patrick.net

indigenous says

They don't get started in the first place. The wars are instigated Wilson with the Lusitania, FDR with sanctions on Japan then with the Japanese ambassadors begging for peace being turned away by FDR, the atrocities with the US bombing Japan and ending with the totally unnecessary A bombs, Kennedy's murder of Diem followed by LBJ and the Gulf of Tonkin, GWB and the weapons of mass destruction.

I always enjoy your distorted view of history. Other than Iraq none of these wars were instigated by the US. The US could have chosen not to participate, but the wars were already ongoing.

The Lusitania was sunk a year after WWI started and 2 years before the US entered the war. Hardly in instigation.

Japan was at war for 5 years when fdr put sanctions on japan, they were in china and indochina(vietnam) already and were about to attack the dutch east indies. The begging for peace is pure bullshit. Japan insisted they be given control of all of southeast asia and continue to conquer china.

The war in vietnam was ongoing since 1946. Killing diem changed nothing other than maybe the timing. Ho Chi Min was already committed to coming in with NVA regular army by 1963 well before the coup. Kennedy didn't murder diem, the vietnamese army did. Kennedy supported the coup but believed diem would be sent into exile. Here are the details, not that you are going to read any of it or actually learn some history. http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB101/

bob2356 says

The US could have chosen not to participate

Which was my point, the US MO is to instigate actions that provoke US involvement. E.G FDR knew the attack on Pearl Harbor was imminent and did nothing in order to gain support for going into the war, before Pearl Harbor 88% of the US citizens were against going into the war. BTW Churchill bombed Germany 1st and kept it out of the papers, when Germany retaliated it was reported as unprovoked.

bob2356 says

Killing diem changed nothing other than maybe the timing.

Not what I read. Are you going to defend LBJ's bullshit as well?

> then with the Japanese ambassadors begging for peace being turned away by FDR,

The Japanese sent their second negotiator to the US in mid-November, about when the Japanese First Air Fleet began staging to Hokkaido in preparation for their late November sortie to Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese did not want "peace" in 1941 -- after all, Kurusu had been sent to DC by the new Prime Minister, Army General Tojo -- they wanted to continue their war in China, forcing CKS's surrender and the total subjugation of China as a client state in the Japanese New Economic Order, their East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

With Hitler's tanks having overrun all of Europe and looking to be in Red Square before winter, French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies were glittering prizes free for the taking -- but for the American interference in Japan's affairs here.

Funny thing with all the printing the Bank of Japan has been doing, I just noticed the yen has strengthened 10%:

Kurdoda's going to need a bigger printing press.

Print!Print!Print! paper fiat currency.
The new global paradigm.

Exerps from a podcast about the book, "The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam"

So we get through the '50s, and by the end of the '50s, Vietnam has been so
miraculously recovered under Ngo Dinh Diem, along with a lot of American aid and
help, which was very good. And they actually were building schools, roads, everything,
even rudimentary healthcare in the rural districts, to the point where the communist
leadership in the North had a meeting in '59 and said, if it goes on like this, the whole
thing is going to collapse. We'll have no chance of winning back South Vietnam.
Incidentally, there had been in the Geneva Accords, the part that were signed with
the French in post-Dien Bien Phu in 1955, that by 1956 the country, which had
basically been artificially dissected as North and South Vietnam, would have elections.

