Hanoi Jane caused torture of US pilots
Richard Rongstad
J.R. Labbe
Aug. 6, 1999
No speech by Fonda? That's good news
Attorney Ronald Bliss' office at Fulbright & Jaworski is a long way from
the Viet Cong prison camps where he spent almost seven years of his
life. But utter the name "Jane Fonda," and the trip down a very rugged
memory lane only takes a second.
"She prolonged that war, according to [North Vietnamese] Gen. Vo Nguyen
Giap," the Houston attorney said this week in a telephone interview.
"While our boys were dying in the fields and being shot out of the
skies, she helped convince the American people that we couldn't win and
convinced the North Vietnamese that they could."
It's no surprise, then, that the former Air Force captain was elated by
the news that the actress-turned-self-proclaimed-youth-advocate has
canceled her scheduled appearance next week at the American Bar
Association's annual convention in Atlanta.
ABA officials released a brief statement last week saying that because
of a scheduling conflict, Fonda would not be speaking Tuesday at the
Silver Gavel Awards luncheon. In her place will be CNN anchor Judy
Woodruff.
Bliss, a member of the ABA who practices intellectual properties law,
doesn't buy the explanation.
"In Texas, we say that just doesn't pass the smell test," he said.
"There's always a scheduling conflict in my mind if she's going to be on
the agenda."
Bliss has good reason to want to avoid contact with the actress who took
her vocal protests of the Vietnam War on the road in 1972 -- the road
right to Hanoi. As a 23-year-old fighter pilot, he was shot down over
Vietnam on Sept. 4, 1966, while at the stick of a single-engine,
single-seated F-105 Thunderchief.
"It was affectionately called the Thud because that's the sound it made
when it hit the ground," he said.
Bliss was first held at the infamous Hanoi Hilton, the old French prison
downtown, where the Viet Cong began their "treatment" of prisoners.
"There was a special group of seven cells called Heartbreak Hotel,"
Bliss recalled. "Permanent leg irons, hooks in the ceiling, all the
bells and whistles. They knew how to do it right."
Eight or 10 days later, Bliss said, he was thrown into a cell with
another officer, a naval aviator, and then both were moved to a camp
called The Zoo on the outskirts of the city. He wasn't released until
March 4, 1973 -- 18 days before his 30th birthday.
"The reason I got a roommate so soon was because the Viet Cong had left
this guy in one of their little rope tricks for too long, and he had
lost the use of his arms for about six months," Bliss said. "They needed
me to take care of him."
Bliss said these extra duties were the cloud with a silver lining. "He
was a heck of a guy, and it was an honor to know him."
In a matter-of-fact way, Bliss recounted hearing the propaganda tapes
that Fonda made for the North Vietnamese.
"They played her tape for us for quite a while. Some people in the camp
were squeezed to meet with her -- put under physical and mental duress,"
Bliss said.
Left unspoken by Bliss, but filled in by Amarillo lawyer Charles White,
who organized a write-in campaign to the ABA against Fonda's convention
appearance, was the fact that Bliss was one of the prisoners "squeezed"
by the North Vietnamese for resisting their demands to see her.
White, who was an Army first lieutenant, spent 1968 between the DMZ and
Da Nang, where his field artillery unit was attached to the 3rd Marine
Division.
"I came back unscathed," was all that the civil trial lawyer wanted to
say about his year in-country.
White was in large part responsible for the flak that the ABA received
from angry veterans shortly after its June announcement of Fonda's
appearance. According to news reports in the `New York Post' and the
`Atlanta Journal and Constitution,' the ABA downplayed any part that
protest letters may have played in Fonda's cancellation.
"We did have a few people who criticized her, but that is not uncommon,"
ABA spokeswoman Nancy Slonim told the `Post.'
White would like to argue Slonim's definition of `few.' As a civil trial
lawyer, he's well equipped to do so. And he has the scores of email
copied to him by other Vietnam veterans who participated in the write-in
campaign.
Regardless of the true reason for the change in speakers, Bliss is
thankful for White's efforts.
"Charles, God bless you," Bliss wrote to White after hearing the news.
"I'll be happy to buy you dinner anytime you can get to Houston. It is a
quiet, warm realization that people still appreciate right and wrong!"
Bliss acknowledges that there are people in this country who want to put
Fonda's actions in the past. But he can't -- not ever.
"People say it's a lot of water under the bridge. We're a forgiving
country; shouldn't we forgive her? For someone who really wants to ask
that, I say go visit the Gold Star mothers, the uncles, the brothers who
lost loved ones. Go see the children who never knew their fathers. Go to
the VA hospitals and look at those men missing parts of their faces,
parts of their bodies, the mentally distraught. Then come back and ask
that question."
Jill "J.R." Labbe is senior editorial writer and columnist for the
`Star-Telegram.' She can be reached via email at
jrl...@star-telegram.com or by phone at (817) 390-7599.
Send your comments to jrl...@star-telegram.com
Richard Rongstad
http://members.aol.com/rhrongstad/private/mainrhr.htm
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." A.J. Liebling
Jon Cohen
postings-I guess that you are very young or just not there when all this
was going on. She did alot more than just protest.
And VC and NVA did not beat the Americans-our own Government did it for
them-you may wish to read up on the handling of the war and compare it to
say the Gulf War.
The VC lost the Tet battles-they wiped themselves out-became a non-factor
afterwards.
As for the rest-too many what ifs.........
David Lentz
Michael Kagalenko wrote:
>
> Steve Hix (se...@macol.net) wrote
> ]In article <7q4t19$9cn$1...@isn.dac.neu.edu>, mkag...@lynx.dac.neu.edu wrote:
> ]
> ]> Face it ; it's over, you guys lost. No use trying to re-fight it.
> ]
> ]Nobody is re-fighting anything.
> ]
> ]We just don't think that people who were part of the
> ]problem, who made things worse for everyone, should
> ]profit from their actions.
>
> But Jane Fonda didn't do anything of a kind; she protested an unjust war.
Bull!
Jane Fonda did not protest the war. Fonda supported the war.
Fonda protested United States involvement in the war. The
infamous picture shows Hanoi Jane seated on anti aircraft gun
with an North Vietnamese helmet on. Don the uniform of the enemy
and posing on weapon of war fully indicate that Fonda supported
the war from the North Vietnamese perspective. It was just the
American Fighting Men she despised.
David
Dweezil Dwarftosser
Kagalenko) wrote:
>Khreriov (khre...@aol.com) wrote
>]>Subject: Re: Hanoi Jane caused torture of US pilots
>]>From: mkag...@lynx01.dac.neu.edu (Michael Kagalenko)
>]>Date: Thu, 26 August 1999 10:26 PM EDT
>]>Message-id: <7q4t19$9cn$1...@isn.dac.neu.edu>
>]>
>]>
>]> Face it ; it's over, you guys lost. No use trying to re-fight it.
>]>
>]
>] Fool. The armed forces didn't lose the war, the politicians did.
>] Fonda should have been tried for treason, convicted, and executed.
>
> Face it, you lost. Vietnamese whipped your arse real good.
Since the historical record is still being unearthed, could you
provide us with a single battle (land, air, or sea) which the allies
lost to the North Vietnamese ? I don't remember any.
- John T.
Bill Silvey
> Khreriov (khre...@aol.com) wrote
> ]>Subject: Re: Hanoi Jane caused torture of US pilots
> ]>From: mkag...@lynx01.dac.neu.edu (Michael Kagalenko)
> ]>Date: Thu, 26 August 1999 10:26 PM EDT
> ]>Message-id: <7q4t19$9cn$1...@isn.dac.neu.edu>
> ]>
> ]>
> ]> Face it ; it's over, you guys lost. No use trying to re-fight it.
> ]>
> ]
> ] Fool. The armed forces didn't lose the war, the politicians did.
> ] Fonda should have been tried for treason, convicted, and executed.
>
> Face it, you lost. Vietnamese whipped your arse real good.
Rather a lot like the way the Afghanis murdered your vaunted Red Army, you
fucking commie.
--
Bill Silvey, Oathmaster, Clan Wolverine - Fuck the IDSA
"I post to see what kind of responses I will get. I don't know of every
single facet of a subject I post on."
- ATN082268's confession in posting
<19980604050705...@ladder01.news.aol.com>
that it does in fact post in rec.games.mecha only to troll.
Spell 'yrtsinim' backwards to email me.
Drewe Manton
(Khreriov) writes:
> Fool. The armed forces didn't lose the war, the politicians did.
> Fonda should have been tried for treason, convicted, and executed.
>
>
Hear hear! Left to fight the war properly North Vietnam would've capitulated
in 1-2 weeks. The US military were betrayed by the political leadership.
regards
Drewe
Rama Lama Yip Diddley Aye
Temple of the Green Grass
"The stupidity of the action is directly proportional to the number of people
watching you"
Preserve wild life. . . pickle a Mon-key!
C.C. Jordan
<dlen...@rochester.rr.com//NOSPAM//> wrote:
>
>
>Michael Kagalenko wrote:
>>
>> Steve Hix (se...@macol.net) wrote
>> ]In article <7q4t19$9cn$1...@isn.dac.neu.edu>, mkag...@lynx.dac.neu.edu wrote:
>> ]
>> ]> Face it ; it's over, you guys lost. No use trying to re-fight it.
>> ]
>> ]Nobody is re-fighting anything.
>> ]
>> ]We just don't think that people who were part of the
>> ]problem, who made things worse for everyone, should
>> ]profit from their actions.
>>
>> But Jane Fonda didn't do anything of a kind; she protested an unjust war.
>
>Bull!
>
>Jane Fonda did not protest the war. Fonda supported the war.
>Fonda protested United States involvement in the war. The
>infamous picture shows Hanoi Jane seated on anti aircraft gun
>with an North Vietnamese helmet on. Don the uniform of the enemy
>and posing on weapon of war fully indicate that Fonda supported
>the war from the North Vietnamese perspective. It was just the
>American Fighting Men she despised.
>
>David
I received this several weeks ago from Larry Durbin. It should clear
the air as to Fonda's role and should give knuckleheads like
pause to stop and think, inasmuch as that is possible.
"I received this from a very good friend, a USMC aviator, combat vet. It's
worth reading, and perhaps distributing to our group. We must not forget
this occurred!"
WR,
BJ "Combat" Craig
Vietnam:
VF-191 68-70
VF-114 73-76
Lest we forget..."100 years of great women" Jane Fonda should never be
considered.
The first part of this is from an F-4E pilot. The pilot's name is Jerry
Driscoll, a River Rat.
Folks,
There are few things I have strong visceral reactions to, but Jane Fonda's
participation in what I believe to be blatant treason, is one of them. Part
of my conviction comes from exposure to those who suffered her attentions.
In 1978, the Commandant of the USAF Survival School was a former POW in Ho
Lo Prison-the "Hanoi Hilton". Dragged from a stinking cesspit of a cell,
cleaned, fed, and dressed in clean PJs, he was ordered to describe for a
visiting American "Peace Activist" the "lenient and humane treatment" he'd
received. He spat at Ms. Fonda, was clubbed, and dragged away. During the
subsequent beating, he fell forward upon the camp Commandant's feet,
accidentally pulling the man's shoe off-which sent that officer berserk. In
'78, the AF Col still suffered from double vision-permanently grounding
him-from the Vietnamese Col's frenzied application of wooden baton.
From 1983-85, Col Larry Carrigan was 347FW/DO (F-4Es). He'd spent 6 years
in the "Hilton"-the first three of which he was "missing in action". His
wife lived on faith that he was still alive. His group, too, got the
leaned/fed/clothed routine in preparation for a "peace delegation" visit.
They, however, had time and devised a plan to get word to the world that
they still survived. Each man secreted a tiny piece of paper, with his SSN
on it, in the palm of his hand. When paraded before Ms. Fonda and a
cameraman, she walked the line, shaking each man's hand and asking little
encouraging snippets like: "Aren't you sorry you bombed babies?" and "Are
you grateful for the humane treatment from your benevolent captors?"
Believing this HAD to be an act, they each palmed her their sliver of
paper. She took them all without missing a beat. At the end of the line
and once the camera stopped rolling, to the shocked disbelief of the POWs,
she turned to the officer in charge...and handed him the little pile. Three
men died from the subsequent beatings. Col Carrigan was almost number four.
For years after their release, a group of determined former POWs including
Col Carrigan, tried to bring Ms. Fonda and others up on charges of treason.
I don't know that they used it, but the charge of "Negligent Homicide due
to Depraved Indifference" would also seem appropriate. Her obvious
"granting of aid and comfort to the enemy", alone, should've been sufficient
for the treason count. However, to date, Jane Fonda has never been
formally charged with anything and continues to enjoy the privileged life of
the rich and famous.
I, personally, think that this is shame on us, the American Citizenry.
Part of our shortfall is ignorance: most don't know such actions ever took
place. Thought you might appreciate the knowledge. Most of you've probably
already seen this by now... only addition I might add to these sentiments
is to remember the satisfaction of relieving myself into the urinal at some
airbase or another where "zaps" of Hanoi Jane's@#&#$% face had been
applied.
To whom it may concern:
I was a civilian economic development advisor in Viet Nam, and was
captured by the North Vietnamese communists in South Viet Nam in 1968, and
held for over 5 years. I spent 27 months in solitary confinement, one year
in a cage in Cambodia, and one year in a "black box" in Hanoi.
My North Vietnamese captors deliberately poisoned and murdered a female
missionary, a nurse in a leprosarium in Ban me Thuot, SouthVietnam, whom I
buried in the jungle near the Cambodian border. At one time, I was weighing
approximately 90 lbs. (My normal weight is 170 lbs.).
We were Jane Fonda's "war criminals." When Jane Fonda was in Hanoi, I was
asked by the camp communist political officer if I would be willing to meet
with Jane Fonda. I said yes, for I would like to tell her about the real
treatment we POWs were receiving, which was far different from the treatment
purported by the North Vietnamese, and parroted by Jane Fonda, as "humane
and lenient." Because of this, I spent three days on a rocky floor on my
knees with outstretched arms with a piece of steel rebar placed on my hands,
and beaten with a bamboo cane every time my arms dipped.
I had the opportunity to meet with Jane Fonda for a couple of hours after I
was released. I asked her if she would be willing to debate me on TV. She
did not answer me, her husband, Tom Hayden, answered for her. She was mind
controlled by her husband. This does not exemplify someone who should be
honored as "100 Years of Great Women."
After I was released, I was asked what I thought of Jane Fonda and the
anti-war movement. I said that I held Joan Baez's husband in very high
regard, for he thought the war was wrong, burned his draft card and went to
prison in protest. If the other anti-war protesters took this same route,
it would have brought our judicial system to a halt and ended the war much
earlier, and there wouldn't be as many on that somber black granite wall
called the Vietnam Memorial. This is democracy. This is the American way.
Jane Fonda, on the other hand, chose to be a traitor, and went to Hanoi,
wore their uniform, propagandized for the communists, and urged American
soldiers to desert. As we were being tortured, and some of the POWs
murdered, she called us liars. After her heros-the North Vietnamese
communists-took over South Vietnam, they systematically murdered 80,000
South Vietnamese political prisoners. May their souls rest on her head
forever. Shame! Shame!
