GROUND ZER0, New York, N.Y.--Aug. 3, 2003-- "Death to America!"  That was the chant offered by five score of friends and relatives of Uday and Qusay Hussein  who formed a coven around the two Terrorists’ gravesite in their father’s hometown this week.

    Buried 11 days after their brutal death in a standoff with American Special Forces, the two brothers were hailed as martyrs and heroes, and their blood was anointed to the soil by allies of Saddam's tyrannical 23-year rule over Iraq on the premise that Saddam Hussein's legacy would rise again.
    The question posed by the burial of Saddam's progeny:  Can Terrorism be buried?  Does it ever die?
    The world would like to think that by killing those responsible for delivering death and destruction, the endpoint of violence would be reached.   Once the bodies of brutality and Terror were buried, we could move ahead in peace, not looking over our shoulder or cocking our ears to hear the footsteps of the resurrected Beast stalking us from the netherworld.

    But Terrorism is a weed in the garden of plenty.  You pull it out by the roots and it still returns, as though it is invincible to all the forms and natures of weed killers, resistant to all the sinewy fingers yanking and pulling to rid the weeds of their stranglehold over the roots of human hope and potential prosperity.
     The shouts:  "Death to America!" are not new epithets reminding us that the Garden of Evil has long tentacles, and seeks to choke all efforts to re-sod the soil of tyranny and oppression.
    

      Only a half-century ago many thought that when Hitler died his death would heal the sores of evil.  But even as the shovelfuls of earth splattered on this dictator's face, Stalin's  brutality, perhaps far worse in some ways, but nevertheless as ugly and horrific, continued to rise up into the clouds to darken the future of humanity.  Stalin's barbarity trumped Hitler's.

      Adding to the looming presence of a new Beast of Terror, there were the fragments of a myth that Hitler lived, that he didn't commit suicide, that he wasn't killed, that he escaped to South America.   Whether alive or dead, his legacy of hate and Terror still lives among those who subscribe to the ultimate abuse of power over others.  Hitler symbolizes the Beast of Terror's invincibility to death, just as Saddam Hussein is currently reminding the world through his "escape" from death, and the recent moot burial of his sons prove.
      It is evidence once more that Terrorism cannot die, that no matter what we want to believe in our folklore, we must never give up the Sword and Shield of Vigilance, we must never retire ourselves as Sentinels of Vigilance or think for a blink that our children or their children's children's are safe from the shadow of the Beast.
      As a Sentinel of Vigilance, I have some experience at watching the burial of Terrorism and learning that no matter how deep the bones are cast into bowels of the earth, they worm their way to the surface with new skin, new faces and yet the same old agenda--Fear, Intimidation and Complacency.

     In Vietnam I witnessed a number of "Terrorist" funerals.   The wives, parents and grandparents led the processions, wailing and sending eerie messages that chilled my bones, as though hexing me and all foreigners who ravaged their land, turned their husbands, sons, daughters, grandchildren into mulch for the rice paddies.   In guerrilla wars, the enemy is pervasive and elemental.   You can be attacked by anyone at any time, as is the case in Iraq at the moment.   It turns everyone into a possible "enemy" until he or she is dead.   Then, as with all corpses, they become reminders of man's inhumanity to man.
      Sadly, war and violence is indiscriminate about who it kills.  The enemy and innocent become mixed into one bloody heap, faces of death and destruction wreaked become difficult to justify as the "cost of war" when the tears and pain of loss crease a child’s face over the loss of a loved one, or a relative’s eyes burrow into you with a deadness far more lethal than a poisoned tipped arrow.

      Standing near Uday and Qusay’s graves were American soldiers.   They represented the peacekeepers to some, and the Terrorists to others.   News reports note they slipped out of sight after the Voices yelled:  “Death to America!”
       Terrorism often turns to guilt, remorse and sorrow in the aftermath of blood for both those who are the victims as well as those who are the perpetrators.   In death, Terrorists turn to human beings when their bodies become cold shells of discolored bloodless flesh.  Once life evaporates, they become innocent in their death, harmless.  Those who wail over their bodies forget about the whippings, the rapes, the executions, the tortures issued by their tongues or hands, or the grips of Fear, Intimidation and Complacency their fingers held around the mourner's throats.  
       They do not see the bodies of former Beasts, but of human beings cut short in life, perhaps before redemption.

