| Topic: |
Sociology > Education |
| User: |
"Stan de SD" |
| Date: |
02 Jan 2006 05:35:48 AM |
| Object: |
Re: Anti-War Up - After the War |
"i2p6 west" <nospam@rr.net> wrote in message
news:11rf93efuhkji73@corp.supernews.com...
A group of internationally known figures, celebrated both for
their
talent and their dedication to human rights (Gino Strada, Paul Farmer,
Kurt
Vonnegut, Nadine Gordimer, Eduardo Galeano, and others), will soon
launch a
worldwide campaign to enlist tens of millions of people in a movement
for
the renunciation of war, hoping to reach the point where governments,
facing
popular resistance, will find it difficult or impossible to wage war.
And while they are pursing that silly little Utopian pipe dream, some
fanatical kook, knowing that his potential opponents are too deluded,
demoralized, or caught up in their own narcissistic crusades, will figure
it's time to strike.
That's the way the real world works, and all the hand-holding,
drum-circling, flower-passing, Kumbaya singing, and UN resolutions will
never change it...
Get a clue, while you're still alive for it to do any good. :O|
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: Anti-War Up - After the War |
02 Jan 2006 09:29:56 AM |
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Stain de STD wrote:
some fanatical kook, knowing that his potential opponents are too deluded, demoralized, or caught up in their own narcissistic crusades, will figure it's time to strike.
That's pretty much the way W had it figured. Fundamentalist fools like
you seldom differ.
..
..
..
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| User: "Stan de SD" |
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| Title: Re: Anti-War Up - After the War |
02 Jan 2006 03:29:52 PM |
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<hc23hc@mac.com> wrote in message
news:1136215795.934431.216340@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Stain de STD wrote:
some fanatical kook, knowing that his potential opponents are too
deluded, demoralized, or caught up in their own narcissistic crusades, will
figure it's time to strike.
That's pretty much the way W had it figured. Fundamentalist fools like
you seldom differ.
As usual, you reveal your ignorance.
.
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| User: "Jafo" |
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| Title: Re: Anti-War Up - After the War |
02 Jan 2006 03:38:48 PM |
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As viewed from alt.california, Stan de SD wrote:
Slick <hc23hc@mac.com> wrote...
Stain de STD wrote:
some fanatical kook, knowing that his potential opponents are too
deluded, demoralized, or caught up in their own narcissistic crusades,
will figure it's time to strike.
That's pretty much the way W had it figured. Fundamentalist fools
like you seldom differ.
As usual, you reveal your ignorance.
As well as a certain pride in that ignorance.
--
Jafo
.
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| User: "DCI" |
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| Title: Re: Anti-War Up - After the War |
02 Jan 2006 05:47:39 PM |
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On Mon, 02 Jan 2006 13:38:48 -0800, Jafo <a@nospam.invalid> wrote:
As viewed from alt.california, Stan de SD wrote:
Slick <hc23hc@mac.com> wrote...
Stain de STD wrote:
some fanatical kook, knowing that his potential opponents are too
deluded, demoralized, or caught up in their own narcissistic crusades,
will figure it's time to strike.
That's pretty much the way W had it figured. Fundamentalist fools
like you seldom differ.
As usual, you reveal your ignorance.
As well as a certain pride in that ignorance.
--
Jafo
And just like a junior high school debate team member, one who
presumes much and recognizes little. Oration for Slick is trying to
drown out the voices in his/hers/its head.
DCI
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| User: "redvet" |
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| Title: Re: Anti-War Up - After the War |
03 Jan 2006 01:32:44 AM |
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"DCI" <never@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:mmejr1p72sd66rgh1lujna6fcq1vf8ga7e@4ax.com...
On Mon, 02 Jan 2006 13:38:48 -0800, Jafo <a@nospam.invalid> wrote:
As viewed from alt.california, Stan de SD wrote:
Slick <hc23hc@mac.com> wrote...
Stain de STD wrote:
some fanatical kook, knowing that his potential opponents are too
deluded, demoralized, or caught up in their own narcissistic crusades,
will figure it's time to strike.
That's pretty much the way W had it figured. Fundamentalist fools
like you seldom differ.
As usual, you reveal your ignorance.
As well as a certain pride in that ignorance.
--
Jafo
And just like a junior high school debate team member, one who
presumes much and recognizes little. Oration for Slick is trying to
drown out the voices in his/hers/its head.
