GUN AND WAR ADDICTION

 War is evil; permanent war is permanent evil. 

Het boek verscheen in 1958 en sloeg in als een bom.
Het verhaalt over de gebreken van de Amerikaanse Diplomatieke Dienst. Men had geen enkele interesse  voor de lokale taal, cultuur en gewoonten van het land waar de Dienst gestationeerd was. Zich zelfs distantiërend van de lokale bevolking in duidelijke tegenstelling tot de communisten die vooraf uitgebreid geïnstrueerd werden over hun standplaats en heel gemakkelijk integreerden met de lokale bevolking.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_American 
Een strategie die voor het Oostblok zeer succesrijk bleek te zijn.
Het boek maakte zo'n indruk dat J.F. Kennedy aan al zijn collega's in de Senaat een exemplaar stuurde.
"The book was one of the biggest bestsellers in the country, has been in print continuously since it appeared and is one of the most politically influential novels in all of American literature".
Heeft het geleid tot beter opgeleide diplomaten? Zeker, niet! 
Er is geen termijn van een president na de Tweede Wereldoorlog te noemen dat niet 'gekruid' was met martiaal taalgebruik, geweld of beide.
"Curtis Emerson LeMay (1906–1990) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay was a general in the United States Air Force in his 1965 autobiography (co-written with MacKinlay Kantor) LeMay is quoted as saying his response to North Vietnam would be to demand that "they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age". 


De laatste twee Presidenten George W. Bush en Barak Obama spanden de kroon. Bush deed het geweld in het Midden-Oosten oplaaien.
 
George W. Bush:
“If we wait for threats to fully materialize we will have waited too long,” he said. “We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge.”
Although it was less noted, Bush in that same speech also reintroduced the Plan’s central theme. He declared that the United States would prevent the emergence of a rival power by maintaining “military strengths beyond challenge.” With that, the President effectively adopted a strategy his father’s administration had developed ten years earlier to ensure that the United States would remain the world’s preeminent power. While the headlines screamed “preemption,” no one noticed the declaration of the dominance strategy.”
Obama's regeerperiode spande qua oorlogsgeweld de kroon. Hij voerde op zeven plaatsen tegelijk oorlog en verwoeste in het 'voorbijgaan'  Libië als moderne staat.


Zijn standrechtelijke Drone executies mogen niet onvermeld blijven!



Met Cuba kon hij gelukkig zonder militair machtsvertoon tot een vergelijk komen

 Met Iran wist hij met de permanente vertegenwoordiging
van de Veiligheidsraad,  het Verenigd Koninkrijk, Rusland, Frankrijk en China een overeenkomst te sluiten met als doel indamming van eventuele 'Nucleaire" aspiraties van dat land.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_nuclear_deal_framework
Ondanks het feit dat Iran zich voorbeeldig houdt aan de afspraken wordt de gesloten overeenkomst door de nieuwe  president Donald Trump weggehoond.
De president laat zich eveneens door Noord-Korea uitdagen en heeft dat land in zijn toespraak voor de Algemene Vergadering in de Verenigde Naties met totale vernietiging bedreigd.

Wat maakt de Amerikanen zo gewelddadig? Heeft het met de volksaard van doen? Immers de meeste burgers zijn in het bezit van een of meerdere wapens. Behoren wapens tot de 'huishoudinventaris' en lijken daardoor minder afschrikwekkend? Nodigt een conflict/frustratie zodoende eerder uit om de wapens te grijpen dan verbaal tot een oplossing te komen? 

Lawrence Davidson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Davidson
probeert in zijn kolom een analyse van dit wonderlijke verschijnsel te geven: http://www.tothepointanalyses.com/
If you go to the Wikipedia page that gives a timeline of U.S. foreign military operations between 1775 and 2010, you are likely to come away in shock. It seems that ever since the founding of the country, the United States has been at war. It is as if Americans just could not (and still cannot) sit still, but had to (and still have to) force themselves on others through military action. Often this is aimed at controlling foreign resources, thus forcing upon others the consequences of their own capitalist avarice. At other times the violence is spurred on by an ideology that confuses U.S. interests with civilization and freedom. Only very rarely is Washington out there on the side of the angels.
Regardless, the bottom line seems to be that peace has never been a deeply ingrained cultural value for the citizens of the United States.

