Yes, Ryan, Hillary was eagerly promoting war w Russia. While Trump might bumble into war, Hillary actively seeks out military conflict. Not sure how that is somehow lost on you…
Great panel guys. Thank you for expressing so well the fears I have about the escalating situations with North Korea and Syria. Why am I not hearing this on the other media!
Do want to comment on Trump’s tie. At that length it is an arrow pointing at his crouch, an advertisement saying he’s available … at least to women who are 9s or 10s.
This is such low hanging fruit for Trump. He is going to do this again because it stroked his ego alot. Trump killed 200 civilians? How many civilians were killed by Assad again? Did Trump cry when he saw how many children HE killed?
There is no easy solution to the North Korea problem. China does not want a unified Korea on their border because it might be an American ally. China does not like the current regime in NK either. China feel like the status quo is fine because they have great influence over NK since China is basically NKs only trading partner. The problem is that Trump is talking a big game which will upset this balance. Keep NK isolated and let China reign them in. NK will not launch nukes unless they are provoked. Trump might just do that because he wants to show everyone how “tough” he is. The military industrial complex will could try to persuade him to act. The danger is that Trump could be manipulated by the military and do something to cause NK to launch a nuke. Trump seems to have great admiration for military leaders, so he might defer to their opinions and do a military action.
NK has every right as a nation to test nukes for defense as we do… As long as they are done underground, just like we do. If we start dropping(regular) bombs on NK, it will be the greatest gift to that regime. Our own regime is led by a child man who has a military of incompetents that think NK will sit there like many other countries and take it..like many others nations and people we have bombed directly or indirectly through surrogates. NK will respond with a massive first strike we have not seen since WW2. And if China moves in and helps NK, which they WILL, .. whats that I hear in the distance.. flash boom WW3. Good Night.
The only people who should be against the War on Coal are the owners of the coal mine. Period. Supporters of coal say that it is good for making cheap electricity. That is bullshit. The reason coal is so “cheap” is because the costs to society, like air and water pollution, the destruction of the environment, harm to the miners and global warming, are not payed by the coal users but by the rest of society. Burning coal pollutes the air and water, is dangerous to the workers, and causes global warming, where is the upside to coal? Why do we still want 150 year old dirty technology? There is no future in coal.
Why are they cheering for more coal jobs? These jobs are dangerous and make the workers sick. To win other these workers – Democrats need to offer a plan to help these miners get new jobs that pay about the same. We need to advocate for more wind jobs in these states. We need to tell people about ALL of the harm coal does. Don’t just talk about global warming because these workers don’t see those effects and they have an incentive to deny it exists. It is harder to deny water and air pollution and the health problems to the miners.
What is written below is a pure military analysis by a military history enthusiast, I hope people do not take it as an endorsement of the Vietnam war.
Actually the war in Vietnam was practically over by 1970 with the VC virtually wiped out thanks in large parts to the military effort that some in the panel said was “unproductive” especially the infamous Phoenix Program and renewed bombing offensive. The only people left fighting were the official NVA and they were militarily defeated by 1972.
What happened after 1970 is not unlike what happened after 2010 in Iraq when the US screwed the political transition and resulted in a revival of the insurgency. When Saigon fell the US troops have been long gone from Vietnam and it was Ford that gave the NVA the green light to proceed when he refused to intervene except to slow the NVA in order for the US to destroy US made equipment and evacuate ARVN personnel.
I hope you hear my response in the spirit it is offered also.
The Allies lost Vietnam despite the Chinese leaving Vietnam in a rush nearly 5 years before the US did, so the defeat of South Vietnam had little to nothing to do with the US withdrawal from its proxy war:
“The Chinese began to withdraw in November 1968 in preparation for a clash with the Soviets, which occurred at Zhenbao Island in March 1969. ” — Wikipedia (Vietnam War)
vs.
“Despite the Paris Peace Accord, which was signed by all parties in January 1973, the fighting continued…
…
Direct U.S. military involvement ended on 15 August 1973.” — Wikipedia (Vietnam War)
It would appear that the Chinese abandoning the battlefield after the disastrous Tet offensive caused few ill effects on the ‘defeated’ North for a full five years while the Allies continued to engage, even during the ‘ceasefire’.
On the other hand, the South lost to a ‘defeated’ northern enemy in a single day battle just two years after the US ceased hostilities, a full seven years after the Chinese had withdrawn.
