Mark Twain once believed American imperialism to be honorable, a good and beneficial outcome for any land that received our country’s blessing in this special way. He changed his mind.[1]

Today, over a century removed from Twain’s final musings, Americans still line up armed with charged ideologies in debates about “just” wars and “necessary” wars and “false flags” and “domino theories” and “military intervention (which is never off the table) and “peace keeping missions” and “military advisors” and so on.

Though “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1936, starring Errol Flynn) is about British imperialism, not American, the problem stays the same—Powerful men, who manage to become our leaders, send masses of innocent, well-intentioned citizens into all-manner of conflicts where they are ordered to kill as many like-minded soldiers in foreign uniforms as they can. Soldiers on both sides obey. Endless warfare. Illusive peace! Countless victims march off, willingly volunteering to sacrifice everything for a victory that only offers foggy spoils to shadowy, powerful puppeteers.

From Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem:

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns,” he said;
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.”

The film’s final scene depicts a famous battle of the Crimean War when many combatants were doomed by impossible odds against survival. Filming this “charge scene” [2] climax entailed the unthinkable use of trip wires. Dozens of horses died to create the realistic, tragic recreation of yet another blunder of warfare—Man’s ultimate bête noire! The tragedy of this cruel treatment of horses prompted the U.S. Congress to enact safety standards for animals in films, and the ASPCA worked to ban trip wires from use in film-making, too.[3]

The Bentari Project will not cease to promote the better goal, the only sane goal, the goal that should shine from the highest peaks where all human hopes spring eternal—Universal Peace with Prosperity for All and NO ANIMAL CRUELTY!

[1] See 8/31/14 Bentari Project Blog Post: http://www.bentari.com/Blog/Entry.aspx?pid=276&bid=51&beid=1018

[2] See “the charge” scene on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyqcZMsBOU4

[3] See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Charge_of_the_Light_Brigade_%281936_film%29