| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
MacArthur’s Prophetic Warning to the American People Foreshadowing the Socialistic Infiltration of our Constitutional Republic and Free Enterprise System
“This is the Voice of Freedom, General MacArthur speaking…”
America the Battlefield
by Timothy A. Pope
February 16, 2015
Love him or hate him, the indomitable General of the Army, Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), an indelible military genius, was a great American—perhaps one of the greatest. He was a patriot, a warrior, a statesman, a rebel, a leader, a brilliant commander and a poet who never minced words nor failed to accomplish the mission at hand. He excelled at everything he put his hand to, and set the bar high and lofty for all men and women who are desirous to be actively engaged in the animating contest of Freedom. MacArthur lived in tumultuous times and presided over great struggles and battles fought for reasons up to and including the preservation of Liberty in every clime and place.
“You couldn’t shrug your shoulders at Douglas MacArthur,” observed historian David McCullough. “There was nothing bland about him, nothing passive about him, nothing dull about him. There’s no question about his patriotism, there’s no question about his courage, and there’s no question, it seems to me, about his importance as one of the protagonists of the 20th century.”
Once again our nation and world finds ourselves at the brink of regional and global war and conflict which defined MacArthur’s time—the pre-staging of a third global conflagration with its preceding economic sanctions, currency wars and monetary realignments. With that in mind, the words in his farewell memoir could have been written today, because if you study the cycles of human nature, sociology, economics, weather, solar activity, civil unrest and war, history not only repeats itself, it rhymes.
“There is no present or future—only the past,” wrote Eugene O’Neill, in A Moon for the Misbegotten, (1952), “happening over and over again…” And so it is in our day likewise recurring, the age-old cycles of plenty-to-poverty, peace-to-war, of which King Solomon hinted at in Ecclesiastes 1:9, “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
Written in his own hand and finished only weeks before his death, General Douglas MacArthur’s memoir, Reminiscences(1964), spans more than half a century of modern history. The following excerpt is, in my opinion, the most important words he ever penned and at the same time the greatest warning he ever recorded on behalf of the benefit of the American people and our posterity regarding what he came to acknowledge as the treacherous domestic threat infiltrating our American way of life—a warning which has all but fallen on deaf ears.
I’ll let his own words speak for themselves, and then enumerate my thoughts below.
Sourced from my own personal copy of Reminiscences by Douglas MacArthur, (McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, NY, 1964), First Edition, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-22955, pp. 414-418:
Great changes have taken place in our military establishment, some good, some not so good. Materially the improvement has been spectacular, psychologically yet to be proven. The men in the ranks are largely citizen soldiers, sailors or airmen—men from the farm, the city, from school, from the college campus—men not dedicated to the profession of arms; men not primarily skilled in the art of war; men most amazingly like the men you know and see and meet each day of your life.
If hostilities come these men will know the endless tramp of marching feet, the incessant whine of sniper bullets, the ceaseless rustle of sputtering machine guns, the sinister wail of air combat, the deafening blast of crashing bombs, the stealthy stroke of hidden torpedoes, the amphibious lurch over perilous waves, the dark majesty of fighting ships, the mad din of battle and all the tense and ghastly horror and savage destruction of a stricken area of war.
These men will suffer hunger and thirst, broiling suns and frozen reaches, but they must go on and on and on when everything within them seems to stop and die. They will grow old in youth burned out in searing minutes, even though life owes them many tranquil years. In these troubled times of confused and bewildered international sophistication, let no man misunderstand why they must do that which they must do. These men will fight, and, perchance die, for one reason only—for their country—for America. No complex philosophies of world intrigue and conspiracy dominate their thoughts. No exploitation or extravagance of propaganda dims their sensibilities. Just the simple fact, their country called.