      What many blind to Terrorism's viral nature do not see is that the Legacy of Terror survives the death of the Terrorist.
       It escapes the body of the dying and leaps into a living host, somewhere.    Its contagious  nature allows it to slip through the metal detectors and duck radar to breed and stew until ripened in the minds and hearts of those Terror Breeders who become pregnant with the idea of tyrannical power, fueled by the desire to use Fear, Intimidation and Complacency as tools to force others to kneel before them.

        In Iraq, the burial of Saddam Hussein’s sons is a symbol that the legacy of Terrorism is alive even among the dead.  Adding to that formula is the Damocles Sword hanging over the heads of the liberators of tyranny while Saddam himself, the architect of Iraq's tyranny, still lives.

         Tyranny's fans cheer on Saddam's escape, hoping that he will return to lead them back into the caves where children feared the death of their parents, where fathers shuddered that their daughters would be raped, and grandparents watched their children tossed in prisons for the slightest infraction.
          Still, many cling to the idea that life was better under tyranny than it is under Vigilant reconstruction.  They think only as far as the tip of their noses, ignoring the future prosperity of the Children's Children's Children.   They are manacled to old habits, old beliefs, old prejudices.
          Terrorism feeds on the gravity of change.   Far from Iraq, in the more civilized nations of the world, the same forces of gravity that make those around a gravesite cheer the death of tyrants as martyrs and jeer the liberators as vile and corrupt cancers, make many turn their heads to the forces of Vigilance and consider them acts of tyranny.
          America's willingness to take on Terrorism and depose those who threaten the world with violence is not cheered by all as paving the road to a better life for the future of all.   Entire nations have cast stones at America, calling it an empire maker, accusing it of being driven by a bloodthirsty desire to conquer the world.
         Within its own borders, many rise up to post signs making American leadership the tyrant, positioning its acts of Vigilance as bestial acts seeking blood for oil, or contests to sweep away the weak so its muscles can strangle poor, indigent nations into empirical slavery.

         These critics stand at the graves of Vigilance and shout:  "Death to America!"   Many use the wall of Free Speech to hide behind as they call out into the darkness, hoping their Voices will fire the Beast in at least one other listener to turn against the defenders of freedom whose historic purpose is not to rule the world, but to offer to future generations the same rights and privileges its own children enjoy.
         So, I was somewhat saddened to hear the cry of the Beast at the funeral for Saddam's sons.   What saddened me most was the parent of a child in America who embraces such words as "Death to America," and in the presence of his or her children turn to someone and says:  "See, they know.  They know how wrong America is for fighting a war in Iraq.  They know how corrupt American policy is.  How hypocritical."
          I feel sad a child has to hear his or her parents take up the club of the Beast and berate a nation struggling to rid Terrorism from the path of the children of the world.   I feel sad that the parent who embraces the resentment and hostility against America's efforts to remove tyranny doesn't give his or her child the story from both sides of the coin--the story of the Beast of Terror versus the Sentinel of Vigilance.

        I would like to believe that each parent has studied the Beast of Terror within himself or herself, and also the Sentinel of Vigilance within, and has seen that unless careful, the Beast will rise above the Sentinel and lash out with a forked tongue to make good appear evil, to twist the right into the wrong until the speaker is blinded by the truth and turns it into the great lie.
         That's why I know the Beast cannot be buried.
         He can only be contained.
         And the best weapons to keep him in check are the Pledge of Vigilance and the Principles of Vigilance.
        Perhaps it is time to unearth those Principles.    One can start by downloading the Pledge of Vigilance below, and practice applying them to one's self, and to one's children and loved ones.   Then, perhaps, the Beast will know he truly has little chance of escape.

Aug 2--Mel Gibson--Christ Killer Filmmaker Terrorist?

©2001 - 2004, VigilanceVoice.com, All rights reserved -  a ((HYYPE)) design

The Pledge Of Vigilance