Yesterday i was reading the Nurnberg Diary again and i noticed this quote by one of the most distinguished pilot who ever lived. I wanted to share it with you because you can easily connect the things that he said to today's situations.

Goering (in prison) to the American psychologist Gustave Gilbert :
"naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in russia nor in england nor in america, nor for that matter in germany. that is understood. but, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship."

Gustave : "But in democracy people choose their leaders and they have a voice. For example in America only the parliament can declare a war."

Goering: "oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. that is easy. all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. it works the same way in any country."

Well, i know a leader like this who is in power in 2004... :rolleyes:

America isn't proto fascist for no reason...;)

War is good for business, business is good to republicans, republicans declare wars, it's not that hard to understand...

The Vietnam War was started by a Democrat , Kennedy. It was furtherd along by Johnson, another Democrat. Republicans, Nixon and Ford, stopped the Vietnam War.

That particular quote has featured on these forums a number of times now.
And... "One of the most distinguished pilots who ever lived"? Not really.

War is good for business, business is good to republicans, republicans declare wars, it's not that hard to understand...

The First World War and Second World War were both started by Democrats.

"The First World War and Second World War were both started by Democrats."
What?!? Can you be specific?

Maybe he means the involvement of the US in said wars was done during the watch of democratic presidents. . . ?

"The First World War and Second World War were both started by Democrats."
What?!? Can you be specific?

Just go back and look who were the presidents when both wars started, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) was in office during the start of WW2, Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) was the other Democrat that was in office when the first World War started. Why is it you speak without looking things up?

Yeah, but they didn't start either war. WWI was started by an assassination of an Austrian archduke or something, wasn't it? And WWII was started when France declared war on Germany after the invasion of Poland.

You're being US-centric, Cosmic. That's all. I get your meaning though. ;)

Alrighty then, I can accept it that you misphrased "The First World War and Second World War were both started by Democrats." meaning to say that the First World War and Second World War both started during Democrat US Administrations. This still leaves me wondering what causative relationship you would draw from that chronology.

I happen to consider both the same war, and I think that the US had little to do with the forces for change that came to an insane and unecessary head in 1914.

The Democrats were in charge during the wars, they could have refused to enter into those wars but asked congress to enter into the wars. If people keep suggesting that Republicans are always the ones starting wars I just want everyone to understand just who it was that put America at war instead of keeping America out of the wars. Democrats were the ones in charge and they were totally responsible for becomming involved, not the Republicans.

Overdose: Not to entirely contribute to threadjacking, I do think that the Goering quote has relevance to the Bush 43 Administration. It's a little bit worn-out for me personally, it still rings true. For those who haven't seriously considered the recent threat rising fascism in the USA, it's a quote well worth pondering. As is the concept of fascism (http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=38301), beyond merely superficial association with the German and Italian varieties of the past.

Cosmic: That's still not causation. I don't know understand what good reason Americans had for marching off to World War Part 1. In Part 2, I think that fighting fascism was a worthy cause, as it is today in our own midst. I don't think war and peace is so partisan for Americans as you would depict it, you might add that Kennedy got us mired in Vietnam. You won't get any argument from me positing that only my fellow Republicans are warlike, and that Democrats are not.

- Democrats didn't start WWI WWII, not even America started those wars.

- Kennedy had a plan to get out of Vietnam (MacNara created it), but was, as we all know, killed.

- Every single president has been involved with some form of armed conflict (many of which were full blown wars), so I really don't think it's fair to claim that this is partisan activity. Perhaps just a part of being in power?

- BTW, this war isn't good for buisness. As a matter of fact, many in Big Buisness don't want W re-elected because their reputation overseas has turned to shit.

Also, i might add that Congress supported both WWI and WWII - in fact, WWII was only debated for 30 minutes on the floor and only one Congressman voted against it.

"WWII was only debated for 30 minutes"

I think you've touched on something much more significant than party affiliation. Most politicians, in eagerness to prove themselves emminently patriotic, are prone to rubber-stamping almost any belligerent national tendency, shirking the personal risk of exhaustively and publicly assessing the risks to the country, as is their duty.

