shad,
Re: I never felt that people who supported the US government's policy in Vietnam in the mid 60's were non-thinkers. Ill-informed...misinformed possibly.
You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. Most of the people who supported the Viet Nam War were, in fact, superficial thinkers who didn't engage in a suitable level of skepticism about such outright state lies like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution justification. It wasn't just the public who were cowed, of course. The devious and dishonest Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed the U.S. Senate 98-2, with only two Senators, Morse and Guerning, actually voting correctly in the face of LBJ's deliberate fraud.
The American public, ill-served by a media that was riddled with CIA operatives (see Mighty Wurlitzer, tinyurl.com, was too damn dumb to realize they were being swindled.
*** Re: Labeling someone a commie was a popular post WW II pastime...unfortunately
It's still popular here among the Right Wingnuts on SI. I've been called a commie dozens of times on these threads. Which just goes to show how damn dumb the Right Wing is. It should be apparent to all who read me for a while that I'm not a Commie. I'm an Anarcho-Groucho-Marxist.
*** Re: "I grew up in a military family and like most early post war kids I was proud of my country. WW II John Wayne movies and such fueled that pride."
And I'm proud of my contribution here in outting John Wayne, aka Marion Morrison, as a phony who chose to leap over his competitors for "leading man" roles in Hollywood in the early 1940s when they enlisted in the WW II effort and Wayne stayed home in order to pose as a patriot. Message 18881972
Some who served: jewishworldreview.com
*** Re: But arrogance was one of the Achilles heels of the baby boomer 60's-70's youth movement. The neo-cons apparently suffer the same affliction today?
LOL! Except David Horowitz, who suffers from the same hubris today as a neo-con that he did in the 1960s as a New Leftist without a clue. Some minds never gel into adult form.
*** Re: An open mind is usually not a bad thing.
There are limits. For example, should the Bush Team come out with an outlandish statement that, for instance Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat, or that the earth is flat; the next day's headlines would have read or will read:
IMMINENT DANGER SEEN IN MIDEAST
or
"ALTERNATE VIEW OF WORLD -- WHITE HOUSE"
Too much open mindedness toward crackpot lies from White House should be labeled feeble-mindedness, senility and/or pathological gullibility. The media is guilty of all three. Besides being guilty of blatant propagandizing and disinformation. |