It has to do with a failure in American
diplomacy, and where this starts is with Averell Harriman, a very powerful, very
influential New Dealer. I mean, he was well recognized as a man with enormous
influence in and around D.C. In fact, he had even helped JFK in his election campaign,
and therefore, even though he was becoming quite the elder statesman, they felt they
had to pay him off with something after the election, and of course they gave him his
own title of Roving Ambassador, and then eventually whatever title he wanted in the
State Department, and he had several.
But what happened was that during the Second World War, he had been FDR's righthand
man with the Soviets, procuring agreements for how things would go during the
war, which he was reasonably good at, and how Europe would look after the war,
which he was abysmally bad at, even though they all hailed him as the great
negotiator, because as we know, all the agreements for Eastern Europe, Stalin threw
into the garbage bin.
So Harriman, here was his chance to go and really leave the whole diplomatic field
with a big win. And how he saw it, looking at Southeast Asia along with JFK, who was
scared stiff of what he saw there, especially with the fact that they knew Laos was
being used by the communists, was, let's declare Laos neutral and get the Soviets —
and Averell said, I can get the Soviets to make their clients, the North Vietnamese
comply. And in a famous conversation, or infamous conversation, he had with
Ambassador Frederick Nolting, who was JFK's ambassador to Vietnam, he said, I have a
fingertip's feeling that I can get the Soviets to make the Vietnamese communists
comply with keeping Laos and in June they'll stay out of there.
And Ambassador Nolting said to him, well, I don't have your experience with the
Soviets, but my fingertips are telling me the exact opposite, and of course his
fingertips were the correct ones. The Soviets were only too happy to be given this
position of enormous prestige in the negotiations of Southeast Asia, so they said, yes,
of course, we can get them to comply. Well, there was no compliance from the North,
but Averell — and so really, the Pathet Lao, who were an NVA or North Vietnamese
construction, you know, they were a communist force in Laos, just expanded, and so
did the trail system and supply system to the South.
So what happened then was of course the Vietnamese, and even people from Thailand,
everybody in the region was squawking, you cannot make Laos neutral. Harriman had
to go out, he went out in 1961 with the new ambassador, Frederick Nolting out there,
and he started to — he had a meeting with Ngo Dinh Diem about Laotian neutrality,
because Ngo Dinh Nhu had been adamant that you couldn't have Laos neutral. That
would be surrendering South Vietnam to constant attack on its flank. He would be
constantly on the strategic defensive, and it couldn't bode well for the future.
Harriman clashed with Diem immediately. Apparently from eyewitnesses, and Nolting
was one of them, there was sort of a visceral dislike that was taken, one for the other
before they even began talking. There just was a clash of a very worldly man, Averell
Harriman, with a very unworldly man, Ngo Dinh Diem. That meeting didn't go well, at
the end with Harriman basically outright threatening Diem that if he didn't comply the
U.S. would pull away all support, and of course that would be the economic collapse
of South Vietnam — not the military collapse, but certainly the economic, which would
lead to the military collapse.
So Diem was silent on this, and basically Ambassador Nolting after that point had to
try and get South Vietnamese compliance, even though he agreed with the South
Vietnamese. And a quick note here: Nolting had been sent out by Kennedy to assure
the South Vietnamese government of their absolute support by the U.S. government
and that they would not interfere in South Vietnamese governmental practices and
that they respected their autonomy as a national government. And Nolting was
extremely good at that, even though when he had first gone out, he had been
skeptical too. He had heard these words about the background, about this prickly
Vietnamese leader who seemed a bit otherworldly and could be difficult to get along
with. But all that fell away after he met Diem, and they got along very well indeed.
And one of the pillories that you often come across on the Left is that Nolting was not
very bright, which is an absolute, outright falsehood. The man had won scholarships to
Harvard. His professor there had been none other than — oh, the famous British
mathematician and atheist, what was his name? Lord — oh, I'm sorry, I forget it now.
But anyways, he had done very well at Harvard and had done very well in philosophy
and up at the PhD level. So anyways, he was no dim ball, contrary to leftist
accusations.
So the minute that Harriman gets back to D.C., to Washington, he starts plotting
against Diem, and we have the files on that. We've got the documents. And from that
point on, he started pitching the idea of having a coup and looking for another leader,
and around him he'd built this cadre of likeminded liberal thinkers, such as John
Kenneth Galbraith — then to become ambassador of India, a bit of a star in the JFK
crowd — and Mike Forrestall and Roger Hilsman, National Security Advisor. So he'd
built a very powerful team around him.
But in effect, he didn't even need that, because his own prestige was so substantial
that, from eyewitness accounts, when they'd have White House meetings with
Kennedy, it was more like Harriman telling Kennedy what was going to happen than
Kennedy giving Harriman the instructions. In fact, Kennedy tended to bow out of the
way when Harriman came online — although he wasn't happy entirely with what he
heard from Kennedy, and as we get towards the end of Diem's government in '63, he
had Ambassador Nolting back in Washington giving him advice to the contrary.
But it was from that point forward, really, to cut to the chase for your listeners, that
the planning was underway to get rid of Diem. So it was all according to his objections
to what was going to go on in Laos. And the agreements were signed in '62 over strong
objections from the Vietnamese and from Thailand and from others in the region. And
of course the communists never honored it. In fact, they turned the Ho Chi Minh trail
into a freeway system, just about, coming down through Laos, and the supplies and
men picked up even forward, which, of course, threw South Vietnam onto this
strategic defensive. It was so much the case that men like Bill Colby and people within
the State Department who were not of the mind of Averell Harriman had a name for
the Ho Chi Minh trail, and they called it the Averell Harriman Memorial Highway.

