Things to Remember on Memorial Day

Memorial Day is a day to remember. Here are a few suggestions:

• The Japanese  attack on Pearl Harbor was known in advance but nothing was done to stop it because the Roosevelt Administration wanted the propaganda effect of dead Americans to manipulate the country into a war. See books like Robert Stinnett’s Day of Deceit and Mark Emerson Willey’s Pearl Harbor: Mother of All Conspiracies.
• Further, according to the document known as the McCollum memo, viewable at Whatreallyhappened.com , the Roosevelt Administration not only allowed an attack by the Japanese, they actively sought ways to provoke one.
• Propagandists to this day try to hide these facts, even though an Army Board of inquiry concluded in a 1944 investigation, "...everything that the Japanese were planning to do was known to the United States..."
  
• The U.S. used two nuclear weapons, the only ones ever used in war, on purely civilian targets, killing tens of thousands of people instantly. This is horrific, and certainly takes on a new, even more horrific meaning when one realizes the U.S. government desired the war.
• The South Vietnamese government was a product of French colonialist aggression against an independent Vietnam. The allies of the French were the tiny minority of elite Vietnamese families that had grown rich in the exploitative system under the French. That is, not by their own labor, but by that of others.
• The U.S. aggression against Vietnam, like other U.S. aggressions, was based on a lie. In this case, the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident in which the U.S. faked North Vietnamese attacks against U.S. ships near their coastline.
• The South Vietnamese government of the 1960s was a fascist puppet government of the U.S., but also supported by the French. In 1963, the Viet Cong (so-called National Liberation Front) overthrew the corrupt and tyrannical Diem regime. However, the U.S. quickly put another corrupt and tyrannical leader in power.
• The My Lai massacre in which U.S. troops machine-gunned men, women and children was not unique in the Vietnam War. As Robert Parry (he broke the Iran-Contra story in 1985) writes: “While a horrific example of a Vietnam war crime, the My Lai massacre was not unique. It fit a long pattern of indiscriminate violence against civilians that had marred U.S. participation in the Vietnam War from its earliest days when Americans acted primarily as advisers.”
• The “Baby-killer” rhetoric directed unfairly at all U.S. troops returning from Vietnam was not as far-fetched as we are being led to believe by the revisionist fanatics who want to paint the U.S. as uniquely benign and Americans as capable only of heroic and humanitarian behavior.
• Colin Powell, hero of the moderate Republican right, facilitator of the fraudulent war against Iraq, not only took part in some of these atrocities in Vietnam himself as a young Army officer, but later played a crucial role in trying to cover up the My Lai massacre (see link above). The only reason his cover-up didn’t work was because others coming back began telling the story. Powell’s career is a story of kissing-ass and covering up criminality and corruption so that he could move up the ladder more quickly. His recent retirement from the Bush Administration is far too late to win him any brownie points with history. His legacy is set - and it is a bloody and corrupt one.
• The U.S. attack on Grenada in 1983, a country whose population could have neatly fit inside the Rose Bowl, was said to be motivated by concern for U.S. medical students on the island. The more likely motivation was to beat up on someone weak enough for Reagan to “stand tall” in an attempt to overcome public resistance to U.S. military aggressions abroad, a natural result of America's crime spree in Indochina. In addition to this, the U.S. has always wanted to send a message to the rebellious countries in the Western Hemisphere it dominates: “If you raise your head in a way we don’t like, we’ll come down on you hard.” In other words, if you try to overcome the pattern of exploitation instituted by the U.S. and its local collaborators in the region, we’ll consider you a threat to our wealth and power and a bad example to others in the area and destroy you. This is the real face of American power in the world, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean.
• Panama was run in the 1980s by a tyrannical, drug-running, money laundering, terrorism-supporting CIA asset named Manuel Noriega, kept there in great part by George Bush Sr., who was head of the CIA in 1976-77. In 1989, Noriega was considered a problem, but not because he was a tyrannical, drug-running, money laundering, terrorism-supporting CIA asset. The problem was he was no longer on a tight-leash. The overlords in Washington decided he had to go. The U.S. military invaded, killing hundreds of civilians in a midnight bombing attack, injuring thousands more and making thousands of others homeless. A U.S.-dominated regime was put in power. But aside from not being on a tight-leash anymore, even more “threatening” perhaps was the fact that Noriega held mountains of potentially incriminating evidence against the Reagan-Bush crowd involving drugs, money-laundering, terrorism and God-knows-what-else. U.S. troops, before even capturing Manuel Noriega, were dispatched to capture 15,000 boxes of documents that subsequently disappeared into the black hole of Washington secrecy.
• Just 8 months following this murderous naked aggression against Panama for reasons of corruption and criminality, the same U.S. administration guilty of it became outraged by the murderous naked aggression of recent U.S. stooge Saddam Hussein’s Iraq against the corrupt and arrogant regime of Kuwait. The best reports of the time suggest upwards of two thousand Kuwaitis were killed in this aggression, roughly equivalent to the number killed by the U.S. in its aggression against Panama 8 months earlier, but which we are meant to interpret as just per the propaganda name of our aggression, Operation Just Cause.
• The Kuwaitis were taking advantage of U.S. protection, by drilling under the border into Iraqi oil fields. This was at a crucial point in the economic recovery of Iraq following the costly 8 year war against Iran (suggested and supported by the U.S.)
• The U.S. gave mixed signals to Iraq, suggesting it did not care how the Iraqis handled its border dispute with Kuwait.
• Like in Vietnam, the U.S. used lies to promote its 1990-1991 war with Iraq. The most cited reason for support of the war by the congressman who authorized George Bush I was the story of Iraqi troops leaving Kuwaiti babies to die on the floor of a hospital after removing them from incubators they then took with them back to Iraq. The only problem with the story was that it was bullshit. After the war, the Los Angeles Times printed a tiny story on a back page quoting Mohammed Matar, head of Kuwait's primary health system, who said, "I think it was just something for propaganda."
• Tens of thousands of Iraqis died directly and indirectly from this U.S. aggression, masked as a war against aggression. Tens of thousands more died in the 1990s in the economic embargo kept in place by the U.S. and its allies. See this.
• Contrary to the popular myth promoted by U.S. propagandists, the no-fly zones in Iraq which the U.S. maintained over Iraq for ten years, were not authorized by the U.N.
• Contrary to the popular myth promoted by U.S. propagandists, the Iraqis destroyed all of their unconventional weapons and programs by the early to mid-1990s, in keeping with their agreement to do so following the 1990-91 Gulf War – and the U.S. government knew this.
• This means the then-continuing embargo, bombings and the subsequent 2003 invasion and occupation, were unjust, and not much more than mass murder – right up to this very morning, Memorial Day, 2005.
• This means the Bush Administration was lying when it said the aggression against Iraq was justified by an imminent threat.
• 9-11, the cited reason for so much U.S. behavior, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and even domestically, is hardly reliably attributable to Al Qaeda. The government-authored conspiracy theory is wacky and as full of holes as a piece of Swiss cheese. Aside from Whatreallyhappend.com, a good place to start, and which ties this whole memorial list back to the beginning, is David Ray Griffin’s book, The New Pearl Harbor, Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 . Another good source is The Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute: A Comprehensive Chronicle of the Road to 9/11 - And America's Reponse, by Paul Thompson and the Center for Cooperative Research.
• During the recent coup against Haiti, the U.S. kidnapped the Haitian leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide and, with French help, spirited him out of the country at gun point. Now the country, long a victim of U.S. brutality and exploitation, is once more in the grip of U.S.-linked terrorists and thugs. Oh yeah. The "heroic" and "moderate" Colin Powell had a role in this criminality too. Sleep easy, Powell.

