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| 5/24 |
| 2005/5/28-31 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:37879 Activity:moderate |
5/28 Happy Memorial Weekend! Go watch the History Channel, MSNBC, etc
they have a lot of educational shows, like history of wars,
counter culture in Marin County/Arizona, etc. I'd like to take
this time to ask WHERE ARE THE PROTESTORS??? In the 70s, there
were a lot of peace and environmental activists. They actually
accomplished something, like going to the streets, holding anti-war
concerts, speaking out against Nixon, and generally creating
awareness in the public. Many people hate Bush and hate the illegal
and unethical war in Iraq, but WHERE ARE THE PROTESTORS? Have people
gotten soft? Or lazy and apathetic? COME ON. I want to see
protestors creating awareness like in the 70s.
\_ Actually, you're mistaking the 60's for the 70s. Also,
what the hell are you protesting? Do you want us to actually
get out of Iraq right now without resolving the situation?
Don't you think that regardless of whether you were for
or against the war that we have to stay there to insure a
stable middle east? What's your suggestion, we let the country
detoriate even further? What kind of nitwit are you anyway?
\_ You think there's only one solution, hence you're the nitwit
william. I propose splitting Iraq into smaller federations
rather than this monolithic government in which one side
feels short changed. There are many things that could have
been done, like hiring better post-war strategists who have
better ideas on nation building than it is now. If you think
the current solution of killing insurgents is working, you're
a fucking idiot. There's no fine distinction between insurgents
and the growing number of civilians who have strong resentments
towards US.
\_ Hello. Have you been following what's going on in Iraq
lately? I think the 'growing number of civilians' wants
foreigners out now, since they feel they are fighting an
Iraqi government. The last few operations against insurgents
have been increasingly done by the Iraqis themselves (with
American help). -- ilyas
\_ The USSR is no longer financially supporting insurgency groups.
Most non-leftists realize the boomers damaged this country
for generations.
\_ I think you mean "destabilized".
\_ because our wars have brought us peace
\_ Except for the ones that didn't
\- 1. there was a draft in the vietnam example. that caused
major social disruptions (and minor inconvenience to people
like CHENEY) 2. +50k usa casualties rather than low hundreds
\_ low thousands
\- i believe
the 50k vietnam
death figure
is comparable
to the invasion
stage casualty
count, not the
occupiation
count.
in iraq (and the number of vietnamese killed were also much
higher than number of iraqis ... and these number dont matter
higher than number of iraqis ... not that these numbers make
that much to people here anyway) ... but on a narrower question
of something like "why did people get more pissed off over the
secret bombing or gulf of tonkin vs the deliberate or incompetent
mistakes today" ... that's a reasonable question. 3. there is
not really much of a POW legacy to the gulf war. i guess we're
just distracted by Xbox and cable tv and web p0rn to care that
OBL got away.
OBL got away. 4. the victory conditions were more involved in
the southeast asian conflict ... the "mission accomplished"
was declared after getting saddam out. an invasion to toople
a govt != intervetion in a civil war.
\_ too bad, I was hoping that GWB would be remembered the way
Nixon is remembered, but I guess he's going to be revered
by Republicans the same way Reagan was revered. Oh well.
