Remarks by Spencer Graves at an Armistice Day memorial on 2021-11-11 at 11 AM:
I accepted a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the US Air Force in 1967, January 28, near the peak of the US war in Vietnam. In July 1967 with three months on active duty, it came to me that the South Vietnamese should have a “home team” advantage. So why did they need foreign troops, when their enemies, the Viet Cong, did not? Only one answer made sense to me: The US was supporting a totally corrupt government selected for them in Washington, and they REFUSED to put their lives on the line to defend it.
Later I learned that former President Eisenhower had said that everyone with whom he had communicated, who was knowledgeable about Indochinese affairs, including Vietnam, agree that the Communist Ho Chi Minh might have gotten 80 percent of the vote if elections had been held there. This was the universal expert consensus that was not even mentionable in the mainstream media of that day. Eisenhower knew that he might not be reelected in 1956 if a Communist had won an election scheduled there for July of that year. He therefore clandestinely cancelled those elections.
If the mainstream media in the United States had allowed the truth about Vietnam to be disseminated, they might have lost advertising revenue.
Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama made similar comments. These three presidents and many other incumbent politicians doubtless believed that the mainstream media would not allow them to honestly promote world peace and US national security when doing so might threaten the social status of those who control much of the money for the mainstream media in the US.
The most egregious example I know of this is an America West flight that made an emergency landing in 1999 when two Saudis tried to break into the cockpit. From that and other incidents, the FBI and other US government security agencies knew that members of the Saudi royal family and employees of the Saudi embassy and consulates in the US were involved in the preparations for something like what happened on September 11, 2001. That information was classified Top Secret and only declassified by President Obama in 2016.
But that information is still not broadly disseminated. My research says that the two primary recruiters for Islamic terrorism are Saudi Arabia and the United States. Hundreds of thousands of people have died from US-led anti-terrorism actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, who had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. Maybe a few dozen did. Not one of those people killed had a fair trial. Not one was informed of the nature of the alleged crimes for which they were executed. Not one had an opportunity to defend themselves in court.
The for-profit media system in the US makes it essentially impossible them to disseminate honest information about almost anything. As a result, politicians who act on honest information about national defense are vilified for being soft on “terrorism” (or between 1946 and 1991 being soft on “Communism”). Instead, they must manufacture enemies for us.
The current escalation of rhetoric with China, our nuclear “modernization”, and increasing nuclear proliferation all indicate that the risk of a nuclear war is increasing. The estimate of a risk of a nuclear war that I’ve found most credible says there is a 40 percent chance of a nuclear war within the next 70 years, less than life expectancy of a child born today. And that assumes that the risk is constant, when it seems to be increasing. If a nuclear war comes, Daniel Ellsberg has said that the most likely outcome is a nuclear winter lasting a decade during which 98 percent of humanity will starve to death if they do not die of something else sooner.
INVITATION: If you can think of some way that Spencer might help you communicate a message like this to more people, please let him know: spencer dot graves at effectivedefense dot org.
—Spencer Graves is the Secretary of the Board of PeaceWorks-KC. Copyright 2021, Spencer Graves; photo by Henry Stoever, Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License.