How? Does this make any sense? No, of course not, because US cessation of hostilities is not what caused the defeat of South Vietnam at all.
Allied defeat can best be understood as a lost contest for the hearts and minds of the people.
“The North Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong were fighting to reunify Vietnam. They viewed the conflict as a colonial war and a continuation of the First Indochina War against forces from France and later on the United States.” — Wikipedia (Vietnam War)
versus:
“The U.S. government viewed its involvement in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam. This was part of the domino theory of a wider containment policy, with the stated aim of stopping the spread of communism worldwide.” — Wikipedia (Vietnam War)
The Allies ignored the true motivation for the communist takeover in the first place — because of course the corporations in control of the Allied forces were actually fighting to keep their lucrative racket going — and in so doing, lost the war for hearts and minds before a single shot was fired.
When viewed in a more global perspective, the Vietnam War does parallel the invasion and occupation of Iraq closely, but not in the way you implied. I excerpted the essence of the global perspective on Vietnam war as seen through the eyes of John Stockwell, a former CIA case officer in Vietnam who later became a dissident and political activist.
(I bet you hear a few bells going ‘ding’ in your head as you read Stockwell’s speech. The parallels to the invasion and occupation of Iraq are obvious, with none of them having anything to do with libs having snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by ‘pulling out prematurely’.):
“I went from … a tour in Washington to Vietnam. And there, my career, and my life, began to get a little bit more serious. They assigned me a country. It was during the cease-fire, ’73 to ’75. There was no cease-fire. Young men were being slaughtered. I saw a slaughter. 300 young men that the South Vietnamese army ambushed. Their bodies brought in and laid out in a lot next to my compound. I was up-country in Tayninh. They were laid out next door, until the families could come and claim them and take them away for burial.
I thought about this. I had to work with the sadistic police chief. When I reported that he liked to carve people with knives in the CIA safe-house – when I reported this to my bosses, they said, `(1). The post was too important to close down. (2). They weren’t going to get the man transferred or fired because that would make problems, political problems, and he was very good at working with us in the operations he worked on. (3). Therefore if I didn’t have the stomach for the job, that they could transfer me.’
But they hastened to point out, if I did demonstrate a lack of `moral fiber’ to handle working with the sadistic police chief, that I wouldn’t get another good job in the CIA, it would be a mark against my career.
So I kept the job, I closed the safe-house down, I told my staff that I didn’t approve of that kind of activity, and I proceeded to work with him for the next 2 years, pretending that I had reformed him, and he didn’t do this sort of thing anymore. The parallel is obvious with El Salvador today, where the CIA, the state department, works with the death squads.
…
Now, the corruption was so bad, that the S. Vietnamese army was a skeleton army. Colonels would let the troops go home if they would come in once a month and sign the pay vouchers so the colonel could pocket the money. Then he could sell half of the uniforms and boots and M-16’s to the communist forces – that was their major supply, just as it is in El Salvador today. He could use half of the trucks to haul produce, half of the helicopters to haul heroin.
And the Army couldn’t fight. And we lived with it, and we saw it, and there was no doubt – everybody talked about it openly. We could provide all kinds of proof, and they wouldn’t let us report it. Now this was a serious problem because the south was attacked in the winter of 1975, and it collapsed like a big vase hit by a sledgehammer. And the U.S. was humiliated, and that was the dramatic end of our long involvement in Vietnam.
…
There is a mood, a sentiment in Washington, by our leadership today, for the past 4 years, that a good communist is a dead communist. If you’re killing 1 to 3 million communists, that’s great. President Reagan has gone public and said he would reduce the Soviet Union to a pile of ashes. The problem, though, is that these people killed by our national security activities are not communists. They’re not Russians, they’re not KGB. In the field we used to play chess with the KGB officers, and have drinks with them. It was like professional football players – we would knock heads on Sunday, maybe in an operation, and then Tuesday you’re at a banquet together drinking toasts and talking.
The people that are dying in these things are people of the third world. That’s the common denominator that you come up with. People of the third world. People that have the misfortune of being born in the Metumba mountains of the Congo, in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and now in the hills of northern Nicaragua. Far more Catholics than communists, far more Buddhists than communists. Most of them couldn’t give you an intelligent definition of communism, or of capitalism.