This Congress deserves to be fired, for shirking their duty in guarding our nation from the Iraq occupation and the Patriot Act- All because wrapping themselves in the flag, and coddling a nascent nationalist religion was a stronger impulse than serving the people responsibly. This danger will grow, until Americans demand better of their elected representatives.


Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.


If a Nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be... if we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed."


Those who desire to give up Freedom in order to gain Security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.

-Thomas Jefferson

Then theres one of goerings other statements.
""Guns will make us powerful," he proclaimed, "butter will just make us fat.""

he posed it as guns or butter. I woud generally agree. Most countries cannot afford both guns and butter. The USA can afford both right now because it is still at thte top of the economy. Maybe not in 20 years time.

You have forgotten to mention the Korean Conflict: started in a Democratic administration ended in a Republican administration much like Viet Nam.
Bush has however overused the terrorist threat to push through some very Constitutionally questionable measures much like happened in the Reich's undermining of the German Constitution.

The USA can afford both right now because it is still at thte top of the economy. Maybe not in 20 years time.
That's ok, conventional warfare is almost obsolete.

"The Democrats were in charge during the wars, they could have refused to enter into those wars but asked congress to enter into the wars. If people keep suggesting that Republicans are always the ones starting wars I just want everyone to understand just who it was that put America at war instead of keeping America out of the wars. Democrats were the ones in charge and they were totally responsible for becomming involved, not the Republicans. "

The difference is, for the most part, some wars are needed, some aren't. What if Roosevelt hadn't entered WW2 after Pearl Harbor? What if we had let the Germans take over Europe in either war? It wasn't Democrats saying, "Gee, i feel like going to war today." It was necessary in order to aid our allies. You can't really say that a Democrat started a war, when it was retaliation for an attack on us. Now, I haven't studied Vietnam as much as other wars, but it seems to me that it was a war that was not necessary, and in that case Kennedy should not have gone to war, it was a mistake by a Democrat. I also agree with the war in Afghanistan, as it is a retaliation for an attack on the U.S., but remember, we are warring on certian groups there, not the country. The thing that makes people think the Republicans are war like is war-mongering. Iraq is a very good example of this.

Bush did not have a justified reason for going into this war. He used the anger and ignorance of the people of the U.S. to gain support for the war, but overall, this was not a necessary war. They didn't attack us first, and despite what the administration fed the media, they don't seem to have any way to have attacked us. For what ever reason, this is a war that Bush wanted to go into, this is a war that, unlike the world wars, really was started by the president. So, despite who was in control, this is a war that a Republican is solely responsible for.

But would it be obsolete against another developed nation? Imagine a war between America and China in twenty years (and China is rearming and modernising bloody fast), it would be carnage. Like before the world wars, they guessed wrong the forms that those wars would take and both were slaughters.

I guess that this all comes down to justification of fear. I think that fear was justified during WWII, but not so much recently in Iraq. Yet, for all the railing I've done against this war, i hope that the interim government makes things better.

I don't think a conventional war will ever be fought between the US and China due to nuclear weapons. Would either side risk total destruction?

BTW, Vietnam was never technically a war (as congress never declared war). The troops Kennedy sent over were training South Vietnamese, and it went downhill from there - fast. (Oversimplification, but you'll survive)

Spidergoat- what do you mean conventional warfare is not going to last much longer? I see no particular change in actual warfare for decades. Sure, increased availability of NBC warfare will change things a little, but you'll still need men on the ground with guns.

The United States involvement in Vietnam predates the Kennedy Administration by quite some time.


1954

Battle of Dienbienphu Begins: A force of 40,000 heavily armed Vietminh lay seige to the French garrison at Dienbienphu. Using Chinese artillery to shell the airstrip, the Vietminh make it impossible for French supplies to arrive by air. It soon becomes clear that the French have met their match.

Eisenhower Cites "Domino Theory" Regarding Southeast Asia: Responding to the defeat of the French by the Vietminh at Dienbienphu, President Eisenhower outlines the Domino Theory: "You have a row of dominoes set up. You knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly."

French Defeated at Dien Bien Phu

Geneva Convention Begins: Delegates from nine nations convene in Geneva to start negotiations that will lead to the end of hostilities in Indochina. The idea of partitioning Vietnam is first explored at this forum.