( History is a heavy sword in the hands of those who refuse to forget it.
Think of this the next time you see Ms. Fonda-Turner at a Braves game )
Forwarded by:
C.C. Jordan
The Planes and Pilots of WWII Internet Magazine
http://www.worldwar2aviation.com
http://www.cradleofaviation.org - Cradle of Aviation Museum
Ed Rasimus
> Face it, you lost. Vietnamese whipped your arse real good.
For someone whose email ends in .edu, you should have access to a good
library. Take a trip down memory lane and check out what really went
on there. In particular take a look at some photos of the results of
Linebacker II and see if you can draw a chronological connection
between those eleven days and the signing of the peace accord two
weeks later.
Then put the issue of Ms Fonda and her actions during the war into a
perspective of a military involvement in your own country. Try to
envision that you are in the military (I know it's a stretch, but try)
and that you are in combat fighting for your life, or even worse, that
you've been captured and imprisoned and tortured. Now, a national
figure, a movie star comes to "visit" and results in your further
torture and propagandizement. How do you feel, or have you not a clue
about patriotism or self-sacrifice or duty, honor and country?
Ahh, I thought so.
Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (ret)
*** Ziff-Davis Interactive
*** (http://www.zdnet.com)
BUFDRVR
Just one more reason to route against the Atlanta Braves :)
BUFDRVR
"Stay on the bomb run boys, I'm gonna get those bomb doors open if it harelips
everyone on Bear Creek"
C.C. Jordan
wrote:
>On Fri, 27 Aug 1999 06:45:16 -0400, David Lentz
><dlen...@rochester.rr.com//NOSPAM//> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>Michael Kagalenko wrote:
>>>
>>> Steve Hix (se...@macol.net) wrote
>>> ]In article <7q4t19$9cn$1...@isn.dac.neu.edu>, mkag...@lynx.dac.neu.edu wrote:
>>> ]
>>> ]> Face it ; it's over, you guys lost. No use trying to re-fight it.
>>> ]
>>> ]Nobody is re-fighting anything.
>>> ]
>>> ]We just don't think that people who were part of the
>>> ]problem, who made things worse for everyone, should
>>> ]profit from their actions.
>>>
>>> But Jane Fonda didn't do anything of a kind; she protested an unjust war.
>>
>>Bull!
>>
>>Jane Fonda did not protest the war. Fonda supported the war.
>>Fonda protested United States involvement in the war. The
>>infamous picture shows Hanoi Jane seated on anti aircraft gun
>>with an North Vietnamese helmet on. Don the uniform of the enemy
>>and posing on weapon of war fully indicate that Fonda supported
>>the war from the North Vietnamese perspective. It was just the
>>American Fighting Men she despised.
>>
>>David
>
>I received this several weeks ago from Larry Durbin. It should clear
>the air as to Fonda's role and should give knuckleheads like
>pause to stop and think, inasmuch as that is possible.
Hot on the heels of my post earlier today, this arrived in my mailbox.
In the interest of accuracy I am posting it complete except the e-mail
addresses which have been disguised.
Please note that this does not exonerate Fonda. It merely dispells
some embellishments to the facts.
From: mmcgrath@%$#@#$.NET (Mike McGrath)
Sender: NAM...@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM (The NamPow List)
Reply-to: NAM...@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM (The NamPow List)
To: NAM...@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM
Hi CC: Sorry to bother you with a long message, but I thought you
needed to see a message that I sent to some folks who were
establishing web pages with completely false stories which had been
submitted to them as true stories. They agreed to stop after
learning that they had received bogus information. NAM-POW names of:
Jerry Driscoll, Larry Carrigan, and A.J. Myers have been connected,
falsely, with the below stories. If any of you see these false
stories passed around the net from group to group, please send a copy
of this message to the sender and try to get this nonsense and
slander of McCain, Driscoll, Carrigan, and A.J stopped. Thanks, Mike
McGrath, President of NAM-POWs....
(1) There is a bogus story floating around about Larry Carrigan, Jane
Fonda, torture of POWs, death of POWs, strips of paper, notes given
to Jane, etc. I just thought you should know that this is all bull
crap propagated by someone for some unknown purpose....probably to
bolster some hate against the traitorous witch. I'm not defending
her, we all hate her as much as the next person, but you need to get
your stories straight. Jerry Driscoll is my Secretary/Treasurer.
I just talked to him. Same for A.J. Myers. They had nothing to
do with the article attributed to them. They ask that we get
their names off that bunch of crap. Tonight I talked with Larry
Carrigan. He asked that we get his name off all that crap as well.
He never left a room to talk to anyone like that. No torture or
beatings to see Fonda. He was living with Bud Day, John McCain and a
bunch of hard nosed resistors during the Fonda visit...lots of
witnesses if you want to question him (or them). Larry was never near
Jane. There were never any POWs killed on account of Jane. (Did
anyone ever provide a name of one of these tortured fellows?) That
story about the notes has a nice theatric touch, but no such thing
ever happened. The only ones who met with Jane willingly, to my
knowledge, were CDR Gene Wilber and LCOL Ed Miller. One NAM-POW was
forced to go before the Fonda delegation. And I think that was
only to sit at a table for a photo opportunity. I doubt he even got
a chance to talk to her let alone slip her a note. To my knowledge,
the worst that happened to the rest of us was that we had to listen
to the camp radio (Radio Hanoi and Hanoi Hannah) with the Fonda
propaganda. It pissed us off, but I doubt you can call that
"torture." So, if you get a chance to SHUT THIS STORY DOWN to the
groups who are forwarding it, PLEASE DO SO. You can cut and paste
this paragraph is you want to. Doubters can come to me if they need
to. Mike McGrath, President of NAM-POWs. POW 30 June 67 to 4 march
73. <mmcgrath@%$#@#$.net>
(2) Next, the false stories of John McCain's conduct. Again, there
are false stories floating around the net about McCain. He was never
missing from our group for six months. He never co-operated with the
enemy. We have dozens of us who lived with and around John for his
entire time (10-26-67 to 14 March 73). Larry Carrigan, for one,
lived with or near both John and Ted Guy. Larry says Ted would never
make the statements which are being attributed to him ...and Ted
can't set the record straight because he is dead. We have dozens of
roommates who will vouch for the loyalty and courage and conduct of
John McCain. Here is a more accurate story: John had both arms and
at least one leg badly hurt on ejection. He was bayoneted near the
groin by a soldier as they were pulling him from the lake. After
three days of interrogations and no cooperation, he was near death.
They found out his father was Admiral McCain. They stopped the
interrogations, gave him medical care, brought in a French reporter
(with camera), and let him make a statement to his family that he was
alive and would recover and come home. After laying off the rough
stuff, and trying to get John to cooperate by the "good guy"
treatment for a couple of weeks, they got pissed off that he would
not give information or cooperate. So, they threw him in a cell with
Bud Day (MOH recipient) and Maj Norris Overly. McCain was in danger
of dying from maltreatment. Maj Overly had to nurse both men back to
health. From that point on, McCain resisted just as hard as any
other POW. He went through the same interrogations and
treatment. His roommates can testify to his valor and patriotism.
In short, I think that the slanderous reports by faceless people (and
some are attributed to Ted Guy...which I doubt are true) are from the
bunch who are really pissed off that McCain made a political decision
to back Clinton when Clinton decided it was time for "normalization"
of diplomatic and trade relations, and it was time to have
Ambassadorial level representation. To many, that made John a
traitor. To most, it was just a political reality. It opened the
door to better cooperation for a host of areas, including a full
accounting of the POW/MIA issue (which is still an ongoing issue
today. We have 2,060 yet to account for). If you want to get the
straight story on McCain's conduct, please contact his roommates.
Start with the Honorable Orson Swindle at <OrsonIII@&%$#%$.com>.
Thanks for helping shut down these Phony stories. Again, you can
copy this paragraph if it will help. Mike McGrath, President of
NAM-POWs.
Bottom line: Who are these guys who pretend to know who the POWs
are, what we are, how we think and thought, how we conducted
ourselves, what we said, what we did, or why we did whatever. There
are over 50 books written by or about us which pretty much detail
our ordeal. For book list, see our web site at:
<www.eos.net/rrva/nampow/nampows.html> If that isn't enough, please
contact us personally and get the straight story. Over 280 of our
e-mail addresses are on the NAM-POW web site. We also list the
300 or so Phony POWs on the Hall of Shame. But please don't
attribute anything to us that is not verified. Thanks. Mike
For those with a genuine interest to find out about us, I suggest
you get a very recently released book, 700 pages of hard hitting
researched reality, "Honor Bound," by Frederick Kiley and Stuart
Rochester (recently nominated for a Pulitzer for this work). This by
far is the most comprehensive work ever done on our ordeal. Do you
want to find out the truth about the Cuban Program, the torture, the
brutality, etc. Just pick up your phone and call the Naval Institute
at: 1-800-233-8764. Read this book first, then we'll talk to you
about real POW experiences in Hanoi... not false stories of Hanoi.
Forwarded by,
Michael Kagalenko
]
]Michael Kagalenko wrote:
]>
]> Steve Hix (se...@macol.net) wrote
]> ]In article <7q4t19$9cn$1...@isn.dac.neu.edu>, mkag...@lynx.dac.neu.edu wrote:
]> ]
]> ]> Face it ; it's over, you guys lost. No use trying to re-fight it.
]> ]
]> ]Nobody is re-fighting anything.
]> ]
]> ]We just don't think that people who were part of the
]> ]problem, who made things worse for everyone, should
]> ]profit from their actions.
]>
]> But Jane Fonda didn't do anything of a kind; she protested an unjust war.
]
]Bull!
]
]Jane Fonda did not protest the war. Fonda supported the war.
]Fonda protested United States involvement in the war.
But, without the USA there wouldn't have been any war. The South
Vietnamese dictatorship were American puppets hated by the people
they claimed to represent.
] The
Michael Kagalenko
]
]> Steve Hix (se...@macol.net) wrote
]> ]In article <7q4t19$9cn$1...@isn.dac.neu.edu>, mkag...@lynx.dac.neu.edu wrote:
]> ]
]> ]> Face it ; it's over, you guys lost. No use trying to re-fight it.
]> ]
]> ]Nobody is re-fighting anything.
]> ]
]> ]We just don't think that people who were part of the
]> ]problem, who made things worse for everyone, should
]> ]profit from their actions.
]>
]> But Jane Fonda didn't do anything of a kind; she protested an unjust war.
]
]to enemies of her country. There is a little difference, again,
]too subtle for you to understand.
Warmongers like yourself are the real enemies of America, not some
small Asian nation half a world away. If one wants to find out why
schoolboys go on shooting sprees, one needs to look no further than
continious glorification of military values by media and Hollywood.
Jane Fonda exercised one of the great American constitutional
liberties that your war propaganda made you believe you were
defendening. The visceral hate she still elicits, decades later,
demonstrate that it wasn't freedom that you were fighting for in Vietnam.
Michael Kagalenko
]In article <19990826230548...@ng-ck1.aol.com>, khre...@aol.com
](Khreriov) writes:
]
]> Fool. The armed forces didn't lose the war, the politicians did.
]> Fonda should have been tried for treason, convicted, and executed.
]>
]>
]
] Hear hear! Left to fight the war properly North Vietnam would've capitulated
]in 1-2 weeks. The US military were betrayed by the political leadership.
]regards
Well, cry me a river, mister. You clearly are unhappy you weren't allowed
to do in whole Vietnam what you did in My Lai.
Face it: you guys lost. Vietnamese whipped your arse so hard it still hurts.
]Drewe
]
]
Hollenbaugh
throughout my command today (Army PEO Aviation). The actual facts of
Fonda's actions are bad enough. No one should cloud the matter by
embellishing them. The truth, after all, is all anyone ever wanted. I'll
feed this back through the channels.
Dan H.
C.C. Jordan wrote in message <37c704a2...@netnews.worldnet.att.net>...>
(snip)
David Lentz
Michael Kagalenko wrote:
<snip>
> ]Bull!
> ]
> ]Jane Fonda did not protest the war. Fonda supported the war.
> ]Fonda protested United States involvement in the war.
>
> But, without the USA there wouldn't have been any war. The South
> Vietnamese dictatorship were American puppets hated by the people
> they claimed to represent.
Which explains the North Vietnamese conquest of South Vietnam,
millions of deaths and thousands of boat people.
David
Jon Cohen
Now where is my Metro card?.....................
Latrine Duty
to the U.S.,she began putting on a Free The Army(FTA)show outside Army
posts.She urged the soldiers to go AWOL and to sabotage equipment going
to SEA.
Steve Hix
> Steve Hix (se...@macol.net) wrote
> ]She did more than "protest", she gave direct aid and comfort
> ]to enemies of her country. There is a little difference, again,
> ]too subtle for you to understand.
>
>
> Warmongers like yourself
You have no idea of what you're talking about, and you certainly
know nothing about me.
I was not at any time supporting that war, or any number of
others since then.
> [snip rant]
*PLONK*
Michael Kagalenko
]In article <37c68b43...@netnews.worldnet.att.net>,
]Jor...@worldwar2aviation.com (C.C. Jordan) wrote:
]> On Fri, 27 Aug 1999 06:45:16 -0400, David Lentz
]> <dlen...@rochester.rr.com//NOSPAM//> wrote:
]
]> >Michael Kagalenko wrote:
]> >>
]> >> Steve Hix (se...@macol.net) wrote
]> >> ]In article <7q4t19$9cn$1...@isn.dac.neu.edu>, mkag...@lynx.dac.neu.edu
]wrote:
]> >> ]
]> >> ]> Face it ; it's over, you guys lost. No use trying to re-fight it.
]> >> ]
]> >> ]Nobody is re-fighting anything.
]> >> ]
]> >> ]We just don't think that people who were part of the
]> >> ]problem, who made things worse for everyone, should
]> >> ]profit from their actions.
]> >>
]> >> But Jane Fonda didn't do anything of a kind; she protested an unjust war.
]None of the following will have any effect whatsoever on Kagalenko,
]as it might were he intellectually honest.
Well, that's not the reason; the reason the below whining does not
move me is that those pilots were war criminals. They indiscriminately
bombed combatants and civilians alike; mussive bombings of Cambodia
are widely acknowledged to have caused the impoverisment and radicalization
of peasants, which led to seizure of power by Khmer Rouge.
After all Jane Fonda was right; they _were_ baby killers.
]
]
]> >Bull!
Richard Rongstad
> Face it ; it's over, you guys lost. No use trying to re-fight it.
>
Re-fight what? The war is over, the punishment's barely begun.
Mike Kopack
on the radio at work every night. The guys at work can't understand why I always
root against them. Lockheed has even had a couple of trips down to games and I
always pass. Mabye it's just me, but I'm just not going, nothing against the team,
it's just the ownership.
Mike
BUFDRVR wrote:
> >Think of this the next time you see Ms. Fonda-Turner at a Braves game )
>
TIMOTHY GUEGUEN
: On 27 Aug 1999, Michael Kagalenko wrote:
: > ]>
: > ]> Face it ; it's over, you guys lost. No use trying to re-fight it.