…
And this is what the CIA was teaching them to do. And one of the women who was in this program for 2 years – tortured in Brazil for 2 years – she testified internationally when she eventually got out. She said, `The most horrible thing about it was in fact, that the people doing the torture were not raving psychopaths.’ She couldn’t break mental contact with them the way you could if they were psychopath. They were very ordinary people.
…
There’s a lesson in all of this. And the lesson is that it isn’t only Gestapo maniacs, or KGB maniacs, that do inhuman things to other people, it’s people that do inhuman things to other people. And we are responsible for doing these things, on a massive basis, to people of the world today. And we do it in a way that gives us this plausible denial to our own consciences; we create a CIA, a secret police, we give them a vast budget, and we let them go and run these programs in our name, and we pretend like we don’t know it’s going on, although the information is there for us to know; and we pretend like it’s ok because we’re fighting some vague communist threat. And we’re just as responsible for these 1 to 3 million people we’ve slaughtered and for all the people we’ve tortured and made miserable, as the Gestapo was the people that they’ve slaughtered and killed. Genocide is genocide!
…
Read The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. For 20 years the CIA was helping the Kuomantang to finance itself and then to get rich smuggling heroin. When we took over from the French in 1954 their intelligence service had been financing itself by smuggling the heroin out of Laos. We replaced them – we put Air America, the CIA subsidiary – it would fly in with crates marked humanitarian aid, which were arms, and it would fly back out with heroin. And the first target, market, of this heroin was the U.S. GI’s in Vietnam.
…
Read Deadly Deceits by Ralph McGehee [9] for the Vietnam story. In Thailand, the Congo, Laos, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Honduras, the CIA put together large standing armies. In Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, the Congo, Iran, Nicaragua, and Sri Lanka, the CIA armed and encouraged ethnic minorities to rise up and fight. The first thing we began doing in Nicaragua, 1981 was to fund an element of the Mesquite indians, to give them money and training and arms, so they could rise up and fight against the government in Managua. In El Salvador, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Uganda and the Congo, the CIA helped form and train the death squads.
…
Lesley Gelb, the heavyweight with the New York Times, was exposed for having been working covertly with the CIA in 1978 to recruit journalists in Europe, who would introduce stories, print stories that would create sympathy for the neutron bomb.
The Church committee found that they had published over 1,000 books, paying someone to write a book, the CIA puts its propaganda lines in it, the professor or the scholar gets credit for the book and gets the royalties. The latest flap we had about that was last year. A professor at Harvard was exposed for accepting 105,000 dollars from the CIA to write a book about the Middle East. Several thousand professors and graduate students co-opted by the CIA to run its operations on campuses and build files on students.
And then we have evidence – now, which has been hard to collect in the past but we knew it was happening – of CIA agents participating, trying to manipulate, our elections. FDN, Contra commanders, traveling this country on CIA plane tickets, going on television and pin-pointing a Congressional and saying, `That man is soft on Communism. That man is a Sandinista lover.’ A CIA agent going on television, trying to manipulate our elections.
All of this, to keep America safe for freedom and democracy.
…
Another big operation in which we said the same thing was Angola, 1975, my little war. We were saying exactly the same thing – Cubans and Soviets.
Now I will be not going into great detail about this one tonight because I wrote a book about it, I detailed it. And you can get a copy of that book and read it for yourselves. I have to urge you, however – please do not rush out and buy a copy of that book because the CIA sued me. All of my profits go to the CIA, so if you buy a copy of the book you’ll be donating 65 cents to the CIA. So check it out from your library!
If you have to buy a copy, well buy one copy and share it with all your friends. If your bookstore is doing real well and you want to just sort of put a copy down in your belt…
…
We have a feeling that the Vietnam war was the first one in which the people resisted. But once again, we haven’t read our history. Kate Richards-O’Hare. In 1915, she said about WW I, `The Women of the U.S. are nothing but brood sows, producing sons to be put in the army, to be made into fertilizer’. She was jailed for 5 years for anti-war talk.
The lessons of the Vietnam war for the American people is that it was a tragic mistake…. 58,000 of our own young people were killed, 2 million Vietnamese were killed. We withdrew, and our position wound up actually stronger in the Pacific basin.
You look around this society today to see if there’s any evidence of our preparations for war, and it hits you in the face.
‘Join the Army. Be all that you can be’. Now if there was truth in advertising, obviously those commercials would show a few seconds of young men with their legs blown off at the knees, young men with their intestines wrapped around their necks because that’s what war is really all about.
