Fighting Communism in SE Asia – the years of the Ugly American, Rand Corp., domino theory, Robert McNamara, Westmoreland, president Johnson and the Pentagon Papers with whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. The treacherous acts of the 1968 Paris Talks with rising star Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. Tricky Dick faced impeachment over the cover-up and collusion to obstruct justice after the Watergate break-in. A lesson people in power can live an honorable life until death with impunity. Henry Kissinger the bag of dirt, still has influence in U.S. foreign policy with both Republicans and the leadership of Democrats: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Is that the Hope for young people living their ideals? Henry Kissinger still this week hit the radio air waves in Holland in an interview with Jan Arend Boekenstein talking about The Idealist. In my volunteer work on the weekends I live my ideals … with teeners and get plenty of appreciation for what I do. I’m a blessed person and nothing will change that in the short term.
○ ‘Pentagon Papers’ Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg Explains Why We Go To War
In de aftermath of FBI’s Hoover, the Kennedy assassination, the Tonkin Gulf incident, the tragic year of the TET offensive, lies, indoctrination, “patriotism”, the downfall of U.S. democracy through the murders/assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. I lived through those years and it formed me, gave me insight and I was a critical thinker in 1965 and have remained so.
John Pilger – The Quiet Mutiny – World in Action (1970)
“The war isn’t over, but it is ending. It is ending not because of the Paris talks or the demonstrations at home. It is ending because the largest and wealthiest and most powerful organisation on Earth, the American Army, is being challenged from within, from the very cellars of its pyramid, from the most forgotten, the most brutalised and certainly the bravest of its members. The war is ending because the grunt is taking no more bullshit.”
John Pilger today, fact is I have to read this stuff at the EuroTrib today as yr commenters on the fp stories are blinded by hate, frustrated from defeat, consumed by fake news, alternate facts and barricaded from conversation and movement of free thought by measures fitting the age of McCarthyism and downrating comments I had come to believe was beholden to the Orange Satan. Somehow BT has become a murky pond eating its own. I will survive as I have done though the decades and live by my ideals. I my closely knit community in real life I am quite fortunate and was able to share personal experience on line in the community of Booman Tribune. That’s all gone, love has been filtered out for hate. It’s a choice I can’t turn around.
On the Beach 2017 by John Pilger
The US submarine captain says, “We’ve all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you’re never ready, because you don’t know when it’s coming. Well, now we do know and there’s nothing to be done about it.”
He says he will be dead by September. It will take about a week to die, though no one can be sure. Animals live the longest.The war was over in a month. The United States, Russia and China were the protagonists. It is not clear if it was started by accident or mistake. There was no victor. The northern hemisphere is contaminated and lifeless now.
I read On the Beach for the first time the other day, finishing it as the US Congress passed a law to wage economic war on Russia, the world’s second most lethal nuclear power. There was no justification for this insane vote, except the promise of plunder.
The “sanctions” are aimed at Europe, too, mainly Germany, which depends on Russian natural gas and on European companies that do legitimate business with Russia. In what passed for debate on Capitol Hill, the more garrulous senators left no doubt that the embargo was designed to force Europe to import expensive American gas.
Their main aim seems to be war – real war. No provocation as extreme can suggest anything else. They seem to crave it, even though Americans have little idea what war is. The Civil War of 1861-5 was the last on their mainland. War is what the United States does to others.
The only nation to have used nuclear weapons against human beings, they have since destroyed scores of governments, many of them democracies, and laid to waste whole societies – the million deaths in Iraq were a fraction of the carnage in Indo-China, which President Reagan called “a noble cause” and President Obama revised as the tragedy of an “exceptional people“. He was not referring to the Vietnamese.
To leave a turd as yr comment in my diary is way below decency. Apparently it’s symptomatic for what America has become. Fortunately there are still a dozen or so commenters with whom I have discourse on and off line. It’s still worthwhile, but I’ll split my precious time between the pond and ET.
Some of us have grown up, gained wisdom and won’t be deceived by the bullshit of the Pentagon, the Intelligence Community with its billions of dark money, that shiny hill of Washington DC with the corruption and oligarchy and the U.S. media with its “patriotism” which has eroded to a shell of fascism and propaganda.
Further reading, my recent diaries on topic …
○ Exploiting Fear: The Psychology of War
○ During Yeltsin Era, UK and US Stripped Assets Off Russia
○ Media In IC’s Bidding and All Out War vs. POTUS