Watched the BBC documentary, Why We Fight. It may be available here on Google Video.
I found it to be quite an eye opener. I was shocked by many of the things I learned. I am interested in delving further into some of the points it raises. It would be good to have a summary of the points this documentary covers, but I didn’t do that tonight. I did pause a few times to capture some important quotes, but there were many more, not captured here.
The U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945:
“99.9% of us were delighted because we’d been convinced that if Japan was not hit by nuclear weapons, one million of us would be killed–drop those bombs and they will surrender. Well they were trying to surrender all that summer. But Truman wouldn’t listen because Truman wanted to drop the bombs. To show off; To frighten Stalin.”
“Today, the United States spends more on defense than all other parts of the federal budget combined.” This was followed with some statistic that the US spends more than all of the rest of the UN countries, plus some other countries, combined.
Around the 57 minute timestamp — there were some important points about Vietnam. The people being lied to regarding the Gulf of Tomkin, and about the ongoing situation during the war.
Towards the end, regarding Standing Armies:
“We’re walking on thin ice. We are treading the same path taken by the first democratic regime ever created in the Western world, namely the Roman Republic. The Roman Republic inadvertently acquired an empire around the world and they then discovered that to maintain, expand, protect this empire they required standing armies. Standing armies is what George Washington warned us against in his farewell address. They will destroy the structure of government that we tried to create in our Constitution, to prevent the rise of an imperial presidency.
“The single most important article in our Constitution is the one that gives the right to go to war exclusively to the elected representatives of the people, in the Congress. Our Congress, in October of 2002, voted in both houses to give this power to a single man including the use of nuclear weapons if he so chose. And of course in less than six months later, he did choose to exercise it in Iraq.”
…
“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance and we have not been vigilant since Dwight Eisenhower issued his warning to us back in 1961 about the dangers of unauthorized power in the form of the military-industrial complex.”
“I think we fight because too many people are not standing up and saying ‘I’m not doing this anymore.’”
Several of those quotes were from Chalmers Johnson, whose work I was very pleased to have been introduced to through this documentary. An amazing scholar and writer, I look forward to reviewing his fine work. Here is a recent essay which ties many of his themes together: Republic or empire: A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States. Please have a look.