If there was honesty on the part of the army and the government, they would tell about the Vietnam veterans, more of whom died violent deaths from suicide after they came back from Vietnam then died in the fighting itself.”
Except for the Chinese angle what you said pretty much agrees with what I said, that the US screwed the transition from full US occupation to full South Vietnamese control.
The communists built a strong stable highly militarized state (thanks to strong USSR presence) while the US gave power to some of the most horrendous people imaginable and kept them there. The Buddhist-Catholic struggle was a real thing and was the beginning of the downfall of Vietnam and so was the Vietnamese government’s racism towards ethnic minorities (mountain peoples and tribal groups) who were excellent fighters but were ignored by the South Vietnamese government. The fall of Saigon was not unexpected, it was a well known secret so was the fact that the US was not going to intervene.
In theory the ARVN had the power to win the war alone but it didn’t because the leadership was more interested in fleeing than winning. Why should the soldiers fight for a leadership that was full of cowards?
In any case my comment was about the military aspect which is largely misunderstood. The politics of the intervention were bad but that is up to the people. Support for Vietnam rarely fell below 50% in Gallup polling (it was as much as 64% in 1969) and young people in particular were enthusiastic for the war:
Yes but as you indicated in your response it was the corruption on the capitalist side that undermined the military effort of the Allies.
It was truly a lost opportunity. Capitalism and socialism had a chance to blend and merge into a populist regime without the authoritarian rule but the capitalists just would not get their act together. They were too busy scheming for wealth.
Oh well. Now they have a blend of capitalism and communism in Vietnam. Less ideal than blending capitalism and socialism in a democratic government, but workable apparently. Seems stable.
The Communist regime was far worse than the capitalist regime in terms of human rights and technically speaking far more dictatorial. However it was clean and stable and that is what mattered to people in the end.
The Southern Vietnamese did not want the North to rule them but were not willing to fight for it either which is the difference between the two.
As for the merger, it was impossible. It was a binary choice and like (Eastern and Central Europe after WWII) and the communists had no intention to share power as the 1946 elections showed.
Yes, there is little about the dictatorial communist regimes, or the proxy wars, that is either black-white or encouraging. So many dead, for what? Senseless. Flawed. Human.
We need a third party like the UN to help us. There’s overwhelming evidence our government has been taken over by corporations and warmongers. We no longer live in a democracy, but an oligarchy. We need help.
“Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ‘Patriotism’ is its cult…Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.”
― Erich Fromm
Sorry commentator, there are reasons against assassinating the leader of North Korea, but arguing that ‘it’s up to the people of North Korea to remove him’ is not a good one.
People under dictators tend not to have that option.
Funny though how that seems to be the rationale behind every “sanctions” regime imposed by the US and the West. The idea that the sanctions will hurt the people so much that they will rise up against their Leader and overthrow them. And if it isn’t a mass movement by the public, it will be a smaller movement by a cabal of the elite to overthrow the Leader in a coup …
> The idea that the sanctions will hurt the people so much that they will rise up against their Leader and overthrow them.
Are there even any documented cases in which it actually worked? Pretty sure that the historical record says that US sanctions have never led to the domestic overthrow of anyone, always counter-productively reinforcing the regime’s standing as being attacked by an outside superpower, even as it did nothing but hurt the lower classes of that country.
if his only answer is attacking north korea to disarm it and liberate their people then the only solution is for south korea to help heal their divide they have wanted to tend to for so long. with us looking over their shoulder to help where they want us to if they need us to.
Since Trump is perpetually in campaign mode, maybe some other slogans would be more appropriate:
GARS (Give America Radiation Sickness) or ???
This fucker is going to get us all killed. Goddamn it to hell. End this nonsense and impeach the bastard, and I hope it’s not too late.
Comments
Yes, Ryan, Hillary was eagerly promoting war w Russia. While Trump might bumble into war, Hillary actively seeks out military conflict. Not sure how that is somehow lost on you…
Hillary is not opposed to war completely, but I don’t remember her “promoting war with Russia.”
Must have missed that part where Hillary promoted war with Russia.
ryan clayton
Great panel guys. Thank you for expressing so well the fears I have about the escalating situations with North Korea and Syria. Why am I not hearing this on the other media!
Do want to comment on Trump’s tie. At that length it is an arrow pointing at his crouch, an advertisement saying he’s available … at least to women who are 9s or 10s.
