Some well-known American war casualties.
President John F. Kennedy
Dr. Martin Luther King
U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy
Malcom X
President Barack Obama accepts Nobel Prize for Peace
while waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq
When you start a new country with human slavery driving much of its economy, serious karma will play out around that for quite a while, or longer.
Consider Muhammed Ali was put in an American prison because he refused to be inducted and sent to Vietnam. His view was no Viet Cong had ever called him no nigger.
Here's something else Ali said:
“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?
No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would put my prestige in jeopardy and could cause me to lose millions of dollars which should accrue to me as the champion.
But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is right here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…
If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail. We’ve been in jail for four hundred years.”
Imagine a U.S. Military with no black troops. Imagine only young white soldiers dying in Vietnam. Imagine the furor from American whites.
I developed the view, which the angels on my case seemed to favor, that John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy and Malcom X were killed because they publicly opposed America being at war in Vietnam. Only a few people agreed with me, even though the Las Vegas odds odds of all four men being killed after they opposed the Vietnam war not being connected, were ZERO. Those also were the God odds.
Now consider the unimaginable. America's first and so far only black president, Barack Obama, accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace, while he continued President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney's rich white men wars for corporate profit in Afghanistan and Iraq. Did President Obama ever see the similarity between black American soldiers fighting in those two wars, to black slaves picking cotton in the Old South?
Now consider what President Donald Trump really meant, and what his followers understood he meant, when he said, "Stop the steal." Trump meant, stop the steal by black voters.
Recall the many photos of seas of white faces at MAGA rallies. Here's one.
Recall presidential candidate Donald Trump waffling in 2016, when he was endorsed by former Klu Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Recall Trump pretending he had never heard of Duke. Recall Trump not saying pronto that he didn't want Duke or the KKK's support.
Recall President Donald Trump defending the white mob in Charlottesville, Virginia, waving Confederate and Swastika flags, enraged over the removal of Confederate monuments from public view.
Consider the January 6, 2021 attempt to overthrow the American government by a Trump-incited white mob.
Recall Ivana Trump being quoted in Vanity Fair as saying, when she and Donald were married, he kept a book of Hitler's speeches in a cabinet on his side of their bed, and sometimes he pulled it out at night and read it; and when later asked about that, Trump said, if he ever had such a book, he didn't read it.
Consider Donald Trump said the Iraq war was invented, and when he ran for President in 2016, he said he would end America's endless wars. Yet after being elected president, he proposed monetizing the natural resources of Iraq and Afghanistan to repay America for those two wars.
Consider the furor that arose from the American right over President Joe Biden pulling America out of the Afghanistan war, which President Donald Trump had said he was going to do. There was no way to get out of Afghanistan cleanly, even as there was no way to get out of the Vietnam war cleanly.
Consider two jolting Vietnam war revelations the angels arranged to be dropped on me.
(1) In mid-1988, my father invited me to attended a Downtown Birmingham Rotary Club luncheon with him. This was a top shelf club, its members prominent or children of prominent members. The guest speaker was the CEO (or President or Executive Director) of the National Geographic. His topic was "Getting to Know Our Neighbors." He said the Geographic had come to think many conflicts between nations were caused, at least in part, by people not knowing much about people in other countries. He said a study had revealed that 95 percent of American high school and college students could not locate Vietnam on a map.
After the speaker finished his talk, he invited questions, The first question was, "Did the Geographic have a position on the Vietnam war?" The speaker said the Geographic had correspondents in Saigon, where there was a huge street demonstration of people carrying posters begging America to save them. The posters were in English . That demonstration was seen all over America television news. It swung American sentiment from against to for American military intervention in South Vietnam.
The speaker said the Geographic's correspondents spoke Vietnamese and French and they interviewed many of the demonstrators, who said they had been paid money by the Saigon government to demonstrate and carry the posters They did not speak English and did not know what was on the posters or why they were demonstrating. The speaker said the Geographic did some digging and learned the money for the demonstration had been paid by American corporations and the U.S. Government.
You could have heard a pin drop in the Rotary Club. Many of the older members, including my father, were WW II combat veterans. My father look like he was going to throw up. He had never liked the Vietnam war. He said nothing about it the, nor during the drive back to where he had picked me up to go to the luncheon with him. He never spoke of it later.
(2) In the spring of 2005, I joined a "Seekers" group, who met weekly in the Unitarian Church in Key West. The church minister, who just happened to be from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, attended each meeting. There were about ten of us. We talked about on and of-off beat topics.
One day, a fellow maybe 10 years my senior, said he had worked for the CIA and was stationed with a CIA team in South Vietnam when the French were trying to retake Vietnam and regain access to its rubber trees and other national recourses. Although publicly the American government was backing France, his team's mission was to help Ho Chi Minh beat the French, so America could have access to Vietnam's rubber trees and other natural resources. He said that Ho wanted to do business with America, but in the end America wanted too much. Not caring at all for Communist China, Ho sought the Soviet Union's help.
I sat in my chair waiting on a response from the other group members. No one said anything. I asked, "Did you hear what he just said?" There was no response. It was like being among the walking dead. Seekers? That older man and I became somewhat friends. He received copies of my shootings off of my mouth posted at my blog. We bumped into each other every now and then in Key West. Sometimes I retold that on my blog. A Key west reader of the blog told me that he knew the same man, who had told him the same story with a lot more details.
Consider also the false flag Gulf of Tonkin resolution in the U.S. Congress, which put all of the above skullduggery into full play and led to America eventually being split about down the middle, until Republican Richard Nixon was elected President and got America out of Democrat President Lyndon Johnson's rich white man$ Vietnam war, like Democrat President Joe Biden would much later get America out President George W. Bush and Vice-President Richard Cheney's war in Afghanistan, for which Biden had voted in favor when he was in the U.S. Congress.
Were America's wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq worth even one killed, wounded or post traumatic stressed American soldier? Well?
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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