Leo Lyons wrote: ↑Wed Mar 13, 2019 3:49 pmHey billy.pilgrim; I'm just being curious. I've been following the comments on this very interesting thread since you started it, and I'm just curious as to your interest in the My Lai events and Lt. Calley, and why you keep the subject of it alive. Did you have relatives involved? Were you directly or indirectly involved?
sorry I took so long, been busy and watching basketball.
what about you, no one close involved seems hard to believe.
I'm just doing my best, here and there, to keep some truth, in one of those major pivotal teachable moments in our history, alive before the Howard (Fox) Campbell, Jr. rewrite blinds the right.
Also, to poke at all those vets out there who still lie to their kids and grandkids about how they were spit on (Johnny at lnf heard it from his dad or uncle) or the all too common (my stalker Hugh from upstate or possibly here was one of these) I volunteered to go to Viet Nam but they stationed me in Italy or Germany or wherever because they needed my special skill.
The protest was never against the troops. The protest was against the government sponsoring this war, it was against the military establishment and the companies and people who profited from the war, but because more people didn’t keep hammering with the truth and what it could have taught us about the idiocy of imposing power over people who wanted freedom, we now have forever wars and a population being taught to bow to the military.
My Lai is only a representative of the hundreds of similar atrocities, but My Lai slipped past the cover-up and was huge in exposing the truth.
The only spitting on vets came from the right and was directed at protesting vets by right-wingers, but people who can be tricked into believing that FDR caused the Great Depression, can be convinced to shut down anything and to support anything. All protest is un-American, and all disagreement is a sign of disloyalty. Follow the Leader.
I’m not sure how anyone who was draft age in the 60s isn’t connected. For the millions who died, for the elderly and children who died horrible deaths, for the fighters who spent a lifetime trying to rid their country of Colonial rule, for those on all sides – from the ones who were caught up in their particular side’s slogan filled speeches glorifying war to those who followed the law when called, for those who lost friends and family and those who endured prison or had to leave the country, for and even for the physical scars to the country, I think a truthful understanding of Viet Nam would serve to make us better in the present.
Its’ not that we haven’t destroyed country after country in the name of profit (oppression), but Viet Nam exposed how easy it is to gin up a little fear and turn it into huge profits for our own increasingly smaller ruling class and their brand-new mercenary military.
Without people remembering history, you end up with crap history and lies about fighting for freedom, rather than the reality of abandoning allies, supporting Colonial oppression and violating treaties. It’s easy to see that we were the bad guys in Viet Nam and for a while it looked as if we wanted to learn a lesson. Now the story of Viet Nam, sanitized by the forever right-wing rewrite, is a lesson about blindly supporting violence and oppression.
“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free."
Guess who