This is such low hanging fruit for Trump. He is going to do this again because it stroked his ego alot. Trump killed 200 civilians? How many civilians were killed by Assad again? Did Trump cry when he saw how many children HE killed?
Trumplethinshin’s theme song: A blast from the past by “The Gap Band”.
Oops! The title of the Gap Band song is “You Dropped A Bomb On Me”
Where is Cenk Uygur?
There is no easy solution to the North Korea problem. China does not want a unified Korea on their border because it might be an American ally. China does not like the current regime in NK either. China feel like the status quo is fine because they have great influence over NK since China is basically NKs only trading partner. The problem is that Trump is talking a big game which will upset this balance. Keep NK isolated and let China reign them in. NK will not launch nukes unless they are provoked. Trump might just do that because he wants to show everyone how “tough” he is. The military industrial complex will could try to persuade him to act. The danger is that Trump could be manipulated by the military and do something to cause NK to launch a nuke. Trump seems to have great admiration for military leaders, so he might defer to their opinions and do a military action.
NK has every right as a nation to test nukes for defense as we do… As long as they are done underground, just like we do. If we start dropping(regular) bombs on NK, it will be the greatest gift to that regime. Our own regime is led by a child man who has a military of incompetents that think NK will sit there like many other countries and take it..like many others nations and people we have bombed directly or indirectly through surrogates. NK will respond with a massive first strike we have not seen since WW2. And if China moves in and helps NK, which they WILL, .. whats that I hear in the distance.. flash boom WW3. Good Night.
The only people who should be against the War on Coal are the owners of the coal mine. Period. Supporters of coal say that it is good for making cheap electricity. That is bullshit. The reason coal is so “cheap” is because the costs to society, like air and water pollution, the destruction of the environment, harm to the miners and global warming, are not payed by the coal users but by the rest of society. Burning coal pollutes the air and water, is dangerous to the workers, and causes global warming, where is the upside to coal? Why do we still want 150 year old dirty technology? There is no future in coal.
Why are they cheering for more coal jobs? These jobs are dangerous and make the workers sick. To win other these workers – Democrats need to offer a plan to help these miners get new jobs that pay about the same. We need to advocate for more wind jobs in these states. We need to tell people about ALL of the harm coal does. Don’t just talk about global warming because these workers don’t see those effects and they have an incentive to deny it exists. It is harder to deny water and air pollution and the health problems to the miners.
What is written below is a pure military analysis by a military history enthusiast, I hope people do not take it as an endorsement of the Vietnam war.
Actually the war in Vietnam was practically over by 1970 with the VC virtually wiped out thanks in large parts to the military effort that some in the panel said was “unproductive” especially the infamous Phoenix Program and renewed bombing offensive. The only people left fighting were the official NVA and they were militarily defeated by 1972.
What happened after 1970 is not unlike what happened after 2010 in Iraq when the US screwed the political transition and resulted in a revival of the insurgency. When Saigon fell the US troops have been long gone from Vietnam and it was Ford that gave the NVA the green light to proceed when he refused to intervene except to slow the NVA in order for the US to destroy US made equipment and evacuate ARVN personnel.
I hope you hear my response in the spirit it is offered also.
The Allies lost Vietnam despite the Chinese leaving Vietnam in a rush nearly 5 years before the US did, so the defeat of South Vietnam had little to nothing to do with the US withdrawal from its proxy war:
“The Chinese began to withdraw in November 1968 in preparation for a clash with the Soviets, which occurred at Zhenbao Island in March 1969. ” — Wikipedia (Vietnam War)
vs.
“Despite the Paris Peace Accord, which was signed by all parties in January 1973, the fighting continued…
…
Direct U.S. military involvement ended on 15 August 1973.” — Wikipedia (Vietnam War)
It would appear that the Chinese abandoning the battlefield after the disastrous Tet offensive caused few ill effects on the ‘defeated’ North for a full five years while the Allies continued to engage, even during the ‘ceasefire’.
On the other hand, the South lost to a ‘defeated’ northern enemy in a single day battle just two years after the US ceased hostilities, a full seven years after the Chinese had withdrawn.
How? Does this make any sense? No, of course not, because US cessation of hostilities is not what caused the defeat of South Vietnam at all.
Allied defeat can best be understood as a lost contest for the hearts and minds of the people.
