Emergency Anti War Convention, Philadelphia, July 4, 2007

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Emergency Anti War Convention, Philadelphia, July 4, 2007

Post by Michael » June 20th, 2007, 6:45 pm

<center>Image</center>

<center>(originally published at OpEdNews)</center>

“Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he who gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it’s ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a changin’.” – Bob Dylan, 1963


That’s right, folks, nineteen-hundred and sixty-three. I was thirteen years old and I was told that the big bad communists in North Vietnam just shot at one of our destroyers. I was told that, if we didn’t fight back, the North Vietnamese were going to take over Democratic South Vietnam and then Laos, Cambodia, Burma, The Philippines and even New Zealand and Australia would fall!

After misleading the American people about the phantom attack on the American destroyer Maddox in The Gulf of Tonkin, Lyndon Johnson went so far as to proclaim, “If we quit Vietnam, tomorrow we'll be fighting in Hawaii and next week we'll have to fight in San Francisco.”

My god, people, what in the hell does this sound like to you! Does this not reek of “if we don’t fight them over there, we’ll have to fight them over here.”?

What I wasn’t told when I was thirteen was that the very same commander who reported being attacked by the North Vietnamese in The Gulf Of Tonkin on August 4, 1964, Captain John Herrick, retracted his original report after further investigation.

However, Lyndon Johnson, getting all he needed with the first, erroneous report, ignored Herrick’s correction and the rest, as they say, is one sad history.

What I wasn’t told when I was thirteen was that the “Democratic” South was under the leadership of a madman, Ngo Dinh Diem. He was the only South Vietnamese leader to whom we listened. We listened to him because, while we were trying to make a case to invade Vietnam and save the South, Roman Catholic Diem was making us look bad with his killing of Buddhists and his favoring of Roman Catholics, who made up only 10% of the population, for high government positions.

The US, by way, of course, of the CIA, paid several generals to overthrow Diem. They did this and then they killed him.

The leaders that followed Diem were only nominal as the United States government and military acted as if they were the government of South Vietnam. The United States ignored subsequent leaders of Vietnam when they asked for help in fighting a violently bloody civil war which may not have been nearly as intense if the factions in Vietnam were allowed to resolve their own internal conflict.

“Those who can not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” – George Santayana

Why is it that Americans fall into this category so frequently and so easily? Why did Americans believe two presidents when they promised to keep us out of a European war?

Why does everything written above about Vietnam sound so familiar? Why have we fallen for it again?

Not only are Americans still saying that we need to win the war in Iraq, whatever that looks like, but there are those who to this day blame “hippies” or peace advocates for our “loosing” the war in Vietnam and proclaim that, if we “lose” the war in Iraq, it will be the same, “unpatriotic” peace advocates who will be the cause.

Hey, ole blood and guts, why aren’t the presidents who lied to get us into Vietnam and Iraq the causes of our losing? How about if we didn’t send an army into a nation we had no business sending an army into, there would have been no war to lose. How about maybe those who’ve obviously forgotten our history enough to allow it to be repeated are the people who lost in Vietnam and are losing in Iraq.

We never lost the war in Vietnam. We lost our morality in Vietnam once it was lost in Washington D. C. and we’re not going to lose in Iraq. We’ve lost our morality once again in Iraq once it was lost in Washington D. C.

What about the fact that we’ve allowed The United States of America to become The Former United States of America because there is a faction of the population who believes that the American government has always been infallible? What about the fact that we’ve finally allowed ourselves to be governed by one political party, The Corporacracy?

Even our two so called maverick presidential candidates are too chicken shit to remove their feet from inside The Corporacracy’s door. The Democrats don’t want Dennis Kucinich to run for president and The Republicans don’t want Ron Paul to run for president and yet Kucinich still runs as a Democrat and Paul as a Republican.

These two men say that their parties have lost their way, that the parties’ bases have to change the parties into what they once were.

