an angry old curmudgeon:
'Whenever I despair, I remember that the
way of truth and love has always won.
There may be tyrants and murderers,
and for a time, they may seem invincible,
but in the end, they will always fail...'
Mahatma Gandhi
'No one has supported President Bush
in Iraq more than I have...'
John McCain
'Whenever I despair, I remember that the
way of truth and love has always won.
There may be tyrants and murderers,
and for a time, they may seem invincible,
but in the end, they will always fail...'
Mahatma Gandhi
'No one has supported President Bush
in Iraq more than I have...'
John McCain
BOTH HIS FATHER AND GRANDFATHER WERE 4 STAR ADMIRALS...
AND HE BECAME A NAVAL AVIATOR DURING THE VIETNAM WAR. He was almost killed in the 1967 U.S. Forestall fire and while on a bombing mission over Hanoi he was shot down, seriously injured, captured by the North Vietnamese, and held as a prisoner of war until 1973. He experienced episodes of torture and refused an out-of-sequence early repatriation offer and came home with war wounds that left him with physical limitations. Once home, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives 1n 1982 and then became a member of the United States Senate in 1986, in 2000 he ran in the heated Presidential Primary and lost to George W. Bush, secured the Republican nomination in 2008 and lost to Barack Obama. Along the way, he had been exonerated in a political influence scandal in the 1980s called the Keating Five and was lambasted by the press for having chosen a former Governor of Alaska as his running-mate in the Presidential race of 2008; and he had slowly devolved from being a military hero who somehow had now become a brooding old man, one willing to go to war with any nation on Earth.
I begin to wonder how a man who once was a genuine hero who has experienced first-hand the dire cost of war; one who should have been taught that mindless anti-communism is not worth killing or dying for, in a world in which Communism was hardly a monolithic force. Vietnam ought to have taught him that nationalism, with its engines of independence and self-determination, is a more powerful force by far than Marxism, but McCain then became an advocate for the immediate use of military force in Iraq, and now wants to to do the same to Syria and ISIS, and any other nation which he determines needs to be blown-off the face of the Earth. He should have learned that we can't talk in the flowery pieties of democracy and freedom while supporting a right to obliterate innocent people in another country like Afghanistan only because they happen to live in a country where terrorists roam. But above all else, as an American citizen and genuine war hero, he should have learned never again to place our trust in a President and Vice-President who led us into a war with lies about weapons of mass destruction which killed thousand of innocent people and shed the blood of over four-thousand Americans; or never to trust the war making decisions to men who have not directly experienced combat.
He and all Americans should have learned that before they go barging into some remote place in the world they sought to have studied its history. In Vietnam and then in Iraq, we Americans were deep in the swamp before we started reading the thousand-year story of the tenacious Vietnamese struggle for independence from China; or discovered the long and complicated history of Iraq before it led to folly, pain, death, and tragedy. Yet in Afghanistan, the old mistakes became general once more; ignorance is apparently invincible, the American capacity for human folly without limit. There is no excuse for this anymore, of course.
The literature on Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan grows daily, filling library shelves and bookstores. The complete story of any war remains elusive, to be sure, because historians and journalists have little or no access to the other side, to the men and women and children of Vietnam, to those in Iraq who have endured so much misery and pain for so many years. Until we offer a hand of friendship to the people we once defeated, we won't know it all. This is now more than obvious with the current struggle in regard to Iran. We don't even know all of the American part of the tragic tale which may lay ahead for all of the nations we have defeated in the name of war.
But in the interim texts of war there are men like McCain and Cheney, military men, and ordinary citizens, who wish for us to experience more death and destruction. Way back when we once read the Pentagon Papers, we saw the instinct for bureaucratic self-deception, the presentation of false options, the insistence on illusion in the face of facts, and have yet to understand the difference between genuine national pride and self-centered national vanity, then choose to settle for the fury, pain, and craziness of combat. We've had books that have explored the shattering effect of war and those who fought it. Our political leaders were too fearful to allow the caskets of our dead to be seen on our television sets, the truth of any war after World War Two became internalized, mythic, surrealistic, allusive; its darkest furies, deepest grief, and most brutal injuries became the problem of the poor kids whose parents could not afford to have them bought out in the way that the rich did, who could afford for their children to be deferred and not deployed into combat.
There are others who are not Americans, of course. Men like the newly reelected Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin 'Bibi' Netanyahu who wishes total destruction of the Palestinian State and the Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khomeini who would like be armed with nuclear weapons if it becomes necessary to obliterate Israel. The extraordinary thing is that men like this who make hard decisions in government do not seem to have read a sentence of literature, or to have applied the lessons of history of the present world; and yet, everyone seems to want to have a go at war.
I have an old friend by the name of Al Harms, who was also a naval aviator during the Vietnam War and would tell me tales about the beauty of the place. Of flocking birds, white against the bottle-green hills. Of how beautiful napalm can look exploding in orange flames across a dark hillside when seen from an airplane, along with the natural green beauty forever underlined by man-made damage he had just created; those blue and brown rain-filled pools which had been made by B-25s' and ghastly dead forests, created by Agent Orange. But the worst thing he said he had witnessed were the bodies of men and women and children fried to death by the napalm being fired from his airplane, and of how the nightmares had forever remained with him from the memory of that scene. He said that he was ashamed of himself for having volunteered to go off to fight that war.
