Sorry, I can’t get on the bandwagon of celebrating dead American soldier. The Vietnam War killed my sympathy for the American soldier. That war killed 2 to 4 million Vietnamese. That was a war of colonial aggression. We took the side of the French, the colonialist nation that suppressed the Vietnamese people. We supported them because they were Christians (not Buddhist or communists), and when the French left the U.S. set up its own puppet government with the intent of running the show.
Here’s what our heroes were doing:
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/history/news-my-lai-massacre-pictures?image=6
I was an immoral war. It wasn’t tragic for America, only for the Vietnamese. Also, America hadn’t gone wrong with the Vietnam War. It had gone wrong at its very founding.
Most of its history has been about slaughtering the Indians. When Americans fight a war of liberation, it’s to liberation another people of its wealth—be that wealth the land that belonged to the Indians or the Africans taken to be slaves on plantations.
On the way America liberated a big chunk of Mexico from the Mexicans. Once Americans had liberated all the land from the Indians and Mexicans, they started looking elsewhere, like Hawaii, where the Marines were used to liberate from the Hawaiian people their homeland. Of course, Americans liberated Alaska from the indigenous people there.
“After the Spanish-American War, Spain and the United States signed the Treaty of Paris (1898), by which Spain ceded Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam to the United States for the sum of $20 million.” (Wikipedia)
In other words, the U.S. liberated Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam from Spain not so that those people could be free to determine their own destiny but so the U.S. could take the place of Spain as the colonialist power. Americans’ interest was financial, military, and religious. U.S. missionaries couldn’t wait to convert the pagans and Catholics to Protestantism. In other words, the U.S. was betraying its ideal of self-determination. The only country that had a right to self-determination in this case was the U.S. For example, after liberating the Filipinos from Spain the U.S. had to fight the Philippine War because the Filipinos wanted to be free of U.S. domination.200,000 U.S. troops were involved in this colonialistic war. 50,000 natives died.
And what was the Iraq War (euphemistically called Operation Iraqi Freedom,) all about? Could it be to liberate the Iraqis of their oil? If not, why are there still 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq?
And now that bin Laden is dead why aren’t the 130,000 U.S. troops there leaving? Could this be the reason:
“Afghanistan is an IMPOVERISHED AND LEAST DEVELOPED COUNTRY, one of the world's poorest. In 2010, the nation's GDP EXCHANGE RATE STOOD AT $16.63 BILLION [Vermont has the smallest GDP in the U.S. 26.400 billon, ¾ larger than Afghan’s GDP] and the GDP per capita was $1,000. Its unemployment rate is 35% and roughly 36% of its citizens live below the poverty line. About 42 percent of the population live on less than $1 a day [hardly enough for lipstick!], according to USAID. However, due to the infusion of multi-billion dollars in international assistance and investments, as well as remittances from expats, the economy has steadily improved, growing at approximately 12 percent per year during the past six years. It is also due to improvements in agricultural production [poppy production, which the Taliban had eliminated before the U.S. arrived], which is the backbone of the nation's economy since over 75% of its citizens are involved in this field.” (Wikipedia)
In other words, America (like the Soviets before) wish to liberate the Afghans of their natural resources?
Yeah, it’s time to change Memorial Day to Immorality Day in order to celebrate what the U.S. military has really been all about.
P.S. What about Desert Storm? Yeah, what about it? Do you really think it was really about protecting the people of Kuwait? If it was about saving people from aggression we would be doing a lot more rescuing in Africa. But the BIG QUESTION is why didn’t we take out the MONSTER Saddam Hussein? Let’s face it, most of the soldiers the coalition slaughtered (and it was not but slaughter) were not fight by choice but so they wouldn’t be tortured and killed by Hussein’s ghouls. I understand that they had to be taken out. What I don’t understand is why the instigator wasn’t taken out. It would be a little like defeating Nazi Germany and then letting Hitler off the hook, though I do believe the German did Hitler’s bidding by choice.
But I do know why. Because the fucking Iraqi people didn’t matter, just as they didn’t really matter when our own little Hitler, G.W.B., invaded Iraq when there was (as he and his ghouls knew) there was no reason to. And by the way, now that Ratko Mladić has been arrested and will be standing trial for war crimes, why isn’t G.W.B. being arrested for his war crime? He killed 8,000 Bosnian Muslims. G.W.B. has caused the death of at least a half million Iraqis. The difference is whatever America does is right even when it’s wrong.
So G.W.B.’s father let the Hussein off the hook even though he was guilty of crimes against humanity because (1) oil and (2) he was an enemy of Iran. The U.S. Government’s ONLY interest is power—political and financial—nothing else. The Iraqi people did not matter. The fact that Hussein was guilty of war crimes did not matter. So even when America looks good it’s really just looking out for its own interests.
