On The Death of Rev. Mr. George Whitefield (by Phillis Wheatley)

Phillis Wheatley, one of the first “African American” poets, who came to America from Africa as a slave, wrote this elegy for George Whitefield:

HAIL, happy saint, on thine immortal throne,
Possest of glory, life, and bliss unknown;
We hear no more the music of thy tongue,
Thy wonted auditories cease to throng.
Thy sermons in unequall’d accents flow’d,
And ev’ry bosom with devotion glow’d;

Thou didst in strains of eloquence refin’d
Inflame the heart, and captivate the mind.
Unhappy we the setting sun deplore,
So glorious once, but ah! it shines no more.

Behold the prophet in his tow’ring flight!
He leaves the earth for heav’n's unmeasur’d height,
And worlds unknown receive him from our sight.
There Whitefield wings with rapid course his way,
And sails to Zion through vast seas of day.
Thy pray’rs, great saint, and thine incessant cries
Have pierc’d the bosom of thy native skies.
Thou moon hast seen, and all the stars of light,
How he has wrestled with his God by night.
He pray’d that grace in ev’ry heart might dwell,
He long’d to see America excel;
He charg’d its youth that ev’ry grace divine
Should with full lustre in their conduct shine;
That Saviour, which his soul did first receive,
The greatest gift that ev’n a God can give,
He freely offer’d to the num’rous throng,
That on his lips with list’ning pleasure hung.

“Take him, ye wretched, for your only good,
“Take him ye starving sinners, for your food;
“Ye thirsty, come to this life-giving stream,
“Ye preachers, take him for your joyful theme;
“Take him my dear Americans , he said,
“Be your complaints on his kind bosom laid:
“Take him, ye Africans , he longs for you,
” Impartial Saviour is his title due:
“Wash’d in the fountain of redeeming blood,
“You shall be sons, and kings, and priests to God.”

Great Countess , we Americans revere
Thy name, and mingle in thy grief sincere;

New England deeply feels, the Orphans mourn,
Their more than father will no more return.

But, though arrested by the hand of death,
Whitefield no more exerts his lab’ring breath,
Yet let us view him in th’ eternal skies,
Let ev’ry heart to this bright vision rise;
While the tomb safe retains its sacred trust,
Till life divine re-animates his dust.

 

Ronald Reagan’s Administration and the Massacres in Guatemala

Efraín Ríos Montt

In 1950, Efraín Ríos Montt received training in the Department of Defence’s “School of the Americas”. This school, which provides training for the military personnel from Latin American countries, was renamed to “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” in 2001.

Montt would go on to execute a coup in Guatemala and take the executive office for over a year in the early 1980′s. Aided by an alliance with the Reagan administration, Montt’s administration would go to carry out an extremely brutal program, which some would call genocide. During Montt’s reign, government-orchestrated killings and disappearances reached more than 3,000 a month, most of which were Mayans.

The Reagan administration gave Montt’s government $4 million in helicopter parts and $6.3 million in additional supplies, which included spare parts for aircrafts used in counterinsurgency operations. However, Reagan’s assistance towards Montt was not limited to supplies. Reagan publicly vouched for Montt. Reagan visited Guatemala just a couple days before the Las Dos Erres massacre of 1983 (which featured instances of slaughter, rape, and cruel torture), and said of the dictator: ”[he] is a man of great personal integrity and commitment. … I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice.”

Later, in 1985, Montt was given an Army Commendation Medal for meritorious service by the then-U.S. Secretary of the Army John Otho Marsh.

Now in 2013, after 13 failed appeals, the man who Reagan said possessed “great personal integrity and commitment” is more clearly seen for what he was, a brutal tyrant. He has been ordered by a Guatemalan court to face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

According to Reuters, “Prosecutors allege Rios Montt, who ruled as commander-in-chief…turned a blind eye as soldiers used rape, torture and arson against leftist insurgents and targeted indigenous people during a ‘scorched earth’ military offensive that killed at least 1,771 members of the Ixil tribe,”

This is a classic example of what happens when dictators are coddled because they share a common enemy (in this case the common enemy between Reagan and Montt was communism).  A similar situation occurred between Reagan’s administration and Saddam Huessein. History teaches the astute observer that the enemy of  an enemy is not necessarily a friend. And hence, being anti-communist is emphatically not a guarantee that one is pro-freedom–as the case of Efraín Ríos Montt makes clear.

Martin Luther King Jr On Foreign Policy – Part 4 of 4

mlk_01From his April 4, 1967 speech.

Excerpt 8

“Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now…I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being  destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed  hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours.  The initiative to stop it must be ours…If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam….If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world  will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.”

Excerpt 9

“In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.  I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult  process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

  1. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
  2. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
  3. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
  4. Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
  5. Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.”

Excerpt 10

“America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood. This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons…We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes  that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative  anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.”

Martin Luther King Jr On Foreign Policy – Part 3 of 4

mlk_01From his April 4, 1967 speech.

