Freelance journalist S. Hersh in nov. 1969 broke the news that a year and a half earlier US forces had massacred up to 500 civilians in the village of My Lai nicknamed Pinkville for its strong enemy sympathies. Babies, pregnant women and old people had been scalped and mutilated as command of the situation broke down. Not a single shot had been clearly fired at US forces. Indicative of the growing dehumanization of this time, and resembling US attitudes towards the Japanese in WW2 65% of Americans told pollsters they were not bothered by the news of massacre. The only officer found guilty was given a partial pardon by Nixon public opinion strongly in favor.
Similar atrocities occurred in neighboring El Salvador, where US trained troops stabbed de-capitated, raped and machine gunned 767 civilians in the village of El Mozote in late 1981, including 358 children under age 13. Congress ended up funneling almost $6 billion to this tiny country making it the largest recipient of US foreign aid per capita in the world. Wealthy landlords were running the right-wing death squads that murdered thousands of suspected leftists. The death toll from the war reached 70,000.
Nearby in the darkness, something hangs atop a steel tower... a bomb. Today they will test it. The test is code-named Trinity. The inspiration... John Donne, Robert Oppenheimer's favorite poet. One of the premier scientists of his age, Oppenheimer loved literature and the desert of the Southwest. He was a peaceful man, who just happened to have created and coordinated the most destructive weapon in all history. <...> At 5:29 and 45 seconds, the bomb detonates. The light is brighter than the sun. Observing the explosion, Oppenheimer recalls a line from the hindu scripture, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." This terrifying weapon would launch the United States on a journey, turning the refuge of the founding fathers into a militarized state.
When truman finally met with robert oppenheimer in October 1945, he asked him to guess when the russians would develop their own atomic bomb. Oppenheimer did not know. Truman responded that he knew the answer: "never." Clearly surprised by the president's truculent ignorance and frustrated that he did not understand the seriousness of the evolving crisis, Oppenheimer blurted out, "mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands." Truman responded with anger. Truman: I told him the blood was on my hands and to let me worry about that. Afterwards, Truman told dean acheson... Truman: I don't want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again. Oppenheimer was later attacked by right-wing conservatives as an agent of the Soviet Union, and subjected to numerous investigations by the f. B. I. in 1954, his security clearance was revoked. His real crime in the eyes of american authorities was opposing building the new hydrogen bomb, which he considered a weapon of genocide.
However Kennedy, a decorated veteran of WW2, resisted sending in combat troops. He said to Arthur Schlesinger: The troops will march in, the bands will play, the crowds will cheer, and in 4 days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. Well, it's like taking a drink: the effect wears off and you have to take another.
It was the American war against the poor of the earth, the most easily killed, the collateral damage. As was asked at the beginning, was it really about fighting communism or was it a misunderstood or disguised motivation? It was George Kennen, America's leading early cold war strategist, who went to the heart of the matter in a memorandum written in 1948: 'with 50% percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality, and daydreamings. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards and democratization. We are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.'
I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
At his presidential daily briefing on August 6th, Where the threat of al qaeda operatives Hijacking planes was discussed, Bush disdainfully told his c. I. A. Briefer... George w. Bush: All right,
you've covered your ass now. Stone: Yet with a straight face, Bush told a news conference in April 2004... Had I had any inkling whatsoever That the people were gonna fly airplanes into buildings, We would have moved heaven and earth to save the country.
The feeble international response to the Spanish civil war was even more disheartening. Fighting erupted in July, 1936, when general Francisco Franco's forces set out to topple the elected Spanish Republic and establish a fascist regime. <...> Hitler and Mussolini, who sent abundant aid and thousands of troops. Hitler supplied his feared condor legion, whose bombing of guernica was depicted by Pablo Picasso in his famous mural.
In another great blow to the allied cause, Japan stunned the British Empire at Singapore in early 1942. The British had more troops defending Singapore than England itself. 80,000 commonwealth soldiers, many of them Australian, were taken prisoner. But in a sign of the true feelings of colonized peoples, of the 55,000 British Indian troops taken prisoner by the Japanese, 40,000 changed sides to fight for the Japanese.
On the other hand stalin was in no rush to institute revolutionary change, if at all. As in Greece, he recognized that the communists, although they'd often played a leading role in anti-nazi resistance movements, represented a minority element in most of these liberated nations. Never having shared trotsky's zeal for international communism, he had once remarked that communism fit poland like a saddle fit a cow.
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