gave up reading."

- Lord Conesford

* * *

"If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert, and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography."

- P.J. O'Rourke

* * *

"There are more old drunkards than old doctors."

- Benjamin Franklin

* * *

"My dad was the town drunk. Usually that's not so bad, but New York City?"

- Henny Youngman

* * *

"When I sell liquor, it's bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lakeshore Drive, it's hospitality."

- Al Capone

* * *

"How do you look when I'm sober?"

- Ring Lardner

* * *

"Drugs are murdering our children."

- President George Bush the Elder, 1989

* * *

John Winkokur: "How did you react to winning a Pulitzer?
Dave Barry: "I figured it was just one more indication of the nation's drug problem."

* * *

Larry King: "Don't you think it would be better to legalize victimless crimes like drugs and prostitution and divert the resources to more important things like rapes and assaults and things like that?"
Senator Tom Harkin: "No, I don't agree with that at all."

* * *

"The current environment is so polluted with hysteria that nothing rational can happen to solve the drug problem. Until we're able to get the facts into perspective and debunk the myths, we're just not going to make progress and effectively deal with these issues."

- Georgette Bennett

* * *

"The prohibition law, written for weaklings and derelicts, has divided the nation, like Gaul, into three parts - wets, drys, and hypocrites."

- Florence Sabin, 1931

* * *

"While the consequences of drugs such as cocaine are indisputably severe, they are not unlike those which flow from the misuse of other, legal, substances."

- Byron R. White, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

* * *

"In Europe, when tobacco was first introduced, it was immediately banned. In Turkey, if you got caught with tobacco, you had your nose slit. China and Russia imposed the death penalty for possession of tobacco."

- Andrew Weil, M.D.

* * *

"As society has become less tolerant of drugs, people have become less willing to report drug use, even in anonymous surveys."

- National Institute of Justice

* * *

"Stop wasting jail space on prostitutes, drug users and other victimless criminals. Even if we find it morally acceptable to imprison these people for choices they make regarding their bodies, we must realize that we simply cannot afford to continue clogging the court system and the prison system with the harmless 'criminals.' "

- Edward B. Wagner

* * *

"Don't do drugs because if you do drugs you'll go to prison, and drugs are really expensive in prison."

- John Hardwick

* * *

"We simply do not catch a high enough percentage of users to make the law a real threat, although we do catch enough to seriously overburden our legal system."

- Jackson Eli Reynolds

* * *

"The growth of drug-related crime is a far greater evil to society as a whole than drug taking. Even so, because we have been seduced by the idea that governments should legislate for our own good, very few people can see how dangerously absurd the present policy is."

- John Casey

* * *

"Our excessive use of drugs (all drugs - the licit and illicit) indicates a deep despair in the country. Drug problems are just bringing us that message. Where despair is greatest, drug use is greatest: the very poor and the very rich. Barrios and boredom produce a need to escape. What to do about barrios and boredom? Killing the messenger (jailing drug users) has only made the problem worse. Its easier to declare war on the messenger than to do something about the message."

- Peter McWilliams, Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society, 1993

* * *

"It (alcoholic beverages) sloweth age, it strengtheneth youth, it helpeth digestion, it abandoneth melancholie, it relisheth the heart, it lighteneth the mind, it quickeneth the spirits, it keepeth and preserveth the head whirling, the eyes from dazzling, the tongue from lisping, the mouth from snaffling, the teeth from chattering, and the throat from rattling; it keepeth the stomach from wambling, the heart from swelling, the hands from shivering, the sinews from shrinking, the viens from crumbling, the bones from aching, and the marrow from soaking."

- Anonymous, Thirteenth Century

* * *

"We, the undersigned, recognizing the evils of drunkenness and resolved to check its alarming increase, with consequent poverty, misery and crime among our people, hereby solemnly pledge ourselves that we will not get drunk more than four times a year, viz., Fourth of July, Muster Day, Christmas Day, and Sheep-Sheering."

- Massachusetts temperence societies, 1820

* * *

"If we are going to have freedom, we are going to have to let people act foolishly as well as wisely."

Sam J. Ervin, 1970

* * *

"I'm not going to talk about what I did as a child. What I am going to talk about -- and I am going to say this consistently -- [is that] it is irrelevant what I did 20 to 30 years ago. What's relevant is that I have learned from any mistakes I made. I do not want to send signals to anybody that what Gov. Bush did 30 years ago is cool to try."

