Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth, where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. And today, I want to have a George Patton Memorial Day. How about you? A George Patton Memorial Day.

What do I mean by a George Patton Memorial Day? Oh, well, in the first place, George Patton never put his men's lives at risk unnecessarily, General George Patton. He only committed his troops when there was a possibility of victory, and his men loved him for this. He understood that dying was not the point of war, but rather living. He's famous for saying, and I quote, the object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other poor bastard die for his, unquote.

General George Patton, who also felt that profanity was the essence of a soldier's language, eloquent profanity, he said. So that's why he says the object of war is not to die for your country, to make the other poor bastard die for his. This valuing the lives of his men extended especially to his strategy in battle. Patton also said, my motto in battle is go forward. That was his battle or his war philosophy, go forward.

Forward movement, that is making a big relentless push until you achieved your objective, saved time and energy, and most importantly, reduced casualties. The more steadily you advanced, he taught, the more rapidly the enemy retreated, and the less fighting you had to do. There's an ineluctable logic to offense in war, according to Patton, and that is the shorter the exposure to combat, the shorter the duration of action, and the shorter the bloodshed. By constantly pressing forward, especially after victories, you kept the enemy from reorganizing to fight.

After a series of victories in Germany, Patton said, and I quote, we destroyed two armies in one week with a handful of losses to ourselves, and I don't propose to give the bastards the chance to reorganize on the East Bank. I owe that to my men, he said. I owe that to my men. Yes, Patton was a great general, not only because he won great victories in the field, but because he never unnecessarily risked the lives of his soldiers. I owe that to my men, he was fond of saying.

I owe that to my men could be the saying etched in stone on his memorial, for that matter. This is a principle anchored in the Bible, too, let me say. God treasured the lives of his people in times of war. For example, the following young men were exempted from having to serve in the army in the Bible. First of all, anyone having just built a house.

Such a man was only beginning to establish a covenant household, so he didn't have to serve if he has just built a house or anyone having just planted a vineyard. God was merciful to the man who has just established a fruitful tract of land in the promised land. And then thirdly, anyone who has just betrothed their wife did not have to serve immediately in the army. God showed kindness to the man who has but just left his father and mother and become one flesh with his wife. God treasures the lives of his people in times of war.

One of my favorite examples is the case of Uriah. Uriah was the husband of Bathsheba, with whom King David had an affair after spotting her bathing on her roof from his roof, his royal residence in Jerusalem. Now, the narrative of this incident is a rollicking good tale, and it clearly indicates that Uriah was a more honorable man than King David. And we see this truth reflected in several ways, and they're all centered on the conduct of warfare. For example, David lingers in Jerusalem in his palace, as chapter 11 of 2 Samuel opens up by saying, in the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle.

Well, instead of personally leading the troops, as he had in the past, well, David sends out General Joab and his servants with him and all Israel, as the text says. Where was the king? Living at ease in his palace. And we also see this reflected in his indulging this moment of decadence. David slides further into decadence when he observes Bathsheba, and he lusts after her and takes steps to bring her into his palace and sleep with her.

And then, surprise, surprise, when she becomes pregnant, David concocts a plan to cover his tracks and to avoid scandal. He brings back Bathsheba's husband, Uriah, from the front lines for a few days of R&R, and lets him sleep with her so that it seems he is the father of the child conceived. Certainly, David must have rationalized Uriah, like me, will avail himself of a few days of luxury in the midst of the deprivations of war. Well, what does Uriah actually do? His conscience will not allow him to be at ease as long as his brothers are in the field.

He says to David's face, the ark of Israel and Judah dwell in booths as my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field. Shall I then go to my house to eat and drink and lie with my wife? As you live and as your soul lives, I will not do this thing, unquote. Uriah speaking directly to King David. And so, instead of going home, he sleeps with the troops that remain in Jerusalem.

Well, exasperated, David devises another plan. Instead of repenting, any godly man would have repented of his sin right then and there. But when Uriah turns to the war, returns to the war, excuse me, David arranges through Joab to have Uriah put in the front lines in the hottest part of fighting where, predictably, he is killed. Voila, problem solved. David can now take this poor widow Bathsheba into his harem as his own.

