the very dark side of u.s. history--a partial history of u.s. terrorism _ ...

8/6/2019 The Very Dark Side of U.S. History--a partial history of U.S. terrorism _ Information Clearing House_ ICH

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5/12/11 7:Surprise -- The Very Dark Side of U.S. History : Information Clearing House: ICH

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Surprise -- The Very Dark

Side of U.S. History

By Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry, Consortium News

Editor's Note: Many Americans view their country and its

soldiers as the "good guys" spreading "democracy" and

"liberty" around the world. When the United States inflicts

unnecessary death and destruction, it's viewed as a mistake

or an aberration.

In the following article Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry

examine the long history of these acts of brutality, a record

that suggests they are neither a "mistake" nor an

"aberration" but rather conscious counterinsurgency

doctrine on the "dark side."

October 10, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- There
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a dark -- seldom acknowledged -- thread that runs through

U.S. military doctrine, dating back to the early days of the

Republic.

This military tradition has explicitly defended the selective usof terror, whether in suppressing Native American resistance

on the frontiers in the 19th Century or in protecting U.S.

interests abroad in the 20th Century or fighting the "war on

terror" over the last decade.

The American people are largely oblivious to this hiddentradition because most of the literature advocating state-

sponsored terror is carefully confined to national security

circles and rarely spills out into the public debate, which is

instead dominated by feel-good messages about well-

intentioned U.S. interventions abroad.

Over the decades, congressional and journalistic investigation

have exposed some of these abuses. But when that does

happen, the cases are usually deemed anomalies or excesses

by out-of-control soldiers.

But the historical record shows that terror tactics have longbeen a dark side of U.S. military doctrine. The theories surviv

today in textbooks on counterinsurgency warfare, "low-

intensity" conflict and "counter-terrorism."


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Some historians trace the formal acceptance of those brutal

tenets to the 1860s when the U.S. Army was facing challenge

from a rebellious South and resistance from Native American

in the West. Out of those crises emerged the modern military

concept of "total war" -- which considers attacks on civiliansand their economic infrastructure an integral part of a

victorious strategy.

In 1864, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman cut a swath of

destruction through civilian territory in Georgia and the

Carolinas. His plan was to destroy the South's will to fight anits ability to sustain a large army in the field. The devastation

left plantations in flames and brought widespread Confederat

complaints of rape and murder of civilians.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, Col. John M. Chivington and the

Third Colorado Cavalry were employing their own terrortactics to pacify Cheyennes. A scout named John Smith later

described the attack at Sand Creek, Colorado, on unsuspectin

Indians at a peaceful encampment:

"They were scalped; their brains knocked out; the men used

their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children,knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains

out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word." [U.S.

Cong., Senate, 39 Cong., 2nd Sess., "The Chivington

Massacre," Reports of the Committees.]


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Though Smith's objectivity was challenged at the time, today

even defenders of the Sand Creek raid concede that most

women and children there were killed and mutilated. [See Lt.

Col. William R. Dunn,I Stand by Sand Creek.]

Yet, in the 1860s, many whites in Colorado saw the slaughter

as the only realistic way to bring peace, just as Sherman

viewed his "march to the sea" as necessary to force the South

surrender.

The brutal tactics in the West also helped clear the way for th

transcontinental railroad, built fortunes for favored

businessmen and consolidated Republican political power for

more than six decades, until the Great Depression of the

1930s. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Indian Genocide and

Republican Power."]

Four years after the Civil War, Sherman became commanding

general of the Army and incorporated the Indian pacification

strategies -- as well as his own tactics -- into U.S. military

doctrine. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, who had led Indian wars in

the Missouri territory, succeeded Sherman in 1883 and furthe

entrenched those strategies as policy. [See Ward Churchill,A

Little Matter of Genocide.]

By the end of the 19th Century, the Native American warrior
http://consortiumnews.com/2010/100610b.html


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had been vanquished, but the Army's winning strategies lived

on.

