RICH MAN’S WAR, POOR MAN’S BLOOD

“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”General Smedley Butler

I don’t need your civil warIt feeds the rich while it buries the poorYour power hungry sellin’ soldiersIn a human grocery store

Guns N’ Roses – Civil War

Whether it is a distinguished general who came to his senses in 1935, after doing the bidding of the monied interests by initiating conflict throughout the world to fill their coffers with blood money, or a rock & roll star fifty years later writing a hit song about the exact same theme, the song remains the same. The wealthy always benefit from war, the poor always die in their wars, and politicians are bribed to continually foment conflict, hate, and railing against whoever their puppet masters choose as the enemy of the moment. This is not a recent development, it has spanned centuries, just the sums of money feeding the military industrial complex are now astronomical.

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BURNING BOOKS IN A BRAVE NEW 1984 WORLD – THE AGE OF CENSORSHIP

In Part 1 of this article, I explored how Huxley, Orwell, and Bradbury foretold the use of technology by totalitarians to subjugate and control the masses. Now we move on to a currently hot topic – censorship.

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Nick Tyrone on Twitter: "This Venn diagram isn't possible. “1984” is set in an authoritarian future in which all pleasure is repressed; “Brave New World” in one where people are provided with

Censorship

“There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves” Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 Censorship by Riley Curry

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people run­ning about with lit matches.” Ray Bradbury

The primary theme of Fahrenheit 451 is censorship. In Bradbury’s dystopia, burning books was the principal method of censorship, directed by the government, but generally supported by the masses. A form of self-censorship developed, as the dullards, intellectually lazy, and willfully ignorant, preferred books to be burned so they felt that would put them on a level playing field with the critical thinkers and intellectually curious minded.

It always comes back to the government doing everything in their power to keep the masses apathetic, ill-informed, entertained, and distracted, to ensure their continued control over society. Bradbury believed the masses would go along with censorship because they already had television, radio, and fast cars, with vacuous programming, loud music, and unceasing advertising creating over-stimulation and distraction for the populace. They were too distracted to read a book, learn, think critically, or question the authorities.

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THE WALL WAS TOO HIGH, AS YOU CAN SEE

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

As I have witnessed and lived through the last three dystopian years of mass hysteria, mass delusion, and mass mental illness, I find myself drawn to the same thinkers, social commentators, and musical artists over and over. The wisdom, wit, and clarity of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Roger Waters in describing a world gone mad makes me feel less alone in my observations about humanity, politicians, governments, bankers, billionaire funded NGOs, war mongering psychopaths, and entities intent on shredding the social fabric of this country and the world.

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Quoth the Vultures “Evermore”

Guest Post by Edward Curtin

On the short roof outside the bedroom window, two black vultures sit, staring in.  They have come to remind me of something.  I put my book down and peer back at these strange looking creatures.

The book: Our War: What We Did in Vietnam And What It Did to Us by David Harris.  I had read it when it was first published in 1996 and it has stuck with me, as has the utterly savage US war against Vietnam that killed so many millions, what the Vietnamese call The American War.

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MARCH OF FOLLY: FALL OF AMERICAN EMPIRE

“Folly is a child of power.” Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

The March Of Folly - Repeated?

“A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense, and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function?” Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

The term “folly” is particularly apt at this stage in the decline of the great American empire. Folly is defined as: criminally or tragically foolish actions or conduct; an excessively costly or unprofitable undertaking. If ever a word captured the actions of American political leaders in the 21st Century and reflect the tragic downfall of an empire borne out of the ashes of the Second World War, it is the term “folly”.

For the last two decades I’ve been befuddled by the inane foolishness of our leaders, as they have driven the nation into a bottomless pit of debt at an astoundingly ridiculous pace, initiated military conflict across the globe, and in the last three years initiated anti-human policies guaranteed to destroy our economic system, depopulate the planet, increase human suffering, and turn the world into a techno-gulag where we will own nothing, eat bugs, and bow down to the commands of globalist overlords.

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Ukraine Proves We Learned Nothing From The Vietnam War

Authored by James W. Carden via American Committee For US-Russia Accord,

Days ago marked 50 years since the signing of the Paris Peace Accords which effectively ended American participation in the Vietnam war. One of the consequences, according to Georgetown University international affairs scholar Charles Kupchan, was that an “isolationist impulse” made a “significant comeback in response to the Vietnam War, which severely strained the liberal internationalist consensus.”

As the Cold War historian John Lamberton Harper points out, President Jimmy Carter’s hawkish Polish-born national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, scorned his intra-administration rival, the cautious, gentlemanly secretary of state Cyrus Vance as “a nice man but burned by Vietnam.” Indeed, Vance and a number of his generation carried with them a profound disillusionment in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. And for a short time, the “Vietnam Syndrome,” (shorthand for a wariness and suspicion of unnecessary and unsupportable foreign interventions) occasionally informed American policy at the highest levels and manifested itself in the promulgations of the Wienberger and Powell Doctrines which, in theory anyway, represented a kind of resistance on the part of the Pentagon to unnecessary military adventures.

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CHARLIE DON’T SURF (Oldie but Goodie)

This was one of my favorite articles, written in February 2010. Most of my normal financial sites turned it down. A lot of people didn’t like it. It was too tough for them to swallow. I like it when my articles make people uncomfortable. My confidence that it was a good article went up when Marc Faber emailed me and said it was one of the best articles about American Imperialism he had read and asked me for permission to reprint it in his Gloom, Doom and Boom Report. I was reminded of the article because I was on a Zoom call with Marc and others today. He believes the US starting a war in Asia, where he lives, is the biggest threat today.

