"I'm sorry, forgive me, and God bless America, because we can criticize ..

[understandinglife]

... our government."


Silence Broken, Pardons Granted 88 Years After Crimes of Sedition

By Jim Robbins
The New York Times

Wednesday 03 May 2006

Helena, Mont. - When Steve Milch found out recently that his great-grandfather, an immigrant from Bavaria, had been convicted of sedition in Montana during World War I, he was taken aback. It was something no one in the family had ever talked about.

For the past 88 years, a lot of secrets have been kept in Montana families, especially those of German descent, about a flurry of wartime sedition prosecutions in 1918, when public sentiment against Germany was at a feverish pitch.

Seventy-nine Montanans were convicted under the state law, considered among the harshest in the country, for speaking out in ways deemed critical of the United States. In one instance, a traveling wine and brandy salesman was sentenced to 7 to 20 years in prison for calling wartime food regulations a "big joke."

But the silence - and for some families, the shame - has ended. The convictions will be undone on Wednesday when Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a descendant of ethnic Germans who migrated here from Russia in 1909, posthumously pardons 75 men and three women. One man was pardoned shortly after the war.

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Link: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050306P.shtml

And, we all know how hard Bush and the neoconsters are striving to deny both the truth and our ability to speak/write it.

Vigilance.


Peace.

[understandinglife]

1. "... said he had found the similarities between 2001 and 1918 to be eerie.

"The hair on the back of my neck stood up," Mr. Work said. "The rhetoric was so similar, from the demonization of the enemy to saying 'either you're with us or against us' to the hasty passage of laws."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050306P.shtml

Never Forget: George W. Bush willfully violated National Security to cover-up his willful launch of a war of aggression and illegal occupation of Iraq.