Oh, can you see the callous disregard for the lives of his men, David displays here? They are but pawns for his own aggrandizement. David must have, must have his appetite sated, but preserve the appearance of being a righteous king. Oh, if that means sacrificing the life of one of his finest soldiers, then so be it. This is but a small vignette, dear listener, of what evil, powerful rulers do with their soldiers.

Memorial Day is not for them. Throughout history, evil rulers use war for their own glory and their troops be damned, right? God hates this kind of warfare. Ironically, before David sunk to the depth of depravity we see here in his treatment of Uriah, David composed this in one of his Psalms where he says in Psalm 68, trample underfoot those who lust after tribute, scatter the peoples who delight in war. Oh, if he would have stuck to that principle, he would have been better off.

Trample underfoot such men, such rulers who love the prophets that come from war. That's what lusting after tribute means. They are to be trampled underfoot. Well, if that's the case, there goes most of Congress and certainly all of those in the White House. This is how corrupt rulers come to contemptuously use the lives of their men to become rich.

That is gearing up the engines of war, driving those engines relentlessly. If you are not familiar, dear listener, if you're not yet familiar with Smedley Butler and his should-be famous speech, War is a Racket. Go out and find it. Smedley Butler was a Marine Corps major general and twice awarded Medal of Honor recipient, who came to see that a few politicians and corporations tended to make huge fortunes from mass human suffering when they engaged in war. He says in his speech, and I quote, War is a racket.

It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. Unquote.

War is a racket by Smedley Butler. Butler goes on to chronicle how he, to his regret, helped to enrich a number of corporate interests around the world during World War I. As the American military fought ostensibly for America's defense, on the one hand, in the freedom of people in the nations we conquered on the other. But in reality, what was motivating our leaders behind all of the noble rhetoric was greed, pure and simple. And not only are the loss of lives calculated in terms of the peoples that armies slaughter, where they take their warfare, but also in terms of the soldiers of our own forces.

Yes. On the backs and in the blood of our men at arms, a few cynical men in power become rich. Those who lust after tribute draft armies of Uriahs to die. That is what the modern, or the ancient term for a lust for profits and profiting off of war is lust after tribute. Oh, and those who lust after tribute.

They draft whole armies of Uriahs to die for them and their wealth. We the people go to war for flag and country. They the bankers send to war for cash and profits. This is not why we honor the fallen on Memorial Day, is it? It's not the purpose of Memorial Day.

First observed on May 30, 1868. Memorial Day, which was called Decoration Day originally, Memorial Day was originally intended to honor those who died in the Civil War in the Union Army. And later it was expanded to include the Confederate dead. And eventually, of course, it came to encompass the remembrance of all those who died in service to our country in all of our wars. And I remember growing up and for many, many years, I always saw Memorial Day as a sacred time when we honored and remembered those who died in the defense of our nation.

How many American young men, dear listener, how many American young men have perished on a far away field or in a trench or foxhole or on some distant ocean, never to see mom and dad again or become a mom or dad themselves, to have all of their hopes and dreams cut short by an enemy bullet defending you and I. Celebrating Memorial Day properly demands a measure of empathy where we can place ourselves in the combat boots of another man who no less than us has a family he loves and dreams he wishes to make reality and fruits of labor he longs to enjoy. Do you think he doesn't enjoy that as much as you?

You want to wake up tomorrow and make that happen, don't you? Well, so does only he has been drafted or possibly volunteer to pick up a weapon and go and risk his life and all that we have mentioned to defend us. The true soldier doesn't fight because he hates what's in front of him, G.K. Chesterton says, but because he loves what is behind him. G.K. Chesterton. What a great saying.

The true soldier doesn't fight because he hates what's in front of him, but because he loves what's behind him. That kind of service is deserving of honor and it should not be treated lightly or used cynically by those responsible for sending us to war. What can we say of those presently in charge of our Defense Department and Congress? Oh, dear listener, at the top of the list is the Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden. He has shown himself to be a man incapable of the least bit of empathy for the men under his charge, unless he can make it self-referential in bringing up a false past about his son, for example.