-- George W. Bush in an interview with WMUR-TV in New Hampshire, when asked if he had used "drugs, marijuana, cocaine"

* * *

"It was just inebriating what Midland was all about then."

— George W. Bush, from a 1994 interview, as quoted in First Son, by Bill Minutaglio

* * *

"I don't do drugs. I am drugs."

-Slavador Dali

* * *

Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

--Lily Tomlin

* * *

"Drug addicts may be considered the precursors or experimenters who tirelessly blaze new paths of life, and their cautioness lacks the the foundation for caution."

-G.Deleuze

* * *

I've never advocated the use of drugs to anyone, but they always worked for me"

- Hunter Thompson

* * *

"If the words life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the piece of hemp it was written on."

- Terence McKenna

* * *

"A poet makes himself a visionary through a long boundless and systemised disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love of suffering of madness, he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons and preserves their quintessences, unspeakable torment where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great accursed, the great invalid and the supreme scientist for he attains the unknown. So what if he is destroyed in his flight through things unheard of, unnameable. The poet as the thief of fire."

Arthur Rimbaud

* * *

"Well ya see, Norm, it's like this... A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members. In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Excessive intake of alcohol, as we know, kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. That's why you always feel smarter after a few beers."

- Cliff, Cheers

* * *

"Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence."

– Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist

* * *

"Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the '20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does."

– US District Judge James C. Paine, addressing the Federal Bar Association in Miami, November, 1991

* * *

"Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging than the drug itself."

– Jimmy Carter

* * *

"Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment."

– Philip K. Dick

* * *

"I am convinced that we can do to guns what we've done to drugs: create a multi-billion dollar underground market over which we have absolutely no control."

– George L. Roman

* * *

"I favor free trade in drugs for the same reason the Founding Fathers favored free trade in ideas: in a free society it is none of the government's business what ideas a man puts into his mind; likewise, it should be none of its business what drugs he puts into his body."

– Thomas Szasz

* * *

"I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my value system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal."

– Milton Friedman

* * *

"Acquainted with magic drugs used by her parents before her, she learned how to use those of compelling qualities and became the wedded wife of Belisarius, after having already borne many children."

- Procopius of Caesarea, The Secret History, circa 550 CE

* * *

"Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous, habit-forming drugs. But once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments … Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils? Why not prevent him from reading bad books and bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music? The mischief done by bad ideologies, surely, is much more pernicious both for the individual and for the whole society, than that done by narcotic drugs."

– Von Mises, Human Action

* * *

"The illegal drug trade is the financial engine that fuels many terrorist organizations around the world, including Osama bin Laden."

– Dennis Hastert, House Speaker

* * *

"The War on Drugs is a price support system for terrorists and drug pushers. It turns ordinary, cheap plants like marijuana and poppies into fantastically lucrative black market products. Without the War on Drugs, the financial engine that fuels terrorist organizations would sputter to a halt."

– Ron Crickenberger, Libertarian Party Political Director 2/4/02

* * *

"Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit and abolish women?"

– Martin Luther

* * *

"The greatest danger is from legal drugs."

– Terry McNally, at the Conference on World Affairs, Boulder CO, 4/6/04

* * *

"A country that goes out of its way to imprison the innocent has no business preaching democracy to the world."

– Paul Craig Roberts

© SpiritCaller.net, 2002-2005

'I have Rove's Emails'

2007-05-12T01:31:14Z

Greg Palast On C-SPAN -
'I have Rove's Emails'
By Greg Palast
5-11-7

This Sunday 7pm Eastern on C-SPAN's Book TV

Greg Palast and Amy Goodman have a couple of neo-cons for lunch - recorded live at the LA Book Fest.

Want a taste? Read the Interview with Palast from the Dollars & Sense magazine spring issue about to hit the streets

"I have Karl Rove's emails. No kidding."

Dollars & Sense: In the new edition of your book, ARMED MADHOUSE, you report on the theft of the 2008 election. How do know what they're doing? Any way to stop them?

Palast: I know because I have Karl Rove's emails. No kidding. He and his team aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer. They sent copies of their plans to GeorgeWBush.ORG instead of GeorgeWBush.COM addresses -- and, heh heh, they ended up in my in-box. Who says this job ain't fun?

Dollars & Sense: Bush fired eight prosecutors. You were behind the scenes on that story long before it broke in the US. What are they still withholding from us?

