One of my longest friends is Mr. David Ross of Vermont, a two-tour combat medic in Vietnam. He is a lifetime antiwar activist, and regardless of our apparent inability to learn from our historical mistakes, a man who retains hope that we may yet see. I could not have put our historical hubris better than this:
Some Perspective on America
.Self fulfilling prophesies continue. Donald Duncan, Vietnam Special Forces who has written extensively on the subject, recounts the following. He and an ARVIN (Armed Forces of Vietnam) he was training called in coordinates on a village selected for them by higher-ups. The planes came and blew the hell out the place killing many including lots of kids. (It was a village - all genders / age groups).
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They did a post bombing assessment and Duncan then asked his ARVIN counterpart "What do you think we accomplished today?" The reply was "Today we make many new VC." (VC = Vietcong meaning Vietnamese communist, a derogatory term for the National Liberation Front of Vietnam.)
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So it goes with America all over the world. We attack, invade, overthrow, install proxy governments to serve american business interest and then express outraged indignation when something like 9-11, the attacks on the Marine barracks in Lebanon, an ambassador is killed etc. We make many new jihadists.
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Eighty percent of what's happening in the Middle East is blowback from all of what we've done there. You can go back farther but the "modern history" of this goes back to the CIA overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh of Iran in 1953 of who was elected by a wide margin in the ONLY truly democratic election ever held in that part of the world.
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All these refugees, they are the direct result of what america has done and we should be accepting every single one of them for resettlement here in america and we should just pay for it. I haven't seen my opinion on this anywhere or even an acknowledgement of our responsibility. And ISIS, just another of our lovely children.
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If you travel abroad, tell folks you're Canadian. You have no concept of how much so many people in the world hate you.
David, we used to hope (back on The Last Patrol) that what we were doing would change America, would wake it up, would wake The People up, and we wouldn't have it happen again.
Looks like they-- we, excluding present company-- didn't learn jack sh*t, or if they did, they have voluntarily and personally, each individual to him/herself, DECIDED that the best path is the warpath, the embodiment of Niccolo Macchiavelli's advice to his Prince that those who do not continually seek to expand must eventually contract and be overrun.
We all know enough Americans to know that the majority of us would recoil in horror and do something, if they thought they could, about American foreign policy's actions and its consequences.
Unfortunately, Americans look at the wholly-owned-and-operated media that scrupulously excises anything but the scripted globalist consumer-capitalist business-as-usual narrative:
"Everything is fine, see, your shelves are all full, your new-car lots are waiting to sell you 400 different models plus options, your owners-- oops-- managers-- oops-- leaders are being sure that global warming happens so that we -- uh, you-- can have all the mineral resources underneath the Arctic and Antarctic ice packs we are now removing."
"Oh, and don't worry about that man behind the curtain."
and acknowledge that there is absolutely nothing they can do about it individually. I will make my wolf cry one day, trick is, how to do it as part of a wolf pack.
One thing for sure, the old communist-style ideologies aren't going to lead any revolutions. Americans are far too behaviorally modified against specifically Marxist movements. PLANETARY SURVIVALISM must be the modern ideology of revolution.
I have my own elaborated ideas about what planetary survivalism entails as a political ideology, but as to its application, one would have to go to an authority like Michael T. Klare, author of a crucial 21st-century book titled "The Race for What's Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources" (Picador, NY NY, 2012).
Klare shows us the actors and the stakes, and throughout elaborates the capitalist Old Paradigm, as well as Macchiavelli's principle above, as practiced by those attempting to acquire the resources at absolutely all costs.
Environmental and antiwar activists know better than almost all others how any alternative blueprint for the future of the Earth except for business-as-usual until collapse is strictly being excised from the main narrative, though not completely excised from public discourse. We The People are still at least TALKING about how not to rush like lemmings to self-destruction.
SO WE MUST HOLLER LOUDER. Me, I'm going to take my cue from the Apaches versus Rio Tinto Copper (a company which appears prominently in Klare's great book). And from the Sioux versus the Pipeline. Till those cues, I write and discuss, keep both ears and mouth open. On and off the stage, we must know our song well before we start singing (to quote a heartbreaking musical sell-out, siggghhhh...
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