From "Johnny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo

[Bluebear]

I had forgotten all about this book ....

"If you make a war if there are guns to be aimed, if there are bullets to be fired, if there are men to be killed they will not be us. They will not be us, the guys who grow wheat and turn it into food, the guys who make cloths and paper and houses and tiles the guys who build dams and power plants and string the long moaning high tension wires, the guys who crack crude oil down in a dozen different parts who make light globes and sewing machines and shovels and automobiles and airplanes and tanks and guns. Oh no, it will not be us who die. It will be you.

It will be you---you who urge us on to battle, you who incite us against ourselves, you who would have one cobbler kill another cobbler, you who would have one man who works kill another man who works, you who would have one human being who wants only to live kill another human being who only wants to live. Remember this. Remember this well, you people who plan for war. Remember, this you patriots, you fierce ones, you spawners of hate, you inventors of slogans. Remember this as you have never remembered anything else in your lives.

We are men of peace. We are men who work and we want no quarrel. But if you destroy our peace, if you take away our work, if you try to range us one against the other we will know what to do. If you tell us to make the world safe for democracy we will take you seriously and by god and by Christ we will make it so. We will use the guns you force upon us, we will use them to defend our very lives and the menace to our lives does not lie on the other side of a nomansland that was set apart without our consent. It lies within or own boundaries here and now. We have seen it and we know it.

Put the gun into our hands and we will use them.

Give us the slogans and we will turn them into realities. Sing the battle hymns and we will take them up where you left off. Not one, not ten, not ten thousand, not a million, not ten million, not ten millions, not a hundred millions but a billion, two billions of us, all the people of the world. We will have the slogans and we will have the hymns and we will have the guns and we will use them and we will live. Make no mistake of it we will live. We will be alive and we will walk and talk and eat and sing and laugh and feel and love and bear our children in tranquility in security in decency in peace. You plan the wars and point us the way and we will point the gun."

[iverglas]

1. and an amazing movie

http://www.variagate.com/johnny.htm

The visual impact -- it's the story of a young man left limbless, faceless, voiceless, by WWI -- is enormous. I read the book, but it's the movie I remember. I saw it in the theatre, oh, thirty years ago, when Trumbo was finally able to get it made. Yup, 1971. Dalton Trumbo was one of the Hollywood Ten:

http://www.levity.com/corduroy/trumbo.htm

From Time, May 24, 1993

HONORED. DALTON TRUMBO, screenwriter, with an Oscar for the screenplay of Roman Holiday, 40 years after its 1953 release and 16 years after his death. Trumbo was among the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood until his name disappeared from the screen for years as a result of Hollywood's McCarthy-era blacklist. The House Un-American Activities Committee accused Trumbo of membership in the Communist Party (an affiliation he acknowledged years later), and he went to prison in 1950 rather than cooperate with his inquisitors. Unable to use his own name, he recruited a series of "fronts," and it was during his underground years, ironically, that he produced his best scripts--the most famous being Roman Holiday, the tale of a princess passing as a commoner. Trumbo enlisted his friend Ian McLellan Hunter to pose as the creator of the film, but now an Academy Award has gone to the real author. In 1975 Trumbo received an Oscar for a blacklist-era work, The Brave One. That time, he was still alive to enjoy it.

Apparently (rather bad) video/DVD copies are available, but not easy to find.

Worth seeing for all kinds of timely reasons. And of course, there's Donald Sutherland in his younger days ... playing Jesus. ;)