POWER IS NOT A MEANS, IT IS AN END.

     

      History:  Dec. 2, 1823:

       United States announces Monroe Doctrine: essentially, that the US is entitled to do whatever it wants in Western Hemisphere.

       Quote: 

      "No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." -- George Orwell - 1984

       With Iraq still burning and Afghanistan still a murder zone it is difficult to visualise a world without war and more difficult to contain your anger when you look at the part played in this world carnage by an American lead West. The shear brutal force unleashed on the innocent Iraqi people and the continuing slaughter of the Afghan people is just a follow on from other brutal American acts of imperialism. We should not forget the Vietnam slaughter, what the Vietnamese went through was the longest war in recent history.

        The following extract from John Pilger's excellent article on this war and its aftermath, found on "informationclearinghousereminds" reminds us of the part played by our own Margaret Thatcher in adding to the misery of the Vietnamese people after the war.

         “ ---- I walked down into the rain and followed the children through a labyrinth to the Young Flower School, an orphanage. A teacher hurriedly assembled a small choir and I was greeted with a burst of singing. "What are the words of the song?" I asked Tran, whose father was a GI. He looked gravely at the floor, as nine year olds do, before reciting words that left my interpreter shaking her head. "Planes come no more," she repeated, "do not weep for those just born … the human being is evergreen."

       The year was 1978. Vietnam was then being punished for seeing off the last American helicopter gunship, the war’s creation, the last B52 with its ladders of bombs silhouetted against the flash of their carnage, the last C-130s that had dumped, the US Senate was told, "a quantity of toxic chemical amounting to six pounds per head of population, destroying much of the ecosystem and causing a fatal catastrophe," the last of a psychosis that made village after village a murder scene.

        And when it was all over on May Day, 1975, Hollywood began its long celebration of the invaders as victims, the standard purgative, while revenge was policy. Vietnam was classified as "Category Z" in Washington, which imposed the draconian Trading with the Enemy Act from the first world war. This ensured that even Oxfam America was barred from sending humanitarian aid. Allies pitched in. One of Margaret Thatcher’s first acts on coming to power in 1979 was to persuade the European Community to halt its regular shipments of food and milk to Vietnamese children. According to the World Health Organization, a third of all infants under five so deteriorated following the milk ban that the majority of them were stunted or likely to be. Almost none of this was news in the west.---”

 

 

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