This is classic behavior of the narcissist. Nothing is important unless it can be made to highlight himself, and Biden has done this. Biden claims that his son, Beau, lost his life in Iraq and won the Bronze Star and Distinguished Service Cross and died in Iraq. None of this is true. This is called stolen valor.

In his botched, shameful evacuation of Afghanistan in 2021 as well, Biden was responsible for the deaths of 13 American servicemen at the hands of a terrorist. And then, to top it all off, when the remains of those servicemen returned at Dover Air Force Base in a formal dignified return service, Biden shows his callous impatience towards the memory of those men by checking his watch as those bodies came off the transport. Thousands of other American servicemen and civilians have been left behind in the evacuation of Afghanistan.

It cannot possibly be called a retreat either, because army doctrine calls for planning and order and the protection of life when men and materiel are taken off a war zone. That's retreat. All Biden did was get out as fast as he could, with no regard for human life or the plight of Afghanis, for example, who helped us while we were there. His minions lie about it to this day, insisting it was well managed, but the facts belie their lies.

And of course, there is the well-financed slaughterhouse of Ukraine, where a generation of Ukrainian men have been systematically marched off into eternity, while Ukrainian oligarchs and American politicians and arms manufacturers have grown fat and rich in the process. Oh, dear listener, Bob Dylan sings in his song from his early career, Masters of War. He sings, come you masters of war, you that build all the guns, you that build the death planes, you that build the big bombs, you that hide behind walls, you that hide behind desks. I just want you to know I can see through your masks. Unquote.

Oh, that song, Masters of War, was written at the height of the Vietnam War, but it still rings true today. Doesn't it, dear listener? Before we go on, I'd like to remind you that you can take this broadcast as a podcast as a podcast as well. And I just urge you to do that option, and you will be notified before this podcast drops. But we have a catalog of all of our broadcasts and podcasts at our website, americastruths.org, americastruths.org.

And there you'll find years of our broadcast cataloged, and you can research by topic. You can research by date. Perhaps there's a broadcast you remember from the past that you wish you may have heard again or may have access to. Well, you can find those at our website, americastruths.org. And I urge you to go ahead and check those out.

This one will be up there pretty soon. Well, going on, the five biggest arms dealers, as we look at the lust for tribute, right, profit from warfare, the five biggest arms dealers, and they are Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Energies, and General Dynamics. They are the third largest contributors to politicians right behind the pharmaceutical industry and the Silicon Valley giants. The arms dealers, those five big ones, doled out some $60 million in campaign contributions in the election of 2020, and they're scheduled to influence this 2024 election with, with how much? Who knows how much they will contribute?

We'll see afterwards. Well, in biblical times, the profiting from war, as we have seen, was called a lust after tribute because kings would conquer land after land, people after people, so they could accumulate plunder from the storehouses and then strap them down economically with taxes. The story of the Roman Empire can be encapsulated in the phrase lust after tribute. It was greed without regard, greed without regard, without regard to the lives of soldiers or civilians. Today, it is simply what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex.

The integration of arms and manufacturers. That's the idea of military-industrial complex. It's the integration of arms manufacturers with government policy makers, such that foreign policy is determined in large part by what benefits that military-industrial complex, or what has come to be known as well as the deep state, as I have covered in previous broadcasts, and you can find those on americastrues.org. Previous broadcasts, a major component of that deep state complex is the gradual encroachment of the alphabet agencies.

That is, the intelligence community, the senile intelligence agency, the Federal Bureau of Intimidation, or the NSA, right? On and on we could go. The gradual encroachment of these intelligence agencies into our way of governance, such that many now call it the fourth branch of government. The deep state now uses the loyalty and patriotism of the American people to profit from war. Cynically uses the loyalty and patriotism of the American people to profit from war.

The rallying cry of feeding the meat grinder, the meat grinder, excuse me, of war in Ukraine, for example, has been protect the integrity of Ukrainian borders, and such things like the liberty and freedoms of Ukrainians are threatened by Russia. Well, this would be laughable, dear listener, if so much blood was not at stake. But it is. Those same politicians and corporate shills care not a whit about the integrity of our own borders, and they're actively destroying the liberties of Americans. Do you know how hollow your rhetoric sounds, deep state?