Palast: Look, it's all about VOTES. You'll see that the prosecutor that Karl Rove insisted in putting in place is a slithery character named Tim Griffin. He's the guy I busted as the spider-mind behind the "caging lists" which purged thousands of Black voters. The prosecutors fired, as you'll see in Armed Madhouse, include those, like David Iglesias in New Mexico, who refused to bring phony cases of fraud against legitimate voters. It's a matter of economics: the Republican party is systematically knocking out lower-income voters; that makes their purges racially biased -- but my data show that's just the effect of hunting down and attacking the ballot power of working class and poor voters. Disenfranchisement is class war by other means.

Dollars & Sense: Why the hell hasn't the U.S. press covered the story of Bush's vultures, election's theft, Iraq's oil or any of the other stories you've put on the front pages in Europe?

Palast: Robert Kennedy Jr. just complained to the head of ABC News about the blackout on my stories. (ABC has the right to take my stuff from BBC for free.) I'm not holding my breath for an answer. I call it, The Silence of the Media Lambs. We've got loads of terrific investigative reporters in America, but gutless editors. So the suck-ups to power get the choice posts in metropolitan dailies and on the networks.

Think of the punishment inflicted for the crime of investigative reporting. Seymour Hersh told me he was forced out of the New York Times and Bob Parry, the guy who busted open the Iran-Contra story, was pushed out of the Associated Press. On the other hand, Bob Woodward, who had his journalistic tongue up George Bush's rectum, who went from writing 'All the President's Men' to being one of the President's men, is doing just fine.

Dollars & Sense: Many progressives are focused on privatization of the Iraqi economy, including its oil industry, as Bush's real goal for the invasion. But you write about two radically different plans within the administration, the neo-cons' versus Big Oil's-and Big Oil's plan was the one opposed to privatization. What's going on here? Plus: any update on how privatization and the whole neo-liberal reshaping of the Iraqi economy are going?

Palast: A lot of intelligent folk believe Bush had a secret plan to grab the oil fields of Iraq before the tanks rolled. That's wrong. He had TWO plans. In Armed Madhouse, I show you both -- the result of two years undercover for BBC. The plans conflict. There's the neo-con plan: Privatize -- that is, sell off -- everything, "especially the oil" industry. That's a quote from the 101-page document which I learned was written by the neo-cons. That didn't happen -- because a Jim Baker team -- he's the lawyer for both Exxon and Saudi Arabia -- secretly wrote a 323-page plan that called for CONTROLLING the oil flow, not owning it. The purpose was to LIMIT the supply of oil from Iraq and keep prices high. This would, "enhance [Iraq's] relationship with OPEC" -- the oil cartel. That's a quote from the document you're not supposed to see.

So here it is: the invasion was about LIMITING the flow of oil from Iraq, keeping prices high, not grabbing the oil to bring prices down for your SUV. The secret Baker plan is now the law in Iraq and prices are over $50 a barrel. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

Dollars & Sense: We've covered some of the less-told stories of Venezuela under Chavez-for example, how he's dramatically expanding the co-operative sector of the economy. Some progressives worry though: is he a populist demagogue, maybe in the Juan Peron mold, or is he really committed to worker autonomy, democracy, and all that good stuff? You've talked with Hugo Chavez. What's your take?

Palast: Chavez recommends that everyone read my book, so obviously I think he's the greatest statesman since Lincoln. But seriously, folks, what makes the guy an astonishing threat to the Bush World Order is that he insists on keeping the cash from the sale of Venezuela's oil -- shock of shocks! -- in Venezuela! With some lent to the rest of Latin America. Up until now, Venezuela sold us oil then immediately shifted the funds back to the US Federal Reserve. Chavez withdrew the funds from the Fed and, Heaven help us, spent it on building his own nation's economy. Is he a "demogogue"? The word means, spokesman for the people. That he is. Fun trivia: RFK Jr. reminded me that Chavez picked up the line, "Whiff of sulfur" in speaking of Bush from my last book which he had just read.

Dollars & Sense: You write about how, depending on the price of oil over time, Venezuela's oil could turn out to be a pivot point of huge geopolitical change. Can you explain?

Palast: Internal US Department of Energy analysis (I got my hands on it for BBC; it's in the book) shows that Venezuela, not Saudi Arabia, has the largest reserve of crude. That's a geo-political earthquake.