These are merely some of the things Americans and people everywhere ought to remember this Memorial Day. The real lessons are universal: Loyalty to your leaders is not necessarily the same thing as loyalty to your country, not to mention what is right and wrong. That kind of loyalty is one essential part of fascism. Do not trust leaders, of every sort, public and private. Do not wave your flag when you should be thinking instead. Question authority, of every sort, public and private. Question the history you are fed. Question the “reality” manufactured around you by powerful interests who do not hesitate to lie, cheat, steal and murder – even their own people. Just because the military is engaged in action, it does not follow they are doing something good, protecting our security or preserving our liberty. Think for yourself. And don’t expect to be liked or respected for it.

Comments

[go long into the day]

on that babes removed from incubators in Kuwait - the DAUGHTER of the Kuwait Ambassador to the US posed for that "news" report - pentagon psy ops at your service. simply stellar. it worked.

[Michael Zimmer]

Bang on with your observations in "Things to Remember on Memorial Day".

Michael Zimmer
The Progressive Mind

[Ron Leighton]

Go long,

Thanks for the response. I knew about little Nayirah, the al-Sabah daughter. The Pentagon and the private propagandists over at Hill & Knowlton spun some ugly fantasies, didn't they. Question is, what are they working on as we speak!?

Take care,
Ron

[Ron Leighton]

Hi Michael,

Great website you have. Very interesting! And thanks for linking to mine.

Take care,
Ron

[Joe]

Great post. Hopefully it'll help wake some people up to what is really happening. I missed Powell's involvement in Haiti, so that was interesting to read.

[Ron Leighton]

Thanks Joe. Glad you liked it. Powell's role in the Haiti coup and the attempted coverup of My Lai are part and parcel of his career...and he's a "moderate"!! That's why I pick on him. The right wing love to trot out guys like him when their right wing seems to wacko and extreme. Trouble is, Powell and others like him are wacko and extreme themselves. Thanks for the link too. I'll check it out.

[sotssuink]

[b]Do any of you still chat in Yahoo Chat?[/b]
I used to chat in yahoo quite a bit but gave up on them after they got filled up by porn bots. I really miss some of the chats I used to have there though in the politics and religion rooms.

I came accross a new site the other day though called [url=http://oohya.net][b]Oohya Chat[/b][/url] which is actually pretty good. It has cams and voice and a better profile system then yahoo but most important I didn't see any bots at all in it. It doesn't have near the user base yahoo had though but it's new so I'm sure it will grow.

Anyway just wondered if any of you guys chat there and if so what room? They have state rooms but there's never anyone in my state lol. If you guys don't chat there is there anywhere else that you guys chat at besides the forums?