Imperial America

When the United States claimed the Philippines as a prize in

the Spanish-American War, Filipino insurgents resisted. In

1900, the U.S. commander, Gen. J. Franklin Bell, consciously

modeled his brutal counterinsurgency campaign after the

Indian wars and Sherman's "march to the sea."

Bell believed that by punishing the wealthier Filipinos throug

destruction of their homes -- much as Sherman had done in th

South -- they would be coerced into helping convince their

countrymen to submit.

Learning from the Indian wars, he also isolated the guerrillasby forcing Filipinos into tightly controlled zones where

schools were built and other social amenities were provided.

"The entire population outside of the major cities in Batangas

was herded into concentration camps," wrote historian Stuart

Creighton Miller. "Bell's main target was the wealthier and

better-educated classes. Adding insult to injury, Bell made

these people carry the petrol used to burn their own country

homes." [See Miller's "Benevolent Assimilation."]


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For those outside the protected areas, there was terror. A

supportive news correspondent described one scene in which

American soldiers killed "men, women, children from lads

of 10 and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino, as such, wa

little better than a dog.

"Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to 'make them

talk,' have taken prisoner people who held up their hands and

peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of

evidence to show they were even insurrectos, stood them on a

bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the waterbelow and float down as an example to those who found their

bullet-riddled corpses."

Defending the tactics, the correspondent noted that "it is not

civilized warfare, but we are not dealing with a civilized

people. The only thing they know and fear is force, violence,and brutality." [Philadelphia Ledger, Nov. 19, 1900]

In 1901, anti-imperialists in Congress exposed and denounced

Bell's brutal tactics. Nevertheless, Bell's strategies won

military acclaim as a refined method of pacification.

In a 1973 book, one pro-Bell military historian, John MorganGates, termed reports of U.S. atrocities "exaggerated" and

hailed Bell's "excellent understanding of the role of

benevolence in pacification."


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Gates recalled that Bell's campaign in Batanga was regarded

by military strategists as "pacification in its most perfected

form." [See Gates's Schoolbooks and Krags: The United State

Army in the Philippines, 1898-1902.]

Spreading the Word

At the turn of the century, the methodology of pacification

was a hot topic among the European colonial powers, too.

From Namibia to Indochina, Europeans struggled to subdue

local populations.

Often outright slaughter proved effective, as the Germans

demonstrated with massacres of the Herrero tribe in Namibia

from 1904-1907. But military strategists often compared note

about more subtle techniques of targeted terror mixed with

demonstrations of benevolence.

Counterinsurgency strategies were back in vogue after World

War II as many subjugated people demanded independence

from colonial rule and Washington worried about the

expansion of communism. In the 1950s, the Huk rebellion

against U.S. dominance made the Philippines again thelaboratory, with Bell's earlier lessons clearly remembered.

"The campaign against the Huk movement in the Philippines

greatly resembled the American campaign of almost 50


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years earlier," historian Gates observed. "The American

approach to the problem of pacification had been a studied

one."

But the war against the Huks had some new wrinkles,particularly the modern concept of psychological warfare or

psy-war.

Under the pioneering strategies of the CIA's Maj. Gen.

Edward G. Lansdale, psy-war was a new spin to the old game

of breaking the will of a target population. The idea was toanalyze the psychological weaknesses of a people and develo

"themes" that could induce actions favorable to those carrying

out the operation.

While psy-war included propaganda and disinformation, it

also relied on terror tactics of a demonstrative nature. AnArmy psy-war pamphlet, drawing on Lansdale's experience in

the Philippines, advocated "exemplary criminal violence -- th

murder and mutilation of captives and the display of their

bodies," according to Michael McClintock'sInstruments of

Statecraft.

In his memoirs, Lansdale boasted of one legendary psy-war

trick used against the Huks who were considered superstitiou

and fearful of a vampire-like creature called an asuang.