“The North Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong were fighting to reunify Vietnam. They viewed the conflict as a colonial war and a continuation of the First Indochina War against forces from France and later on the United States.” — Wikipedia (Vietnam War)
versus:
“The U.S. government viewed its involvement in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam. This was part of the domino theory of a wider containment policy, with the stated aim of stopping the spread of communism worldwide.” — Wikipedia (Vietnam War)
The Allies ignored the true motivation for the communist takeover in the first place — because of course the corporations in control of the Allied forces were actually fighting to keep their lucrative racket going — and in so doing, lost the war for hearts and minds before a single shot was fired.
When viewed in a more global perspective, the Vietnam War does parallel the invasion and occupation of Iraq closely, but not in the way you implied. I excerpted the essence of the global perspective on Vietnam war as seen through the eyes of John Stockwell, a former CIA case officer in Vietnam who later became a dissident and political activist.
(I bet you hear a few bells going ‘ding’ in your head as you read Stockwell’s speech. The parallels to the invasion and occupation of Iraq are obvious, with none of them having anything to do with libs having snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by ‘pulling out prematurely’.):
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4068.htm
“I went from … a tour in Washington to Vietnam. And there, my career, and my life, began to get a little bit more serious. They assigned me a country. It was during the cease-fire, ’73 to ’75. There was no cease-fire. Young men were being slaughtered. I saw a slaughter. 300 young men that the South Vietnamese army ambushed. Their bodies brought in and laid out in a lot next to my compound. I was up-country in Tayninh. They were laid out next door, until the families could come and claim them and take them away for burial.
I thought about this. I had to work with the sadistic police chief. When I reported that he liked to carve people with knives in the CIA safe-house – when I reported this to my bosses, they said, `(1). The post was too important to close down. (2). They weren’t going to get the man transferred or fired because that would make problems, political problems, and he was very good at working with us in the operations he worked on. (3). Therefore if I didn’t have the stomach for the job, that they could transfer me.’
But they hastened to point out, if I did demonstrate a lack of `moral fiber’ to handle working with the sadistic police chief, that I wouldn’t get another good job in the CIA, it would be a mark against my career.
So I kept the job, I closed the safe-house down, I told my staff that I didn’t approve of that kind of activity, and I proceeded to work with him for the next 2 years, pretending that I had reformed him, and he didn’t do this sort of thing anymore. The parallel is obvious with El Salvador today, where the CIA, the state department, works with the death squads.
…
Now, the corruption was so bad, that the S. Vietnamese army was a skeleton army. Colonels would let the troops go home if they would come in once a month and sign the pay vouchers so the colonel could pocket the money. Then he could sell half of the uniforms and boots and M-16’s to the communist forces – that was their major supply, just as it is in El Salvador today. He could use half of the trucks to haul produce, half of the helicopters to haul heroin.
And the Army couldn’t fight. And we lived with it, and we saw it, and there was no doubt – everybody talked about it openly. We could provide all kinds of proof, and they wouldn’t let us report it. Now this was a serious problem because the south was attacked in the winter of 1975, and it collapsed like a big vase hit by a sledgehammer. And the U.S. was humiliated, and that was the dramatic end of our long involvement in Vietnam.
…
There is a mood, a sentiment in Washington, by our leadership today, for the past 4 years, that a good communist is a dead communist. If you’re killing 1 to 3 million communists, that’s great. President Reagan has gone public and said he would reduce the Soviet Union to a pile of ashes. The problem, though, is that these people killed by our national security activities are not communists. They’re not Russians, they’re not KGB. In the field we used to play chess with the KGB officers, and have drinks with them. It was like professional football players – we would knock heads on Sunday, maybe in an operation, and then Tuesday you’re at a banquet together drinking toasts and talking.
The people that are dying in these things are people of the third world. That’s the common denominator that you come up with. People of the third world. People that have the misfortune of being born in the Metumba mountains of the Congo, in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and now in the hills of northern Nicaragua. Far more Catholics than communists, far more Buddhists than communists. Most of them couldn’t give you an intelligent definition of communism, or of capitalism.
…
And this is what the CIA was teaching them to do. And one of the women who was in this program for 2 years – tortured in Brazil for 2 years – she testified internationally when she eventually got out. She said, `The most horrible thing about it was in fact, that the people doing the torture were not raving psychopaths.’ She couldn’t break mental contact with them the way you could if they were psychopath. They were very ordinary people.
