I always enjoyed the song from my days in the Army….ass deep in rice paddy mud…..and because of those wonderful years of my youth I chose to study international relations focusing on war……its causes and solutions…..
It is a good field of study….of course you will never get rich in this field and in most cases will be very unpopular in some circles…..
The problem is trying to explain the complexities of war to people whose only exposure to the obscenity is through video games and movies…….it is like trying to explain the joys of orgasm to a gerbil……
This is a really good piece that was Originally posted at TomDispatch.
It may be hard to believe now, but in 1970 the protest song “War,” sung by Edwin Starr, hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. That was at the height of the Vietnam antiwar movement and the song, written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, became something of a […]
Source: War, What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing – Antiwar.com Original by — Antiwar.com
I was fortunate, and had good timing & luck, thus managing to avoid ‘Nam, though it was close for a time whether or not Uncle Sugar was going to take me, or not… my # in the draft lottery was 19, so, for a time there, I waited for a “Greetings” letter… Went into mental health, and street life instead of mainstream, thus augmenting my formal education at the School of Hard Knocks… and, let me tell you, life on the street in Berkeley was much like a war zone at times, during the protests, if no other time… Us against the Blue Meanies of the Oakland Tactical Squad…& their bullets were NOT rubber….
1970 was a year, for me, of protests, wherein I learned about police intransigence, and who, and how much, to trust reality… but, all in all, a good year, with much hope in the air…
All gone now….The waters I’ve seen go under the bridge are muddy and full of bodies, and still rising…
Ah well, all we can do is all we can do… gotta go; just got more spam from Barack and the folks at the White House….
See ya bro…
gigoid, the dubious
Some of my friends who went to Nam came back telling me they enjoyed the song of the enemy screaming for mercy or in the throes of death. Of course the modern tendency is to dwell on how some of our Viet Nam Vets came back with “Issues.”
I did not know anyone that would tell that…..most of us talked only with fellow vets or we kept silent because NO one would understand….they still don’t………
There were some rumors that some of our comrades in arms were taking shots at their own commanding officers over there too — and doing a lot of pot smoking … and other things.
Sounds like the rumors from Vietnam…..what are they doing recycling the past?
Romeo Dallaire.
‘Shake hands With the Devil’
A sobering book..
‘There was no way to laugh anymore, to love, to care, and there was a sense of guilt in having survived when others had been killed. I turned into a worse workaholic than I had already been by trying to work myself into the ground’
Romeo Dallaire
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/romeo_dallaire.html
Bystanders to Genocide
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/09/bystanders-to-genocide/304571/
The 1991 US bombing of the “Highway of Death” is of the most heinous war crimes in history. http://buff.ly/21qayur
I agree and pics of the destruction is what lead Bush1 to a ceasefire before it became a major issue…..
‘I am astonished each time I come to the U.S. by the ignorance of a high percentage of the population, which knows almost nothing about Latin America or about the world. It’s quite blind and deaf to anything that may happen outside the frontiers of the U.S.’
Eduardo Galeano
A hero of mine…
‘Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent’..
Say’s it all really…
Taught in your schools and universities…
or too left?
Sad world…
We Americans love our slogans…..but it is NO way to know what is going on around them…..but they still fall for them every time….