When Ho Chi Minh spoke to a large group of supporters in Hanoi in 1945, he stated these subversive "Communist principles":
"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Minh greatly admired the United States and even appealed to the American government for help.
America ignored Minh's pleas for help. Instead, the United States chose to take up where France left off and go to war with him. It also chose to support Ngo Dinh Diem as the leader of South Vietnam. Diem was a rotten human being and surrounded himself with family members whose corruption and inhumanity exceeded his own.
When Buddhist leaders led popular protests against the aristocratic and authoritarian rule of Diem and his family, Thich Quang Duc, a revered bodhisattva, burned himself to death at a busy Saigon intersection on June 11, 1963.
New York Times reporter David Halberstam witnessed the event and wrote:
"I was to see that sight again, but once was enough. Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning human flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think.... As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him."
Madame Nhu, a member of the Diem ruling family responded to the protest by quipping:
"Let them burn. We shall clap our hands."
She was one of America's proxies in Vietnam. What does that say about the United States?
A pattern emerges".
Afghanistan and Iraq are not aberrations in United States foreign policy. Bush and his Neocons are not "a few bad apples". They may be more malevolent than their predecessors, but they are not the first to advance American corporate and plutocratic interests through lies, propaganda, invasion, and flagrant crimes against humanity. America's socioeconomic system has engendered and reinforced such pathological behavior for years.
In Cannery Row, Steinbeck's Doc concluded:
"The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest, are the traits of success."
In America, the inmates truly run the asylum.
Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow, rife with well-researched examples of America's imperial conquests from Mexico to Iraq, further validates the assertion many other writers and I have been making for some time now. While manifestations of the dark side of human nature are inevitable aspects of human civilization, the American Way requires its dedicated adherents to commit their lives to cruelty and inhumanity. If human civilization is to survive, we need to collectively reject this abominable mandate.
"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Minh greatly admired the United States and even appealed to the American government for help.
America ignored Minh's pleas for help. Instead, the United States chose to take up where France left off and go to war with him. It also chose to support Ngo Dinh Diem as the leader of South Vietnam. Diem was a rotten human being and surrounded himself with family members whose corruption and inhumanity exceeded his own.
New York Times reporter David Halberstam witnessed the event and wrote:
"I was to see that sight again, but once was enough. Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning human flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think.... As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him."
Madame Nhu, a member of the Diem ruling family responded to the protest by quipping:
"Let them burn. We shall clap our hands."
She was one of America's proxies in Vietnam. What does that say about the United States?
A pattern emerges".
Afghanistan and Iraq are not aberrations in United States foreign policy. Bush and his Neocons are not "a few bad apples". They may be more malevolent than their predecessors, but they are not the first to advance American corporate and plutocratic interests through lies, propaganda, invasion, and flagrant crimes against humanity. America's socioeconomic system has engendered and reinforced such pathological behavior for years.
In Cannery Row, Steinbeck's Doc concluded:
"The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest, are the traits of success."
In America, the inmates truly run the asylum.
Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow, rife with well-researched examples of America's imperial conquests from Mexico to Iraq, further validates the assertion many other writers and I have been making for some time now. While manifestations of the dark side of human nature are inevitable aspects of human civilization, the American Way requires its dedicated adherents to commit their lives to cruelty and inhumanity. If human civilization is to survive, we need to collectively reject this abominable mandate.
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