: > ]>
: > ]
: > ] Fool. The armed forces didn't lose the war, the politicians did.
: > ] Fonda should have been tried for treason, convicted, and executed.
: > Face it, you lost. Vietnamese whipped your arse real good.
: Folks...don't even bother. He's tried twice now. Trolls should be
: shot, not fed.
Frankly I tend to think Mr. Rongstad's actions border on trollery. What
better way to get people all riled up than to bring up Jane Fonda's
stupidity of yore?
tim gueguen 101867
TIMOTHY GUEGUEN
: In article <7q78lc$vmu$1...@isn.dac.neu.edu>, mkag...@lynx.dac.neu.edu wrote:
: > Steve Hix (se...@macol.net) wrote
: > ]She did more than "protest", she gave direct aid and comfort
: > ]to enemies of her country. There is a little difference, again,
: > ]too subtle for you to understand.
: >
: >
: > Warmongers like yourself
: You have no idea of what you're talking about, and you certainly
: know nothing about me.
: I was not at any time supporting that war, or any number of
: others since then.
However one defines her actions, they were naive and stupid to the extreme.
The real problem with Jane Fonda is not what she did, for we all make
mistakes, but that she's
never had the guts to come out publically and admit what she did was a
mistake.
tim gueguen 101867
TIMOTHY GUEGUEN
: I live here in South Carolina, about 100 miles from Atlanta and the Braves are
: on the radio at work every night. The guys at work can't understand why I always
: root against them. Lockheed has even had a couple of trips down to games and I
: always pass. Mabye it's just me, but I'm just not going, nothing against the team,
: it's just the ownership.
nonsense. Any team that supports that crap deserves to lose, and lose often.
tim gueguen 101867
Jussi Saari
>
> The South Vietnamese dictatorship were American puppets hated by
> the people they claimed to represent.
While the democratic people's republic up north was a free country
whose people loved their leaders, which were of course completely
independent of USSR, right?
Jussi
LesB
> But, without the USA there wouldn't have been any war.
There already was a war. It was the French who were there first - it
was called Indo-China in those days. The US just took over when the
French pulled out.
>The South Vietnamese dictatorship were American
>puppets hated by the people they claimed to represent.
Nope. They were just your usual greedy, self-seeking bastards -
corruption (and drug trafficking) was rife.
--
Smoke on. Go.
LesB
[take out one to mail]
Drewe Manton
Kagalenko) writes:
>Well, cry me a river, mister. You clearly are unhappy you weren't allowed
> to do in whole Vietnam what you did in My Lai.
>
> Face it: you guys lost. Vietnamese whipped your arse so hard it still hurts.
>
Well actually Michael, I am British so the "you guys" thing doesn't quite
apply. And as for what happened at My Lai, the only way I can express my
feelings about that little episode is to say how gratified I was that the
helicopter pilot and his crew were finally presented with the medals they so
richly deserved for placing themselves between the troops and civilians and
leveling their weapons on the troops when they realised what was happening in,
I believe, 1997. But I don't expect you to believe that.
regards
David Graeber
(LesB) wrote:
Why does this statement contradict the former one?
Surely they both are true.
DG
David Graeber
<dlen...@rochester.rr.com//NOSPAM//> wrote:
> Michael Kagalenko wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> > ]Bull!
> > ]
> > ]Jane Fonda did not protest the war. Fonda supported the war.
> > ]Fonda protested United States involvement in the war.
> >
> > But, without the USA there wouldn't have been any war. The South
> > Vietnamese dictatorship were American puppets hated by the people
> > they claimed to represent.
>
> Which explains the North Vietnamese conquest of South Vietnam,
> millions of deaths and thousands of boat people.
After having seen a couple million of your compatriots
killed, usually in horrible ways, people can sometimes
get pretty vindictive.
DG
David Lentz
Must be new math. Except the people the North Vietnamese killed
were the one the were preporting to be liberating, Go figure.
David
Michael Kagalenko
]Not only did traitor Fonda aid and abet the enemy but after she returned
]to the U.S.,she began putting on a Free The Army(FTA)show outside Army
]posts.She urged the soldiers to go AWOL and to sabotage equipment going
]to SEA.
Two thumbs up to Jane Fonda. That's what real courage is about;
defying armed and powerful in defence of what is right.
David Graeber
<dlen...@rochester.rr.com//NOSPAM//> wrote:
Oh, this is childish. First of all, the North Vietnamese
simply didn't slaughter millions of people when they took
over the south to begin with - you must be thinking of Pol Pot
or something. They did round up people they identified with
the previous regime - some of whom were indeed war criminals
of one sort or another, but most of whom were just somehow
tied to the losing side - into prison camps, and many weren't
released for many years. The camps were pretty nasty places,
and the whole thing certainly had a measure of vindictive
vengeance in it. But why am I debating with someone who
doesn't seem to know the difference between Vietnam and
Cambodia? Look: the reason there was a war in Vietnam was
because the CIA realized that the NLF would have won if they
had held the free elections promised in the international
agreements which ended the war against France. There was never
any question that the other side would have won a free
election. Maybe you should learn at least the most elementary
facts of what you are talking about before posting things
to the Internet, huh? I mean, I know it isn't common
practice, but it might be nice.
DG
LesB
>In article <37c7b0bc...@nntp.netcruiser>, one...@netcomuk.co.uk
>(LesB) wrote:
>
>> Michael Kagalenko wrote:
>>
>> > But, without the USA there wouldn't have been any war.
>>
>> There already was a war. It was the French who were there first - it
>> was called Indo-China in those days. The US just took over when the
>> French pulled out.
>>
>> >The South Vietnamese dictatorship were American
>> >puppets hated by the people they claimed to represent.
>>
>> Nope. They were just your usual greedy, self-seeking bastards -
>> corruption (and drug trafficking) was rife.
>
> Why does this statement contradict the former one?
>Surely they both are true.
Don't see what you are querying here. What contradiction are you
talking about? The statements are not mutually supportive (although
my second statement was in all probability true under the French as
well.)
Ed Rasimus
> Two thumbs up to Jane Fonda. That's what real courage is about;
> defying armed and powerful in defence of what is right.
Sometimes I really have a problem with the First Amendment.
Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (ret)
*** Ziff-Davis Interactive
*** (http://www.zdnet.com)
Drewe Manton
A particularly subtle way of saying you would like to hang him by his thumbs
and stitch his tongue to his forehead Ed!<G>
We should all chip in to buy him some toilet paper. . . . . might help to
wipe up the copious amounts of verbal diahorea this man spews forth.
David Graeber
(LesB) wrote:
The point is they are not mutually contradictory. And
there is plenty of evidence both are true, so long as you
are willing to be a "most of" before "the people they claimed
to represent."
DG
Michael
"The South Vietnamese dictatorship were greedy, self-seeking bastards;
American puppets hated by the people they claimed to represent.
Corruption and drug trafficking were rife."
Anyone who disagrees with those statements would do well to read
Chomsky's "For Reasons of State."
In that work, Chomsky analyzes the Pentagon Papers and puts them in the
familiar Chomskyian perspective.
Even without Chomsky's perspective, the Pentagon Papers contradict
nearly all of the American government's assertions concerning the war.
Many people do not know that the Pentagon Papers are the Pentagon's
secret history of the war and that they detail the massive
disassociation between what was said about the war and what was actually
done.
The fact that many, I'd guess the great majority of people, still
believe the propaganda from that era that has been debunked by the
government's own internal documents, in addition to mountains of other
evidence, should be deeply disturbing.
There were many "lessons" from Vietnam and few, if any, of the important
ones have been acknowledged, much less learned.
I think that the disconnect between the historically verifiable facts
of the conflict and the continued use of the wartime propaganda for
partisan political gain through all these years provides an example of
yet another of those lessons not learned.
When the Democrats have been attacked on issues concerning the "lost"
war in Vietnam they have always accepted the inherently false terms of
the debate rather than challenging the demonstrably false basic
assumptions necessary to their opponent's arguments.
That basic setup happens over and over again. A good example in today's
news concerns the debate surrounding the Kansas school board's decision
to allow schools to avoid teaching basic science.
Rather than stand up for rationality, Al Gore replies that he believes
that local communities should decide what is taught in schools,
regardless of the facts. This is leadership? Obviously not.
The question is how far down this road we'll travel before the wheel
turns back towards fact-based reality. Must we have the American
equivalent of an Islamic Republic first?
Michael
that is easily discernable in its mindset, is a good example of what I'm
talking about in the note below.
It's funny on another level because the truth of it is magnified a
thousand fold if you substitute "Americans" for North Vietnamese.
In addition to the implied ignorance of the facts, you can see a classic
example of an argument built on logical fallacy.
Thus, because "the people the North Vietnamese killed were the one the
were preporting to be liberating (sic)" any criticism of the U.S. role
(i.e. deterring democracy, killing millions, etc) is unwarranted.
I see so much argument out there that is built on innacuracy and
justified with logical fallacy.
If we can't do anything about that, I don't see how we can have any hope
of a decent future. It wouldn't require a great social upheaval to
require a hard curriculum in logic at various levels in the school
system. Would that help?
David Graeber wrote:
>
> In article <790y3.2361$v6.1...@typhoon.nyroc.rr.com>, David Lentz
> <dlen...@rochester.rr.com//NOSPAM//> wrote:
>
> > David Graeber wrote:
> > >
> > > In article <ucGx3.3217$r6.8...@typhoon.nyroc.rr.com>, David Lentz
> > > <dlen...@rochester.rr.com//NOSPAM//> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Michael Kagalenko wrote:
> > > >
> > > > <snip>
> > > >
> > > > > ]Bull!
> > > > > ]
> > > > > ]Jane Fonda did not protest the war. Fonda supported the war.
> > > > > ]Fonda protested United States involvement in the war.
> > > > >
> > > > > But, without the USA there wouldn't have been any war. The South
> > > > > Vietnamese dictatorship were American puppets hated by the people
> > > > > they claimed to represent.
> > > >
beverly cochran
Jussi Saari <Jussi...@mail.lut.fi> wrote in article
<37C7A116...@mail.lut.fi>...
> Michael Kagalenko wrote:
> >
> > The South Vietnamese dictatorship were American puppets hated by
> > the people they claimed to represent.
>
> While the democratic people's republic up north was a free country
> whose people loved their leaders, which were of course completely
> independent of USSR, right?
>
>
> Near as damn it, yes. (See CIA reports of 1952-6)
>
David Graeber
<beverly...@virgin.net> wrote:
The irony was they wanted to be allies with
the US - went to them even before they went to
the USSR. If the US hadn't sided with the French
colonialists, who knows what might have happened.
DG
Steve Hix
<beverly...@virgin.net> wrote:
> Jussi Saari <Jussi...@mail.lut.fi> wrote in article
> <37C7A116...@mail.lut.fi>...
> > Michael Kagalenko wrote:
> > >
> > > The South Vietnamese dictatorship were American puppets hated by
> > > the people they claimed to represent.
> >
> > While the democratic people's republic up north was a free country
> > whose people loved their leaders, which were of course completely
> > independent of USSR, right?
> >
> >
>Near as damn it, yes. (See CIA reports of 1952-6)
There was a large difference between the NVN of 1956
and that of 1968-73.
Michael Kagalenko
]
]> Two thumbs up to Jane Fonda. That's what real courage is about;
]> defying armed and powerful in defence of what is right.
]Sometimes I really have a problem with the First Amendment.
Of course you do; that's why I am saying that you are much greater
danger to the USA than Vietnamese ever were.
] Ed Rasimus
Stephen Denney
se...@macol.net (Steve Hix) wrote:
> Newsgroups: rec.aviation.military,alt.fan.noam-chomsky
> Subject: Re: Hanoi Jane caused torture of US pilots
>
<snip>
> There was a large difference between the NVN [North Vietnam] of 1956
> and that of 1968-73.
What might that difference be?
- Steve Denney
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney
"It is easier to admire a revolution when one does not know its victims."
- Jean Lacouture
141.192
>Michael Kagalenko wrote:
>> But, without the USA there wouldn't have been any war. The South
>> Vietnamese dictatorship were American puppets hated by the people
>> they claimed to represent.
>Which explains the North Vietnamese conquest of South Vietnam,
>millions of deaths and thousands of boat people.
Correct me if I'm wrong (with facts only please), but according
to my knowledge there was supposed to be a UN backed free election
in the mid 50's. Unfortunately, communists were the likely winners,
largely because they had kicked the french out of the country,
which IMHO is always a good thing to do :-]
US could not allow communists to win, and so no election in whole Vietnam
in the mid-50's. Of course it soon turned out that NV was the dictatorship
and SV was (though very, very slowly...) progressing towards a democratic
country, but it does not change the fact that letting the Vietnamese
to decide themselves there would have been one communist Vietnam
already in 1955. Propably many would be sorry later, but letting people
make their own mistakes is what democracy really means.
Kari Kamunen
RobbelothE
>Date: Mon, 30 August 1999 10:39 AM EDT
>Message-id:
><Pine.SOL.3.96.990830...@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU>
>
>
>
> se...@macol.net (Steve Hix) wrote:
>> Newsgroups: rec.aviation.military,alt.fan.noam-chomsky
>> Subject: Re: Hanoi Jane caused torture of US pilots
>>
><snip>
>> There was a large difference between the NVN [North Vietnam] of 1956
>> and that of 1968-73.
>
>What might that difference be?
> - Steve Denney
Yeah! What he said! Let's see: Ho Chi Minh in charge, Communist
government....so what DID change?
Ed
"'Twas a woman who drove me to drink,
and I never had the courtesy to thank her for it."
W. C. Fields
wnor...@my-deja.com
> Chomsky's "For Reasons of State."
>
> In that work, Chomsky analyzes the Pentagon Papers and puts them in
the
> familiar Chomskyian perspective.
>
That would be the familiar, commie rat, Chomskyian perspective in other
words? Using kommisar Chomsky's Vietnam diatribes to bolster Hanoi
Jane does make a perverse kind of sense though. If anything, Chomsky's
own shenanigans in Hanoi make Fonda seem downright centrist by
comparison. Here are transcriptions of speeches that these two
socialist utopians gave during their visits to Hanoi during the Vietnam
war.
Jane "I slept in the Lincoln bedroom" Fonda, Radio Hanoi, 1972:
http://gos.sbc.edu/f/fonda.html
Noam Chomsky, Radio Hanoi, 1970:
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/6760/nc-pro-vc.html
Bill
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
Gary Watson
have had to turn around and fight all the way back to the south - then
repeat the effort. Too bad Johnson, Kennedy and company had not read some of
the history books about Vietnam first.
Drewe Manton <dmant...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:19990828071259...@ngol01.aol.com...
> In article <7q78eu$uud$1...@isn.dac.neu.edu>, mkag...@lynx01.dac.neu.edu
(Michael
> Kagalenko) writes:
>
> >Well, cry me a river, mister. You clearly are unhappy you weren't allowed
> > to do in whole Vietnam what you did in My Lai.
> >
> > Face it: you guys lost. Vietnamese whipped your arse so hard it still
hurts.
