Re: [Marxism] Marxism and Conspiracy

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

David Thorstad wrote:
> 
> Mr./Comrade Austin:
> My advice to you is to chill and reflect before you speak.
>     You must be very young indeed not to realize how wrong your
> assumptions about the Vietnam War and the "lies that were used to lead
> the US" into it are. Ditto the Tonkin Gulf charade, a Democrat scam no
> different from anything the Bushgang has cooked up (and which, true to
> form as the historic party of war, the Democrats have endorsed from the
> gitgo).  All kinds of us, even young students like myself at the time,
> saw through this phony justification for bombing the shit out of North
> Vietnam.

Yes. Even people who supported the war did not take the Tonkin Gulf
charade seriously. But more importantly, there was no justification of
the war _even if_ the Tonkin Gulf episode had happened as protrayed. And
more importantly yet, the Administration would have gone to war (with
public support to begin with) even without such trivial lies as the
Tonkin Gulf scam.

THE BIG LIE -- and it was right out in the open and didn't require any
factual lies whatever -- was that the U.S. had any damn business in
Vietnam _regardless_ of what was going on there. It was _that_ lie that
we had to expose in order to recruit more people to the anti-war
movement. Of course most of us new Tonkin Gulf was a sham, but I doubt
that many of us ever wasted a second in our anti-war efforts to talk
about it when there were so many more things (discoverable on the front
pages of the NYT) that proved the insanity, the horror, and the evil of
the u.s. invasion.

Carrol

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