Summary: U.S. Inauguration Day:<br> The portentousness can be petrifying.<br> As the First World War was obliterating millions of lives in Europe, before the United States entered that war, military “preparedness” was a key political topic in the U.S.: Should a nation presently at peace prepare for potential future war?<br> Clergyman Jefferson argues here that to refuse to arm yourself against your fellow humans is an act of pure strength; to arm yourself, an act of pure fear; and, Clergyman Jefferson writes, “Christians” ought have nobler emotions than fear to motivate their actions.<br> Genuine “Christian” morality of uncompromising pacifism and self-sacrificing charity – pacifism even when your enemies murder you; charity even when you starve – is as powerful and as impressive and as deserving of veneration as it is rare to find publicly expressed, either eloquently or vulgarly; and, where expressed, it can be expected to be popularly ignored if not outright derided.<br> Clergyman Jefferson also writes that if you “create a war machine,” you cannot know who will use it, nor whether the next U.S. president will be a “megalomaniac… who, when he wants a thing, takes it.”<br> -The Voice before the Void<br> Money for the Machinery of Human Slaughter<br> from “Military Preparedness a Danger to Democracy”<br> Charles Edward Jefferson<br> published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1916 July<br> edited by William Dudley and The Voice before the Void<br>