Excerpt 6

“We have destroyed [Vietnam's] two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops….We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and  killed their men. What liberators?…Now there is little left to build on — save bitterness….What must [the Vietnamese]  think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem…How can they trust us when  now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new  weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions.  Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized  plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts…Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth  about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly  been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of  the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and  mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save  him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak  nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.”
Excerpt 7

“I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in  Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy.  We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we  claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle  among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we  create hell for the poor.”

Martin Luther King Jr On Foreign Policy – Part 2 of 4

MLKFrom his April 4, 1967 speech.

Excerpt 4

“And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side…but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony.

Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ‘ready’ for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists…For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.”

Excerpt 5

“After the French were defeated it looked as if independence [for Vietnam] and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided
nation, and…we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators — our chosen man, Premier Diem…The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy…Now they languish under our bombs and consider us — not their fellow Vietnamese –the real enemy…we herd them off the land of  their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs…They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one ‘Vietcong’-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers…What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they  think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these  voiceless ones?”

American Puritan Poets: Samuel Danforth

Samuel Danforth was born in England in 1626. He emigrated with his father to Massachusetts in 1634. After his father died in 1639, he lived with Thomas Shephard, the pastor of the church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Danforth attended Harvard, graduated in 1643, tutored there until 1650, and became a fellow of Harvard College. In 1650, he became pastor at Roxbury where John Eliot was a teaching elder. He published a catechism in 1650 or 1651, but no known copies of it are known to have survived. A reprint of one of his sermons is currently available for purchase.

Danforth was as an astronomer, mathematician, and a poet. He’s especially known for his almanacs, which are the earliest surviving examples of almanacs in America. These almanacs contained many of his poems.

In a publication of Danforth’s poems released by University of Nebraska, it is said that: ”Samuel Danforth’s poems from the Almanacks for 1647–1649 are some of the earliest examples of  ’secular’ poetry published in New England”

Here are a few excerpts of his poetry:

“A Coal-white Bird appeares this spring
That neither cares to sigh or sing.
This when the merry Birds espy,
They take her for some enemy.
Why so, when as she humbly stands
Only to shake you by your hands?”

“While Europe burnes & broiles & dyes in flames,
And Englands sobs are heard from Tweed to Thames;
While Irelands ashes up and down do fly,
And Scotlands tears run down aboundantly:
While poor Barbados cryes; the Pestilence !
And Virgins-land thrusts out her sons from thence;
The worthles Orphan may sit still and blesse,
That yet it sleeps in peace and quietnes.”

“My sorrows all are turned in to joy.
No fiend of hell shall hence forth me asay,
My fears are heald, my teares are wipt away;
Gods reconciled face I now behould,
He that dispersd my darkness many fold;
In Abrams bosom now I swetely rest,
Of perfect joy & hapiness posest.”

American Puritan Poets: Michael Wigglesworth

Michael Wigglesworth was born in 1631 and settled in Connecticut as a young child. He entered Harvard intending to become a physician. He had a dream about the day of judgement, however, which convinced him to become a preacher. And after graduating from Harvard, he ministered in Massachusetts.

He was never a very well known preacher. He was often quite sickly and unable to perform his pulpit duties. In a way, his literary labors were a way for him to remain active in spite of his infirmities. One memoir of his life states that “The tounge was forced to be mute…but the pen could be used for that purpose”.

Wigglesworth is perhaps best known for his poem The Day Of Doom, published in 1662. It sold nearly 2,000 copies in the first year. It was once supposed that there was one copy of this volume for every thirty-five people in New England. It may very well have been America’s first bestseller.

In the poem, he wrote:

“Awake, awake, O sinner, and repent,
And quarrel not because I thus alarm
Thy soul, to save it from eternal harm.”

His poetry was once described as being cast in “familiar, jingling, ballad meter”.

Shortly after The Day of Doom was published, he went to Bermuda in order to try and find a cure for his illness. There he medicine, and he eventually became a physician, and the well-known  Massachusetts judge Samuel Sewall, who was also his contemporary, said that Wigglessworth was “very useful” as a physician.

In 1697, he was appointed a Fellow of Harvard College. Shortly before he died, he wrote two poems “Death Expected And Welcomed” and “A Farwel to the world”. He died in 1705 in Malden,  Massachusetts, the location of his first pastorate. His two parting poems were published in Cotton Mather’s biography of Wigglesworth.

Wigglesworth had three marriages (Mary in 1655, Martha in 1679, and Sybil in 1691) and eight  children. His grandchild, Edward Wigglesworth, was a Colonel in the American revolutionary war.

The epitaph on Wigglesworth’s grave has been attributed to Cotton Mather, and says:

“His pen did once Meat from the Eater take
And now he’s gone beyond the Eater’s reach
His body once so thin was next to none
From hence he’s to unbodied spirits flown.
Once his rare skill did all diseases heal
And he doth nothing now uneasy feel.
He to his paradise is joyful come
And waits with joy to see his Day of Doom.”