War and Propaganda
War and Propaganda Abstracts Piped from Yahoo! Pipes
Abstract
These abstracts are taken from the actual AskWhy! pages and piped here via Yahoo! Pipes. They allow you to get a flavour of each page to see whether it might be of interest without having to load every one. An aid to browsing the website! The Heading in each case is a link to the page.
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 14 October 2009
AskWhy! War and Propaganda Abstracts
Abstracts from each page on the War and Propaganda directory of the AskWhy! main website.
Telford Taylor on US War Crimes: Legality of War
At the Nuremberg trials, Telford Taylor was US chief counsel for the prosecution, with the rank of brigadier general. A professor of law at Columbia University in 1970, he wrote Nuremberg and Vietnam: an American Tragedy, a devastating rebuttal of Washington propaganda to justify US aggression and evade responsibility for US war crimes. It revealed that US actions in Indo-China parallelled nazi crimes in Europe and left no doubt the war in Vietnam was unlawful, criminal, and a violation of the American Constitution. Addressing the Nuremberg tribunal, US chief prosecutor Robert Jackson said that the nazi war crimes trial was a stern warning to all potential aggressors. Americans have been the most frequent and worst such aggressor ever since.
The Secret Pentagon Papers on US Policy in Vietnam
US forces were said to be in South Vietnam at the “request” of Saigon. There was no such request. In May 1961, Lyndon Johnson, Vice President, went to Saigon to press the South Vietnamese to ask the US to send in troops. General Taylor too urged sending troops, though “the introduction of US forces may increase tensions and risk a major war in Asia”. Having signed a secret memorandum on sabotage in Vietnam, President Kennedy told the State Department to prepare a White Paper on Vietnamese responsibility for aggression in South Vietnam. The Washington Post and the Pentagon Papers confirm responsibility for the deadlock in the Paris talks on Vietnam rested with the US. While the State Department vowed loyalty to Ngo Dinh Diem, it prepared to overthrow him. The publication by US newspapers in 1971 of the secret Pentagon Papers on US policy in Vietnam showed the methods used to shape public opinion to suit the US ruling caste. They cite countless examples of lies, provocation and perfidy by the US.
Propaganda: Manipulation of the Mind
Although the term itself is relatively new, psychological warfare has been waged for almost three thousand years with little in its fundamental arguments changing. In the Iraq war, Bush and Blair presented themselves as saviours of the Iraqi people. Cyrus the Persian, 2500 years ago did the same when he invaded the same country, and still was doing the same when he occupied Jerusalem, as the bible makes clear time after time. Cyrus was the Jewish messiah, their Saviour, before Christians invented a new one. What Bush and Blair and other Christians will not face up to is that the whole of the Jewish scripture is propaganda presented in just the same way as the pious pair present theirs. The Persians were saviours of the people, but had to have force in reserve to keep their saved peoples in order! The God they taught to the Jews was Yehouah Sabaoth—the God of the Armies!
Propaganda about Vietnam: US Heroism in Movies
The Vietnamese war in The Deer Hunter shows subhuman Gooks unfairly winning battles by living like rats instead of standing in the open to be blasted by highly explosive bombs from seven miles high—dropped by US heroes. A malleable generation is conditioned by simplistic, boasting, “immortal good guy”, “disposable bad guy” images of war. It is no less simplistic today to pretend that people are “saved” by destroying them. The Vietnamese war was to save the Vietnamese from communism. What did it achieve? Much of North Vietnam was left a moonscape, devoid of any signs of life—no houses, factories, schools, hospitals, pagodas, churches—all had been obliterated. Forty four per cent of forests had been destroyed, much of the rest had no birds and animals.
Oil and Arab History: US and UK Middle Eastern Policies
In the autumn of 1957, the US tried to intervene against Syria. On 14 July 1958, as a result of its folly over Suez, the British puppet Iraqi royal family was deposed in Baghdad in a bloody military coup. At the same time, the United States disgraced itself not only in the eyes of the Arabs but of the entire world by landing its soldiers in Lebanon to prop up Shamoun and check the freedom movement spreading from the 14 July overthrow in Iraq. But then, at the beginning of the 1960s, the US government decided that its Arab puppets were not reliable for US neocolonial policies in the Middle East. Washington began to back Israel more and more. At a time when McCarthyite anticommunist hysteria had been boiling over in the US itself, the US set itself against the Arab states that had turned to the USSR for assistance, more in desperation after being rebutted by the US than for any deeply held ideological reasons. These were Egypt and Syria.