Dollars & Sense: Are you really convinced that a big devaluation of the Chinese currency would be meaningless in terms of saving U.S. manufacturing jobs by making Chinese exports more expensive? Then why are U.S. policymakers across the political spectrum so obsessed with getting China to devalue its currency?

Palast: You're really asking, Why do politicians feed us bullshit? That's a whole book right there. Both parties are winking and nodding and giggling behind your back that the way to save jobs is to change the value of China's money. It's a brilliant cover for the bi-partisan banging the American worker received with the one-two punch of NAFTA and 'Most Favored Nation' trade status for China. There are 700 Wal-Mart plants in China -- zero in the USA. Hillary Clinton was on the board of Wal-Mart when that shift went into full swing. No wonder she's joining George Bush in talking about baloney like "exchange rates."

Greg Palast is author of ARMED MADHOUSE: From Baghdad to New Orleans -- Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild, by Greg Palast, newly released in an updated, expanded edition; now in paperback. For more info go to www.GregPalast.com

Catch Palast, Randi Rhodes and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - live from New York at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6C0F65AB2719BDF5

*******
Some very interesting shit in this article.... food for thought- and scary...700 walmart factories in China!!!!!!

Crawford Memories

2007-03-30T09:59:25Z

Its August 2001 and your lazy ass is relaxing in Crawford, Texas. Its been a rough nine months for you as the newly ursurping president of the just emerging NEOCON Republican class. You spent all the budget surplus that Clinton left you on your rich buddies; helped start and then cover up a energy crises in California, insulted China, North Korea, and Canada, figured out a way to give another bigger tax break to you pals and give a pittance to the poor; all the while gutting social programs that had to do with population contriol, education, public health and transportation... and your head aches with the recent crap you've had to say about the cell research. You deserve a break!

As you slash back a tall glass of jack daniells on the rocks, your glazed eyes wander over the lastest intellegence warnings about a possible terrorist attack on the USA.

"Clarke has been doing his homework," you think smugly. You remember dizzly that Cheney was saying the timetable was set and ticking 'for the next Pearl Harbor..' But none of it matters to you really- as long as you get to kick Iraq's ass in the long run.

You pull the dossier towards you and read...
********

Link to actual Memo
http://www.politicalgateway.com/pdfdocuments/clarkememo.pdf

*******
"Al Qida?" you smirk- now thoroughly soused. "Sounds like some homo fairy democratic plot." You laugh at your own drunken wit and think briefly of how they will get theirs- the homos, the democrats and the Al Qida. Except with the latter- its not a politcal revenge you are planning- but several billion dollars wired already to a unknown swiss bank account. "For services to be rendered." Cheney had said cryptically. That Cheney sure was a mysterious bastard.

The room begins to sway and you laugh like the drunken madman that you are. And as you pass out- your last thought is that thank goodness, no there is no lethal pretzal to break your fall....

Over There

2007-03-28T05:48:57Z

'One of the last': WWI vet recalls Great War

By Andrea Stone, USA TODAY
CHARLES TOWN, W.Va. — When the guns fell silent on Nov. 11, 1918, exactly 4,734,991 Americans had served in World War I. Four are known to be alive.
"I am one of the last," says Frank Woodruff Buckles, who at 106 is among the few living links — and perhaps the healthiest — to what was known as the Great War. "I didn't know it would be down to one to a million."

April 6 will mark the 90th anniversary of the United States' entry into World War I. The soldiers who went Over There thought they were fighting the "war to end all wars." It did not live up to its title. The United States has fought five major conflicts since then, including the current war in Iraq.

Type "World War I American casualties" into the Google search engine and it asks, "Did you mean World War II?" Yet this largely forgotten war has never been more relevant. The days of trench warfare and biplane dogfights are long gone, but the first industrialized war set the stage for all that came after. It marked the emergence of the United States as a superpower. The war in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ethnic cleansing, weapons of mass destruction, globalization, U.S. foreign policy and even women's rights and controversy over the treatment of returning veterans — all have roots in World War I.

"If you want to understand the world of today, don't start at 9/11/2001," Harvard historian Niall Ferguson says. "You need to go all the way back to August 1914," when the war began.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Iraq | France | Britain | Europe | World War II | War | Frank | Arlington National Cemetery | World War I | Pershing
Buckles was a schoolboy then. When America got into the war in 1917, the 16-year-old went looking for adventure. "I was a snappy soldier," he says now, holding a sepia-toned photo of himself as a doughboy. "All gung-ho."

