History Quotes / VietnamWar

-->-- '''KurtVonnegut''', ''Literature/BreakfastOfChampions''

-->-- "March to the Witch's Castle" by '''[[Music/George Clinton]]'''

[[NoExceptYes We're sending fifty thousand more,]]\\

->'''Dick:''' They don't American citizens traveling abroad?
->'''Tom:''' Not they. The our government is asking us as as citizens to refrain from traveling to foreign lands.

'''Meadlo''': Well, I fired them automatic, so you can’t- You just spray the area on them and so you can’t know how many you killed ‘cause they were going fast. So I might have killed ten or fifteen of them.\\

->''America has hear the bugle call\\

->What did we do wrong in Vietnam? '''We pulled out!''' Huh? Not a very ''[[AllPsychologyIsFreudian manly]]'' thing to do is it? When you’re fucking people, you gotta stay in there and fuck 'em good. Fuck ‘em all the way, fuck ‘em ‘til the end, stay in there and keep fucking 'em until they’re all dead. We left a few women and children alive in Vietnam and we haven’t felt good about ourselves since!

-->-- "Hello Vietnam" by Johnny Wright

'''MAJ Barker:''' Are you sure we're not in a looney bin? Sometimes I think we're in a goddamn looney bin!

->More recently, we have been emphasizing [[WarIsHell the horror of wasting American lives in Vietnam]] in a stage managed exhibition carried on by Washington for the political advantages of being at war and without any will to win.

->The shell of pretense by which the comsymps have promoted us into this growing war in Vietnam is so transparent and so flimsy that it would collapse under even a modicum of common sense. But how are we to get that common sense applied, or will the American people simply never learn from experience? Finally we come to the 64 dollar question about Vietnam. what are we fighting for? What are we trying to accomplish? What are our goals? What is our real purpose? Nobody knows. Or, at least nobody in [[Usefulnotes/LyndonJohnson the administration]] is willing to say and it is only when that question is answered honestly, that the whole business makes sense. And, thus paradoxically becomes crazier than ever. For the purpose of our being at war in Vietnam is to simply be at war. The ages-old advice to rulers was phrased by [[Creator/WilliamShakespeare Shalespeare]], as follows:"Be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels". That formula is being used on the American people today with double-barreled effectiveness. For the objective is not simply to distract the attention of gullible minds from the advance of [[CommieNazis state socialism]] and [[HitlerAteSugar government regimentation at home]] although, this it certainly does, but the more sinister, though parallel purpose is to use the very fact of our being at war as an excuse and as a means of speeding up that advance of gradually completing the transition into state socialism and of converting the increasing and tightening regimentation into the framework of a totalitarian police state.

->The shell of pretense by which the comsymps have promoted us into this growing war in Vietnam is so transparent and so flimsy that it would collapse under even a modicum of common sense. But how are we to get that common sense applied, or will the American people simply never learn from experience? Finally we come to the 64 dollar question about Vietnam. what are we fighting for? What are we trying to accomplish? What are our goals? What is our real purpose? Nobody knows. Or, at least nobody in [[Usefulnotes/LyndonJohnson the administration]] is willing to say and it is only when that question is answered honestly, that the whole business makes sense. And, thus paradoxically becomes crazier than ever. For the purpose of our being at war in Vietnam is to simply be at war. The ages-old advice to rulers was phrased by [[Creator/WilliamShakespeare Shalespeare]], as follows:"Be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels". That formula is being used on the American people today with double-barreled effectiveness. For the objective is not simply to distract the attention of gullible minds from the advance of [[CommieNazis state socialism]] and [[HitlerAteSugar government regimentation at home]] although, this it certainly does, but the more sinister, though parallel purpose is to use the very fact of our being at war as an excuse and as a means of speeding up that advance of gradually completing the transition into state socialism and of converting the increasing and tightening regimentation into the framework of a totalitarian police state.

->The shell of pretense by which the comsymps have promoted us into this growing war in Vietnam is so transparent and so flimsy that it would collapse under even a modicum of common sense.
-->'''Robert W. Welch''', 1965

->In compliance with modern politics, the war was originally intended to save South Vietnam from communism, but the proclaimed purpose of the war was not to protect freedom or individual rights, it was not to establish capitalism or any particular social system-it was to uphold theSouth Vietnamese right to "national self-determination" i.e. the right to vote themselves into any sort of system (including communism, as American propagandists kept proclaiming).\\\
The right to vote is a ''consequence, not a primary cause'' of a free social system-and the value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voter's power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny. Outside the context of a free society, who would want to die for the right to vote? Yet ''that'' is what the American soldiers were asked to die for-not even their own vote, but to secure that privilege for the South Vietnamese, who had no other rights and no knowledge of rights and freedom.\\\
Picking up the liberals' discarded old slogan of UsefulNotes/WorldWarI dats-"the self -determination of nations"-the American conservatives were trying to hide the American system, ''capitalism'' under some sort of collective cover. And it is ''not'' capitalism that most of them were (and are) advocating, it was a mixed economy. Who would want to die for a mixed economy?

-->-- Interview with '''Meadlo''' on ''CBS News''

-->-- Journalist '''Peter Arnett''' in ''The New York Times''

-->--'''President UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy'''

-->--'''Marshall [=McLuhran=]'''

-->-- '''Martin Luther King'''

-->--'''Radio/PaulHarvey'''

-->--'''UsefulNotes/LyndonJohnson'''