What Causes Wars? The Economy Stupid!
In the 70s, bookstores offered dozens of books on the US military industrial complex and its impact on US policy, economy and culture. US scientists Richard J Barnet (The Economy of Death) and Ralph E Lapp (Arms Beyond Doubt: The Tyranny of Weapons Technology) published their protests and evidence against Vietnam war hysteria and the all pervasive militarization of social life. Both showed the disastrous influence of the military industrial complex on US economy and policy, and the corrupting effect of the militarization of American society as a whole. Barnet wrote:
Since 1946, tax payers have been asked to contribute more than a trillion dollars for national securiiy. Each year the Federal government spends more than 70 cents of every budget dollar on past, present and future wars.Today all that is forgotten, and to remember it is unpatriotic.
Today in the Home of Abraham
Why they love you, Yankees. An Account of US Missile Strikes in Iraq. Another victory for US and UK barstool heroes.
Fundamentalists and Fascists
This administration, like all of them irrespective of the wishes of the voters in the great society, came to office intent on escalating militarism for their own profit. They are callous men who worship Rambo not any God of love, and do not care an iota about the deaths of anyone, whether the sons of Ishmael whom it is permissible to kill as one of God’s errors, or their own soldiers, whose deaths they try to minimise by giving kill ratios to prove that not many die compared with the people of the evil empire. That’s all right then! Whether Washington ever admits it or not, the oligarchy in charge of the USA is deeply deluded. Plans for the continued militarisation of the US economy should be resisted by popular outrage. Insane policies can never make anyone feel safe, particularly from the mad policy makers themselves.
The Ten Commandments: Interpreted for Republican Christians
Communism has been replaced by Islam. Moslems see the War on Terror as a Christian holy war against Islam, and the Bush administration’s evangelicals also see it as a Holy Crusade against Islam. That is Christian progress. Bush’s excuse for the invasion was Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. The real motive is oil, for Iraq has the second-largest oil reserves in the world. What the Ten Commandments mean for Bush’s Americans.
US Crimes in Vietnam: Livre Noir, the Black Book
A monstrous crime was perpetrated before our eyes in Vietnam. The massive bombings of South Vietnam by B52 planes were a crime, part of a war of total annihilation, for the bombings were conducted over wide areas and were not aimed at any particular targets. Chemical warfare, intensive bombings, mass extermination of people, the disastrous social and psychological effects of these US crimes are not isolated accretions attendant upon, the vicissitudes of war. They were and are still a global crime, the result of an overall strategy. Senator J William Fulbright said that American bombs and artillery fire had killed a quarter of a million South Vietnamese civilians. Today the best guesses put the number of civilians murdered in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos as 2 million!
US Lies and Deception: the Pentagon Papers
The New York Times, having secretly received a copy of the Pentagon study, began printing a series of nine sets of articles and supporting documents. The next day Attorney General John Mitchell requested that the New York Times voluntarily stop publishing and return the materials. The New York Times declined. The series was completed on 5 July 1971, after Mitchell’s court restraining order had been resisted. The government had challenged publication of the entire set of narratives and documents on the grounds that they were designated top secret. Other newspapers, principally the Washington Post, but also the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun-Times, the SL Louis Post-Dispatch and the Christian Science Monitor, also published articles on the Papers.
After the Iraq War
Invading American soldiers were taken prisoner and shown on TV. George Bush said it violated the Geneva convention and “exposed the evil at the heart of the regime”, as if he could care less about the Geneva convention. US television stations showed the hundreds of prisoners US Government officials admit are being ill treated, held by the US in Guantanamo Bay, kneeling on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs, blindfolded with opaque goggles and deafened with earphones to ensure complete visual and aural deprivation. This is all right, the US says, because they are not “prisoners of war”! They are “unlawful combatants”. The UN refused to pass a resolution legalizing the Iraq war, and the “Coalition” went ahead without any UN approval. That must mean that the “Coalition” soldiers fighting the war are unlawful combatants themselves.