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"The psy-war squad set up an ambush along a trail used by th

Huks," Lansdale wrote. "When a Huk patrol came along the

trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man on the

patrol, their move unseen in the dark night. They punctured h

neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, held the body up by thheels, drained it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail

"When the Huks returned to look for the missing man and

found their bloodless comrade, every member of the patrol

believed the asuang had got him." [See Lansdale'sIn the Mids

of Wars.]

The Huk rebellion also saw the refinement of free-fire zones,

technique used effectively by Bell's forces a half-century

earlier. In the 1950s, special squadrons were assigned to do

the dirty work.

"The special tactic of these squadrons was to cordon off areas

anyone they caught inside the cordon was considered an

enemy," explained one pro-U.S. Filipino colonel. "Almost

daily you could find bodies floating in the river, many of them

victims of [Major Napoleon] Valeriano's Nenita Unit. [See

Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of PeasantRevolt in the Philippines.]

On to Vietnam


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The successful suppression of the Huks led the war's architec

to share their lessons elsewhere in Asia and beyond. Valerian

went on to co-author an important American textbook on

counterinsurgency and to serve as part of the American

pacification effort in Vietnam with Lansdale.

Following the Philippine model, Vietnamese were crowded

into "strategic hamlets"; "free-fire zones" were declared with

homes and crops destroyed; and the Phoenix program

eliminated thousands of suspected Viet Cong cadre.

The ruthless strategies were absorbed and accepted even by

widely respected military figures, such as Gen. Colin Powell

who served two tours in Vietnam and endorsed the routine

practice of murdering Vietnamese males as a necessary part o

the counterinsurgency effort.

"I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age

male," Powell wrote in his much-lauded memoir, My

American Journey. "If a helo [a U.S. helicopter] spotted a

peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a

possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him

If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostileintent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him.

"Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with

whom I had served at Gelnhausen [West Germany], Lt. Col.


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Walter Pritchard, was killed by enemy sniper fire while

observing MAMs from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only

one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to

dull fine perceptions of right and wrong."

In 1965, the U.S. intelligence community formalized its hard-

learned counterinsurgency lessons by commissioning a top-

secret program called Project X. Based at the U.S. Army

Intelligence Center and School at Fort Holabird, Maryland, th

project drew from field experience and developed teaching

plans to "provide intelligence training to friendly foreigncountries," according to a Pentagon history prepared in 1991

and released in 1997.

Called "a guide for the conduct of clandestine operations,"

Project X "was first used by the U.S. Intelligence School on

Okinawa to train Vietnamese and, presumably, other foreignnationals," the history stated.

Linda Matthews of the Pentagon's Counterintelligence

Division recalled that in 1967-68, some of the Project X

training material was prepared by officers connected to the

Phoenix program. "She suggested the possibility that someoffending material from the Phoenix program may have foun

its way into the Project X materials at that time," the Pentago

report said.


12/30



In the 1970s, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School

moved to Fort Huachuca in Arizona and began exporting

Project X material to U.S. military assistance groups working

with "friendly foreign countries." By the mid-1970s, the

Project X material was going to armies all over the world.

In its 1992 review, the Pentagon acknowledged that Project X

was the source for some of the "objectionable" lessons at the

School of the Americas where Latin American officers were

trained in blackmail, kidnapping, murder and spying on non-

violent political opponents.

But disclosure of the full story was blocked near the end of th

first Bush administration when senior Pentagon officials

working for then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ordered the

destruction of most Project X records. [See Robert Parry's

Lost History.]

Living Dangerously

By the mid-1960s, some of the U.S. counterinsurgency lesson

had reached Indonesia, too. The U.S. military training was

surreptitious because Washington viewed the country'sneutralist leader Sukarno as politically suspect. The training

was permitted only to give the United States influence within

the Indonesian military which was considered more reliable.
http://www.neckdeepbook.com/


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The covert U.S. aid and training was mostly innocuous-

sounding "civic action," which is generally thought to mean

building roads, staffing health clinics and performing other

"hearts-and-minds" activities with civilians. But "civic action

also provided cover in Indonesia, as in the Philippines andVietnam, for psy-war.

