corrente

In a comment to my previous post on the Felt matter, parsec wrote:

"I was in college when the Watergate hearings were televised and not being a politically in-tune type I was only vaguely aware of the ins and outs of the story. It didn't make sense to me why Nixon would be involved with such a thing when the election was in the bag. I never believed many of the nasty things people said about him at the time. Then, over time, one by one, the stories proved true. The last one was verified about four years ago when the Nixon Library(!) exhibited the letter from Anna Chenault wherein she lamented the price she was paying for having persuaded President Thieu to withdraw from the Paris peace talks -- so Nixon could beat Humphrey in the '68 election. The deal left on the table that year was the same one we accepted five years -- and 20,000+ American lives -- later."

But they died for freedom. Don't you see how much freer we are since the war, what with all our oil-guzzling Hummers and non-returnable bottles and useless-as-tits-on-a-boar McMansions we rattle around in? Doesn't the sweet smell of liberty waft through the air when you look at a new improved map of Vietnam? And how about those Cambodians? They really came out of the deal smelling like roses, didn't they? Good God, it's great to give your life for a concept, isn't it? Well, I guess I wouldn't know, being as I'm not quite dead yet, and being as neither are all the powermongers who move the pieces on the board and exchange someone else's lives for their own even as they speechify all that high talk about how good it is to die for freedom. But, Goddamn! It sure does sound pretty, doesn't it? Pretty enough to tempt all those kids who believed in a real, honorable American dream, the one where we ride in with the cavalry and save the little guy from the murdering Hun. Pretty enough to grow plenty more cannon fodder for the next 50 years of patriotic bullshit memorial services overseen by cowardly men offering cliched epitaphs to dead soldiers that they, and they alone, are responsible for murdering.

20,000+ more dead? Please. There's so much more where they came from. We can do this for hundreds more years, and so long as we confuse pity and respect for our dead with a mandate for endless war, we will never. Ever. Stop.