Post Iraq War Soundbites
An eminent Porton Down scientist and UK expert in biological and chemical weapons, particularly Iraq’s, Dr David Kelly, apparently killed himself in an Oxfordshire copse after he had been named as the source of a BBC item claiming that the Labour government of Tony Blair (renamed Tony B Liar) had “sexed up” the September 2002 dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, used as grounds for the subsequent illegal war on Iraq. Blair was forced to appoint Lord Hutton, an eminent Judge, to conduct an enquiry into the civil servant’s death, one that inevitably would reveal a great deal behind the scenes in the preparations for the war.
Lunatics, Neocons and the Costs of War
It suited the Bush administration’s crude propaganda to stir up national indignation by saying that Bin Laden just hated America—something that no American can understand, because they do not know what their governments have been doing in their name. Plenty of people in the world hate America, but they do not just hate it, and they do not hate it for its freedoms. They hate it for its governments’ hypocrisy in foreign affairs. It is not American freedom Bin Laden objects to, it is American foreign policy. Freedom for Americans is taken to mean servitude and oppression under American puppet governments for everyone else. No American administration wants to address real issues in foreign policy, and most American voters haven’t a clue what “foreign” means except that it is unpleasant.
Faith and Lies, or Reason?
What do most Americans know about the world outside the US? They are famously ignorant. Though a prosperous nation, less than 10 per cent ever travel abroad. Few are bothered about geography, world affairs and the alternative outlooks that other people have. Did readers and radio or television audiences in the west ever learn why the Soviet revolution happened? Are they capable of thinking that other people are human beings too? That, like the American revolutionaries victorious in 1776, they are willing to die for their independence? The US attitude, as fomented by the Christian Right and neocons, is “do not do as we have done, do as we tell you”.
Criticism of Black Mass by Professor John Gray
The notion of a “master race”, a “chosen people” and an “elect” emphasises an entirely human superiority over the rest. The point is the eschatological myth that posits salvation for the superior type and hell fire for the others. As history shows, Christians have never stopped being willing to start burning people on God’s behalf. This sad habit has nothing to do with Enlightenment thinkers, and everything to do with Christian thought. Gray keeps offering and even citing evidence that shows it, yet obstinately and mischievously takes a different view. Criticism of the book, Black Mass by John Gray.
Leo Strauss, Neocons, Fascism and Christianity
Strauss’s neoconservatives are using foreign policy to fulfil what Irving Kristol had already in 1983 called a “national destiny”. The neoconservative ideologues convinced Bush Jr that he is a man of destiny. They pushed him forward as a modern Hitler to win a New World Empire. Bush, with the massive turnout of Christians in his favour won a second term based on lies, and the unnecessary suffering of a lot of human beings. The evangelical yearning for righteousness is incompatible with liberty. Free people will not necessarily choose righteousness, as even God recognized. Moreover, the Christian right applauds suffering because it makes man appeal to God for redemption, so the neocons use both Straussist and Christian delusions to achieve the political domination they desire. The neocon aim is a New World Order under US hegemony, achieved by destroying America’s enemies, and all international jurisdiction.
Can we Trust Our Leaders? Secret History: Shameful History
Secret History: 1. In 1918 southern Germany proclaimed itself a communist republic, 2. Britain and the US intervened in Russia between 1917 and 1921, 3. In 1919 the British Cabinet expected revolution in the UK, so posted troops on the streets of Britain, 4. In Ireland, Lloyd George, until November 1920 countered the IRA with a ferocious campaign of counter terror, 5. The US prepared for war with Britain only months after the end of WWI, 6. The top industrialists including Pirelli and the bankers actively supported Mussolini, while the Vatican and the monarchy stood aside, 7. Irish Fascists in the 1930s became the chief opposition party in Irish politics, 8. In 1939, the British Government suggested a far reaching nonaggression pact with Hitler, 9. In 1944 the Germans defeated the RAF and the Eighth US Air Force, 10. In WWII, the US put Japanese Americans in concentration camps, 11. In 1945 Churchill started the Vietnamese war.
Perpetual Blog: Impeach Bush and Blair
Write a letter demanding the impeachment of the war criminals Bush and Blair. This public domain perpetual blog gives you 15463 random, editable, anti-war, pro-democracy e-mails that you can send. Refresh to renew.
