"DON'T LET YOURSELVES DOWN, FOLKS. Enjoy your day. New York is beautiful, right? Hey, Baghdad was beautiful too, really beautiful, trust me - before we destroyed it! TWICE!"
(A middle-aged lady calls out softly, "Thank You" to him. He gets off, and out of the window I see a guy following him shaking his hand. As I get off too, hoping to interview him, I'm having trouble digesting what I have just witnessed. Historical movies flash through my mind of revolutionary upheavals in European countries, and public turmoil in the U.S. during the early 1930s when the creation of unions caused reactionary violence that saw ordinary working people openly discussing and arguing about what to do wherever they found themselves - on the street, in parks, in the work place, in factories during rest breaks, at meetings of university professors and among students on college campuses – like in the South during scary civil rights violence times, when peace and quiet was a luxury. Or during the exciting turmoil in France, summer of '98.
Before I can thread myself through those getting off and on at my end of car he is hurrying to reach the mid-car doors of the next car. Best I can do is squeeze into the nearer front doors of his car before the doors close.)
"DEAR FELLOW AMERICANS, EXCUSE US, THE VETERANS FOR PEACE BRING YOU A HEARTFELT REQUEST ......"
(I figure I'm going to hear an exact repeat performance, but he is improvising,)
"We have GENERALS with us, Generals AGAINST sending our boys to kill and occupy whole nations for lies!
Everyone knows, MOST Americans are against this continuing slaughter. Help your veterans by calling all congressmen backing this corporate war for profit. On Internet google Senate and House – use your free cell phone minutes. A few simple words! Complain! 'Don't want this killing continued in my name!' Tell them you're ashamed! Express yourself in your own words that you don't want this blood on our hands.
How many of us know that both legislatures of the very governments we put in, in Iraq and Afghanistan, voted to have us get out and stop killing whole families with air strikes. That was a half year ago! You won't hear about it on our conglomerate owned TV! NBC is owned by General Electric, one of the biggest arms manufactures in the world. ABC, CBS, CNN and FOX are all interconnected with companies profiting from these wars!
Commercial media promotes war -. We are listening to a year long hype of how democratic our presidential election is - the run up to our having a choice between two corporate backed candidates the media is arranges to give us while the dying and destruction goes on."
(This car is not packed like the first one. The old veteran is able to speak without raising his voice above the heads of the standees. There are only ten or fifteen without seats.)
"Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated so the crimes against humanity in Vietnam could continue. Now our government happily backs that same communist Vietnam government, for WTO membership! Five million dead! Thirty years of trying to overthrow the same communist government we accept now!
Fifty-eight-thousand of us suckers died doing the killing instead of going to Canada like a hundred-and-twenty-five-THOUSAND moral Americans did. Champion Muhammad Ali REFUSED to go help crucify populations of farmers in French Asian colonies! Vietnam War vets who were drafted watch old newsreels, listen to Ali say, No! - Shake their heads, and wonder why THEY didn't go to Canada like others did. King taught conscientious objection.
Presidential candidate Senator Mike Gravel, who they excluded from the TV debates after he said, 'Everyone died in vain in Vietnam and are dying in vain in Iraq'. Dennis Kucinich, was also excluded for saying, 'Get the troops home immediately!'
Everyone who fought our occupation of Vietnam wasn't a communist? Yet former Governor and Senator Bob Kerrey, President of the New School University, said on 60 MINUTES that the nineteen girls his Seal unit massacred were 'AT THE VERY LEAST mind you, AT THE VERY LEAST, SYMPATHIZERS!' Imagine! A former governor and senator, now top educator! - They even put him on the 9/11 commission! As an expert terrorist, we figure.
Presidential hopeful BOB Kerrey was exposed by his own point man of having ordered his Seals to gun down young women and children, after personally seeing to cutting the throat of an elderly man and his family in their 'hooch', as he said. Kerrey accepted a medal for 'enemy successfully killed'. It never occurred to this university president to pull media into the dock with him! It was war promoting MEDIA that taught young Kerry killing poor people was fighting communism.
Now we kill poor people again under the 9/11 catch phrase 'War on Terrorism'. Our corporate media hails another round of crimes against humanity, another million lives lost, another round of U.S. terrorism as a heroic defense of 'freedom'.