The secret U.S.-Indonesian military connections paid off for

Washington when a political crisis erupted, threatening

Sukarno's government.

To counter Indonesia's powerful Communist Party, known as

the PKI, the army's Red Berets organized the slaughter of ten

of thousands of men, women and children. So many bodies

were dumped into the rivers of East Java that they ran red wit

blood.

In a classic psy-war tactic, the bloated carcasses also served a

a political warning to villages down river.

"To make sure they didn't sink, the carcasses were deliberatel

tied to, or impaled on, bamboo stakes," wrote eyewitness Pipi

Rochijat. "And the departure of corpses from the Kediri regiodown the Brantas achieved its golden age when bodies were

stacked on rafts over which the PKI banner proudly flew."

[See Rochijat's "Am I PKI or Non-PKI?" Indonesia, Oct.

1985.]


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Some historians have attributed the grotesque violence to a

crazed army which engaged in "unplanned brutality" or "mas

hysteria" leading ultimately to the slaughter of some half

million Indonesians, many of Chinese descent.

But the recurring tactic of putting bodies on gruesome display

fits as well with the military doctrines of psy-war, a word tha

one of the leading military killers used in un-translated form

one order demanding elimination of the PKI.

Sarwo Edhie, chief of the political para-commando battalion

known as the Red Berets, warned that the communist

opposition "should be given no opportunity to

concentrate/consolidate. It should be pushed back

systematically by all means, including psy-war." [See The

Revolt of the G30S/PKI and Its Suppression, translated by

Robert Cribb in The Indonesian Killings.]

Sarwo Edhie had been identified as a CIA contact when he

served at the Indonesian Embassy in Australia. [SeePacific,

May-June 1968.]

US Media Sympathy

Elite U.S. reaction to the horrific slaughter was muted and ha

remained ambivalent ever since. The Johnson administration

denied any responsibility for the massacres, butNew York


15/30



Times columnist James Reston spoke for many opinion leade

when he approvingly termed the bloody developments in

Indonesia "a gleam of light in Asia."

The American denials of involvement held until 1990 whenU.S. diplomats admitted to a reporter that they had aided the

Indonesian army by supplying lists of suspected communists.

"It really was a big help to the army," embassy officer Robert

Martens told Kathy Kadane of States News Service. "I

probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not allbad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive

moment." Martens had headed the U.S. team that compiled th

death lists.

Kadane's story provoked a telling response from Washington

Postsenior editorial writer Stephen S. Rosenfeld. He acceptethe fact that American officials had assisted "this fearsome

slaughter," but then justified the killings.

Rosenfeld argued that the massacre "was and still is widely

regarded as the grim but earned fate of a conspiratorial

revolutionary party that represented the same communistjuggernaut that was on the march in Vietnam."

In a column entitled, "Indonesia 1965: The Year of Living

Cynically?" Rosenfeld reasoned that "either the army would


16/30



get the communists or the communists would get the army, it

was thought: Indonesia was a domino, and the PKI's demise

kept it [Indonesia] standing in the free world.

"Though the means were grievously tainted, we -- thefastidious among us as well as the hard-headed and cynical --

can be said to have enjoyed the fruits in the geopolitical

stability of that important part of Asia, in the revolution that

never happened." [Washington Post, July 13, 1990]

The fruit tasted far more bitter to the peoples of the Indonesiaarchipelago, however. In 1975, the army of Indonesia's new

dictator, Gen. Suharto, invaded the former Portuguese colony

of East Timor. When the East Timorese resisted, the

Indonesian army returned to its gruesome bag of tricks,

engaging in virtual genocide against the population.

A Catholic missionary provided an eyewitness account of one

search-and-destroy mission in East Timor in 1981.

"We saw with our own eyes the massacre of the people who

were surrendering: all dead, even women and children, even

the littlest ones. Not even pregnant women were spared:they were cut open. . They did what they had done to smal

children the previous year, grabbing them by the legs and

smashing their heads against rocks.


