Emergency Anti War Convention, Philadelphia, July 4, 2007
Posted: June 20th, 2007, 6:45 pm
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<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
World Conditions and Action Items
Speak Your Mind And Read Mine
CDs
“Soldiers Of Peace”
<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
World Conditions and Action Items
Speak Your Mind And Read Mine
CDs
“Soldiers Of Peace”