But the FIRST use of Islamic terror was funded by Nobel Peace Prize winner President Carter who had the CIA secretly fund, arm and train the fundamentalist hill tribes attacking a modern WOMEN EMANCIPATING socialist government in Kabul in order to sucker the Soviets into entering Afghanistan SIX MONTHS LATER.
The CIA funded tribal fundamentalists as a cold war weapon that later blew back on us as the chickens came home to roost on 9/11. Carter's advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski bragged of it causing the collapse of the Soviet Union during a French newspaper interview in 1998.
Those hill tribes executed teachers for teaching girls with Carter's support. I remember a photo on the front page of the New York Times of three professors executed for teaching women. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, former Director of the CIA, wrote in his memoirs From the Shadows, that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention.
Afterwards presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. paid for thousands of Saudi Arabian Wahhabi Jihad schools to be set up in Afghanistan, a Persian language country making recruits for Osama bin Laden who the CIA sent money to.
Are all the people fighting our occupations of countries today terrorists? Would WE not fight a foreign army invasion occupying America?
Our White House tells CIA to torture SUSPECTS, imprisoning them for years without charges. What does that make you and I? Never mind if you didn't vote for him, he is OUR president. Look behind our charming criminally insane government leaders - look to their financial backers.
What kind of twisted minds call Senator McCain a hero for bombing the city of Hanoi twenty-three times KNOWING that Eisenhower confessed Ho Chi Minh would have won by eighty percent plus the all Vietnam election that Ike himself blocked. McCain just followed military orders murderously bombing to prevent the election of Ho. McCain didn't care that Rev. King called it GENOCIDE? Does McCain know many innocent people he killed?
Senator John Kerry, admitted HE killed a South Vietnamese patriot before realizing it was wrong during his re-enlisted tour of duty. Kerry went before Congress to denounce U.S. war crimes. But at his nomination ceremony thirty years later Vietnam Vets paraded to thunderous applause – Kerry made the war on Vietnam heroic again.
Champion Muhammad Ali did not NEED to go to Vietnam to know it was wrong. We love Ali for that. We put thousands and thousands of 9/11s on little Vietnam! Ali is OUR hero of that war, NOT McCain, or Kerry.
Did these famous Americans serve their country when they killed in Vietnam, an exploited colony of France? They all had a good college education, must have heard about the brutality of the French. They must have known that Ho Chi Minh was decorated by our OSS as a dedicated ally of ours against the Japanese and Vichy French. They must have known that Truman, against Roosevelt's promise, had brought a new French army back in US ships to fight an eight-year war against our former allies, the Vietnamese. All this, because Ho Chi Minh was a communist?
Conglomerate owned media, Congress and six presidents all made the scare of communism justify the thirty year long crucifixion of the mostly farmer population of the French colonies of Indochina. We don't go kill communists or 'terrorists' in RUSSIA or CHINA. We just massacre LITTLE counties like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and dozens of others in this old mans lifetime. Are we a nation of cowards to attack only little countries? There are lots of reasons for us to speak up.
We're not democratic toward other nations. Our national hero King Jr. said we are a predatory lawless nation. But we have STILL have free speech. Better use it before we lose it. Vets For Peace want to get more people talking! Talking about war promoting media and homicidal covert crimes of our secret CIA."
(As the car comes into another station, a couple of young guys, maybe foreigners, pass him and say, "Don't stop doing this." "This is really needed" and one pats him on the shoulder as he moves to the door. The vet smiles, thanks them and falls respectfully silent as the recorded voice announces the station on the intercom. Once the new passengers have entered and the doors close he continues:)
"Welcome brothers and sisters who just got on! We're having a little history class sponsored by your Veterans For Peace, trying to get everyone to call Congress and let them know your mind about the media selling us wars with LIES.
Anyone remember the Mai Lai Massacre in Vietnam, or Abu Ghraib torture prison in Iraq or all the air strikes in Afghanistan killing civilians every day? As God is our witness, your killer veterans have found these warm charming third world people happier, more polite and innocent than our uptight tense self-centered commercial culture. More depressed people here than anywhere! We are too worried about ourselves to care what our military is doing to people overseas. Their dying and misery means nothing to Americans.
Look around the car! See anyone here among us capable of killing children? Well we vets were. When we are shooting up other people's country and being shot at, kids get in the way.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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