Many of us are blindly conditioned to salute when a patriotic war is paraded before our eyes. It's wrapped in a flag, it's lavished with emotional tributes, and it's baptized with tears. The manipulators of this war have cynically shed the blood of over 500,000 Ukrainians. And that's a conservative estimate without caring one bit. And they stand ready to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands more Americans and Europeans if NATO joins the fray.

Dear deep state, dearest, dearest deep state, please don't insult our intelligence anymore with appeal to principle when it is profit that you seek. Please, dear deep state, don't tell us you cherish and honor the lives and sacrifices of our soldiers when you put them at risk in foreign escapades, while our own homeland is threatened from within by foreign actors and terrorists. And dear deep state, please don't tell us you will not risk lives unnecessarily when you destroy unit cohesion by recruiting transgender into our military. Oh, the combined armed services fell short of recruitment goals by 25% last year, a record low.

Despite excuses made by politicians, researchers know why. And this is what Thomas Spore, who is a research historian at Heritage Foundation, what he says about this issue. He says, and I quote, the largest threat by far to our current military is the weakening of its fabric by radical progressive or woke policies being imposed, not by a rising generation of slackers, but by the very leaders charged with ensuring their readiness.

Wokeness in the military is being imposed by elected and appointed leaders in the White House, Congress and the Pentagon, who have little understanding of the purpose, character, traditions, and requirements of the institution they are trying to change. Succinctly put, Mr. Spore, Memorial Day is designed to honor those who have fallen, soldiers whose memories are held dear and whose lives were ostensibly held with value and honor by those who sent them into battle. That can no longer be said of our government nor of the very deep state structure that comprises our military industrial complex. They don't care.

They use your lives for their own selfish purposes, not for the good of the country. America is waking up to this reality, though, and that's why recruitment is falling. We, the people, remember yet. We recall the purpose of military service and the honor attached to it, which you, deep state, do not. May God deliver us from you, deep state.

Psalm 140 says, Deliver me, O Lord, from evil men. Preserve me from violent men who plan evil things in their heart and stir up wars continually. That says it all, doesn't it? Deliver us, O Lord, from evil men. Preserve us from violent men who plan evil things in their heart and stir up wars continually.

These are those who rule us now. Your government is filled with evil men who lust after tribute and cynically use your tax dollars and the blood of your sons to acquire it. They care no more for your lives than does the narcissist commander-in-chief who cannot even control his selfishness long enough to refrain from checking his watch for a moment of solemn remembrance. Oh, Smedley Butler, in his piece, war is a racket, had a good partial solution to this desecration of Memorial Day.

He said, and I quote, let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in wartime, as well as the bankers and the speculators. Let them be conscripted to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get. Unquote. A good first step. Sounds like it to me.

That might start to curb the lust for tribute, which God so thoroughly condemns. He says, trample underfoot those who lust after tribute. Scatter the peoples who delight in war. And eventually, the wicked men and women who shed rivers of blood will be engulfed by their own wickedness too. Solomon, in observing the practice of the evil men who conspire and plot to ensnare the righteous in wickedness and war, Solomon assures us that they cannot be delivered from the effects of war themselves by their wickedness.

He says in Ecclesiastes, there is no discharge from war, nor will wickedness deliver those who are given to war. Unquote. No, their own wickedness cannot deliver them from those who are given to war. Dear listener, aspire with me to have a George Patton Memorial Day where we remember soldiers like him, he who was not afraid to fight, but who would not risk unnecessarily the lives of his men for worthless causes. I owe that to my men, Patton would say.

I owe that to my men. Pray that this becomes the motto of a new generation of military leaders and that we might wake up and declare unequivocally, deliver me, O Lord, from evil men. Preserve me from violent men who plan evil things in their heart and stir up wars continually. Let us be for peace under the Prince of Peace, the Lord Jesus Christ. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and I urge you to check out once again our broadcasts, which are chronicled and archived at our website, americastruths.org.

And you can also join us for holy worship on Sundays. We invite you to that. We worship at New Geneva on Sunday at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. And you can call me for more feedback or more information as well at area code 208-523-0196. 208-523-0196.