…
There’s a lesson in all of this. And the lesson is that it isn’t only Gestapo maniacs, or KGB maniacs, that do inhuman things to other people, it’s people that do inhuman things to other people. And we are responsible for doing these things, on a massive basis, to people of the world today. And we do it in a way that gives us this plausible denial to our own consciences; we create a CIA, a secret police, we give them a vast budget, and we let them go and run these programs in our name, and we pretend like we don’t know it’s going on, although the information is there for us to know; and we pretend like it’s ok because we’re fighting some vague communist threat. And we’re just as responsible for these 1 to 3 million people we’ve slaughtered and for all the people we’ve tortured and made miserable, as the Gestapo was the people that they’ve slaughtered and killed. Genocide is genocide!
…
Read The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. For 20 years the CIA was helping the Kuomantang to finance itself and then to get rich smuggling heroin. When we took over from the French in 1954 their intelligence service had been financing itself by smuggling the heroin out of Laos. We replaced them – we put Air America, the CIA subsidiary – it would fly in with crates marked humanitarian aid, which were arms, and it would fly back out with heroin. And the first target, market, of this heroin was the U.S. GI’s in Vietnam.
…
Read Deadly Deceits by Ralph McGehee [9] for the Vietnam story. In Thailand, the Congo, Laos, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Honduras, the CIA put together large standing armies. In Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, the Congo, Iran, Nicaragua, and Sri Lanka, the CIA armed and encouraged ethnic minorities to rise up and fight. The first thing we began doing in Nicaragua, 1981 was to fund an element of the Mesquite indians, to give them money and training and arms, so they could rise up and fight against the government in Managua. In El Salvador, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Uganda and the Congo, the CIA helped form and train the death squads.
…
Lesley Gelb, the heavyweight with the New York Times, was exposed for having been working covertly with the CIA in 1978 to recruit journalists in Europe, who would introduce stories, print stories that would create sympathy for the neutron bomb.
The Church committee found that they had published over 1,000 books, paying someone to write a book, the CIA puts its propaganda lines in it, the professor or the scholar gets credit for the book and gets the royalties. The latest flap we had about that was last year. A professor at Harvard was exposed for accepting 105,000 dollars from the CIA to write a book about the Middle East. Several thousand professors and graduate students co-opted by the CIA to run its operations on campuses and build files on students.
And then we have evidence – now, which has been hard to collect in the past but we knew it was happening – of CIA agents participating, trying to manipulate, our elections. FDN, Contra commanders, traveling this country on CIA plane tickets, going on television and pin-pointing a Congressional and saying, `That man is soft on Communism. That man is a Sandinista lover.’ A CIA agent going on television, trying to manipulate our elections.
All of this, to keep America safe for freedom and democracy.
…
Another big operation in which we said the same thing was Angola, 1975, my little war. We were saying exactly the same thing – Cubans and Soviets.
Now I will be not going into great detail about this one tonight because I wrote a book about it, I detailed it. And you can get a copy of that book and read it for yourselves. I have to urge you, however – please do not rush out and buy a copy of that book because the CIA sued me. All of my profits go to the CIA, so if you buy a copy of the book you’ll be donating 65 cents to the CIA. So check it out from your library!
If you have to buy a copy, well buy one copy and share it with all your friends. If your bookstore is doing real well and you want to just sort of put a copy down in your belt…
…
We have a feeling that the Vietnam war was the first one in which the people resisted. But once again, we haven’t read our history. Kate Richards-O’Hare. In 1915, she said about WW I, `The Women of the U.S. are nothing but brood sows, producing sons to be put in the army, to be made into fertilizer’. She was jailed for 5 years for anti-war talk.
The lessons of the Vietnam war for the American people is that it was a tragic mistake…. 58,000 of our own young people were killed, 2 million Vietnamese were killed. We withdrew, and our position wound up actually stronger in the Pacific basin.
You look around this society today to see if there’s any evidence of our preparations for war, and it hits you in the face.
‘Join the Army. Be all that you can be’. Now if there was truth in advertising, obviously those commercials would show a few seconds of young men with their legs blown off at the knees, young men with their intestines wrapped around their necks because that’s what war is really all about.
If there was honesty on the part of the army and the government, they would tell about the Vietnam veterans, more of whom died violent deaths from suicide after they came back from Vietnam then died in the fighting itself.”
Thanks for the comment.
Except for the Chinese angle what you said pretty much agrees with what I said, that the US screwed the transition from full US occupation to full South Vietnamese control.
