HEY APU

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

I just had a look at your sig & I have to admit that it gave me a chuckle. Especially the part about being "tricked into fighting Uncle Sam's Wall Street Wars". First of all, nobody gets tricked into going to fight a war. If you are in the military , like me, and your unit is called then trickery is not necessary, you have no choice but to go. The only choice you have is whether or not to join the military in the first place & nobody is ever forced to do that either. Those of us in uniform are where we are because we want to be here, not because someone "tricked" us. You are implying that somehow we are all idiots that are fooled by some slick talker wearing a white beard and a red, white and blue top hat to run off and go shoot people.

 

I know you don't agree with the war but myself, everyone else that went with me and nearly all Americans are very proud of what we did over there and we offer no apologies.

[CubKilla]

 

We are proud of you NUKE and of all the men and women serving in the US Armed Forces at home and abroad.

[moochpuppy]

God bless you Nuke!!

[LowerCaseRepublican]

I just had a look at your sig & I have to admit that it gave me a chuckle.  Especially the part about being "tricked into fighting Uncle Sam's Wall Street Wars".  First of all, nobody gets tricked into going to fight a war.  If you are in the military , like me, and your unit is called then trickery is not necessary, you have no choice but to go.  The only choice you have is whether or not to join the military in the first place & nobody is ever forced to do that either.  Those of us in uniform are where we are because we want to be here, not because someone "tricked" us.  You are implying that somehow we are all idiots that are fooled by some slick talker wearing a white beard and a red, white and blue top hat to run off and go shoot people.

 

I know you don't agree with the war but myself, everyone else that went with me and nearly all Americans are very proud of what we did over there and we offer no apologies.

Nuke, I suggest you take a look at Major General Smedley Butler's retirement speech when he retired from the Marines. This is from the mouth of the man who served for over 30 years in the Marine Corps...

 

"I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

 

There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

 

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

 

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

 

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

 

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

 

The trickery employed is that the war was that WW I was the "war to end all wars" yet according to Wilson's ambassador to England that the US declared war on Germany because it was "...the only way of maintaining our present pre-eminent trade status."

 

"Our boys were sent off to die with beautiful ideals painted in front of them. No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason they were marching off to kill and die." -- Major General Smedley Butler, USMC

 

World War II was about stopping the murder of the Jews in WW II yet FDR and Co. knew it was going on the entire time. There are many books that dispel the myths of WW II, especially "Saving Private Power" by Michael Zezima. WW II was not a just war.

 

From a private memorandum between the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department dated 1941 in now declassified documents "If war aims are stated which seem to be concerned solely with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the world. The interests of other peoples should be stressed. This would have a better propaganda effect." Hell, if we were against Hitler then why were so many US corporations like IBM and ones run by George W. Bush's granddaddy doing business with Hitler? And the extermination camps...Britain during the Boer War had used such camps and so had Spain and America in the Philippines. Historian Michael CC Adams notes that these precedents served as models for the Nazis. Hell, the US Army segregated blood and segregated military units too. And according to the declassified documents from the US government, it is now clear that Roosevelt knew about the death camps since the 1930s, yet refused to take action.

 

You should also take a glance at Ralph McGehee's book "My 25 Years in the CIA". He spent 25 years in the CIA during the height of the Cold War and was involved with a lot of the governmental overthrows by the CIA. He discusses in great detail about how he wanted to be part of the CIA to fight communism and help his country. As he progressed, he found out that the CIA was not an intelligence agency but a very loosely conglomorated arm of the Presidency that just gives the President what he wants to hear and not the facts. He found as he worked on that his reports that told things how they actually were in Indonesia and Vietnam and Laos were rejected and his superiors wrote false reports saying we needed to invade and stop.

 

These are just a few of the many examples of how people can be tricked into believing that certain things are so when they are not so glamorous in reality. Many kids are brought up on the steady diet of "US is a protector of freedom" when even people that work in the State Department [William Blum], Marine Major Generals and even people from the CIA say that the over-glorified image of what the United States is, is not really so.

 

And tell me people, I am seriously wondering, since it has now been found that the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened...how can you approve of your nation sending people to die in Vietnam for a lie perpetrated by the US government? How can you hold so steadfast in your belief that we are a nation looking for freedom yet the US lies and deceives it's own people to send us off to die?

 

Also Nuke, disapproval of Bush is rising to well over 40% now, so your opinion is not most of all Americans...it's about 50-50 now. Americans are stupid too. Trust me, if they knew the Bush lies, they wouldn't have sent you over there. I value the lives of the American military and wouldn't be proud that my nation used them after lying to my f***ing face.

 

"My country: Right or Wrong has the same logic of My mother: Sober or drunk." -- George Orwell

[LowerCaseRepublican]

A little bit more on Smedley Butler...does any of this sound familiar? Bush saying that "God told me to invade Afghanistan and Iraq" and the "Operation Iraqi Freedom" but yet he and Cheney try to downplay heavily the involvement of Halliburton etc.

 

What Butler fought so hard to do was to take the focus off of moral and ideological arguments for war and concentrate on the geopolitical factors that actually motivated war. He tried to raise awareness of what the real motivating factors of war were as well as the consequences of war. He was one of the first Americans to really bring the economic implications of war to the forefront of the public conscience. In War is a Racket Butler “names names” and lays out in wonderfully blunt detail how the American “military machine” was used to the benefit of wealthy American industrialists. He noted how proponents of war typically call on God as a supporter of the cause and how they embellish the mission as one of liberation and the spreading of freedom, but that these people tend to shy away from discussing the economic details of military ventures.