Wednesday, January 22, 2025
As Trump promised to do during his campaign for reelection, he immediately issued pardons and commutations for the vigilantes who assaulted the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. This is not the first time that a President has extended massive clemency to a group of Americans who violated the law. Let us remember that Jimmy Carter granted legall forgiveness to those who resisted the draft and moved to Canada. Sons wo wished to visit their parents and siblings could now return without fear of arrest.
The difference between these two groups is almost too obvious to deserve mentioning, but since few people, including President Trump, seem to notice it, let’s not let it go unsaid: one group attempts to violently overthrow the government of the United States. Another group realized that the government of the United States was far too powerful to be deterred from exacerbating, on an incredibly massive scale, a civil war in Vietnam. Rather than participate in that war, they moved to Canada. They disowned the government that they had been raised to respect, cherish, and honor because that government was asking them to cooperate with and participate in a dishonoroble war. Of course, one could ask if any war can be honorable, or if the case is that those who are soldiers devote themselves to a paradox that has no resolution. How, in fact, does one determine what is needed to maintain the legitimate security of one’s neighbors, friends, and family, as multipled on a national scale?
President Carter served in the U.S. Navy in order to defend this country from unprovoked attack. President Trump, as far as I can tell, dodged the draft and did not in any meaningful way take part in protests against the war. Trump’s only concern in the 1960s seems to ave been how to avoid doing anything that might require him to be accountable for his complicity with the government’s predations in Vietnam. Trump wants to rewrite history; but the arc of history is like that of moral law: it bends toward those who justify the risks they took to balance the demands of duty, honor, and country.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/dc-judges-slam-trump-pardons-201300038.html
DC judges slam Trump pardons as ‘revisionist myth,’ ‘will not change the truth’ of Jan. 6
About Bill Mohr