The Democratic Party and The Republican Party are havin’ a party and have no intention of changing or allowing any other organization to put its own candidate up for president. Comfort and greed bloat both arms of The Corporacracy.

Has the Democratic Party done anything for which it was elected? Death in Iraq has not slowed down since November of 2006. They had no intention of facing off against The Regime because, for those insulated reds and blues, it’s all a very high stakes game of chance. The stakes are what they are in most games of chance, dollars.

“The times they are a-changin’.”

If the result of the Philadelphia Emergency Anti War Convention isn’t a major paradigm in this nation, the curtain may very well fall on this, just one more in a long line of stupid empires.

We need a paradigm and only we the people can implement it!

To friendship,
Michael

“An honest God is the noblest work of man.” - Robert G. Ingersoll


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Post by jimboloco » July 27th, 2007, 1:37 pm

well some of us did learn from history
very well stated by the way

two days ago talking with a patient of mine
he said
"that nancy pelosi don't know nothing"

mebbe so
but i said
"it don't take a combat vet to know about the war" (in iraq)
"all you gotta do is pay attention"

keep dogpaddling, man

you were 13 in 1963
i was 16

shit i never even knew that there was a gulf of tonkin resolution until i was in college in the air farce rotc

and i certainly did not learn it from them

you gotta believe that we are pulling the rope, man
it's a tug o war
[color=darkcyan]i'm on a survival mission
yo ho ho an a bottle of rum om[/color]

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Post by Michael » July 27th, 2007, 7:12 pm

Jim,

I was gung-ho about stopping the commies in 1963. Just a few years earlier, when I was in elementary school, we had commie nuclear bomb attack drills during which we learned that would wood keep us safe from nuclear fallout.

More importantly, however, it scared the shit out of me. Here we are, a bunch of elementary school kids, hiding from the bombs those Ruskies were going to send over here. And there was Khrushchev banging his shoe on a table while listening to a speech at The United Nations. I learned to hate commies early on in life and just knew it was their intention to take over the world.

So it made a lot of sense that those commies would, for no good reason, attack us in The Gulf of Tonkin or anywhere, for that matter.

As I moved on through high school, the truth about The Gulf of Tonkin came out.

The truth about Communism also came out. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was no more “Communist” than Wall Street. The rich kept themselves aloof and insulated and the rest of the people stood in line for bread.

One of the definitions of Socialism at Dictionary.com is “Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.”

The second part of that definition was witnessed in Hitler's Germany and in the USSR. We’ve yet to see the first truly done successfully. The governments of some European countries have provided more of the necessities of living than any of the governments of this nation have ever provided. However, I’ve never heard of a government dissolving itself because the populace was ready to share and share alike.

One of the ironies is that the same theory ultimately drives Communists and Libertarians (I bet Libertarians wouldn't want to hear that). The government pretty much steps aside and lets the people run everything. Each of those systems trusts the people to be fair and honest and to look out for one another merely through humanitarian concern.

Empowering a population of over, say, 50 people would result in putting a lot of foxes in charge of a lot of hen houses. We can see in our own capitalist nation that, for far too many people, enough is never enough.

To friendship,
Michael

BTW, after the WTC was attacked, I thought that George W. Bush would be the greatest president that ever lead this nation. If he did the right thing or if his reaction was appropriate for the initial action, he could almost reach that goal by accident. I was ready to follow him into hell.

I just feel fortunate that I never believed that invading Iraq was an appropriate response to what happened at the WTC and Pentagon because The Regime, of which Bush is only a small part, has, indeed, led us into hell.

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Post by jimboloco » July 29th, 2007, 10:27 am

per all bush had to do was set limits
use some common sense
he would've been great
same thing for lbj, nixon

libertarian socialism
mebbe we can stop paying war taxes and give to our favorite charities
[color=darkcyan]i'm on a survival mission
yo ho ho an a bottle of rum om[/color]

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