“I’ve seen horrors… horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that… but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies! I remember when I was with Special Forces… seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm.

There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it… I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.” – Marlon Brando portraying Colonel Walter E. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now

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IF YOU BELIEVE

If you believed they put a man on the moon

Man on the moon

If you believe there’s nothing up his sleeve

Then nothing is cool

REM – Man on the Moon

The REM song Man on the Moon, released in 1992, is a haunting melancholy tune, with Andy Kaufmann and his life and death as the focal point. For me, the lyrics always bring me back to the simpler time of my youth, when our antenna TV could get about eight channels, we had one rotary phone, one old used station wagon, lived in a row home, and a family of five could be raised on a truck driver’s income, with a stay-at-home mom.

It’s the references to the Game of Life, Risk, Monopoly, Twister, checkers, and chess, which invoke what we did for fun when we weren’t out riding bikes, playing stick-ball, roller hockey, or touch football in the streets. Were bad things going on in the world? Sure. The Vietnam War, Watergate, gasoline shortages and rationing, stagflation, and a myriad of other damaging challenges confronted the country, just as they always have throughout history.

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Covid Policy Tactics Were Borrowed from the Vietnam War

Via Brownstone Institute

The Vietnam War inflicted great pain: 58,220 Americans—average age, 23— were killed, along with over one million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. Nightly TV news displayed relentless airborne bombings, exploding artillery, fierce firefights and scrolling names of those killed, along with their hometowns, over a somber, drum-heavy soundtrack. Many survivors sustained physical and mental trauma that afflicted them for life. On the home front, the War created a deep social rift: people either strongly supported the War or vehemently opposed it. The two factions deeply disliked each other and wore tribe-signifying garb.

The Coronavirus response has resembled the Vietnam War.

To begin with, the justifications for starting the War and the Lockdowns were similarly questionable. After provoking North Vietnam at sea and claiming, without basis, that North Vietnam had fired on a small American vessel, LBJ jawboned Congress into passing the Tonkin Resolution, giving him broad authority to wage war without Congressional interference. The Red-Scared majority of 1965 Americans supported ensuing, exponential troop escalations.

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THIS DAY IN HISTORY – Air Force helicopter pilot rescues Special Forces team – 1968

Via History.com

While returning to base from another mission, Air Force 1st Lt. James P. Fleming and four other Bell UH-1F helicopter pilots get an urgent message from an Army Special Forces team pinned down by enemy fire.

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THIS DAY IN HISTORY – U.S. withdraws from Vietnam – 1973

Via History.com

Two months after the signing of the Vietnam peace agreement, the last U.S. combat troops leave South Vietnam as Hanoi frees the remaining American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam. America’s direct eight-year intervention in the Vietnam War was at an end. In Saigon, some 7,000 U.S. Department of Defense civilian employees remained behind to aid South Vietnam in conducting what looked to be a fierce and ongoing war with communist North Vietnam.

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THIS DAY IN HISTORY – Viet Cong officer is shot in the head; iconic photo taken – 1968

Via History.com

Execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém - Wikipedia

Saigon, South Vietnam was a chaotic and bloody place in the winter of 1968. On January 30, North Vietnamese forces struck suddenly and with shocking force at targets throughout the South, taking the South Vietnamese and their American allies by surprise and turning the tide of a war that President Lyndon Johnson had assured his people they were close to winning. As the reeling South Vietnamese army worked to re-establish order in their capital, an American photographer captured an image that would come to symbolize the brutality of the conflict.

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THIS DAY IN HISTORY – U.S. withdraws from Vietnam – 1973

Via History.com

Two months after the signing of the Vietnam peace agreement, the last U.S. combat troops leave South Vietnam as Hanoi frees the remaining American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam. America’s direct eight-year intervention in the Vietnam War was at an end. In Saigon, some 7,000 U.S. Department of Defense civilian employees remained behind to aid South Vietnam in conducting what looked to be a fierce and ongoing war with communist North Vietnam.

Continue reading “THIS DAY IN HISTORY – U.S. withdraws from Vietnam – 1973”

THIS DAY IN HISTORY – U.S. withdraws from Vietnam – 1973

Via History.com

Two months after the signing of the Vietnam peace agreement, the last U.S. combat troops leave South Vietnam as Hanoi frees the remaining American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam. America’s direct eight-year intervention in the Vietnam War was at an end. In Saigon, some 7,000 U.S. Department of Defense civilian employees remained behind to aid South Vietnam in conducting what looked to be a fierce and ongoing war with communist North Vietnam.

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THIS DAY IN HISTORY – Bloodiest year of the war ends – 1968

Via History.com

The bloodiest year of the war comes to an end. At year’s end, 536,040 American servicemen were stationed in Vietnam, an increase of over 50,000 from 1967.

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THIS DAY IN HISTORY – Vietnam air war escalates – 1966

Via History.com

During the Vietnam War, U.S. aircraft bomb the major North Vietnamese population centers of Hanoi and Haiphong for the first time, destroying oil depots located near the two cities. The U.S. military hoped that by bombing Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, and Haiphong, North Vietnam’s largest port, communist forces would be deprived of essential military supplies and thus the ability to wage war.

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