The communists built a strong stable highly militarized state (thanks to strong USSR presence) while the US gave power to some of the most horrendous people imaginable and kept them there. The Buddhist-Catholic struggle was a real thing and was the beginning of the downfall of Vietnam and so was the Vietnamese government’s racism towards ethnic minorities (mountain peoples and tribal groups) who were excellent fighters but were ignored by the South Vietnamese government. The fall of Saigon was not unexpected, it was a well known secret so was the fact that the US was not going to intervene.
In theory the ARVN had the power to win the war alone but it didn’t because the leadership was more interested in fleeing than winning. Why should the soldiers fight for a leadership that was full of cowards?
In any case my comment was about the military aspect which is largely misunderstood. The politics of the intervention were bad but that is up to the people. Support for Vietnam rarely fell below 50% in Gallup polling (it was as much as 64% in 1969) and young people in particular were enthusiastic for the war:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/11998/iraqvietnam-comparison.aspx
Yes but as you indicated in your response it was the corruption on the capitalist side that undermined the military effort of the Allies.
It was truly a lost opportunity. Capitalism and socialism had a chance to blend and merge into a populist regime without the authoritarian rule but the capitalists just would not get their act together. They were too busy scheming for wealth.
Oh well. Now they have a blend of capitalism and communism in Vietnam. Less ideal than blending capitalism and socialism in a democratic government, but workable apparently. Seems stable.
The Communist regime was far worse than the capitalist regime in terms of human rights and technically speaking far more dictatorial. However it was clean and stable and that is what mattered to people in the end.
The Southern Vietnamese did not want the North to rule them but were not willing to fight for it either which is the difference between the two.
As for the merger, it was impossible. It was a binary choice and like (Eastern and Central Europe after WWII) and the communists had no intention to share power as the 1946 elections showed.
Yes, there is little about the dictatorial communist regimes, or the proxy wars, that is either black-white or encouraging. So many dead, for what? Senseless. Flawed. Human.
Hmmm… don’t panic people ….maybe a nuclear winter is the perfect plan for combating global warming.
AG~
Brilliant. I’m going to viral-ize this.
~Upaya~
We need a third party like the UN to help us. There’s overwhelming evidence our government has been taken over by corporations and warmongers. We no longer live in a democracy, but an oligarchy. We need help.
“Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ‘Patriotism’ is its cult…Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.”
― Erich Fromm
Sorry commentator, there are reasons against assassinating the leader of North Korea, but arguing that ‘it’s up to the people of North Korea to remove him’ is not a good one.
People under dictators tend not to have that option.
They are typically removed by outside forces.
So what are we supposed to do about our government?
Funny though how that seems to be the rationale behind every “sanctions” regime imposed by the US and the West. The idea that the sanctions will hurt the people so much that they will rise up against their Leader and overthrow them. And if it isn’t a mass movement by the public, it will be a smaller movement by a cabal of the elite to overthrow the Leader in a coup …
> The idea that the sanctions will hurt the people so much that they will rise up against their Leader and overthrow them.
Are there even any documented cases in which it actually worked? Pretty sure that the historical record says that US sanctions have never led to the domestic overthrow of anyone, always counter-productively reinforcing the regime’s standing as being attacked by an outside superpower, even as it did nothing but hurt the lower classes of that country.
Gigi, his name is Brian Clayton, not Clinton
my bad, ****Ryan Clayton, not Brian Clinton
if his only answer is attacking north korea to disarm it and liberate their people then the only solution is for south korea to help heal their divide they have wanted to tend to for so long. with us looking over their shoulder to help where they want us to if they need us to.
Great week, guys! Even without Cenk, you did a good job. Almost as good as when he’s on. Not an easy accomplishment. Kudos.
Who are these people? Brian Clinton? Brian Uhgar……our John , Jayar is off camera?
We never ended anything dropping bombs? Huh??
You might want to correct Ryan Clayton’s name which as far as I know is not Brian Clinton.
They never fix that shit. At least get the guy’s name right. Sheesh.
Since Trump is perpetually in campaign mode, maybe some other slogans would be more appropriate:
GARS (Give America Radiation Sickness) or ???
This fucker is going to get us all killed. Goddamn it to hell. End this nonsense and impeach the bastard, and I hope it’s not too late.
THANK GOD YOU’RE BACK GIGI I’M SO HAPPY
Good panel but I think they’re a little too pro Trump