> >
>
> Well actually Michael, I am British so the "you guys" thing doesn't
quite
> apply. And as for what happened at My Lai, the only way I can express my
> feelings about that little episode is to say how gratified I was that the
> helicopter pilot and his crew were finally presented with the medals they
so
> richly deserved for placing themselves between the troops and civilians
and
> leveling their weapons on the troops when they realised what was happening
in,
> I believe, 1997. But I don't expect you to believe that.
Stephen Denney
robbe...@aol.com (RobbelothE)
> Newsgroups: rec.aviation.military
Ho Chi Minh was in charge of the North Vietnam regime in 1956 when the
brutal land reform campaign was carried out (thousands killed, many others
imprisoned). He was also in charge for a part of the 1968-73 period (he
died in 1969). The government of North Vietnam was a totalitarian
dictatorship throughout this period. So that is why I asked, what was the
big difference between 1956 and the 1968-73 period for North Vietnam? Of
course, the war was a big difference, but the style of government and
regulation of daily life was essentially the same, it seems to me.
- Steve Denney
Michael
wnor...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
>
> That would be the familiar, commie rat, Chomskyian perspective in other
> words?
Yes, that would be the one. Even if you find argument with the Chomskian
perspective, he provides mountains of factual information from which you
can draw your own conclusions. And as I said in the above article, the
military's own secret history as well as reams of other information
about the government's lies concerning the war is damning enough.
I'm curious what you think about the facts that have been brought up in
this discussion: e.g. the U.S. canceled a democratic election, divided
the country, set up a series of corrupt puppet goverments, killed
millions, etc.
Do you not accept these facts? Do you feel that those actions were
justified and if so, for what? Do you think it was right to bomb
civilians? I'd think it would be pretty hard to argue that the ends
justified the means in the case of America's involvement in Vietnam.
Steve Hix
<Pine.SOL.3.96.990830...@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU>,
Stephen Denney <sde...@ocf.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
> se...@macol.net (Steve Hix) wrote:
> > Newsgroups: rec.aviation.military,alt.fan.noam-chomsky
> > Subject: Re: Hanoi Jane caused torture of US pilots
> >
> <snip>
> > There was a large difference between the NVN [North Vietnam] of 1956
> > and that of 1968-73.
For starters, significant differences in Soviet shipping into
Haiphong and soviet advisors in country.
Steve Davies
--
Steve Davies
England
>
> Warmongers like yourself are the real enemies of America, not some
> small Asian nation half a world away. If one wants to find out why
> schoolboys go on shooting sprees, one needs to look no further than
> continious glorification of military values by media and Hollywood.
> Jane Fonda exercised one of the great American constitutional
> liberties that your war propaganda made you believe you were
> defendening. The visceral hate she still elicits, decades later,
> demonstrate that it wasn't freedom that you were fighting for in Vietnam.
>
>
Michael Kagalenko
]In article <37C97567...@nnn.com>,
] mic...@nnn.com wrote:
]> Perhaps a little rewrite will help:
]>
]> Anyone who disagrees with those statements would do well to read
]> Chomsky's "For Reasons of State."
]>
]> In that work, Chomsky analyzes the Pentagon Papers and puts them in
]the
]> familiar Chomskyian perspective.
]
]That would be the familiar, commie rat, Chomskyian perspective in other
]words?
That is totally amazing, I mean, the ignorance of those retired military types.
Even Macnamara now says the war was a mistake, but those types are still
trying to re-fight it. Only difference, they didn't have much
luck with Vietnamese, so they now take on less challenging targets
like Jane Fonda.
NATrainer
paid for for it. Right or wroug they did as they were told and I will alway
support the troop. She didn't and is a disgrace.
Beable van
The real point is that the US Government didn't support its troops. The
Government knew that they were doing the wrong thing, but still sent all
those US servicemen and women to get killed or injured. They also killed
millions of Vietnamese who were fighting for their freedom. Supporting the
Vietnam Veterans is admirable, but you shouldn't be attacking Hanoi Jane for
it. The US Government did far worse than she ever did, and caused a lot more
death and suffering than her. You should be calling the US Government to
account for its war crimes, before it starts another war and does it all
again.
Dan Clore
> > Perhaps a little rewrite will help:
> >
> > Anyone who disagrees with those statements would do well to read
> > Chomsky's "For Reasons of State."
> >
> > In that work, Chomsky analyzes the Pentagon Papers and puts them in
> the
> > familiar Chomskyian perspective.
> >
> That would be the familiar, commie rat, Chomskyian perspective in other
> words? Using kommisar Chomsky's Vietnam diatribes to bolster Hanoi
> Jane does make a perverse kind of sense though. If anything, Chomsky's
> own shenanigans in Hanoi make Fonda seem downright centrist by
> comparison. Here are transcriptions of speeches that these two
> socialist utopians gave during their visits to Hanoi during the Vietnam
> war.
>
> Jane "I slept in the Lincoln bedroom" Fonda, Radio Hanoi, 1972:
> http://gos.sbc.edu/f/fonda.html
>
> Noam Chomsky, Radio Hanoi, 1970:
> http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/6760/nc-pro-vc.html
Bzzzzt!!!! You lose. The latter URL presents a fictitious Chomsky
speech. Chomsky in face never appeared Radio Hanoi, giving this or any
other speech.
--
---------------------------------------------------
Dan Clore
The Website of Lord Weÿrdgliffe:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/index.html
Welcome to the Waughters....
The Dan Clore Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/necpage.htm
Because the true mysteries cannot be profaned....
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!"
wnor...@my-deja.com
cl...@columbia-center.org wrote:
> wnor...@my-deja.com wrote:
> > That would be the familiar, commie rat, Chomskyian perspective in
other
> > words? Using kommisar Chomsky's Vietnam diatribes to bolster Hanoi
> > Jane does make a perverse kind of sense though. If anything,
Chomsky's
> > own shenanigans in Hanoi make Fonda seem downright centrist by
> > comparison. Here are transcriptions of speeches that these two
> > socialist utopians gave during their visits to Hanoi during the
Vietnam
> > war.
> >
> > Jane "I slept in the Lincoln bedroom" Fonda, Radio Hanoi, 1972:
> > http://gos.sbc.edu/f/fonda.html
> >
> > Noam Chomsky, Radio Hanoi, 1970:
> > http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/6760/nc-pro-vc.html
>
> Bzzzzt!!!! You lose. The latter URL presents a fictitious Chomsky
> speech. Chomsky in face never appeared Radio Hanoi, giving this or any
> other speech.
>
The historical research on the speech is attributed to "Stephen Denney,
an archivist with the UC Berkeley Indochina Center". If you care to
investigate the accuracy of the transcript, you are welcome to contact
Mr. Denney. I take it you are not denying the facts that Chomsky had
visited Hanoi in 1970. What about the text of the Fonda speech, do you
also refute that, which is in the public domain? Jane Fonda herself
has never refuted it. I measure Jane Fonda by her own words spoken to
Radio Hanoi, not by the socialist commentary of Noam Chomsky.
Bill
Stanley
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
Your argument makes no sense. Just because someone does the same thing or even worse
is no reason to over look the crimes of everyone. There are plenty of unsolved
murders in every country does that mean you let everyone go free that has committed
the same or lesser crime. Hanoi Jane is a disgrace to the US but to everyone on
this planet. It was and is easy for her to sit in the comfort of her millions of
dollars a speak of how everyone should share under the communist system and do
nothing to really help anyone.
--
Stanley
NAS Grosse Ile Web Site: http://bigfoot.com/~so
KC4DPC Beacon List Site: http://jump.to/bcn
Naval Air Station Grosse Ile mailing list. All are invited to share
and learn about the history of the unsinkable aircraft carrier.
You can join this list by going to the following web page:
http://www.onelist.com/subscribe.cgi/nasgi
Michael
wnor...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
What about the text of the Fonda speech, do you
> also refute that, which is in the public domain? Jane Fonda herself
> has never refuted it. I measure Jane Fonda by her own words spoken to
> Radio Hanoi, not by the socialist commentary of Noam Chomsky.
>
>
I'm curious what you find so objectionable in Jane Fonda's speech? It
seems very mild to me, more an act of journalism than sedition.
Why don't you blame the civilian and military leaders who ordered
bombing raids on civilians and lied repeatedly about it rather than some
actress who reported on it?
Gatt
> > ]Fonda protested United States involvement in the war.
> >
> > Vietnamese dictatorship were American puppets hated by the people
> > they claimed to represent.
>
> Which explains the North Vietnamese conquest of South Vietnam,
> millions of deaths and thousands of boat people.
STOP FEEDING THE MOTHERFUCKING TROLL!!! He's not interested in logical
discussion, he just wants to work out his post-war propaganda fetish and
if talking to the kind of puke that spit on veterans coming home from the
war is your gig, fine. But, do it somewhere OTHER than
rec.aviation.military please because this asshole is just ranting to get
attention.
-gatt
Chris Gattman
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway,'
but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies." -Mike Royko
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
RobbelothE
>Date: Tue, 31 August 1999 12:47 PM EDT
>Message-id: <37cc0...@news.codenet.net>
>
<<<SNIP>>>
>Do you think it was right to bomb
>> civilians?
As someone who flew aboard the airborne command post for 7th Air Force, I can
say categorically that:
1. We were prohibited from striking a wide variety of "civilian" targets
DESPITE the fact that according to the international Law of Armed Conflict, we
could have done so ligitimately. Examples included dams, levees, dikes.
2. Very often, the discriminator between military and civilian targets was
whether or not aircraft were being shot at from that location. Again, if N.
Vietnamese troops/VC did not abide by the Law of Armed Conflict (e.g., by
placing an anti-aircraft gun on the roof of a hospital -- a clear violation or
storing munitions in a religious site) then the allied powers were not
obligated to consider the location exempt from attack.
Ed Robbeloth
125 Missions over the Ho Chi Minh Trail
"You negotiate with your enemy by placing your knee on his chest and your
knife at his throat." -- Genghis Khan
Dan Clore
Have already been over this with both Mr. Denney and Chomsky himself.
Whatever the origin of the alleged speech, it was not given by Chomsky
over Hanoi Radio, on which he never in fact appeared. The text of the
alleged would make anyone familiar with Chomsky immediately suspicious,
as it is remarkably unlike his many writings and speeches that are
readily available.
> I take it you are not denying the facts that Chomsky had
> visited Hanoi in 1970.
No, his record of that visit is quite interesting.
> What about the text of the Fonda speech, do you
> also refute that, which is in the public domain? Jane Fonda herself
> has never refuted it. I measure Jane Fonda by her own words spoken to
> Radio Hanoi, not by the socialist commentary of Noam Chomsky.
I have nothing to say about Jane Fonda.
Michael
inclination to provide you with exhaustive research in order to answer
your questions, but I'll share what I could find with a quick Alta Vista
search, which is consistent with the facts as I know them.
Ed Rasimus wrote:
>
> I'm curious how you define "facts" as opposed to assertions.
I define facts as "things known to have occurred, or to be true."
> The "democratic
> election" promised by the Geneva Accords of 1954 was under the control of
> the ICC, not the USA. You would have to question how the USA was able to
> influence India, Poland and Canada to stop the election.
>
I've never heard the "Canada made us do it" theory, but perhaps there's
something to it. The typical history, however, is summed up below and
taken from a PBS page.
http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/history/index.html:
"The Geneva Peace Accords, signed by France and Vietnam in the summer of
1954, reflected the strains of the international cold war. Drawn up in
the shadow of the Korean War, the Geneva Accords represented the worst
of all possible futures for war-torn Vietnam. Because of outside
pressures brought to bear by the Soviet Union and the People's Republic
of China, Vietnam's delegates to the Geneva Conference agreed to the
temporary partition of their nation at the seventeenth parallel to allow
France a face-saving defeat. The Communist superpowers feared that a
provocative peace would anger the United States and its western
European allies, and neither Moscow or Peking wanted to risk another
confrontation with the West so soon after the Korean War.
According to the terms of the Geneva Accords, Vietnam would hold
national elections in 1956 to reunify the country. The division at the
seventeenth parallel, a temporary separation without cultural precedent,
would vanish with the elections. The United States, however, had other
ideas. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles did not support the Geneva
Accords because he thought they granted too much power to the Communist
Party of Vietnam. Instead, Dulles and President Dwight D. Eisenhower
supported the creation of a counter-revolutionary alternative south of
the seventeenth parallel."
> Then, you will really have to provide some basis for "killed millions"--if
> we lost 58,000, but killed millions, we should have won.
As for "killed millions, I was able to find this quote from --James
Olson, ed., The Dictionary of the Vietnam War (New York: Peter Bedrick
Books, 1987)"
"To narrow the focus to the period between 1965 and 1974 when Lyndon
Johnson's and Richard Nixon's administrations bombed North and South
Vietnam and conducted search-and-destroy campaigns of attrition,
approximately one million Vietnamese civilians were wounded by
warfare.[39] Vietnamese civilian deaths numbered around 250,000 in South
Vietnam; 65,000 civilians died in the bombing of North Vietnam. North
Vietnamese and Viet Cong military casualties comprised approximately
660,000 killed compared to 225,000 South Vietnamese and 50,000
Americans troops. The estimates of North Vietnamese wounded are still in
the "countless" category, but roughly 500,000 South Vietnamese and
300,000 American soldiers were wounded between 1965 and 1974.[40]"
Although that adds up closer to million than millions, I think it's
right to throw in a lot of the dead from Cambodia and Laos as well.
Another page, perhaps less trustworthy says:
Combatants Killed in Action: 1,382,430
Combatants Wounded in Action: 1,772,465
Combatants MIA/POW: 2,503 (Allied Forces)
Civilians Killed, Vietnamese: 2,000,000*
Civilians Killed, Allied: 1,000 (est.)
* Vietnam Govt estimates killed in Vietnam War, 1960-75:
Combatants (all sides) - 2,000,000 est.
Vietnam civilians - 2,000,000 est.
[http://www.leconsulting.com/arthurhu/index/genocide.htm] (an
interesting page)
I think it's important to note also that whoever kills the most does not
necessarily win. I've seen no evidence that we were defeated militarily
in Vietnam. Seems to me, we quit well after anybody could any longer
define what it would mean to "win." Seems to me that everybody involved
lost, except perhaps the Soviet Union which might have been able to use
the debacle to hold together for a few years longer than otherwise.
> I've got credit for 150 missions over North Vietnam and another
> 100 in Laos, Cambodia and SVN. I might not have enough experience in the air
> campaign to have recognized a policy of bombing civilians.
> Where were you and what types of bombing missions were you directed to
> fly against civilians.
I was out in the back yard running bombing missions against toy soldiers
with firecrackers. Nevertheless, I've read extensively about those times
and don't find a lot of argument that the war accomplished very much, if
anything, positive. If you can suggest some reading that would give me a
better point of view, I'll read it.
And I certainly don't mean any disrespect to you or anyone else who
fought in the war. I'm know it took an incredible amount of bravery to
fly 150 missions and I'm sure it must have hurt to have so much of the
population against you, not to mention internet brats 30 years later.
> Tell me about this policy of bombing
> civilians.
Nothing turned up in my brief search, but why did they call Nixon the
dike bomber?
