Astute reply to the America foreign wars part of yesterday's America needs serious bowel cleanse post at this blog:
David
Dwight Eisenhower speech about the military industrial complex rather obtuse. No one really got it then and now it is totally out of control
Sloan Bashinsky
Oh, I think the military industrial complex got it loud and clear. And, I imagine they set out to propagandize America going to war with patriotism.
Look at how it went for President John F. Kennedy after he got cold feet about expanding America militarily in Vietnam. Look at how it went for Dr. Martin Luther King after he came out against the Vietnam war as a rich white man's war. Look at how it went for Muhammed Ali after he declined to fight in Vietnam.
In the spring of 2005, I attended a weekly group in the Key West Unitarian church, called "Seekers". There was one fellow somewhat older than I. One day, he said he was with the CIA in Vietnam, while the French were trying to retake Vietnam, which they had lost to the Japanese during World War II. He said, outwardly, diplomatically, America was supporting France's efforts, but his units mission was to help the Vietnamese beat the French, because America's government wanted Vietnam's natural resources, particularly the rubber plantations. I asked the Seekers if they heard what the man had just told us? I got no answers. It was as if he had not spoken.
In 1988, I was my father's guest at the Birmingham Downtown Rotary Club monthly luncheon. The guest speaker was an official of the National Graphic. His topic was getting to know our foreign neighbors helped nations get along better. He said a survey had shown 95 percent of American students could not locate Vietnam on a map. After he spoke, a man in the audience asked what was the Geographic's position on the Vietnam war? The Geographic official said the Geographic had correspondents in Saigon when there was a huge public demonstration of Vietnamese people carrying posters in English begging America to save them. The correspondents spoke Vietnamese and talked with some of the protesters, and learned the protesters were from the countryside and had been paid money by the South Vietnamese government to be transported into Saigon and demonstrate, they did not understand English, could not read the posters, and did not know why their were demonstrating. Later, the Geographic dug into it and learned the money paid to the protesters had been given to the South Vietnamese government by the US Government and US corporations. The Geographic official concluded with, until that demonstration, Americans opposed getting into that war. The demonstration was all over American TV and swung American sentiment to intervention. You could have heard a pin drop in that Rotary club. No a word was said. My father, a WWII combat aviator, looked like he wanted to throw up.
What about the false flag attack on an American destroyer off North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin?
Did the American military industrial complex and American presidents and Congress change their spots after Vietnam? Do pigs fly?
David
Nikita Khrushchev's son said that after Kennedy was assassinated he cried because Kennedy had been working and back channels to put an end the nuclear arms race. They had both been frightened and how close we had come to a nuclear Exchange. This for them cost the major defense contractors billions.
Sloan Bashinsky
Interesting, I remember seeing on TV Nikita had pulled off one of his shoes, at UN, I think, and was hammering it on the desk where he sat, ranting, "We will bury you!", while Ike looked cold calm at Nikita. Truman wrote in his own hand in his diary, I saw a photostat reproduced in Life, I think, circa 2002, that he did not drop the A-bombs on Japan to win the war in the Pacific, the Japanese were trying to surrender, but to intimidate the Russians, who were staging to take some of the upper Japanese islands still held by Japan. War is such a lovely thing off which somebodies have to make a great deal of money.
Peggy
You're right. He said it more than once, because he understood war and what it does to those who are in it, to those who bear the brunt of it in their countries. If all presidents listened to Ike, they would never have gotten into any war.
Sloan Bashinsky
My dreamer friend once taught economics in colleges. He said Khruschev's successors were hawks, and the Soviet economy depended on gearing up for war. As I recall, President Regan seized on that and out-war-machined Soviet Union until latter went bankrupt and came unraveled. The Vladimir fellow running Russia now is former KGB and perhaps has Genghis Kahan and Viking genes. I seriously doubt American presidents past and present can read that Ivan's tea leaves. I'd rather see American troops lining America's southern border to stop that invasion, than camped out in Ukraine, Georgia, etc.
David
We created Putin by our own actions. One of the stipulations for the Soviet Union 2 degree to the reunification of Germany was that NATO would not be involved with the Ukraine. Mitchell Gorbachev gave us an opportunity to work with the Russians but Bush Senior decided to go for a complete military hegemony. This helped create Putin. Bill Clinton went back on his word about the Ukraine. You have to remember that Russia has been invaded twice in the last century. The last invasion cost them 20 million live. They are understandably paranoid. The arms race could have been stopped many times but that would have conflicted with the military industrial complex. We are held hostage by our own devices.
Sloan Bashinsky
Yep, and President Truman definitely intimidated the Russians by dropping Fat Boy and Little Joe on Japan.
Just my redneck mystic opinion, the folks on the right, who still think the 2021 presidential election was stolen, are deranged and far greater threat to America than the folks on the left, radical Islam, red China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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