DCI
Aloha DCI,
Sorry 'neva wenyt school' - Your opinion of the article by Professor Zinn
is what? Relevant to the national debate? Not Relevant and why ? ('Smart
***** one liners' are perfectly acceptable; this is alt.war.vietnam, after
all)
..
http://girights.objector.org/
http://www.objector.org/
http://www.mfso.org/
http://www.ivaw.net/
redvet
Facilitator
Vietnam Veterans Against the War/Anti-Imperialist
http://www.oz.net/~vvawai/
Hawaii Chapter
Published in the January, 2006 issue of The Progressive
After the War
by Howard Zinn
The war against Iraq, the assault on its people, the occupation of its
cities, will come to an end, sooner or later. The process has already begun.
The first signs of mutiny are appearing in Congress. The first editorials
calling for withdrawal from Iraq are beginning to appear in the press. The
anti-war movement has been growing, slowly but persistently, all over the
country.
Public opinion polls now show the country decisively against the war
and the Bush Administration. The harsh realities have become visible. The
troops will have to come home.
And while we work with increased determination to make this happen,
should we not think beyond this war? Should we begin to think, even before
this shameful war is over, about ending our addiction to massive violence
and instead using the enormous wealth of our country for human needs? That
is, should we begin to speak about ending war-not just this war or that war,
but war itself? Perhaps the time has come to bring an end to war, and turn
the human race onto a path of health and healing.
A group of internationally known figures, celebrated both for their
talent and their dedication to human rights (Gino Strada, Paul Farmer, Kurt
Vonnegut, Nadine Gordimer, Eduardo Galeano, and others), will soon launch a
worldwide campaign to enlist tens of millions of people in a movement for
the renunciation of war, hoping to reach the point where governments, facing
popular resistance, will find it difficult or impossible to wage war.
There is a persistent argument against such a possibility, which I
have heard from people on all parts of the political spectrum: We will never
do away with war because it comes out of human nature. The most compelling
counter to that claim is in history: We don't find people spontaneously
rushing to make war on others. What we find, rather, is that governments
must make the most strenuous efforts to mobilize populations for war. They
must entice soldiers with promises of money, education, must hold out to
young people whose chances in life look very poor that here is an
opportunity to attain respect and status. And if those enticements don't
work, governments must use coercion: They must conscript young people, force
them into military service, threaten them with prison if they do not comply.
Furthermore, the government must persuade young people and their
families that though the soldier may die, though he or she may lose arms or
legs, or become blind, that it is all for a noble cause, for God, for
country.
When you look at the endless series of wars of this century you do not
find a public demanding war, but rather resisting it, until citizens are
bombarded with exhortations that appeal, not to a killer instinct, but to a
desire to do good, to spread democracy or liberty or overthrow a tyrant.
Woodrow Wilson found a citizenry so reluctant to enter the First World
War that he had to pummel the nation with propaganda and imprison dissenters
in order to get the country to join the butchery going on in Europe.
In the Second World War, there was indeed a strong moral imperative,
which still resonates among most people in this country and which maintains
the reputation of World War II as "the good war." There was a need to defeat
the monstrosity of fascism. It was that belief that drove me to enlist in
the Air Force and fly bombing missions over Europe.
Only after the war did I begin to question the purity of the moral
crusade. Dropping bombs from five miles high, I had seen no human beings,
heard no screams, seen no children dismembered. But now I had to think about
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden, the
deaths of 600,000 civilians in Japan, and a similar number in Germany.
I came to a conclusion about the psychology of myself and other
warriors: Once we decided, at the start, that our side was the good side and
the other side was evil, once we had made that simple and simplistic
calculation, we did not have to think anymore. Then we could commit
unspeakable crimes and it was all right.
I began to think about the motives of the Western powers and Stalinist
Russia and wondered if they cared as much about fascism as about retaining
their own empires, their own power, and if that was why they had military
priorities higher than bombing the rail lines leading to Auschwitz. Six
million Jews were killed in the death camps (allowed to be killed?). Only
60,000 were saved by the war-1 percent.
A gunner on another crew, a reader of history with whom I had become
friends, said to me one day: "You know this is an imperialist war. The
fascists are evil. But our side is not much better." I could not accept his
statement at the time, but it stuck with me.
War, I decided, creates, insidiously, a common morality for all sides.
It poisons everyone who is engaged in it, however different they are in many
ways, turns them into killers and torturers, as we are seeing now. It
pretends to be concerned with toppling tyrants, and may in fact do so, but
the people it kills are the victims of the tyrants. It appears to cleanse
the world of evil, but that does not last, because its very nature spawns
more evil. Wars, like violence in general, I concluded, is a drug. It gives
a quick high, the thrill of victory, but that wears off and then comes
despair.
