Will the Real John Kerry Please Stand Up

[RedEarth]

Will the Real John Kerry Please Stand Up
By Robert Scheer, AlterNet
Posted on August 4, 2004, Printed on August 4, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/19447/

The Republicans have tried to turn John Kerry's military service against him with repeated derogatory references to his 1971 testimony on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But this negative tactic could backfire. If voters were actually to read what the young war hero said 33 years ago, most would come away with increased respect for Kerry's prescience, his patriotism and his willingness to speak truth to power.

After all, the young veteran was daring to state the obvious to leaders who had been in denial for nearly a decade, pointing out that tens of thousands of Americans and many more Vietnamese were dying because "we can't say we have made a mistake" in taking sides in a civil war.

"Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be – and these are his words – 'the first President to lose a war,'" said Kerry. What Kerry did not know, because the White House tapes were then still secret, is that Lyndon B. Johnson had uttered sentiments similar to Nixon's to justify the major escalation of the U.S. intervention in 1964.

"I stayed awake last night thinking about this thing," LBJ told national security advisor McGeorge Bundy on May 27, 1964. "And the more I think of it... I don't think it's worth fighting for, and I don't think we can get out, and it's just the biggest mess." But stay he did, launching another decade of carpet-bombing of Vietnamese peasants, subjecting farmers and soldiers alike to the lifetime suffering of Agent Orange exposure, and even generating war crimes by the U.S. side, such as the infamous My Lai massacre.

Why would Johnson expand a war he didn't believe in? Because, as another advisor cynically warned: "The Republicans are going to make a big political issue out of it" in that year's election. Johnson agreed. "It's the only issue they've got." So off to war went hundreds of thousands of Americans, many of them still suffering today – mentally, emotionally and physically.

more....

http://www.alternet.org/election04/19447/

[latebloomer]

1. Good essay

Thanks for posting it.

I too would like to see more of the John Kerry of the 70s, instead of the man he has devolved into.

[Demeter]

2. People Are NOT Going to Read!

And now there's a movement to keep them from watching TV or movies that don't promote the "Right" view of Reality. Thought control is the order of the day--and evidently, there aren't enough survivors of the Nixon era to point out the traps and keep the young from falling in them. There are whole religions and industries dedicated to making sure people fall into those thought traps. That was the whole point of the 60's--Question Authority--and for good reason. Authority was killing, maiming and destroying people wholesale, publicly, and without turning a hair. Do we really have to get that far in the hole AGAIN? Aren't we there already? Why are the college educated not catching on? Did they all go to schools of indoctrination?

We have to find the answers to these questions, and the antidotes for the poisons in our public well.

[RedEarth]

3. I couldn't agree more.."thought control is the order of the day"

Sounds like you and I are both from the Nixon era. Frankly, that was one of the scariest times for our country. However, we did overcome Watergate and Vietnam only now to be falling back into, in my opinion, potentially even a deeper hole.....due to "thought control". People need to wake up and realize we are in the fight of our lives.

[RedCloud]

4. Right on!

When it is prohibited to show coffins returning...
when our government cowardly does not declare war, therefore making it an official war, yet goes about its' business as if it were a war...
when the press reports the pseudowar as a war...
when the pseudowar replaces the thruth that another pseudowar had been going on for ten years prior...
when those who profited arming the dictator to the teeth also profit by destroying him and in the subsequent rebuilding...
when the children of the wealthy and powerful do not go to fight their wars, rather those ignorant offspring from the hills do and do so with great pride...
when those from the hills only get one side of the story...
when oil can flow from Iraq for a $1 a barrel and this is not common knowledge...
when the CIA mocks bin Laden in the summer of 2001 that the USA will invade Afghanistan by November...
when California was allowed to rot due to the energy crisis...
when democratic voting New York was in flames 9/11 the old goat kept reading his goat story and did not visit New york for three days...

We have lost a lot. I knew when Cambodia was "secretly" invaded. We had our Pentagon's papers. We even had a citizen's committee to investigate the FBI raid the FBI headquarters at a place ironically called MEDIA, Pa. The raid showed that the FBI investigated left wing activity as 97% of all its business. KKK and other extremists groups were 1%. Real crimes were 2%. We have our KGB! And they are on the opposite side of the fence as the founding revolutionaries were.
Our job is to educate one by one. When the people we educate, educate others who will educate others who will educate others we shall prevail, but not one second prior.