In the last conversation I had with Al by phone he said, I cannot understand why a genuine hero like John McCain would still have such a draconian taste for war after being in the same one I was in and confined to the 'Hanoi Hilton' as a prisoner of war. A guy like Dick Cheney I can understand because he is nothing more than a despotic coward who got himself deferred over-and-over again. But all I see from McCain on television is a permanent self-absorbed sneer accompanied by lacerating use of language when he confronts anyone who disagrees with him. He has turned into an angry old man devoid of the courage he had when he was young...
...He then added, The best way I can define myself as opposed to McCain is in the words of Gandhi who said: 'I object to to violence when it appears to be good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent...'
I begin to wonder how a man who once was a genuine hero who has experienced first-hand the dire cost of war; one who should have been taught that mindless anti-communism is not worth killing or dying for, in a world in which Communism was hardly a monolithic force. Vietnam ought to have taught him that nationalism, with its engines of independence and self-determination, is a more powerful force by far than Marxism, but McCain then became an advocate for the immediate use of military force in Iraq, and now wants to to do the same to Syria and ISIS, and any other nation which he determines needs to be blown-off the face of the Earth. He should have learned that we can't talk in the flowery pieties of democracy and freedom while supporting a right to obliterate innocent people in another country like Afghanistan only because they happen to live in a country where terrorists roam. But above all else, as an American citizen and genuine war hero, he should have learned never again to place our trust in a President and Vice-President who led us into a war with lies about weapons of mass destruction which killed thousand of innocent people and shed the blood of over four-thousand Americans; or never to trust the war making decisions to men who have not directly experienced combat.
He and all Americans should have learned that before they go barging into some remote place in the world they sought to have studied its history. In Vietnam and then in Iraq, we Americans were deep in the swamp before we started reading the thousand-year story of the tenacious Vietnamese struggle for independence from China; or discovered the long and complicated history of Iraq before it led to folly, pain, death, and tragedy. Yet in Afghanistan, the old mistakes became general once more; ignorance is apparently invincible, the American capacity for human folly without limit. There is no excuse for this anymore, of course.
The literature on Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan grows daily, filling library shelves and bookstores. The complete story of any war remains elusive, to be sure, because historians and journalists have little or no access to the other side, to the men and women and children of Vietnam, to those in Iraq who have endured so much misery and pain for so many years. Until we offer a hand of friendship to the people we once defeated, we won't know it all. This is now more than obvious with the current struggle in regard to Iran. We don't even know all of the American part of the tragic tale which may lay ahead for all of the nations we have defeated in the name of war.
But in the interim texts of war there are men like McCain and Cheney, military men, and ordinary citizens, who wish for us to experience more death and destruction. Way back when we once read the Pentagon Papers, we saw the instinct for bureaucratic self-deception, the presentation of false options, the insistence on illusion in the face of facts, and have yet to understand the difference between genuine national pride and self-centered national vanity, then choose to settle for the fury, pain, and craziness of combat. We've had books that have explored the shattering effect of war and those who fought it. Our political leaders were too fearful to allow the caskets of our dead to be seen on our television sets, the truth of any war after World War Two became internalized, mythic, surrealistic, allusive; its darkest furies, deepest grief, and most brutal injuries became the problem of the poor kids whose parents could not afford to have them bought out in the way that the rich did, who could afford for their children to be deferred and not deployed into combat.
There are others who are not Americans, of course. Men like the newly reelected Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin 'Bibi' Netanyahu who wishes total destruction of the Palestinian State and the Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khomeini who would like be armed with nuclear weapons if it becomes necessary to obliterate Israel. The extraordinary thing is that men like this who make hard decisions in government do not seem to have read a sentence of literature, or to have applied the lessons of history of the present world; and yet, everyone seems to want to have a go at war.
I have an old friend by the name of Al Harms, who was also a naval aviator during the Vietnam War and would tell me tales about the beauty of the place. Of flocking birds, white against the bottle-green hills. Of how beautiful napalm can look exploding in orange flames across a dark hillside when seen from an airplane, along with the natural green beauty forever underlined by man-made damage he had just created; those blue and brown rain-filled pools which had been made by B-25s' and ghastly dead forests, created by Agent Orange. But the worst thing he said he had witnessed were the bodies of men and women and children fried to death by the napalm being fired from his airplane, and of how the nightmares had forever remained with him from the memory of that scene. He said that he was ashamed of himself for having volunteered to go off to fight that war.
In the last conversation I had with Al by phone he said, I cannot understand why a genuine hero like John McCain would still have such a draconian taste for war after being in the same one I was in and confined to the 'Hanoi Hilton' as a prisoner of war. A guy like Dick Cheney I can understand because he is nothing more than a despotic coward who got himself deferred over-and-over again. But all I see from McCain on television is a permanent self-absorbed sneer accompanied by lacerating use of language when he confronts anyone who disagrees with him. He has turned into an angry old man devoid of the courage he had when he was young...
...He then added, The best way I can define myself as opposed to McCain is in the words of Gandhi who said: 'I object to to violence when it appears to be good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent...'
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