TO HELL WITH WAR!

[unhappycamper]

SPEECH BY NATE GOLDSHLAG
December 2, 2009

We had about 200 in a quiet rally with music and speakers in Boston Wed. night. Absolutely no local press coverage, which is the pattern here.

I spoke and gave the following speech:

I am Nate Goldshlag of the Smedley Butler Brigade of Veterans For Peace, and a member of the national board of VFP.

This is a sad day for America. But perhaps it is a day when millions of people will realize that Barack Obama is not much different from his predecessor George W. Bush. Obama has fooled many people with his message of hope and change. What we have instead is war and death.

Nobody should be surprised at the escalation in Afghanistan. It is exactly what Obama said he would do during the campaign. Obama is not a man of peace, yet in a week, in a total farce, this war president will receive the Nobel Peace Prize. What a sick joke. Obama has proven that there is really only one party in this country, with a left and a right wing - the War Party.

He has proven to be beholden to his corporate and military masters. And now we have the farce of him saying that 30,000 troops will be sent today but withdrawal will start in 19 months and finish in three years. Another effort to fool people. If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can sell to you real cheap. The American people have turned against this war as they have with Iraq but it doesn't matter to the politicians and the president. Oil and the control of energy resources in Central Asia is their agenda, and Afghanistan is important to that.

We seem to have historical amnesia in this country. Wasn't Vietnam also ruled by a corrupt unpopular government with little support in the country? In this case drug lords and warlords comprise the government of Afghanistan. The election was a sham.

Former Marine Captain and Foreign Service official Matthew Hoh, in his courageous resignation, said the following:

"I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war... I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul. ... Our support for this kind of government reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam; an unpopular and corrupt government we backed."



Malalai Joya, the courageous Afghan member of parliament who has been banned because of remarks she made against the government, wrote 2 days ago that "a troop surge can only magnify the crime against Afghanistan. I have said before that by installing warlords and drug traffickers in power in Kabul, the U.S. and NATO have pushed us from the frying pan into the fire."

The wars and huge military budget are destroying our country. We bail out the banks and Wall Street with hundreds of billions of dollars, but people are losing their homes and jobs in massive numbers. We have a whole generation of young soldiers coming back from multiple deployments, broken, with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

We need a peace budget. We need to stop these wars, close the foreign bases, and bring our troops home NOW. We need to slash the military budget and fund human needs. We need to use this money to provide decent health care, housing, and productive jobs for our citizens. We need to put money into a massive effort to convert weapons industries into renewable energy and transportation industries. We need a crash program to combat the global warming crisis and move to renewable energy and stop polluting the atmosphere with CO2.

I always come back to the words of Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, the most decorated Marine in history, and who our chapter of Veterans For Peace is named for. Marines are still taught about Smedley Butler, but they leave out the crucial fact that in the 1930s he turned against war. Gen. Butler said:

"War is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

So...I say,
TO HELL WITH WAR!"



And that is what I say too: We need to end this militarized culture. We need peace not war. To hell with these wars. Bring all the troops home NOW!

Nate Goldschlag



Article at: http://www.veteransforpeace.org/To_hell_with_war.vp.html

[TexasObserver]

1. Recommend

[malaise]

2. +1

Rec

[GreenStormCloud]

3. This is a futile war.

Trying to remake a fundamentalist Islamic culture with a literacy rate of about 28% into a Western style secular democracy is impossible.

[democrank]

4. K & R

~Peace~

[cali]

5. I immediately tune out anyone dumb enough to

to say that Obama is just a bush clone. And that's what Nate is saying. Not to mention the cliche ridden simple formulation that Obama is a puppet or wholly owned by "corporate masters".

These sorts of rants aren't particularly helpful and they're so riddled with cliches and bombast that I can't take them seriously.

And that's from someone adamantly opposed to the Afghanistan surge.

[FSogol]

6. Same here. Un-rec for the Bush clone comment. Pathetic. n/t

[Mithreal]

7. I appreciate what you are saying, but these wars are far more offensive

than whatever language people use to express their frustration.

I think I respect your opinion though.