Bush Gets Away with Lies, Lies and More Lies in History-Illiterate America

[EV_Ares]

George Bush and other Iraq War supporters have argued that if we withdraw from Iraq the result will be like the killing fields of Cambodia -- an odd comparison considering that the US has direct responsibility for that holocaust.

Here are the facts:

The killing fields were real. The genocide against their own people was committed by the Khmer Rouge.

The Vietnamese -- the Communist Vietnamese -- were the people who went in and put a stop to it.

The United States then supported the Khmer Rouge.

Here's how that came to happen.

The United States got involved in the war in Vietnam in an attempt to keep South Vietnam from going communist. Which it would have if nationwide elections had been held as promised.

Cambodia is next to Vietnam. It was ruled by Prince Sihanouk. He attempted to be neutral. Both sides abused that neutrality.

The North Vietnamese send arms, support and men through Cambodia on the "Ho Chi Minh Trail" to go around South Vietnamese and American forces. They also used Cambodian ports.

The United States, which was not at war with Cambodia, officially or unofficially, secretly sent armed forces into Cambodia to interrupt North Vietnamese use of that route. In 1969, Nixon began a campaign of carpet bombing sections of Cambodia. Ultimately about 750,000 Cambodians were killed by the bombings (though the numbers are hard to verify.)


(rest of the article @ link)

http://www.alternet.org/audits/60764/

[Lifelong Protester]

1. Yeah, this guy shows what a legacy Yalie

can do with a great C average in history.

And I understand your big picture also. This country is full of history illiterates, and that is one of our Achilles' heels. People who do not study history, do not understand history, make democracy vulnerable.

Now let's see who is going to win "America's Got Talent" or who is "Smarter than a Fifth Grader..."

[Peace Patriot]

2. Just want to remind everyone that 56% of the American people opposed the Iraq War (Feb 03),

just before the invasion, because they HAD learned the lessons of history!

But the assholes in Washington DC didn't listen to the wisdom of the people and just did their genocide thing anyway. Why were they so smug and murderous and oblivious? I'll get to that in a moment.

56% is a significant majority. It would be a landslide in a presidential election (and believe me, it was). This was after Colin Powell's speech (late Feb 03; his speech was on Feb 5), and just before "shock and awe" (a hundred thousand Iraqis slaughtered, according to the British doctors' report). NYT poll 56%. Other polls 54% to 55%. Bet you didn't know that back then (or maybe even now). Drowned out in the non-stop war propaganda from all war profiteering corporate news monopolies (including the NYT--who cares what the American people think--bury it!). And it's interesting cuz that 56% had to include SOME folks who believed that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and/or had something to do with 9/11. (50% of the American people believed these things.) I love this part of it. It means that embedded in the significant majority of Americans who opposed the war, some Americans were struggling to sort out truth from fiction, didn't trust Bush, and concluded that, if he had WMDs, they were not much of a threat, or if he had something to do with 9/11, it was minor--and neither thing was worth a war!

Of that 56%, about half were against the war outright, and the other half would only agree if it were a UN peacekeeping mission--i.e., international consensus (which never happened, because most leaders in the world knew it was shit).

You may not have heard of that early significant (56%) opposition to the war, but our corrupt political establishment was well aware of it. Along with the Iraq War Resolution (IWR), in the same month (October 2002), they passed the so-called "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA). The two things are closely related. The IWR guaranteed unjust war. The HAVA provided the means to shove that unjust war down the throats of the American people--56% of whom knew their history--by fast-tracking highly insecure and insider hackable electronic voting machines all over the country, run on "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls, no controls on lavish lobbying, no testing procedures in place, and in many states (1/3 of them) NO paper trail whatsoever (unauditable, unrecountable), with only a 1% audit (extremely inadequate) in the best states.