Geneva Convention Agreements Announced: Vietminh General Ta Quang Buu and French General Henri Delteil sign the Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities in Vietnam. As part of the agreement, a provisional demarcation line is drawn at the 17th parallel which will divide Vietnam until nationwide elections are held in 1956. The United States does not accept the agreement, neither does the government of Bao Dai.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/vietnam/timeline.htm


1954 - A peace conference is scheduled for 8 May, to be held in Geneva, Switzerland, the European centre for the United Nations (UN). In order to maximise their leverage at the bargaining table, the Viet Minh decide to attempt to take a significant French military post just before the conference begins. The target is to be Dien Bien Phu. Over 100,000 Viet Minh troops and almost 100,000 transport workers descend on the area.

The siege of the town begins on 13 March. By 27 March the 15,000 French troops inside have been cut off from all support and supplies. The French surrender on 7 May, the day before the Geneva negotiations are set to begin. About 25,000 Vietnamese and more than 1,500 French troops have died during the siege.

The Geneva peace conference begins on 8 May as planned, continuing until 29 July when a compromise agreement is signed. Vietnam will be divided at the 17th parallel. All French and South Vietnamese forces are to move south of the demarcation line. All Viet Minh forces are to move to its north. France will quit the country completely. National elections to reunify the country under a single government are to be held in July 1956.

The agreement is endorsed by the DRV, France, Britain, China and the Soviet Union. The US and the ASV withhold approval. The country has been effectively divided into a communist North (governed by the DRV) and a noncommunist South (administered by the Vietnamese Government in Saigon). The French are gone. On 24 October US President Dwight D. Eisenhower offers South Vietnam direct economic aid.

http://www.moreorless.au.com/heroes/ho.htm

We supported the government of South Vietnam in suspending the election because we thought "our" side would lose. How's that for expressing faith in democracy?

Yeah, South Korea was a sort of proto-fascist dictatorship too i think...

But if both sides have nuclear weapons, do they sort of cancel each other out? Because neither side wants to risk destructive retaliation. And im thinking a sino-american war would probably be on the Korean peninsula, or less likely Taiwan.

"Spidergoat- what do you mean conventional warfare is not going to last much longer? I see no particular change in actual warfare for decades. Sure, increased availability of NBC warfare will change things a little, but you'll still need men on the ground with guns. "

Conventional warfare with tanks and crew-operated weapons and coordinated maneuvers versus guerrilla war or LIC low intensity conflict, which still requires men on the ground, but less sophisticated (and expensive) weapons. I've been reading The Transformation of War, by Martin Van Creveld. What he described in 1991 is coming true.

The Vietnam War was started by a Democrat , Kennedy. It was furtherd along by Johnson, another Democrat. Republicans, Nixon and Ford, stopped the Vietnam War.
check your history man, it was Eisenhower that sent the first advisors

from:
http://www.landscaper.net/timelin.htm

12 Feb 55 - President Eisenhower's administration sends the first U.S. advisers to South Vietnam to train the South Vietnamese Army

5 Sep 56 - President Eisenhower tells a news conference that the French are "involved in a hopelessly losing war in Indochina"

8 July 59 - Two Americans are killed and one wounded during a Viet Minh attack 20 miles north of Saigon

Spidergoat- you mean that it is most likely that the next few wars will be ones of proto imperialism, with the use of guerilla tactics? If so, I would agree. But its only a phase. These things come and go. If things solidify again, as I am sure they will in a few decades, we'll end up back in cold war type situations.

What Creveld describes is the end of warfare between state entities, the end of imperialism (he mentions the gulf war as the last gasp, but that was before Bush & Co. went "retro"), and the return of warfare to the forms it took during the middle ages, before the invention of the state. The threat of nuclear destruction between states will keep large scale conventional wars from taking place.

Errrmm, I cant think of a major war that wasnt in some way backed or organised by a state. (I'm including the papacy as a state.) I assume the middle ages to mean more like the medieval period. About the only non state backed warfare I can think of is the Vikings. And perhaps some of the people who gave Byzantium so much trouble, but they were tribal, so already half way to states.