.
BTW I don't think that Ngo Dinh Diem being assassinated within weeks of Kennedy being assassinated are coincidence. IOW the same people are likely responsible.

Major differences between the rhetoric of your article v mine. Yours reads like a propaganda piece full of generalities and cites opinion and consensus rather than facts.

I see Tatupu has failed to list a single incident to back up his claim of constant depressions under sound financial currency, which BTW, is the whole point of the article I posted. So to circle back around, mathematics, logic, history, experience all point to a resounding crash coming unlike the world has ever seen. At least since the invention of debt economics, and all the misery it has brought with it.

If we think about it logically, fiat currency debt systems are mostly closely tied to two human traits, arrogance, and greed. And I've never seen either produce anything positive...

NuttBoxer says

I see Tatupu has failed to list a single incident to back up his claim of constant depressions under sound financial currency, which BTW, is the whole point of the article I posted

Sorry--I forgot. Before I waste my time--what do you consider a period of sound financial currency? Let's not play No True Scotsman here.

indigenous says

Exerps from a podcast about the book, "The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam"

The first problem is you are listening to a podcast about a book. Maybe try reading the book. I haven't, but might. Diem wasn't building roads, schools, and healthcare. Diem and his cronies were taking american aid to build and stealing it. What he was doing was pursuing his disastrous resettlement policy. Sorry but the corruption under Diem has been documented time and time again. I can come up with at least a dozen books documenting this just off my bookshelves. If shaw writes otherwise then his book is very revisionist history. Geoffry Shaw isn't exactly a neutral observer. Go read his Alexandrian Defense Chronicles stuff. Talk about neocon wet dream.

Try reading Darpa the Pentagons Brain by Anne Jacobson. It has several chapters about this period. I loaned my copy to a friend so I don't have it in my hand, but in summary darpa was contracted to do a major study of the situation vietnam in 1961 or so that lasted for months. The team consisted of people who were very knowledgeable about se asia and most spoke fluent vietnamese. They found diem was totally corrupt, lacked any support among the population, that his policies were deeply unpopular and creating a much larger opposition all the time. Especially the resettlement policy. Kennedy and the CIA hated to hear this, shelved the report and sent out another team the next year. That team had little experience in se asia and didn't speak the language, forcing them to use interpreters, but came back the the report results kennedy and the CIA liked. Every bit of this is documented, dates, places, people, papers, meeting notes, everything.

You might also try watching, since you seem to prefer watching to actually reading, the fog of war. Especially the part where mcnamara met with ho chi min and asked if there was anything that would have stopped him. Ho chi min said no we would have fought to the last man.

So I stand by my statement. Diem being killed by the coup plotters, not the killed by the CIA bullshit you keep repeating to try to make it true, made no difference in the outcome at all. The NVA was coming in no matter what, the south vietnamese government was totally incompetent and corrupt with no hope of stopping them, the people had no support for the government or the us troops. Having a catholic government in a 95% buddist country didn't help at all. Especially when Diem government brought back the landlords the viet minh had driven off years before and forced the peasants to give up the land and pay years of back rent. Which was collected by the south vietnamese army. Marylin Young in "The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990" documents that during the diem regime there was "75 percent support for the NLF, 20 percent trying to remain neutral and 5 percent firmly pro-government,". NLF is another word for vietcong. South Vietnam was going to fall no matter what, the US involvement only changed the timing by a few years.

tatupu70 says

Sorry--I forgot. Before I waste my time--what do you consider a period of sound financial currency? Let's not play No True Scotsman here.

The truest, as I already mentioned, would be when paper was targeted to be 100% backed by specie. But I'd also accept any time under the gold and/or silver standard if the first is too difficult for you. If you use the latter, please clearly demonstrate how the bust was not tied into bank speculation. For example, the bust after the Spanish American War was due to leveraging by local banks, and later the central bank, and only corrected once all speculation ceased.