> Or, just shut up.
nuff said...
David Graeber
.
> > Tell me about this policy of bombing
> > civilians.
>
> Nothing turned up in my brief search, but why did they call Nixon the
> dike bomber?
Estimates of civilian casualties of American bombing
in Cambodia alone run about 150,000. Note these were
citizens of a NEUTRAL country, and can in no wise be
imagined as dockworkers unloading war material or
anything of the sort. How exactly do you kill 150,000
people by accident? Like, accidentally completely
destroy 500 different villages or something?
Incidentally, the source you probably want to look
at about the bombings is Shawcross. He documents Nixon
and Kissinger's deceptions about what they were doing
in some detail if I'm not mistaken.
DG
Beable van
na...@thenavy.com wrote:
> This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
EWWWW! Couldn't you post in text format?
> Your argument makes no sense. Just because someone does the same thing
> or even worse
> is no reason to over look the crimes of everyone. There are plenty of
> unsolved
> murders in every country does that mean you let everyone go free that
> has committed
> the same or lesser crime. Hanoi Jane is a disgrace to the US but to
> everyone on
> this planet. It was and is easy for her to sit in the comfort of her
> millions of
> dollars a speak of how everyone should share under the communist
> system and do
> nothing to really help anyone.
But this is not an unsolved murder. The criminal
has been found: The US Government. The stories
about Jane Fonda causing the deaths of captured
US pilots have been debunked in this thread, by
the US pilots themselves.
All the US and allied servicemen and servicewomen
who died in that "police action", and all the dead
Vietnamese were directly or indirectly killed by
the actions of the US Government. All the US
Government had to do to avoid all those deaths was
to accept the peace agreement after the Vietnamese
beat the French, and let the Vietnamese have free
elections. If it didn't want a communist government
in Vietnam, all it had to do was to befriend its
old ALLY, Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh helped the USA
greatly in the war against the Japanese. How did
the USA repay him and the Vietnamese people? By
betraying them and handing the country back to
the French. Once the USA invaded Vietnam and set
up a puppet government in the south, what was
Ho Chi Minh to do? Accept a new colonial ruler
and betray his own people?
Jane Fonda didn't murder anybody. The US Government
DID. When are YOU going to stop overlooking the
murders the US Government committed, and stop
blaming the whole sorry mess on Jane Fonda?
cheers
beable van polasm
--
_____________Have_you_SMASHED_the_STATE_today?____________
S___M___A___S___H______T___H___E______S___T___A___T___E___!
__L___E___G___A___L___I___Z___E______C___R___I___M___E___!
Stephen Harding
> Estimates of civilian casualties of American bombing
> in Cambodia alone run about 150,000. Note these were
> citizens of a NEUTRAL country, and can in no wise be
> imagined as dockworkers unloading war material or
A NEUTRAL country with an extensive road network supplying
war material by the thousands of tons and personel to SVN,
and run by NON-NEUTRAL North Vietnamese.
Seems North Vietnam didn't consider Cambodia any more neutral
than the US did.
SMH
David Graeber
<har...@hobart.cs.umass.edu> wrote:
Oh, I see. So if you are an old lady who lives in
a country whose government doesn't patrol its borders
to some foreign power's satisfaction, then you
deserve to be blown to little bits. I'm sure you
would accept this logic of the old lady being blown
up was your mother.
DG
Stephen Denney
Actually, it wasn't historical research on my part. Tim Starr visited the
Indochina Archive of UC Berkeley where I work one day last year and said
he was looking for a speech Chomsky delivered while visiting Hanoi in
1970. So I looked in our files on U.S.-North Vietnam relations for that
period and found it there.
>
> Have already been over this with both Mr. Denney and Chomsky himself.
> Whatever the origin of the alleged speech, it was not given by Chomsky
> over Hanoi Radio, on which he never in fact appeared.
If you are saying he never made a speech while sitting in a radio
broadcast booth in Hanoi, then you may well be right. On the other hand,
if you are saying he never made a speech that was broadcast by Hanoi
Radio, then we disagree. The speech was published in the North Vietnam
section of the Asia-Pacific Daily Report of the U.S. Government's Foreign
Broadcast Information Service, on April 16, 1970, pages K2-K3. According
to the citation preceding the text of the speech, Chomsky delivered the
speech at an "13 April meeting welcoming the 1970 American people's spring
offensive" (which I presume were the words of the introduction on Hanoi
Radio) and it was broadcast by Hanoi at 1000 GMT April 14, 1970.
> The text of the
> alleged would make anyone familiar with Chomsky immediately suspicious,
> as it is remarkably unlike his many writings and speeches that are
> readily available.
>
In Chomsky's reply which you posted last January, he did not deny having
made the speech. Nor did he say the speech was out of character for him.
Here is what he did say, in part:
"The short answer is that I know nothing of any speech broadcast on North
Vietnamese radio 30 years ago, or ever. Hence can't comment, any more than
if you asked me about a speech I gave over BBC 30 years ago. The passage
enclosed is reminiscent of things I actually wrote at the time, touching
on the very same topics, which are easily checked -- hence not discussed."
Stephen Harding
Clearly I wouldn't be happy if my mother were blown up, whether she
were innocent civilian, or AK-47 toting People's Liberation Army
platoon leader!
Civilians were killed in Cambodia and Laos the same way they were
killed in North and South Vietnam. Not by design, since it's
generally a waste of bombs to go after civilians. The US was
attempting to get at the communists, who were using Cambodia and
Laos as routes to supply and launch attacks in the south of Vietnam.
People went nuts when Nixon "invaded" Cambodia in 1970, but there
wasn't so much as a whisper of concern about the *invasion and
occupation* of Laos and Cambodia by the communists at the same time.
Civilians never do well in a guerrilla war, nor any war where battle
lines are ill-defined.
SMH
David Lentz
Stephen Harding wrote:
<snip>
> Clearly I wouldn't be happy if my mother were blown up, whether she
> were innocent civilian, or AK-47 toting People's Liberation Army
> platoon leader!
>
> Civilians were killed in Cambodia and Laos the same way they were
> killed in North and South Vietnam. Not by design, since it's
> generally a waste of bombs to go after civilians. The US was
> attempting to get at the communists, who were using Cambodia and
> Laos as routes to supply and launch attacks in the south of Vietnam.
>
> People went nuts when Nixon "invaded" Cambodia in 1970, but there
> wasn't so much as a whisper of concern about the *invasion and
> occupation* of Laos and Cambodia by the communists at the same time.
>
> Civilians never do well in a guerrilla war, nor any war where battle
> lines are ill-defined.
>
> SMH
Rah.
President Nixon did not invade Cambodia, rather he invaded
Occupied Cambodia. Nixon no more invaded Cambodia than President
Franklin Roosevelt invaded France. The problem was not invading
the North Vietnamese sanctuary, but rather one of allowing to
exist for so long.
Henry Kissinger notes that he was in diplomatic contact with
Cambodia at the time of Nixon's secret bombing and Cambodia did
not protest the bombing. Kissenger suggested two possibilities.
One that Cambodia was not even aware of the fact that the US was
bombing her, because there were no Cambodia in occupied Cambodia,
or, two that Cambodia did not find the bombing to be
objectionable.
If Cambodia was a neutral country, North Vietnam had no right to
invade her. Once Cambodia was occupied, the US and South Vietnam
had as much right to attack enemy targets in Cambodia as any
where else.
David
Latrine Duty
Hey,DG,can I get the government to blow up my mother-in-law?I'll give
them the grid co-ordencences.
And in the end the love you take,is equal tothe noise you make.
David Graeber
<Pine.SOL.3.96.990901...@apocalypse.OCF.Berkeley.EDU>,
Stephen Denney <sde...@ocf.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
I guess in dealing with some people any tiny bit
of subtlety is impossible. If Chomsky didn't think
this was "out of character" why would he accuse you
of intentionally ignoring his published work?
Seems to me Chomsky is making a very specific and
pointed accusation here. Why are you insisting on
reproducing a piece of dubious origin, reported by
the official press of one combatant in wartime as
the supposed product of the official press of their
enemies, when there's an endless number of pieces
available which are not dubious in any way: written
by the same author, at the same time, on the same
subject, but things he definitely said and all can
attest to? The only logical reasons I can see would be
(a) you are claiming that Chomsky was being
intentionally deceptive: presumably misrepresenting
his true position in his published work but revealing
it in this propoganda piece. (Or, presumably, the
other way around but it seems unlikely you'd be
claiming that.)
(b) you are being intentionally deceptive.
I suppose reality may be somewhere between the
two - in fact, is likely to be. But I must say I
think your collaboration with ultra-fascist Tim
Starr has completely destroyed any credibility you
might have had with people (like myself) who might
otherwise have considered your arguments something
to be taken seriously.
DG
David Graeber
<har...@hobart.cs.umass.edu> wrote:
> David Graeber wrote:
>
> > In article <37CD03B0...@hobart.cs.umass.edu>, Stephen Harding
> > <har...@hobart.cs.umass.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > David Graeber wrote:
> > >
> > > > Estimates of civilian casualties of American bombing
> > > > in Cambodia alone run about 150,000. Note these were
> > > > citizens of a NEUTRAL country, and can in no wise be
> > > > imagined as dockworkers unloading war material or
> > >
> > > A NEUTRAL country with an extensive road network supplying
> > > war material by the thousands of tons and personel to SVN,
> > > and run by NON-NEUTRAL North Vietnamese.
> > >
> > > Seems North Vietnam didn't consider Cambodia any more neutral
> > > than the US did.
> >
> > Oh, I see. So if you are an old lady who lives in
> > a country whose government doesn't patrol its borders
> > to some foreign power's satisfaction, then you
> > deserve to be blown to little bits. I'm sure you
> > would accept this logic of the old lady being blown
> > up was your mother.
>
> Clearly I wouldn't be happy if my mother were blown up, whether she
> were innocent civilian, or AK-47 toting People's Liberation Army
> platoon leader!
>
> Civilians were killed in Cambodia and Laos the same way they were
> killed in North and South Vietnam. Not by design, since it's
> generally a waste of bombs to go after civilians. The US was
> attempting to get at the communists, who were using Cambodia and
> Laos as routes to supply and launch attacks in the south of Vietnam.
>
> People went nuts when Nixon "invaded" Cambodia in 1970, but there
> wasn't so much as a whisper of concern about the *invasion and
> occupation* of Laos and Cambodia by the communists at the same time.
>
> Civilians never do well in a guerrilla war, nor any war where battle
> lines are ill-defined.
Sorry. You don't kill 150,000 civilians "by accident".
There are endless reports of direct napalm attacks on the
center of heavily populated villages. This is not what
you do when you go after guerrillas hiding in the hills.
As Shawcross documents, the US were intentionally doing
high intensity bombing in the most highly populated areas
of a neutral country, directly targetting population
centers and the agricultural infrastructure (more than
half of the rice mills and draft animals in Cambodia were
killed in the bombing too, by some estimates: was that
an accident as well?) It's a classic example of Nazi-
style terror bombing, except done on a much larger scale
than the Nazis ever did. If you want to defend this sort
of thing, okay, go ahead, but it's your own humanity
you're losing in the process.
DG
David Graeber
<dlen...@rochester.rr.com//NOSPAM//> wrote:
> Stephen Harding wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> > Clearly I wouldn't be happy if my mother were blown up, whether she
> > were innocent civilian, or AK-47 toting People's Liberation Army
> > platoon leader!
> >
> > Civilians were killed in Cambodia and Laos the same way they were
> > killed in North and South Vietnam. Not by design, since it's
> > generally a waste of bombs to go after civilians. The US was
> > attempting to get at the communists, who were using Cambodia and
> > Laos as routes to supply and launch attacks in the south of Vietnam.
> >
> > People went nuts when Nixon "invaded" Cambodia in 1970, but there
> > wasn't so much as a whisper of concern about the *invasion and
> > occupation* of Laos and Cambodia by the communists at the same time.
> >
> > Civilians never do well in a guerrilla war, nor any war where battle
> > lines are ill-defined.
> >
> > SMH
>
> Rah.
>
> President Nixon did not invade Cambodia, rather he invaded
> Occupied Cambodia. Nixon no more invaded Cambodia than President
> Franklin Roosevelt invaded France. The problem was not invading
> the North Vietnamese sanctuary, but rather one of allowing to
> exist for so long.
>
> Henry Kissinger notes that he was in diplomatic contact with
> Cambodia at the time of Nixon's secret bombing and Cambodia did
> not protest the bombing. Kissenger suggested two possibilities.
> One that Cambodia was not even aware of the fact that the US was
> bombing her, because there were no Cambodia in occupied Cambodia,
> or, two that Cambodia did not find the bombing to be
> objectionable.
>
> If Cambodia was a neutral country, North Vietnam had no right to
> invade her. Once Cambodia was occupied, the US and South Vietnam
> had as much right to attack enemy targets in Cambodia as any
> where else.
And drop napalm in the middle of heavily populated villages
too, presumably. By your logic the Nicaraguans would have had
the right to nuke every city in the US where there was a contra
camp or supply network in the '80s. Actually, more right, since
the US wasn't even _trying_ to be neutral.
DG
David Graeber
Kissinger is notorious for lying about this sort of
thing. The Cambodian government under Sihanouk protested
extremely loudly and vigorously for many years.
That is, until said government was overthrown by a US-
supported coup and a puppet military regime installed under
Lon Nol. I suppose the latter might not have protested to
Kissinger privately but that would hardly be surprising
since he was installed in power for that reason. On
the other hand, they had about as much legitimacy as
the government the Soviets installed in Afghanistans
for similar purposes. The suggestion that there were no
Cambodians living in the part of the country bombed by
US forces is so completely ludicrous that it shows you
know absolutely nothing about the subject on which you
seem to feel you can make sweeping pronouncements on
the internet: first of all, there was almost no part
of the country which escaped from the bombing, so I
guess all the Khmer would have had to be hiding in maybe
13% of the country for this to be true; something like
half a million Khmer refugees flooded to the capital,
claiming they were fleeing the bomb attacks (I suppose
they all could have been lying, or all been foreigners
dressed up as Cambodians or something), etc etc.
To take just a tiny snatch of reportage
"In March 1973, the bombardment spread west to envelop
the whole country. Around Phnom Penh, three thousand
civilians were killed in three weeks. At the time UPI
reported 'Refugees swarming into the capital from target
areas report dozens of villages... have been destroyed
and as much as half of their population killed or maimed
in the current bombing raids" (Kiernan, The Pol Pot
Regime, p21)
This was something just handy on the shelf. Just
about anyone who was in Cambodia at the time reported
the same thing: the massive destruction of everything
standing in village after village, weddings and funeral
processions where hundreds of people were wiped out
at a single blow, thousands of women and children
napalmed and killed or burned horribly, stretches of
country left in complete desolation, the complete
destruction of the country's agricultural base... Maybe
you should actually find out what happened rather
than deciding what you'd _like_ to think happened
and then trying to prove that therefore, it did.
DG
DG
Stephen Harding
> Sorry. You don't kill 150,000 civilians "by accident".