I generally agree about nukes inhibiting large scale warfare, but what about little African countries that dont have them?

They have machetes.

The Vietnam War was started by a Democrat , Kennedy. It was furtherd along by Johnson, another Democrat. Republicans, Nixon and Ford, stopped the Vietnam War.

Johnson and Kennedy simply were continuing the Cold War policy of 'rollback' that had been established with Paul Nitze's NSC-68 during the Truman administration, the notion that the US couldn't simply 'contain' communism, but must defeat it. Certainly we know in hindsight that the escalation of force was a mistake, based on faulty assumptions, even probably some outright lies at some level, but that's not's what is so troubling. What is troubling is the fact that later administrations seem to learn nothing from past mistakes in history.

As far as Nixon ending the war, there is evidence that he successfully threw a wrench into Johnson's attempt at ending the war through talks in '68, by having Anna Chenault, a Republican party 'higher up' with high level connections in South Vietnam, convince Thieu to cancel the talks and that Thieu could get a better deal through the Republicans if they were elected.


(Seymour) Hersh describes Nixon sending Anna Chennault to lobby South Vietnamese President Thieu to urge him to obstruct the effort to start peace negotiations. Chennault was a vice president of the Republican election finance committee and chairwoman of Republican Women for Nixon. As head of Flying Tiger Airlines, a company originally formed, with CIA backing, to assist Chiang Kai-shek in his war against the Chinese Communists, Mrs. Chennault had high-level contacts in the South Vietnamese government.

This is authenticated in the 1986 book The Palace File by Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold Schecter. Hung was an advisor to President Thieu and Schecter was Time magazine's Diplomatic Editor. "During the closing week of the election, Nixon's campaign manager John Mitchell, called [Chennault] 'almost every day' to persuade her to keep Thieu from going to Paris for peace talks with the North Vietnamese," they write. She was successful. Five days before the American election, Thieu announced his refusal to participate in the peace talks.

This is again confirmed by Stanley Karnow in his revised (1991) and updated Vietnam: A History which, in its first edition, was the basis for the PBS series. As Karnow writes, "through one of Nixon's foreign policy aides, Richard Allen, [Kissinger] contacted the Republicans, offering to furnish them with covert information on Johnson's moves. A clandestine channel was set up through Nixon's campaign manger, John Mitchell, and Kissinger guided the Republicans secretly on the Vietnam issue for nearly two months -- thus supplying Nixon with the ammunition to blast Humphrey for 'playing politics with war.'"

Karnow further documents Chennault's advice to Thieu to obstruct the peace negotiations. And he supplies new information that Johnson, suspicious of Nixon's intrigues, was bugging the conversations that Chennault had with Thieu.

Anthony Summers's book provides the authentication for what we already know -- but which the media deems less interesting than gossip about Nixon's marriage or his penchant for mood-changing drugs. Unlike earlier biographers, Summers had access to FBI documents, though much of what Hoover found out is still covered up. Although Johnson ordered the FBI to investigate the Nixon-Chennault-Thieu connection, Hoover told Chennault not to worry, that "the bureau was 'making a show' of obeying Johnson's orders."

Nevertheless, what FBI and other documents show is that in the final days of the 1968 campaign, with peace negotiations in the offering, Nixon urged Thieu to stonewall President Johnson in order to undermine the prospect of peace negotiations. As Nixon told Chennault to tell Thieu, he could expect a "better deal" when Nixon became president.
http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/3621


Just go back and look who were the presidents when both wars started, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) was in office during the start of WW2, Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) was the other Democrat that was in office when the first World War started.
The Democrats were in charge during the wars, they could have refused to enter into those wars but asked congress to enter into the wars.

Wilson kept the US out of WW1 for almost 3 years, but was under tremendous pressure from Republicans in Congress led by Senate majority leader Henry Cabot Lodge, and also Teddy Roosevelt, for the US to enter the war, particularly after Germany broke the Sussex and Arabic Pledges and the Zimerman Telegram was released to the newspapers. FDR had little choice either. Japan declared war at roughly the same time that the strike on Pearl Harbor took place. There was no way a sitting president could have pleaded with Congress NOT to declare war under the circumstances.