PBS Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS#PBS_networks is sinds September begonnen met het uitzenden van de 10-delige
Vietnam Oorlogsdocumentaire. Een van de directeuren van de film Ken Burns verwacht dat zijn film de Verenigde Staten zal inspireren om over de Vietnam Oorlog op een geheel andere wijze te denken en te spreken.
John Pilger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Pilger een door de wol geverfde journalist denkt daar heel anders over. Hij is ook geen Amerikaan maar een Australiër die niet van dit soort geëxalteerde nonsens houdt.  https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/21/the-killing-of-history/
In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its “exceptionalism,” Burns’s “entirely new” Vietnam War is presented as an “epic, historic work.” Its lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in Vietnam.
Burns says he is grateful to “the entire Bank of America family” which “has long supported our country’s veterans.”
Agent Orange Spraying
Bank of America was a corporate prop to an invasion that killed perhaps as many as four million Vietnamese and ravaged and poisoned a once bountiful land. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed, and around the same number are estimated to have taken their own lives.
I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings.”
The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of “false flags” that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg released in 1971.
There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous.
Een van de  bekende gruwel foto's van Vietnam

I thought about the “decency” and “good faith” when recalling my own first experiences as a young reporter in Vietnam: watching hypnotically as the skin fell off napalmed peasant children like old parchment, and the ladders of bombs that left trees petrified and festooned with human flesh.
Generaal Westmoreland verwelkomt President Johnson  in Vietnam
General William Westmoreland, the American commander, referred to people as “termites.”
The “meaning” of the Vietnam War is no different from the meaning of other genocidal campaigns against the Native Americans, the colonial massacres in the Philippines, the atomic bombings of Japan, the leveling of every city in North Korea.
The aim was described by Colonel Edward Lansdale, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lansdale the famous CIA man on whom Graham Greene based his central character in The Quiet American.  Quoting Robert Taber’s The War of the Flea, Lansdale said, “There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination. There is only one way to control a territory that harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert.” 
Nothing has changed. When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations on Sept. 19 – a body established to spare humanity the “scourge of war” – he declared he was “ready, willing and able” to “totally destroy” North Korea and its 25 million people. His audience gasped, but Trump’s language was not unusual.


His rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, had boasted she was prepared to “totally obliterate” Iran, a nation of more than 80 million people.


This is the American Way

Lawrence Davidson komt in deel II van zijn kolom to the point: http://www.tothepointanalyses.com/                                                        Part II: A Gun Culture to Complement the War Culture
America’s propensity to violence in other lands is but one side of a two-sided coin. Callous disregard for civilian lives abroad is matched by a willful promotion of violence at home. That willful promotion is the product of a right-wing ideological orientation (stemming from a misreading of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) that demands a nearly open-ended right of all Americans to own an almost unlimited number and types of firearms. The result is gun regulation laws that are embarrassingly ineffective.
Again, the consequences of this position are much more profound than any claim that its supporters’ intentions are to defend citizens rights to own guns.
Since 1968 about as many Americans have been killed in-country by gun violence (1.53 million) as have died in all of America’s wars put together (1.20 million).
The numbers are too close to be dismissed as coincidence. Both reflect a culture of exceptionalism that grants at once the United States government, and its citizens, extensive rights to act in disregard of the safety and security of others.
You would think Americans would recognize an obvious contradiction here. You cannot maintain a safe population and, at the same time, allow citizens the right to own and, largely at their own discretion, use firearms. Nonetheless, some Americans imagine that they have squared this circle by claiming that their guns are for “self-defense” and therefore do make for a safer society. This is just like the U.S. government’s constant exposition that all its violence is committed in the name of civilization and freedom. In both cases we have a dangerous delusion.
Ubiquitous gun ownership makes us unsafe, just as does the endless waging of war.

The inability to see straight is not the sort of failing that can be restricted to one dimension. If you can’t grasp reality due to ideological blinkers or historical ignorance, you are going to end up in trouble both at home and abroad – not just one place, but both. And, the more weaponized you are, both as a state and as a citizen, the greater the potential for disaster. In the end the United States cannot stop killing civilians abroad unless it finds the wisdom to stop killing its own citizens at home – and vice versa. That is the U.S. conundrum, whether America’s 320 million citizens realize it or not.


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