\-http://home.lbl.gov/~psb/Articles/Politics/NixonObit-HST.txt
\_ http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Spring03/Zentz/history%20page.htm
"Media coverage of Vietnam was a rare exception in the history of
combat coverage by the American media. Never before had the press
been granted such access to the war zone. And never again would
they. That war served as a lesson to the government and a pinnacle
of freedom for the media"
\-http://home.lbl.gov:8080/~psb/Articles/Politics/NixonObit-HST.txt |
| 5/24 |
|
| home.lbl.gov/~psb/Articles/Politics/NixonObit-HST.txt From Rolling Stone, June 16, 1994 HE WAS A CROOK by Hunter S Thompson MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK DATE: MAY 1, 1994 FROM: DR. HUNTER S THOMPSON SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER.... HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA.... "And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird." He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon." I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together. "Don't worry," he said, "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you." It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws. That was Nixon's style -- and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form. The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the poten- tially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable -- some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland. It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already. If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship. It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. Many were incensed about the howitzers -- but they knew there was nothing they could do about it -- not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments -- most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H P Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon. Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the US Army lost in all of WW2, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard. Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the s... |
| iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Spring03/Zentz/history%20page.htm The recent war in Iraq and the ongoing war on terroris m have brought the freedom of the press to the forefront of political co nversation across the country. The question of general debate is whether or not the press should be give n unlimited access to the front lines, or submit to government restricti ons for the sake of our military's security. Behind that question often lies another, more intriguing one. Is military security really the reaso n they don't want the press on the front lines? While media war coverage is, to some extent, as old as this country, the debate, as a matter of public concern, is relatively young. The pivotal point in the public's awareness of this issue, as well as many of their suspicions toward military actions, is the Vietnam War. Media coverage of Vietnam was a rare exception in the history of combat c overage by the American media. Never before had the press been granted s uch access to the war zone. That war served as a lesson to the government and a pinnacle of freedom for the media. I n every war or military engagement since, the media have publicly battle d the Pentagon for the right to report the war as they see it. Vietnam taught the government that they had made a grave public relations error by allowing the press to get so close to the action. This was the first time that images of the horrors of war had made it back to the pu blic in mass quantities. The fact that the war was being fought with gue rilla tactics did not help the matter either, as it provided photographe rs with plenty of gruesome images to send to their publishers. One of th e results of this was that the government was faced with domestic unrest as had never been seen before. From this mistake, they learned to retur n to their old ways, restricting media access to the war zone whenever t hey could find a reason and censoring the media's material before allowi ng them to send it home. Prior to Vietnam, it had been understood that the media could not publish certain material regarding military actions. Up through the Korean War, it has been noted as well, few journalists made an effort to criticize our military or our government's involvement in foreign issues. The media still wanted the same l evel of access, of course, but the government now knew better. The Pentagon took these practices to their breaking point in 1991, during the Gulf War. Using a system established in 1983, they restricted press access by forcing the reporters to travel in small pools consisting of reporters, photographers and a small television crew. They reportedly to ld the cameramen when and where to shoot and checked their images for un desirable content before allowing them to ship it home. Lone reporters a nd photographers who did not wish to submit to these restrictions were h unted down and often imprisoned. Some rogue information managed to make it past the military, however, inc luding reports that as the US was withdrawing from Iraq, the military carpet bombed a highway full of cars that has since come to be known as the "Highway of Death." Graphic images appeared that raised suspicions t hat the military was using illegal warfare tactics. In 1992, members of four major media companies met with representatives f rom the pentagon to lay out a policy for future coverage. What they esse ntially came up with was what everyone has come to know today as "embedd ed" journalism. Using this system, journalists would be assigned to trav el along with troops into the combat zones. However, free press advocates today argue that the embedded journalists a re still not allowed to report the truth. This looked to be the truth at the start of the latest war in Iraq. However, as the war briefly climax ed in Baghdad, the restrictions seemed to cease as an increase in graphi c photographs began appearing in America's magazines and newspapers. The rest of this site provides links to online source material on this to pic. Whether you are doing research or just interested in learning more about the issue, the sites should provide you with useful information. |
| home.lbl.gov:8080/~psb/Articles/Politics/NixonObit-HST.txt From Rolling Stone, June 16, 1994 HE WAS A CROOK by Hunter S Thompson MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK DATE: MAY 1, 1994 FROM: DR. HUNTER S THOMPSON SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER.... HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA.... "And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird." He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon." I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together. "Don't worry," he said, "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you." It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws. That was Nixon's style -- and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form. The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the poten- tially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable -- some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland. It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already. If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship. It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. Many were incensed about the howitzers -- but they knew there was nothing they could do about it -- not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments -- most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H P Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon. Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the US Army lost in all of WW2, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard. Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the s... |