“Gaddafi is giving his soldiers Viagra! We have to go to war in Libya!”
why don't we just stop sellin them the boner pills? damn i could be president this shits easy.
If Kennedy really did want to get out of Vietnam, kill the CIA and normalize relations with the USSR then his assassination was truly a watershed on an unimaginable scale.
Listen to this.
Robert MacNamara confirmed in a memoir that Kennedy planned to announce a withdrawal from Vietnam after returning from Dallas, and there seems to be references to an omitted withdrawal memo in the Pentagon Papers.
i am the people Parenti yells about being worried the conspiracy makes JFK look good
like the guy who was fingering the 'immolate us all' button wasn't going 'normalize' relations with the USSR, he literally couldn't: 'ahaha i held the planet hostage be my friend hahah' comic book villain shit
Vietnam shit & CIA shit is sus & one of the things compelling about Parenti's view of this is he impresses how little JFK needed to disagree for it to be justifiable to them to Dome him. Honestly I'd believe it if he was thinking of like, firing the CIA director lol
i am the people Parenti yells about being worried the conspiracy makes JFK look good
link?
i think it was in this i cannae give you a timestamp tho
edit: dang now im just listening to it again lol
he literally couldn’t [end the Cold War]
Well, yeah, the people and structures around Kennedy would never have let him do it, but there is evidence that JFK wanted to take the Cold War in a different direction. He held a naive, liberal worldview and believed that the two contradictory global powers could coexist.
‘ahaha i held the planet hostage be my friend hahah’ comic book villain shit
Are you saying that the Soviets would have never trusted Kennedy? Khrushchev was willing to deescalate. It was always the US that was the antagonist. If the Americans had extended an olive branch it would have been accepted.
evidence that JFK wanted to take the Cold War in a different direction. He held a naive, liberal worldview and believed that the two contradictory global powers could coexist
i find this utterly uncompelling. see: "willing to murder us all over cuba"
The joint chief's wanted to nuke Cuba, so Kennedy was always a moderating influence. The calamity of the Cuban Missile Crisis led to a lot of changes, including a change in Kennedy's attitude. After the crisis he began to publicly express a desire for peace.
Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament--and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude--as individuals and as a Nation--for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward--by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home.
First: Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable--that mankind is doomed--that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.
We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade--therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable--and we believe they can do it again.
Naive? Unattainable? Perhaps. But it appears to have been a sincerely held desire. We'll never know for sure because he didn't get an opportunity to effect it.
you've given me a bit to consider. maybe he meant it and was becoming a non-ghoul, but who can know for sure after he got brained. i'll admit i get a bit kneejerky against Kennedy hagiography
At least the bastards had the balls to actually blow up The Maine. None of this weak shit.
I'm curious, in america is it actually taught that this was real? In my history classes, it was pretty openly stated that the americans set up the gulf of tonkin to be able go in and destabilize a potential ussr ally after an election result they didn't like, that the whole war was basically one long war crime (with focus on all the massacres etc), and that the US lost. The only point made against vietnam was that some of the traps were kind of brutal, but fair enough - thats what you'd do too if the americans invaded so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
With what i've heard on this site about american schools, it occurs to me that you guys might have been told the exact opposite of all that, despite all available evidence and international opinion? How would they even manage to get away with saying that shit when people can prove them wrong?
Many public high schools simply stop teaching history after they finish WWII. College courses might discuss it, but I was never explicitly taught anything regarding Vietnam (or even the Korean War, for that matter).
The reason we were not taught anything post WWII was that it was too contemporary, too "political"
:agony-consuming: WWII oof
Here our history classes refused to go any further than 2005, for a kind of similar (but in effect very different) reason, in that it would become too political - i.e. that it would directly overlap with the politics curriculum and that theres no reason to teach it twice.
I guess this might explain the level of Takes™ you can hear from americans online...
When I was in school in 2014, our textbook listed it, along with domino theory as why we became involvedin Vietnam; and it did not say it was fake.
In the VA ward I talked to a few Vietnam veterans.
He told me he thought he was going over to “fight communism and defend democracy.” He told me about some of the fucked up shit he saw and had to deal with. Later after he got back he said he realized it was all for money for the arms industry and military complex in general.
He’s a great guy, suffers badly from PTSD but I told him I am a communist and he asked genuine questions about why I am, what led me to think things, and what it is we do. I told him I was a candidate of the Party of Communists USA and he asked more genuine questions out of curiosity and intrigue.