I don't know what the true numbers of deaths in the Cambodian
bombings were. I doubt this is a figure attributable to bombing
alone though.
Of course you *can* kill quite a large number of people over a 4-5
year period with a very large number of bombing raids; even [largely]
by accident.
> There are endless reports of direct napalm attacks on the
> center of heavily populated villages. This is not what
> you do when you go after guerrillas hiding in the hills.
B-52s flew something like 4,000 missions over Cambodia. It was
carpet bombing because that's what B-52s largely did at that time. No
smart weaponry and jungle cover to further confuse. The napalm would
have come from smaller fighter/bomber types, that are generally used
for tactical situations, i.e. enemy positions ID'ed and attacked.
Perhaps BUFDRVR, Ed or Walt can fill in some detail.
> As Shawcross documents, the US were intentionally doing
> high intensity bombing in the most highly populated areas
> of a neutral country, directly targetting population
> centers and the agricultural infrastructure (more than
> half of the rice mills and draft animals in Cambodia were
> killed in the bombing too, by some estimates: was that
> an accident as well?) It's a classic example of Nazi-
> style terror bombing, except done on a much larger scale
> than the Nazis ever did. If you want to defend this sort
> of thing, okay, go ahead, but it's your own humanity
> you're losing in the process.
Initial bombing was around border areas. As the bombing intensified,
the NVA moved farther into Cambodia (away from the border). The B-52s
went farther in after them. Later, when the Khmer Rouge began to
threaten the Lon Nol government, the B-52s came farther in again to get
at the Khmer Rouge.
Civilians got entangled in the exchange. There likely were civilian
targets destroyed for terror effect. There likely were accidents that
resulted in deaths of civilians. An accident with todays smart weaponry
may kill a couple hundred people. An accident in a B-52 raid of 1970 (or
today for that matter) could easily kill hundreds, or even a thousand.
American troops were occasionally bombed by B-52s. Was that some sinister
campaign of terror against the US soldier?
Its easy to sit here in judgment over persons making decisions that
have *no* clean resolution to them. Respect Cambodian "neutrality" and
allow the enemy strategic and tactical advantage. Bomb Cambodia and
better protect your own people, but complicate the political/military
situation.
Sihanouk did a nice balancing job for a while, maintaining "neutrality"
that kept a status quo of no cooperation w/ US, and occupation by
Vietnamese communist forces and their use of Cambodian territory for
military operations into SVN.
Do you believe NVN has *any* culpability in the events in Cambodia?
*Only* the US is at fault? It was clearly a bad situation for Cambodia,
and the US. Both US and NVN share plenty of guilt over Cambodia, IMHO.
However, only the Vietnamese communists benefited from the military and
political events that transpired there.
SMH
Stephen Denney
David....@yale.edu (David Graeber) wrote:
<snip>
(SD):
> > In Chomsky's reply which you posted last January, he did not deny
having
> > made the speech. Nor did he say the speech was out of character for him.
> > Here is what he did say, in part:
> >
> > "The short answer is that I know nothing of any speech broadcast on North
> > Vietnamese radio 30 years ago, or ever. Hence can't comment, any more than
> > if you asked me about a speech I gave over BBC 30 years ago. The passage
> > enclosed is reminiscent of things I actually wrote at the time, touching
> > on the very same topics, which are easily checked -- hence not discussed."
>
(DG):
> I guess in dealing with some people any tiny bit
> of subtlety is impossible. If Chomsky didn't think
> this was "out of character" why would he accuse you
> of intentionally ignoring his published work?
>
I wasn't "intentionally ignoring his published work."
> Seems to me Chomsky is making a very specific and
> pointed accusation here. Why are you insisting on
> reproducing a piece of dubious origin, reported by
> the official press of one combatant in wartime as
> the supposed product of the official press of their
> enemies, when there's an endless number of pieces
> available which are not dubious in any way: written
> by the same author, at the same time, on the same
> subject, but things he definitely said and all can
> attest to? The only logical reasons I can see would be
First of all, I am not "insisting on reproducing a piece of dubious
origin." I found the document when Tim Starr visited the archive, and
after he posted it to the Chomsky group I stated my belief that it was
authentic. Most other people who are familiar with FBIS would probably
agree with me. I have also discussed his published writings in the Chomsky
group.
>
> (a) you are claiming that Chomsky was being
> intentionally deceptive: presumably misrepresenting
> his true position in his published work but revealing
> it in this propoganda piece. (Or, presumably, the
> other way around but it seems unlikely you'd be
> claiming that.)
> (b) you are being intentionally deceptive.
I expressed my opinion that Chomsky made the statement that was published
in FBIS, and cited his own response in which he said he could not recall
whether or not he made the statement and said it was reminiscent of things
he has said on the subject. How is that deceptive to you?
> > I suppose reality may be somewhere
between the > two - in fact, is likely to be. But I must say I
> think your collaboration with ultra-fascist Tim
> Starr has completely destroyed any credibility you
> might have had with people (like myself) who might
> otherwise have considered your arguments something
> to be taken seriously.
I don't agree with your characterization of Tim Starr, but it is also
irrelevant. If you came into the archive looking for a document, I would
try to help you in the same way. That is my job; and it would be
unprofessional for me not to help someone because I don't agree with that
person's view. It is not "collaboration". If this kind of attitude carries
over into your teaching, then I pity your students, at least those who
have the temerity to disagree with you.
Nathan Folkert
[snip]
> > To take just a tiny snatch of reportage
> >
> > "In March 1973, the bombardment spread west to envelop
> >the whole country. Around Phnom Penh, three thousand
> >civilians were killed in three weeks. At the time UPI
> >reported 'Refugees swarming into the capital from target
> >areas report dozens of villages... have been destroyed
> >and as much as half of their population killed or maimed
> >in the current bombing raids" (Kiernan, The Pol Pot
> >Regime, p21)
>
> I think you better check your timeline. Nixon's Cambodia incursion
> took place in the spring of 1970. I was there, sending those aircraft
> off on these missions.
Apparently the United States doesn't agree with you, or the library of
Congress is run by hippie bullshitters:
[from http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html]
:United States bombing of enemy troop dispositions in Cambodia--
:particularly in the summer of 1973, when intense aerial bombardment
:(known as Arclight) was used to halt a Khmer Rouge assault on Phnom
:Penh--bought time for the Lon Nol government, but did not stem the
:momentum of the communist forces. United States official documents give a
:figure of 79,959 sorties by B-52 and F-111 aircraft over the country,
:during which a total of 539,129 tons of ordnance were dropped, about 350
:percent of the tonnage (153,000 tons) dropped on Japan during World War
:II. Many of the bombs that fell in Cambodia struck relatively uninhabited
:mountain or forest regions; however, as declassified United States Air
:Force maps show, others fell over some of the most densely inhabited
:areas of the country, such as Siemreab Province, Kampong Chhnang
:Province, and the countryside around Phnom Penh. Deaths from the bombing
:are extremely difficult to estimate, and figures range from a low of
:30,000 to a high of 500,000. Whatever the real extent of the casualties,
:the Arclight missions over Cambodia, which were halted in August 15,
:1973, by the United States Congress, delivered shattering blows to the
:structure of life in many of the country's villages, and, according to
:some critics, drove the Cambodian people into the arms of the Khmer
:Rouge.
Regardless of my personal dislike for the fascist-Maoist policies of the
Khmer Rouge, it is hard to justify bombing a country we never declared war
on for being involved in an undeclared war against another nation with
three and a half times as many tons of ordnance as we dropped on Japan,
the scourge of the Pacific and one of the most powerful and well executed
industrialized military forces of its time.
> Sorry pal, your credibility just went down the drain. You've been fed
> a sack of aged-hippie bullshit, and swallowed the whole bag.
>
> BTW - in many cases, we don't have to "talk to someone who was there",
> or read a leftist interpretation of history to learn about this; some
> of us WERE THERE at the time in question. Rec.aviation.mil is not
> your poli sci class, taught by professors who were busy riding their
> tricycles at that point in history.
While I often agree that professors are full of shit, this is one time
when I would suspect, given the evidence, that you might be wrong,
*despite* having been there. I doubt that the Library of Congress would
have a terribly leftist interpretation of history, especially at the
height of the Reagan era when this country study was compiled. You may
disagree, and I would be pleased to hear arguments contrariwise. And even
if it did, this is hardly an interpretation. The facts are probably easy
to check -- they're declassified, after all.
> - John T., former MSgt, USAF
>
>
>
--
Nathan Folkert
nfol...@cs.stanford.edu
http://www.stanford.edu/~nfolkert
Ed Rasimus
>center of heavily populated villages.
Whoa, David, could you post some of these "endless reports". I mean, I
was flying F-4Es out of Korat in '72-'73 when most of the excess
operational capacity was no longer needed against NVN (because of
their capitulation after LB II). We flew a lot of sorties into
Cambodia.
We weren't carrying napalm. There wasn't much applicability for
napalm. It isn't a good ordinance. CBU is much more effective and less
emotional.
And, we certainly weren't targeting "heavily populated villages." All
strikes were under FAC control and that meant a Cambodian government
observer was involved. Or, the were in a free-fire zone called
"Freedom Deal" which was primarily jungle and heavily laced with
supply trails from the N.
>As Shawcross documents, the US were intentionally doing
>high intensity bombing in the most highly populated areas
>of a neutral country,
Cambodia was never considered a neutral country. A non-belligerent for
quite a long time, but never a neutral. The U.S. was active at the
request of the Cambodian government against an insurgency movement,
Khmer Rouge. And, history is fairly clear about the activities of the
KR after they gained control.
directly targetting population
>centers and the agricultural infrastructure (more than
>half of the rice mills and draft animals in Cambodia were
>killed in the bombing too, by some estimates: was that
>an accident as well?) It's a classic example of Nazi-
>style terror bombing, except done on a much larger scale
>than the Nazis ever did. If you want to defend this sort
>of thing, okay, go ahead, but it's your own humanity
>you're losing in the process.
I spent a bit of time circling over the Angkor Wat, impressed at the
civilization that could build such an edifice. I also spent quite a
bit of time dodging the 23mm and 37mm flak and SA-7s fired by the KR
out of the Wat which they knew quite well was a restricted area and
totally safe for them. They didn't seem to care at all about the
desecration of the religious site nor the possibility that their
actions might endanger the national heritage represented by the wat.
By the way David, where do you gain your knowledge of Cambodia?
> DG
Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (ret)
*** Ziff-Davis Interactive
*** (http://www.zdnet.com)
Ed Rasimus
> Maybe
>you should actually find out what happened rather
>than deciding what you'd _like_ to think happened
>and then trying to prove that therefore, it did.
Yep, David. I was there. I was overhead in Cambodia. Where were you?
PosterBoy
David Graeber <David....@yale.edu> wrote in message
news:David.Graeber-0...@drg9.anthropology.yale.edu...
> I suppose reality may be somewhere between the
> two - in fact, is likely to be. But I must say I
> think your collaboration with ultra-fascist Tim
> Starr has completely destroyed any credibility you
> might have had with people (like myself) who might
> otherwise have considered your arguments something
> to be taken seriously.
With all due respect to your debating skills, David....
You seem to be considering his arguments VERY seriously...enough to post
on and on, with ad hom attacks tossed in, gratuitously.
"Methinks he protesteth....."
Cheers.
Dweezil Dwarftosser
Graeber) wrote:
>In article <Pydz3.3523$r6.1...@typhoon.nyroc.rr.com>, David Lentz
><dlen...@rochester.rr.com//NOSPAM//> wrote:
>
>> If Cambodia was a neutral country, North Vietnam had no right to
>> invade her. Once Cambodia was occupied, the US and South Vietnam
>> had as much right to attack enemy targets in Cambodia as any
>> where else.
>
> And drop napalm in the middle of heavily populated villages
>too, presumably.
If those villages were "heavily infested" with North Vietnamese
invaders, yes, certainly!
> By your logic the Nicaraguans would have had
>the right to nuke every city in the US where there was a contra
>camp or supply network in the '80s. Actually, more right, since
>the US wasn't even _trying_ to be neutral.
Were this to occur, the Nicaraguans probably would have had a good
case for the action - at least technically, in the legal sense.
Of course, Ortega and his crew were booted as soon as they had free
elections - so it is another case where the "recognized" government
was a sham, unwanted by the population they held captive under their
particular brand of communism.
- John T.
Dweezil Dwarftosser
Graeber) wrote:
> Kissinger is notorious for lying about this sort of
>thing. The Cambodian government under Sihanouk protested
>extremely loudly and vigorously for many years.
Yep, poor Snooky was caught between a rock and a hard place.
He didn't want to lose American financial support ( I took the freedom
bird back home seated next to a Cambodian officer on his way to
training in the US ) - but he sure as hell didn't want to piss off the
NVA, either! It wouldn't take much for them to roll right over his
entire country and government, like they had in Laos. So publicly,
he made lots of noise. Privately, he continuosly required propping up
by the west.
>That is, until said government was overthrown by a US-
>supported coup and a puppet military regime installed under
>Lon Nol. I suppose the latter might not have protested to
>Kissinger privately but that would hardly be surprising
>since he was installed in power for that reason. On
>the other hand, they had about as much legitimacy as
>the government the Soviets installed in Afghanistans
>for similar purposes. The suggestion that there were no
>Cambodians living in the part of the country bombed by
>US forces is so completely ludicrous that it shows you
>know absolutely nothing about the subject on which you
>seem to feel you can make sweeping pronouncements on
>the internet: first of all, there was almost no part
>of the country which escaped from the bombing, so I
>guess all the Khmer would have had to be hiding in maybe
>13% of the country for this to be true; something like
>half a million Khmer refugees flooded to the capital,
>claiming they were fleeing the bomb attacks (I suppose
>they all could have been lying, or all been foreigners
>dressed up as Cambodians or something), etc etc.
>
> To take just a tiny snatch of reportage
>
> "In March 1973, the bombardment spread west to envelop
>the whole country. Around Phnom Penh, three thousand
>civilians were killed in three weeks. At the time UPI
>reported 'Refugees swarming into the capital from target
>areas report dozens of villages... have been destroyed
>and as much as half of their population killed or maimed
>in the current bombing raids" (Kiernan, The Pol Pot
>Regime, p21)
I think you better check your timeline. Nixon's Cambodia incursion
took place in the spring of 1970. I was there, sending those aircraft
off on these missions.
> This was something just handy on the shelf. Just
>about anyone who was in Cambodia at the time reported
>the same thing: the massive destruction of everything
>standing in village after village, weddings and funeral
>processions where hundreds of people were wiped out
>at a single blow, thousands of women and children
>napalmed and killed or burned horribly, stretches of
>country left in complete desolation, the complete
>destruction of the country's agricultural base... Maybe
>you should actually find out what happened rather
>than deciding what you'd _like_ to think happened
>and then trying to prove that therefore, it did.
Sorry pal, your credibility just went down the drain. You've been fed
a sack of aged-hippie bullshit, and swallowed the whole bag.
BTW - in many cases, we don't have to "talk to someone who was there",
or read a leftist interpretation of history to learn about this; some
of us WERE THERE at the time in question. Rec.aviation.mil is not
your poli sci class, taught by professors who were busy riding their
tricycles at that point in history.