Such romantic spirit soon was ground up in the "no man's land" between the bloody trenches on Europe's Western Front. It was from there that the original "Unknown Soldier" was retrieved to be entombed in Arlington National Cemetery. Today, the nameless dead of World War II and Korea lie nearby. Their battles are more familiar to tourists watching the ritual changing of the guard on a recent afternoon. Few know that the original tomb, dedicated in 1921, contained a soldier from World War I.

Visitor Linda Mendenhall, 56, a former middle school history teacher from Greensboro, N.C., is an exception. As for her students, "They knew nothing about World War I. It was right up there with the Civil War and the Revolutionary War as ancient history to them," she says. "Their grandparents didn't fight in that war. They couldn't relate."

World War I "has such a dusty distance to it," Tulane University historian Douglas Brinkley says. "It's been eclipsed by World War II" in the nation's memory.

A global entanglement

In 1914, the world was ruled by empires: British, German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman. They were tied to each other through military alliances and secret pledges, but tensions were rising amid industrialization, global competition for resources and growing nationalism among ethnic minorities.

When a Bosnian Serb assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo, that triggered a chain reaction of war declarations that engulfed all of Europe, and eventually countries as far as Japan.

The United States, long wary of foreign entanglements, stayed out of the fighting until April 1917. By then, German U-boat attacks on U.S. ships and evidence that Germany was wooing Mexico to its side persuaded President Woodrow Wilson to ask Congress to declare war. In words resembling those used later by President Bush to justify the Iraq war, Wilson said, "The world must be made safe for democracy."

In tiny Oakwood, Okla., where Buckles lived, patriotic posters appeared in the post office.

"The world was involved in it, and so was I," he says in a voice made halting and raspy by age.

Only 16, he walked into a Marine Corps recruiting office in Wichita and said he was 18. The recruiter didn't believe him and sent him away. The Navy rejected Buckles as flat-footed. Finally, an Army recruiter in Oklahoma City accepted him, but only after Buckles insisted that the only proof of his age was in a family Bible back in Missouri. The state didn't issue birth certificates in those days.

"I liked the Army right off," says Buckles, recalling how he enjoyed calisthenics.

He was in a hurry to get to the front. A sergeant told him to join the ambulance corps because the French, America's ally, were "begging for ambulances." At Fort Riley, Kan., he learned how to use his belt to cinch a wounded soldier to his back and carry him from a trench.

In December 1917, he sailed from Hoboken, N.J., on the RMS Carpathia, the ship that had rescued survivors of the Titanic after it sank in 1912. Buckles says he passed the time listening to the crew's accounts of the rescue. While in England, the young corporal drove dignitaries around.

He eventually got to France, but never close enough to the action to pull anyone from a trench.

In 1918, after the armistice was signed between the allies and Germany on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month — a date now commemorated as Veterans Day — Buckles stayed in Europe to escort prisoners of war back to Germany.

A curio cabinet in his farmhouse here holds a German military belt buckle with the words "Gott Mit Uns" — "God with us."

War's impact remains clear

When President Wilson and the victorious leaders of France and Britain met in Paris in 1919 to draft a peace treaty, they believed God was on their side.

They excluded the defeated powers from negotiations and produced the Treaty of Versailles, which slapped heavy reparations and placed blame for the war on Germany. Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party would rise to power by railing against the treaty.

When World War II began in 1939, "people saw these as two distinct events," says Eli Paul, director of interpretation at the National World War I Museum in Kansas City. Historians now believe they "were the same war with just a long intermission in between."

Ferguson, author of The Pity of War: Explaining World War One, says the legacy of that war is more enduring than that of World War II.

He notes that the Cold War that followed World War II has become less relevant to today's world. America's help in rebuilding Europe after World War II and the success of the European Union have knitted most of the continent together in peace.

World War I's impact continues to resonate. With the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France drew up "arbitrary frontiers" in the Middle East, says Yale University historian Jay Winter, "usually made in an afternoon after tea without much thought to ethnic balance or viability of these countries."

Those borders remain and control the lives of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds in Iraq and rival ethnic groups in Lebanon.

In 1917, before the war ended, Britain, which had wrested Palestine from the Turks, issued the Balfour Declaration. It expressed support for establishing "a national home for the Jewish people" there. The statement gave a major push to the founding of Israel.