I acknowledge the possibility of humanitarian intervention to prevent
atrocities, as in Rwanda. But war, defined as the indiscriminate killing of
large numbers of people, must be resisted.
Whatever can be said about World War II, understanding its complexity,
the situations that followed-Korea, Vietnam-were so far from the kind of
threat that Germany and Japan had posed to the world that those wars could
be justified only by drawing on the glow of "the good war." A hysteria about
communism led to McCarthyism at home and military interventions in Asia and
Latin America-overt and covert-justified by a "Soviet threat" that was
exaggerated just enough to mobilize the people for war.
Vietnam, however, proved to be a sobering experience, in which the
American public, over a period of several years, began to see through the
lies that had been told to justify all that bloodshed. The United States was
forced to withdraw from Vietnam, and the world didn't come to an end. One
half of one tiny country in Southeast Asia was now joined to its communist
other half, and 58,000 American lives and millions of Vietnamese lives had
been expended to prevent that. A majority of Americans had come to oppose
that war, which had provoked the largest anti-war movement in the nation's
history.
The war in Vietnam ended with a public fed up with war. I believe that
the American people, once the fog of propaganda had dissipated, had come
back to a more natural state. Public opinion polls showed that people in the
United States were opposed to send troops anywhere in the world, for any
reason.
The Establishment was alarmed. The government set out deliberately to
overcome what it called "the Vietnam syndrome." Opposition to military
interventions abroad was a sickness, to be cured. And so they would wean the
American public away from its unhealthy attitude, by tighter control of
information, by avoiding a draft, and by engaging in short, swift wars over
weak opponents (Grenada, Panama, Iraq), which didn't give the public time to
develop an anti-war movement.
I would argue that the end of the Vietnam War enabled the people of
the United States to shake the "war syndrome," a disease not natural to the
human body. But they could be infected once again, and September 11 gave the
government that opportunity. Terrorism became the justification for war, but
war is itself terrorism, breeding rage and hate, as we are seeing now.
The war in Iraq has revealed the hypocrisy of the "war on terrorism."
And the government of the United States, indeed governments everywhere, are
becoming exposed as untrustworthy: that is, not to be entrusted with the
safety of human beings, or the safety of the planet, or the guarding of its
air, its water, its natural wealth, or the curing of poverty and disease, or
coping with the alarming growth of natural disasters that plague so many of
the six billion people on Earth.
I don't believe that our government will be able to do once more what
it did after Vietnam-prepare the population for still another plunge into
violence and dishonor. It seems to me that when the war in Iraq ends, and
the war syndrome heals, that there will be a great opportunity to make that
healing permanent.
My hope is that the memory of death and disgrace will be so intense
that the people of the United States will be able to listen to a message
that the rest of the world, sobered by wars without end, can also
understand: that war itself is the enemy of the human race.
Governments will resist this message. But their power is dependent on
the obedience of the citizenry. When that is withdrawn, governments are
helpless. We have seen this again and again in history.
The abolition of war has become not only desirable but absolutely
necessary if the planet is to be saved. It is an idea whose time has come.
Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of "Voices of a
People's History of the United States."
© Copyright 2006 The Progressive
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| User: "Stan de SD" |
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| Title: Re: Anti-War Up - After the War |
03 Jan 2006 04:23:27 AM |
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"redvet" <redvet@lava.net> wrote in message
news:11rka4u7cmb8740@corp.supernews.com...
"DCI" <never@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:mmejr1p72sd66rgh1lujna6fcq1vf8ga7e@4ax.com...
On Mon, 02 Jan 2006 13:38:48 -0800, Jafo <a@nospam.invalid> wrote:
As viewed from alt.california, Stan de SD wrote:
Slick <hc23hc@mac.com> wrote...
Stain de STD wrote:
some fanatical kook, knowing that his potential opponents are too
deluded, demoralized, or caught up in their own narcissistic
crusades,
will figure it's time to strike.
That's pretty much the way W had it figured. Fundamentalist fools
like you seldom differ.
As usual, you reveal your ignorance.
As well as a certain pride in that ignorance.
--
Jafo
And just like a junior high school debate team member, one who
presumes much and recognizes little. Oration for Slick is trying to
drown out the voices in his/hers/its head.
DCI
Aloha DCI,
Sorry 'neva wenyt school' - Your opinion of the article by Professor Zinn
is what? Relevant to the national debate? Not Relevant and why ? ('Smart
***** one liners' are perfectly acceptable; this is alt.war.vietnam, after
all)
Well, we were discussing left-wing assholes, to feel free to stick around if
the shoe fits.
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