- John T., former MSgt, USAF
Dweezil Dwarftosser
Graeber) wrote:
> Sorry. You don't kill 150,000 civilians "by accident".
>There are endless reports of direct napalm attacks on the
>center of heavily populated villages. This is not what
>you do when you go after guerrillas hiding in the hills.
>As Shawcross documents, the US were intentionally doing
>high intensity bombing in the most highly populated areas
>of a neutral country, directly targetting population
>centers and the agricultural infrastructure (more than
>half of the rice mills and draft animals in Cambodia were
>killed in the bombing too, by some estimates: was that
>an accident as well?) It's a classic example of Nazi-
>style terror bombing, except done on a much larger scale
>than the Nazis ever did. If you want to defend this sort
>of thing, okay, go ahead, but it's your own humanity
>you're losing in the process.
C'mon Dave - a smart college boy like you should have better reading
comprehension: no one here defends that "sort of thing" (unnecessarily
killing thousands of innocent civilians) - in fact, some of the folks
here just got finished putting their own ass on the line to stop the
Serbs from doing it!
You are CLAIMING that the US forces did so in South East Asia, solely
on the basis of a political writer's words - and it is the claim which
we are rejecting.
- John T.
David Graeber
(Dweezil Dwarftosser) wrote:
No, actually, when they had anything reasonably resembling
a free election the Sandinistas won (twice) - despite endless US
interferance and open funding of opposition parties, etc etc.
It was only after a decade of open and unremitting terrorism
on the part of the United States, the most powerful country
in the world, and the clear message that Nicaragua would face
nothing but continual and endless military attack by a
terrorist army which made regular habit of torturing and
slaughtering civilians, endless economic blockade and
sabotage, etc etc, with no hope of it ever ending until
they elected a government the US approved of, that the
Nicaraguan public finally buckled under and did what the
US wanted. To call this an expression of freedom is the
most abject, disgusting justification of criminal behavior
one could possibly imagine. It would be as if the US were
a weak and powerless country and Nicaragua a thousand
times more powerful, and therefore, after the US elected
a Republican administration Nicaragua didn't like, it supplied
all the Crips and Bloods in the US with an endless supply
of sophisticated weapons and told them to slaughter as many
people as they liked and destroy the US economy until a
Democratic administration was voted in; and there was
nothing we could do about it; and we defiantly reelected
the Republicans they kept it up; and then, after
about a decade of such terrorism, the electorate finally
grew sick of poverty and war and elected the Democrats,
a bunch of Nicaraguans started crowing that this was
obviously a victory for freedom. You should be ashamed
of yourself.
DG
David Graeber
(Dweezil Dwarftosser) wrote:
>
> I think you better check your timeline. Nixon's Cambodia incursion
> took place in the spring of 1970. I was there, sending those aircraft
> off on these missions.
Yes, and it was only by 1973 that they began carpet-
bombing across the country, all the way to the West,
which is what the quote said...
>
> > This was something just handy on the shelf. Just
> >about anyone who was in Cambodia at the time reported
> >the same thing: the massive destruction of everything
> >standing in village after village, weddings and funeral
> >processions where hundreds of people were wiped out
> >at a single blow, thousands of women and children
> >napalmed and killed or burned horribly, stretches of
> >country left in complete desolation, the complete
> >destruction of the country's agricultural base... Maybe
> >you should actually find out what happened rather
> >than deciding what you'd _like_ to think happened
> >and then trying to prove that therefore, it did.
>
> Sorry pal, your credibility just went down the drain. You've been fed
> a sack of aged-hippie bullshit, and swallowed the whole bag.
No, I'm talking about what people who were there at
the time, on the ground (not in the air dropping the
bombs) say. As a matter of fact, even on this group
(not the aviation group - I didn't even know this was
being cross-posted there) we had one Cambodian refugee
who swore that he had personally seen transistor
radios scattered about by American forces that turned
out to be explosive booby-traps - which struck me
as quite remarkable since previously I'd only heard
this story as something the Soviets did in Afghanistan,
where of course it was represented as the very definition
of pure evil. Now I discover they apparently got the idea
from the USA!
>
> BTW - in many cases, we don't have to "talk to someone who was there",
> or read a leftist interpretation of history to learn about this; some
> of us WERE THERE at the time in question. Rec.aviation.mil is not
> your poli sci class, taught by professors who were busy riding their
> tricycles at that point in history.
Actually, my fiancee is Vietnamese and has
acquaintance with many people who were underneath those
bombers you were so proudly dispatching. I also have
a colleague who has spent decades in Cambodia taking
testimony about what happened there: mainly to document
the crimes of Pol Pot, but he's also gathered endless
testimony on the effects of the US bombing there. It is truly sad
that people can do things like that and - apparently - not feel
the tiniest twinge of remorse. Of course I suspect people
like you are the minority. Most vets I know make it
quite clear that they feel that they were engaged in
something that was fundamentally wrong - and they were
hardly out there sending out bombers to destroy Cambodian
villages. Though I wonder: I suspect you must have some
humanity. On some level you must feel bad about killing
all those people. I would despair of humanity if I
thought someone could be responsible for all those
civilian deaths and truly be proud of having done so.
Now that I realize this is cross-posted to a group
full of people who are proud of having dropped bombs
on Cambodian villages, I think I'll be signing off now.
Debate with your own conscience if you like.
DG
Dweezil Dwarftosser
<nfol...@leland.Stanford.EDU> wrote:
>On Thu, 2 Sep 1999, Dweezil Dwarftosser wrote:
>
>[snip]
>
>> > To take just a tiny snatch of reportage
>> >
>> > "In March 1973, the bombardment spread west to envelop
>> >the whole country. Around Phnom Penh, three thousand
>> >civilians were killed in three weeks. At the time UPI
>> >reported 'Refugees swarming into the capital from target
>> >areas report dozens of villages... have been destroyed
>> >and as much as half of their population killed or maimed
>> >in the current bombing raids" (Kiernan, The Pol Pot
>> >Regime, p21)
>>
>> I think you better check your timeline. Nixon's Cambodia incursion
>> took place in the spring of 1970. I was there, sending those aircraft
>> off on these missions.
>
>Apparently the United States doesn't agree with you, or the library of
>Congress is run by hippie bullshitters:
>
>[from http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html]
My apologies to the original poster. This was a different operation.
If you're interested, try a search on the words "Kent State", which
was precipitated by reaction to the "Parrot's Beak" incursion of
Cambodia. (April/May 1970)
- John T.
Dweezil Dwarftosser
Graeber) wrote:
>In article <37cdfd6...@news.rdu.bellsouth.net>, wc...@usa.net
>(Dweezil Dwarftosser) wrote:
>> > By your logic the Nicaraguans would have had
>> >the right to nuke every city in the US where there was a contra
>> >camp or supply network in the '80s. Actually, more right, since
>> >the US wasn't even _trying_ to be neutral.
>>
>> Were this to occur, the Nicaraguans probably would have had a good
>> case for the action - at least technically, in the legal sense.
>> Of course, Ortega and his crew were booted as soon as they had free
>> elections - so it is another case where the "recognized" government
>> was a sham, unwanted by the population they held captive under their
>> particular brand of communism.
>
> No, actually, when they had anything reasonably resembling
>a free election the Sandinistas won (twice) - despite endless US
>interferance and open funding of opposition parties, etc etc.
Heheh. The old USSR had "free" elections, too. It's amazing how easy
it is to win when there's only one choice on the ballot.
Well, I *am* somewhat ashamed for having responded to what is now an
obvious troll - rather than what I thought was a rather confused
victim of revisionist history. I hope you aren't too disappointed if
you ever get to visit your "worker's paradise"...
- John T.
Nathan Folkert
> On Thu, 02 Sep 1999 02:26:36 -0500, David....@yale.edu (David
> Graeber) wrote:
>
> >In article <37cdfd6...@news.rdu.bellsouth.net>, wc...@usa.net
> >(Dweezil Dwarftosser) wrote:
>
> >> > By your logic the Nicaraguans would have had
> >> >the right to nuke every city in the US where there was a contra
> >> >camp or supply network in the '80s. Actually, more right, since
> >> >the US wasn't even _trying_ to be neutral.
> >>
> >> Were this to occur, the Nicaraguans probably would have had a good
> >> case for the action - at least technically, in the legal sense.
> >> Of course, Ortega and his crew were booted as soon as they had free
> >> elections - so it is another case where the "recognized" government
> >> was a sham, unwanted by the population they held captive under their
> >> particular brand of communism.
> >
> > No, actually, when they had anything reasonably resembling
> >a free election the Sandinistas won (twice) - despite endless US
> >interferance and open funding of opposition parties, etc etc.
>
> Heheh. The old USSR had "free" elections, too. It's amazing how easy
> it is to win when there's only one choice on the ballot.
The difference in this case, of course, is that there wasn't just one
choice on the ballot. There were actually seven, the conservative
opposition parties received about a third of the seats in the National
Assembly, and foreign observers reported that the election seemed fair. It
might be argued that the Sandanistas had great advantages over the other
parties, but it had by no means the advantages of, say, the Russian
Communist Party in its elections.
I think you are both trolls in each other's groups due to the unfortunate
cross-posting of this thread. Perhaps, if there's little left to say, we
should just allow it to die off and let military aviation and noam chomsky
move in their two independent directions...
> - John T.
Michael
Dweezil Dwarftosser wrote:
>
> Ortega and his crew were booted as soon as they had free
> elections - so it is another case where the "recognized" government
> was a sham, unwanted by the population they held captive under their
> particular brand of communism.
>
More to the point of this discssion: it's another case in which many
people still slavishly believe old government lies when the facts to the
contrary are so well-known and easily checked.
David Graeber
<Pine.GSO.4.05.990902...@elaine34.Stanford.EDU>, Nathan
Folkert <nfol...@cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Sep 1999, Dweezil Dwarftosser wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 02 Sep 1999 02:26:36 -0500, David....@yale.edu (David
> > Graeber) wrote:
> >
> > >In article <37cdfd6...@news.rdu.bellsouth.net>, wc...@usa.net
> > >(Dweezil Dwarftosser) wrote:
> >
> > >> > By your logic the Nicaraguans would have had
> > >> >the right to nuke every city in the US where there was a contra
> > >> >camp or supply network in the '80s. Actually, more right, since
> > >> >the US wasn't even _trying_ to be neutral.
> > >>
> > >> Were this to occur, the Nicaraguans probably would have had a good
> > >> case for the action - at least technically, in the legal sense.
> > >> Of course, Ortega and his crew were booted as soon as they had free
> > >> elections - so it is another case where the "recognized" government
> > >> was a sham, unwanted by the population they held captive under their
> > >> particular brand of communism.
> > >
> > > No, actually, when they had anything reasonably resembling
> > >a free election the Sandinistas won (twice) - despite endless US
> > >interferance and open funding of opposition parties, etc etc.
> >
> > Heheh. The old USSR had "free" elections, too. It's amazing how easy
> > it is to win when there's only one choice on the ballot.
>
> The difference in this case, of course, is that there wasn't just one
> choice on the ballot. There were actually seven, the conservative
> opposition parties received about a third of the seats in the National
> Assembly, and foreign observers reported that the election seemed fair. It
> might be argued that the Sandanistas had great advantages over the other
> parties, but it had by no means the advantages of, say, the Russian
> Communist Party in its elections.
There was some unfairness in TV access (though not
press access - the opposition newspaper had the highest
circulation in the country; largely, I am told, owing
to the fact they had the best baseball coverage), but
the main interference in the fairness of the elections
were the fact that the US was openly bribing opposition
parties _not_ to run so they could say the election
was unfair; plus, of course, the fact that the US had
made it clear it would continue an economic blockade and
terrorist war against the country if they voted for
the Sandinistas. How anyone can think this did not
somewhat bias the results is unimaginable: a few years later,
when an American administration so much as suggested
that they might limit foreign aid if the Israelis elected
a regime they didn't like, everyone started screaming to
high heaven that this was a blatant attack on Israeli
democracy. But if you say you will kill people
if they elect a party you don't like it isn't? Yet
the Sandinistas won the election anyway. Only after
five more years of continual blockade and military
attacks, which made it clear it was never going to end,
did the population finally "cry uncle" as Reagan liked
to put it and voted for the people they were told to.
But it's obvious this fellow doesn't know the very
first thing about Nicaragua; he just wants to live in
his preferred fantasy land. If a party he didn't like
won the election, it was unfair. That's all the evidence
he needs. If a party he doesn't like loses the election,
that's "free and fair", for that reason...
> > Well, I *am* somewhat ashamed for having responded to what is now an
> > obvious troll - rather than what I thought was a rather confused
> > victim of revisionist history. I hope you aren't too disappointed if
> > you ever get to visit your "worker's paradise"...
>
> I think you are both trolls in each other's groups due to the unfortunate
> cross-posting of this thread. Perhaps, if there's little left to say, we
> should just allow it to die off and let military aviation and noam chomsky
> move in their two independent directions...
Yes. This fellow is living in his own fantasy world. I guess
for the sake of his conscience he'd have to be, considering
he's a man who by his own admission dispatched endless
bombing raids on Cambodia, and is - in that same distanced,
impersonal sense of someone like Eichmann - responsible
for the death of thousands of innocent civilians who he never
had to meet. Let him stay there. Any subsequent responses
will have the "aviation" group cut out.
DG
Tim Starr
David....@yale.edu (David Graeber) wrote:
>In article
>
<Pine.SOL.3.96.990901...@apocalypse.OCF.Berkeley.EDU>,
> Stephen Denney <sde...@ocf.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
[snip of discussion referring to: Noam Chomsky, Radio Hanoi, 1970,
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/6760/nc-pro-vc.html, in
which Liar Clore denies that Chomsky made the speech found in the URL
above, & UC Berkeley Indochina Archivist Stephen Denney authenticates
it.]
>>>Have already been over this with both Mr. Denney and Chomsky
>>>himself. Whatever the origin of the alleged speech, it was not
>>>given by Chomsky over Hanoi Radio, on which he never in fact
>>>appeared.
This is a novel, but still pathetic, excuse by Liar Clore. If Chomsky
had made a speech in 1943 in Berlin, saying things about how "The German
people must win, the German people must win, because yours is the cause
of humanity, justice, & economic development," & this speech had then
been broadcast on Radio Berlin a few days later, that would do nothing
to mitigate the evil of the act Chomsky had committed.
Chomsky gave moral support to one of the most evil tyrannies the world
has ever seen, that of the Viet Cong, the Stalinist regime of North
Vietnam, during a war which had been started by the Viet Cong's
aggression against South Vietnam, in which Chomsky's own country, the
USA, was allied with South Vietnam & in which Chomsky's fellow
countrymen were fighting & dying to defend South Vietnam against
murderous Viet Cong aggression.
Back to Graeber's pathetic evasions:
>I guess in dealing with some people any tiny bit of subtlety is
>impossible. If Chomsky didn't think this was "out of character" why
>would he accuse you of intentionally ignoring his published work?