"Most of our headaches in the Middle East today are a hangover from the great military binge of 1914-18," Ferguson says. He says the current war in Iraq can be traced to 1917, when British troops entered Baghdad proclaiming that they, like the United States in 2003, came as liberators, not conquerors. "They found themselves facing an insurgency," Ferguson says. "History is repeating itself."

Another disturbing historical parallel between now and then, says World War I historian Jennifer Keene, is controversy over the treatment of returning veterans. More than 200,000 U.S. soldiers suffered physical or mental injuries during World War I, but in 1919 only 217 had completed rehabilitation programs, she says. Later, when veterans marched on Washington to demand promised bonuses during the Depression, armed soldiers attacked them.

The episode was "a horrible black eye on the country and how we treat veterans," says Steve Berkheiser, a retired Marine general who heads the Kansas City museum. "Fast-forward to Walter Reed" and the scandal over substandard treatment of U.S. troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, he says. "There is a line of unfulfilled promises."

Pressure by Great War veterans helped persuade Congress to pass the G.I. Bill in 1944, Keene says. The bill helped create America's postwar middle class and paved the way for benefits still used to attract recruits.

Women's rights also got a boost from World War I. Women's contributions on the home front and overseas as nurses and telephone operators helped persuade Congress to give them the vote in 1920.

And the United States' industrial contribution to World War I, along with the bankrupting of Europe, led to the transfer of the world's financial capital from London to New York. It was the ascendance of U.S. economic and military might.

"That war created the American century," Winter says. "It was when the country became the broker of international affairs."

No memorial on the Mall

Frank Buckles says he "didn't give much thought" to the big picture. By the time he sailed home in January 1920, "The parades were over. Nobody asked me a question … even though I was still in uniform."

That scratchy wool uniform caught the eye of Gen. John "Black Jack" Pershing at a reception in Oklahoma City soon after Buckles returned. The general, just back from commanding U.S. forces in France, shook Buckles' hand and asked where he was from, Buckles recalls.

When Buckles said he'd grown up on a farm in Harrison County, Mo., Pershing said, "Just 43 miles, as the crow flies, from Linn County, where I was born."

Buckles visited Pershing's grave on Veterans Day last year. The general is buried under a plain marble headstone in a little-visited corner of Arlington. America's top World War I general is not noted in the cemetery's tourist brochure.

Nor is there a national memorial to World War I on the National Mall in Washington, as there is to World War II.

The World War I museum in Kansas City, whose Liberty Memorial Tower was built with private donations soon after the war, is the closest thing to a national tribute.

The United States plans no special ceremonies to mark the passing of the last American veteran from World War I. The British, who have seven surviving World War I veterans, plan an elaborate memorial service featuring a symbolic empty coffin atop a gun carriage at Westminster Abbey after the last British survivor dies.

Buckles says it used to bother him that the nation quickly moved on after the war. But then, so did he.

The steamship business beckoned, and he traveled the world. In 1941, he was working in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded. He was captured and spent three years in a prisoner-of-war camp.

Later he moved to San Francisco, married, had a daughter and bought a 330-acre cattle farm here in West Virginia's panhandle, where his ancestors — some of whom he says go back to the Mayflower — had put down roots.

Sitting in a wingback chair, recalling distant names and dates with a clarity that would challenge someone half his age, Buckles says he was always "full of history."

And in more than a century of living it, he says, little compares to that first time the world went to war.

"The world began to change with World War I," he says. "Nothing like it ever happened before."

How the United States' major modern wars compare

War Duration Number served U.S. military deaths U.S. military wounded Major weapons introduced

World War I 1917-18{+1} 4.7 million 116,516 204,002 Airplane, tank, chemical warfare

World War II 1941-45{+1} 16.1 million 405,399 671,846 Amphibious assault ships, paratroops, atom bomb

Korean War 1950-53 5.7 million 54,246 103,284 Helicopters, first jet aircraft in combat

Vietnam War 1964-73 8.7 million 58,209 153,303 Rapid-fire assault rifles, laser-guided bombs, unmanned aerial vehicles

Persian Gulf War 1990-91 2.2 million 382 467 Spy satellites, stealth aircraft

Afghanistan and Iraq October 2001-present 1.5 million 3,599 25,455 Satellite-guided bombs