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I’d like to talk a little bit about the War in the Persian Gulf. Big doings in the Persian Gulf. You know my favourite part of that war? It’s the first war we ever had that was on every channel plus cable. And the war got good ratings too, didn’t it? Got good ratings. Well, we like war. We like war. We are a warlike people. We like war because we’re good at it. And d’ya know why we’re good at it? ’Cause we get a lot of practice. This country is only 200 years old and already we’ve had ten major wars. We average a major war every twenty years in this country. So we’re good at it. And it’s a good thing we are, we’re not very good at anything else any more. Hah? We can’t build a decent car. We can’t build a decent TV set or a VCR worth a fuck, got no steel industry left, can’t educate our young people, can’t get healthcare for the old people, but we can bomb the shit out of your country, all right ... Especially if your country is full of brown people. Oh we like that, don’t we? That’s our hobby. That’s our new job in the world – bombing brown people! Iraq, Panama, Granada, Libya, you got some brown people in your country, tell em to watch the fuck out! Or we’re goddamn bomb them! ... Now you probably noticed I don’t feel about that war the way we were told, the way we were supposed to feel about that war, the way we were ordered and instructed by the United States government to feel about that war – you see, I tell ya, my mind doesn’t work that way – I got this real moron thing I do – it’s called thinking. And I’m not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions! I don’t just roll over when I’m told to. Sad to say most Americans just roll over on command – not me. I have certain rules I live by. My first rule – I don’t believe anything the government tells me. Nothing! Zero! Nope! And I don’t take very seriously the media or the press in this country, who in the case of the Persian War were nothing more than unpaid employees of the Department of Defense, and who most of the time, most of the time, functioned as a kind of... unofficial public relations agency for the United States government. So I don’t listen to them. I don’t really believe in my country. And I got to tell you, folks, I don’t get all choked up about yellow ribbons and American flags – I consider them to be symbols – and I mean symbols – to the simple-minded. Me, I look at war a little bit differently. To me war is a lot of prick waving, OK? A simple thing, OK? A whole lot of men standing in a field waving their pricks at each other ... It’s called dick-fear ... Basically, men are killing each other in order to improve their self-esteem ... the bombs and the rockets and the bullets are all shaped like dicks. It’s a subconscious need to project the penis into other people’s affairs. It’s called fucking with people! So, as far as I’m concerned, that whole thing in the Persian Gulf was nothing more a big prick-waving dick-fight ... What did we do in Vietnam? We pulled out … George Carlin, We Like War
For much of my lifetime the American media has been tightly controlled by a handful of corporations whose main task since 1945 was to terrify Americans into believe the Russians were coming and so we needed more missiles and nuclear warheads and submarines. They have had decades to create a false reality. Gore Vidal, speech World Political Forum, Venice, cited: Gore Vidal: United States of Amnesia
We don’t have a republic. There’s nothing left. Gore Vidal
The dirty little secret is that both Houses of Congress are irrelevant. America’s domestic policy is now being run by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve. America’s foreign policy is now being run by the International Monetary Fund. When the President decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress. Robert Reich, 7th January 1999 USA Today, member of Clinton’s Cabinet
By the time it was over 60 to 65 million people lay dead: including an estimated 27 million Soviets, between 10 to 20 million Chinese, 6 million Jews, over 6 million Germans, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, 2.5 million Japanese and 1.5 milion Yugoslavs. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States I: World War II, Sky Atlantic 2013
The feeble international response to the Spanish Civil War was even more disheartening. ibid.
Texaco persisted undeterred and also supplied oil to Hitler. ibid.
‘If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia; and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany. That way let them kill as many as possible’. ibid. Harry S Truman
In January 1943, just days before the final German surrender at Stalingrad, Roosevelt and Churchill met at Casablanca. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States II: Roosevelt, Truman & Wallace
Back home in a Gallup poll Wallace was the choice of 57% of Democratic voters to succeed Roosevelt. ibid.
In 1944 alone one million workers were on strike at one time or another. ibid.
August 6th 1945: the war in Europe had ended close to three months before on May 8th. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States III: The Bomb
This racism prevailed when President Roosevelt in February 1942 signed an executive order calling for the evacuation of over one hundred and ten thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans from California, Oregon and Washington. ibid.
Okinawa – the bloodiest battle of the Pacific – over 12,000 Americans were killed or missing, and over 36,000 were wounded. ibid.
Almost no-one objected to the slaughter-bombing of Japanese civilians. ibid.
Britain in essence was to become a new client state of the US. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States IV: The Cold War 1945-50
CIA: hundreds of covert operations around the world including more than eighty during Truman’s second term. ibid.
Out of this was born the famous Marshall Plan. ibid.
The image of the enemy will grow proportionate to the size of the defence resulting in an over-reaction and accelerated spending of energies in a futile attempt to liquidate that fear which never seems to erode. ibid.
Republican Dwight David Eisenhower was elected president in 1952 with a landslide. Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States V: The 50s: Eisenhower, The Bomb & the Third World
MacArthur repeatedly and Truman separately threatened to use the bomb. ibid.
Some three to four million Koreans lay dead. ibid.
Military spending would cover more than 50% of the US budget for the rest of the 1950s. ibid.
Anti-communism was good for business. ibid.
Behind the scenes the real power was being exercised by director J Edgar Hoover ... Hoover often played up the phoney threat of a surprise Soviet attack on the US. ibid.
The CIA had now come into its own and in the next year organised the overthrow of Guatemala’s popular leader Jacobo Arbenz. ibid.
By the mid-1950s the reputation of the United States in the third world reached rock bottom as it allied itself to some of the world’s most reactionary regimes. ibid.
Mobutu ruled for three decades as a billionaire dictator and as the CIA’s most trusted ally in Africa. ibid.
Under the Ike the US arsenal expanded from a little more than 1,000 to over 22,000 nuclear weapons. ibid.
Eisenhower repeatedly failed to seize the opportunities that emerged ... The beloved Dwight Eisenhower put the world on a glide-path towards annihilation and the most gargantuan expansion of military power in history. And left the world a far more dangerous place. ibid.