Easy: to change the subject from Chomsky's moral support for a
totalitarian Stalinist regime in a speech he gave in enemy territory,
where he never thought it would reach Western ears, to the
rationalizations for the totalitarian regimes he's supported which he's
published for public consumption in the USA.
>Seems to me Chomsky is making a very specific and pointed accusation
>here. Why are you insisting on reproducing a piece of dubious origin,
>reported by the official press of one combatant in wartime as the
>supposed product of the official press of their enemies, when there's
>an endless number of pieces available which are not dubious in any
>way: written by the same author, at the same time, on the same
>subject, but things he definitely said and all can attest to? The
>only logical reasons I can see would be
>
>(a) you are claiming that Chomsky was being intentionally deceptive:
>presumably misrepresenting his true position in his published work but
>revealing it in this propoganda piece. (Or, presumably, the other way
>around but it seems unlikely you'd be claiming that.)
Precisely.
>(b) you are being intentionally deceptive.
>
>I suppose reality may be somewhere between the two - in fact, is
>likely to be. But I must say I think your collaboration with
>ultra-fascist Tim Starr...
LOL! Me, "ultra-fascist"? That seems to be Graeber's euphemism for
"anti-Communist." For the record, I'm just as anti-Fascist as I am
anti-Communist. I support freedom of conscience, of expression, the
right to self-defense, the right to private property, the right to
personal liberty, etc. Fascism supports none of these rights.
Graeber only calls me an "ultra-fascist" because I don't feel sorry for
the Viet Cong because they eventually got some of what they dished out
to others through the CIA's Operation Phoenix program. The Viet Cong
had been murdering their political opponents for decades by the time the
Provincial Reconnaissance Units targeted them for the same kind of
treatment. It's just too bad the PRUs weren't even more successful than
they were.
Tim Starr
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
Tim Starr
"PosterBoy" <bra...@bigfoot.com> wrote:
>
>David Graeber <David....@yale.edu> wrote in message
>news:David.Graeber-0...@drg9.anthropology.yale.edu...
>
>>likely to be. But I must say I think your collaboration with ultra-
>>fascist Tim Starr has completely destroyed any credibility you might
>>have had with people (like myself) who might otherwise have
>>considered your arguments something to be taken seriously.
>
>considering his arguments VERY seriously...enough to post on and on,
>with ad hom attacks tossed in, gratuitously. "Methinks he
>protesteth....."
Tee-hee. Is Graeber fooling anyone? He's not even fooling Liar Clore,
because Clore's just one of Graeber's co-conspirators. They both know
they're lying, they just won't admit it publicly.
PosterBoy
> In article <37cdffd3...@news.rdu.bellsouth.net>, wc...@usa.net
> (Dweezil Dwarftosser) wrote:
>
> >
> > I think you better check your timeline. Nixon's Cambodia incursion
> > took place in the spring of 1970. I was there, sending those aircraft
> > off on these missions.
>
> bombing across the country, all the way to the West,
> which is what the quote said...
>
> >
> > > This was something just handy on the shelf. Just
> > >about anyone who was in Cambodia at the time reported
> > >the same thing: the massive destruction of everything
> > >standing in village after village, weddings and funeral
> > >processions where hundreds of people were wiped out
> > >at a single blow, thousands of women and children
> > >napalmed and killed or burned horribly, stretches of
> > >country left in complete desolation, the complete
> > >destruction of the country's agricultural base... Maybe
> > >you should actually find out what happened rather
> > >than deciding what you'd _like_ to think happened
> > >and then trying to prove that therefore, it did.
> >
> > Sorry pal, your credibility just went down the drain. You've been fed
> > a sack of aged-hippie bullshit, and swallowed the whole bag.
>
> No, I'm talking about what people who were there at
> the time, on the ground (not in the air dropping the
> bombs) say. As a matter of fact, even on this group
> (not the aviation group - I didn't even know this was
> being cross-posted there)
With all due respect, David.......
BULLSHIT.
Your credibility continues a downward trend.
You posted the above almost one half-hour after the example
below...it's on the record, David...too late for you to pull one of your
"cancel" jobs.
In other words, your claim of "I didn't know" is disallowed...now
that the facts are in evidence.
You DID know!!! And did nothing to avoid it. Is that petard yours?
Thurgood Marshall.
From: David....@yale.edu (David Graeber)
Newsgroups: rec.aviation.military,alt.fan.noam-chomsky
Subject: Re: Hanoi Jane caused torture of US pilots
Date: Thu, 02 Sep 1999 02:26:36 -0500
Organization: Yale University
Lines: 62
Message-ID: <David.Graeber-0...@net231-230.its.yale.edu>
References: <19990826210858...@ng-bg1.aol.com>
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<David.Graeber-0...@drg9.anthropology.yale.edu>
<37cdfd6...@news.rdu.bellsouth.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: net231-230.its.yale.edu
Xref: newshub1.home.com rec.aviation.military:30137481
alt.fan.noam-chomsky:30031176
In article <37cdfd6...@news.rdu.bellsouth.net>, wc...@usa.net
(Dweezil Dwarftosser) wrote:
> On Wed, 01 Sep 1999 15:35:37 -0500, David....@yale.edu (David
> Graeber) wrote:
>
> >In article <Pydz3.3523$r6.1...@typhoon.nyroc.rr.com>, David Lentz
> ><dlen...@rochester.rr.com//NOSPAM//> wrote:
> >
> >> If Cambodia was a neutral country, North Vietnam had no right to
> >> invade her. Once Cambodia was occupied, the US and South Vietnam
> >> had as much right to attack enemy targets in Cambodia as any
> >> where else.
> >
> > And drop napalm in the middle of heavily populated villages
> >too, presumably.
/\/\/\/\/\/ much more text snipped /\/\/\/\/\
Dick Latshaw
David....@yale.edu (David Graeber) wrote:
> Any subsequent responses
> will have the "aviation" group cut out.
Thank God these loony tunes are going back where they came from.
--
Regards,
Dick
PosterBoy
> In article
> <Pine.GSO.4.05.990902...@elaine34.Stanford.EDU>, Nathan
> Folkert <nfol...@cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 2 Sep 1999, Dweezil Dwarftosser wrote:
> >
> > > Graeber) wrote:
> > >
> > > >In article <37cdfd6...@news.rdu.bellsouth.net>, wc...@usa.net
> > > >(Dweezil Dwarftosser) wrote:
> > >
> will have the "aviation" group cut out.
A wise choice, David.
One which will be much appreciated in this place. It is a place alien
to your doctrine. It is, for the most part, an honorable place...despite
the few who visit to try to make it a forum for their ideological rants.
It is alien to you, also, because most readers/posters here respect the
fact that the NG is dedicated to military aviation, not Ivory Tower
sophistry.
I do believe you will be much happier, back watching others rolling some
old bones. Here on RAM, the folks are alive.
Cheers.
Gatt
> to mitigate the evil of the act Chomsky had committed.
>
> Chomsky gave moral support to one of the most evil tyrannies the world
> has ever seen, that of the Viet Cong, the Stalinist regime of North
> Vietnam, during a war which had been started by the Viet Cong's
> aggression against South Vietnam, in which Chomsky's own country, the
> USA, was allied with South Vietnam & in which Chomsky's fellow
> countrymen were fighting & dying to defend South Vietnam against
> murderous Viet Cong aggression.
This only applies if you believe in a sense of country. Chomsky did only
one wrong; after all, as an American citizen it's his right by us to say
whatever he wants even if it's against American citizens. If he and Jane
wanted to go over there and support the VC, and NVA and the communists,
that's both his American and human right.
The "act of evil" Chomsky committed was returning to the United States and
living within the social and political freedoms supported by the people
and the government of the country that he spoke out against. He
should've stayed among the North Vietnamese right along with Fonda and
excercised his freedoms there.
Hell...maybe they could have banded together and spoken out at Tieneman
Square or gone off and protested Afghanistan. It's a pretty low
lifeform that condems and undermines something and then returns to suck
from its tit.
-gatt
>
> Back to Graeber's pathetic evasions:
>
> >I guess in dealing with some people any tiny bit of subtlety is
> >impossible. If Chomsky didn't think this was "out of character" why
> >would he accuse you of intentionally ignoring his published work?
>
> Easy: to change the subject from Chomsky's moral support for a
> totalitarian Stalinist regime in a speech he gave in enemy territory,
> where he never thought it would reach Western ears, to the
> rationalizations for the totalitarian regimes he's supported which he's
> published for public consumption in the USA.
>
> >Seems to me Chomsky is making a very specific and pointed accusation
> >here. Why are you insisting on reproducing a piece of dubious origin,
> >reported by the official press of one combatant in wartime as the
> >supposed product of the official press of their enemies, when there's
> >an endless number of pieces available which are not dubious in any
> >way: written by the same author, at the same time, on the same
> >subject, but things he definitely said and all can attest to? The
> >only logical reasons I can see would be
> >
> >(a) you are claiming that Chomsky was being intentionally deceptive:
> >presumably misrepresenting his true position in his published work but
> >revealing it in this propoganda piece. (Or, presumably, the other way
> >around but it seems unlikely you'd be claiming that.)
>
> Precisely.
>
> >(b) you are being intentionally deceptive.
> >
> >I suppose reality may be somewhere between the two - in fact, is
> >likely to be. But I must say I think your collaboration with
> >ultra-fascist Tim Starr...
>
> LOL! Me, "ultra-fascist"? That seems to be Graeber's euphemism for
> "anti-Communist." For the record, I'm just as anti-Fascist as I am
> anti-Communist. I support freedom of conscience, of expression, the
> right to self-defense, the right to private property, the right to
> personal liberty, etc. Fascism supports none of these rights.
>
> Graeber only calls me an "ultra-fascist" because I don't feel sorry for
> the Viet Cong because they eventually got some of what they dished out
> to others through the CIA's Operation Phoenix program. The Viet Cong
> had been murdering their political opponents for decades by the time the
> Provincial Reconnaissance Units targeted them for the same kind of
> treatment. It's just too bad the PRUs weren't even more successful than
> they were.
>
> Tim Starr
>
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
>
>
Chris Gattman
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway,'
but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies." -Mike Royko
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Graeber
<bra...@bigfoot.com> wrote:
> > Yes. This fellow is living in his own fantasy world. I guess
> > for the sake of his conscience he'd have to be, considering
> > he's a man who by his own admission dispatched endless
> > bombing raids on Cambodia, and is - in that same distanced,
> > impersonal sense of someone like Eichmann - responsible
> > for the death of thousands of innocent civilians who he never
> > had to meet. Let him stay there. Any subsequent responses
> > will have the "aviation" group cut out.
>
>
> A wise choice, David.
> One which will be much appreciated in this place. It is a place alien
> to your doctrine. It is, for the most part, an honorable place...despite
> the few who visit to try to make it a forum for their ideological rants.
> It is alien to you, also, because most readers/posters here respect the
> fact that the NG is dedicated to military aviation, not Ivory Tower
> sophistry.
>
> I do believe you will be much happier, back watching others rolling some
> old bones. Here on RAM, the folks are alive.
Well, if your idea of being alive is sitting around
proudly reminiscing about maiming and mutilating
innocent peasants, you probably have a point. And
if you call "honor" making up excuses for such
behavior - well, I only wish someday you could stand
face to face with some of the people who were
underneath said bombs, as I have occasionally done
(actually, more often members of their families...)
and see how honorable you feel about that. Me, I
have much better things to think about. Bye.
DG
PosterBoy
> > > for the sake of his conscience he'd have to be, considering
> > > he's a man who by his own admission dispatched endless
> > > bombing raids on Cambodia, and is - in that same distanced,
> > > impersonal sense of someone like Eichmann - responsible
> > > for the death of thousands of innocent civilians who he never
> > > had to meet. Let him stay there. Any subsequent responses
> > > will have the "aviation" group cut out.
> >
> >
> > A wise choice, David.
> > One which will be much appreciated in this place. It is a place
alien
> > to your doctrine. It is, for the most part, an honorable
place...despite
> > the few who visit to try to make it a forum for their ideological rants.
> > It is alien to you, also, because most readers/posters here respect
the
> > fact that the NG is dedicated to military aviation, not Ivory Tower
> > sophistry.
> >
> > I do believe you will be much happier, back watching others rolling
some
> > old bones. Here on RAM, the folks are alive.
>
> proudly reminiscing about maiming and mutilating
> innocent peasants, you probably have a point. And
> if you call "honor" making up excuses for such
> behavior - well, I only wish someday you could stand
> face to face with some of the people who were
> underneath said bombs, as I have occasionally done
> (actually, more often members of their families...)
> and see how honorable you feel about that. Me, I
> have much better things to think about. Bye.
Well....
Before you leave this pale......
Aren't you the David Graeber who, a short time ago, promised he
would't cross-post any longer--now that he has "found out" he has been doing
so? But has continued the practice, even unto your most current post?
And while we are on the subject....
Are you now admitting...since I provided the documentation here...that
your claim of "I didn't know" was a fabrication, that you now acknowledge it
as such, apologize for the untruth?
When you respond to a post, Dave, YOU determine its distribution.
With reference to your latest accusations, please give even a single
instance wherein I:
a) said "..sitting around proudly reminiscing about maiming and
mutilating innocent peasants" is my "idea of being alive", or:
b) called "honor" 'making up excuses for such behavior'.
Or were these further lies?
I do think you'd be much more comfortable spreading your falsehoods
among postpubescents who haven't yet been there, done that. You are out of
your element, here, intellectually too challenged to cope with folks who
know their subject.
This is an international NG. There are folks here who hate their own
countries as much as you appear to hate the one that gives you succor. And
who hate your country almost as much as you do. But most of them are also
capable of discussing military aviation with some intelligence...a faculty
you seem incapable of demonstrating...and this gives them pissing rights
here on RAM.
Ezra Cornell...never an Aggie.
Tarver Engineering
Dweezil Dwarftosser <wc...@usa.net> wrote in message
news:37cdffd3...@news.rdu.bellsouth.net...
> On Wed, 01 Sep 1999 16:05:43 -0500, David....@yale.edu (David
> Graeber) wrote:
>
<snip>
> > "In March 1973, the bombardment spread west to envelop
> >the whole country. Around Phnom Penh, three thousand
> >civilians were killed in three weeks. At the time UPI
> >reported 'Refugees swarming into the capital from target
> >areas report dozens of villages... have been destroyed
> >and as much as half of their population killed or maimed
> >in the current bombing raids" (Kiernan, The Pol Pot
> >Regime, p21)
>
> I think you better check your timeline. Nixon's Cambodia incursion
> took place in the spring of 1970. I was there, sending those aircraft
> off on these missions.
My brother was in Viet Nam as an Airborne Ranger and still claims this was
the right move because no more Rangers in his Company died after that.
John
Dan Clore
As a matter of fact David and I are CLAIMING this based both on the
testimony of the victims (Cambodian peasants) and of the perpetrators,
revealed in documents released under FOIA (see Shawcross's _Sideshow_
for maps of the bombing). To those who have done even a minimal amount
of research on the subject, there is really no doubt that the US
intentionally slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent peasants.
--
---------------------------------------------------
Dan Clore
The Website of Lord We˙rdgliffe:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/index.html
Welcome to the Waughters....
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