This "trade secret" vote counting system was made to order for election fraud. Stalin would be proud. ("Those who vote decide nothing. Those who COUNT the votes decide everything." --attributed to Josef Stalin)

Happened in 2004. Happened again in 2006. Both times to FORCE CONTINUATION of the unjust and heinous war in Iraq, in spite of a significant majority of Americans opposed to it from the beginning, and now, an epic-sized opposition of SEVENTY PERCENT of the American people opposed to this war. Our corrupt political establishment--both party leaderships--knew the opposition was big in the beginning, and would only grow, as the disgusting nature of this war was inevitably exposed, by word of mouth, the internet, from foreign news sources and from the soldiers themselves. It was to defeat that great peace-minded, justice-minded, overwhelming American majority--Americans with Vietnam in living memory, Americans who know their history, smart Americans, Americans with common sense--that "trade secret" vote counting was devised and hurried along, with a $3.9 billion federal boondoggle, in time for the 2004 election.

The American people have shown an AMAZING resistance to the relentless, 24/7 warmongering and fascist propaganda that they have been subjected to. 70% is a staggering majority. Their vulnerability was that they still believed that their democracy could be made to work. And extraordinary measures were taken--a total "black hole" in the "news"--to keep them in the dark on the fraudulent election system that had been rushed into place in almost every state. Horribly, the Democratic Party leadership not only supported "trade secret" vote counting, they have been pivotal in keeping the American people ignorant of what had been done to our election system.

Shit-for-brains' lame and despicable reference to Vietnam the other day highlights what our vile political establishment was up against, in shoving Vietnam II down our throats. They were up against the MEMORY and the INTELLIGENCE of the American people. And we are such a big and potentially rebellious country--with a revolutionary history (the fight for independence, the anti-slavery movement, the labor movement, the anti-robber baron movement, the women's suffrage movement, the anti-segregation movement, the UN movement (no more WWs), and the multiple movements of the 60s--black civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, disabled rights, anti-Vietnam war, anti-consumerism, environmentalism--and we are such an important potential check on the power of global corporate predators and war profiteers, that SPECIAL METHODS OF CONTROL, designed just for us, have been implemented, with "trade secret" vote counting, put in place under the radar of the American people, as the main operative mechanism of this fascist coup, the first in our history.

A very important second mechanism is total fascist/corporate control of news and opinion. And it, too, is a sneaky mechanism. The utter crap that is shoved at us, as news and opinion, is not intended to convince us. It is intended to DEMORALIZE us--to make us think that the REST OF THE COUNTRY has gone fascist, when nothing could be further from the truth. WE, the peace-minded, justice-minded Americans, are the majority--yet most of us feel isolated and alone, as if we were members of the minority. They give a BIG TRUMPET to the rightwing way out of proportion to its numbers. And we have to listen to/watch this crap day in, day out. The views of the MAJORITY received almost no representation. We have had to invent our media--such as DU, Truthout, AAR and all the rest--to counter this barrage of FALSE American news and views.

The corporate news monopolies have been a colossal failure at convincing us of anything. But that has not been their purpose. Their purpose is to make us feel POWERLESS. We can't elect who we want, and we have nothing to say about that or anything else. It is a devastating one-two punch to our morale as citizens and progressives.

Analyzing it helps, though. And our democracy is far from dead. It lives on in our hearts, in our passion to get out country back. It lives on in the astonishing election reform movement, and in the persistent impeachment movement, and in the courageous anti-war movement. It lives on in new democracy projects of all kinds.

I will never forget that 56% against the Iraq War in Feb 03. There are many other stats that have indicated a far different and better America than could be seen in the propaganda media. But that one really sticks with me--as an important fact in analyzing election fraud, as an emotional watershed in my own life (helping me to see that the problem was not with the people, but with the government and corporate rule), and, most of all, as a pointer to strategy. Our first task must be to restore transparent vote counting. The American people will do the rest.

[EV_Ares]

3. Thanks for that post. You know, the one thing that really scares me

in our country is the "corporate media"; the power and influence of the people they have. We or some of us tend to be lazy and just take what we read in an article or hear on the radio and tv & go no further in checking it or the resource(s) out.

I do believe we are not doing enough on the history issue though as well. History is so very important to know in going forward in our lives.

I keep trying to be optimistic.

I think the video of Cheney a few years back in an interview telling why we should not invade Baghdad should get a lot more coverage but notice how it has disappeared.