17/30



"The comments of Indonesian officers reveal the moral

character of this army: 'We did the same thing [in 1965] in

Java, in Borneo, in the Celebes, in Irian Jaya, and it worked."

[See A. Barbedo de Magalhaes,East Timor: Land of Hope.]

The references to the success of the 1965 slaughter were not

unusual. In Timor: A People Betrayed, author James Dunn

noted that "on the Indonesian side, there have been many

reports that many soldiers viewed their operation as a further

phase in the ongoing campaign to suppress communism that

had followed the events of September 1965."

Classic psy-war and pacification strategies were followed to

the hilt in East Timor. The Indonesians put on display corpses

and the heads of their victims. Timorese also were herded int

government-controlled camps before permanent relocation in

"resettlement villages" far from their original homes.

"The problem is that people are forced to live in the

settlements and are not allowed to travel outside," said Msgr.

Costa Lopes, apostolic administrator of Dili. "This is the main

reason why people cannot grow enough food." [See John G.

Taylor,Indonesia's Forgotten War: The Hidden History ofEast Timor.]

Public Revulsion


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Through television in the 1960-70s, the Vietnam War finally

brought the horrors of counterinsurgency home to millions of

Americans. They watched as U.S. troops torched villages and

forced distraught old women to leave ancestral homes.

Camera crews caught on film brutal interrogation of Viet

Cong suspects, the execution of one young VC officer, and th

bombing of children with napalm.

In effect, the Vietnam War was the first time Americans got t

witness the pacification strategies that had evolved secretly asnational security policy since the 19th Century. As a result,

millions of Americans protested the war's conduct and

Congress belatedly compelled an end to U.S. participation in

1974.

But the psy-war doctrinal debates were not resolved by theVietnam War. Counterinsurgency advocates regrouped in the

1980s behind President Ronald Reagan, who mounted a

spirited defense of the Vietnamese intervention and reaffirme

U.S. resolve to employ similar tactics against leftist forces

especially in Central America. [See Consortiumnews.com's

"Guatemala: A Test Tube for Repression."]

Reagan also added an important new component to the mix.

Recognizing how graphic images and honest reporting from

the war zone had undercut public support for the
http://consortiumnews.com/2010/100310.html


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counterinsurgency in Vietnam, Reagan authorized an

aggressive domestic "public diplomacy" operation which

practiced what was called "perception management" -- in

effect, intimidating journalists to ensure that only sanitized

information would reach the American people.

Reporters who disclosed atrocities by U.S.-trained forces, suc

as the El Mozote massacre by El Salvador's Atlacatl battalion

in 1981, came under harsh criticism and saw their careers

damaged.

Some Reagan operatives were not shy about their defense of

political terror as a necessity of the Cold War. Neil

Livingstone, a counter-terrorism consultant to the National

Security Council, called death squads "an extremely effective

tool, however odious, in combatting terrorism and

revolutionary challenges." [See McClintock'sInstruments ofStatecraft.]

When Democrats in Congress objected to excesses of

Reagan's interventions in Central America, the administration

responded with more public relations and political pressure,

questioning the patriotism of the critics. For instance, ReaganUnited Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick accused anyon

who took note of U.S.-backed war crimes of "blaming

America first."


20/30



Many Democrats in Congress and journalists in the

Washington press corps buckled under the attacks, giving the

Reagan administration much freer rein to carry out brutal

"death squad" strategies in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala

and Nicaragua.

What is clear from these experiences in Indonesia, Vietnam,

Central America and elsewhere is that the United States, for

generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of

mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S.

benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other ofends-justify-the-means brutality embraced by

counterinsurgency specialists.

Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote

locations with little notice in the national press. But sometime

the two competing visions - of a just America and a ruthlessone - clash in the open, as they did in Vietnam.

Or the dark side of U.S. security policy is thrown into the ligh

by unauthorized leaks, such as the photos of abused detainees

at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or by revelations about

waterboarding and other torture authorized by George W.Bush's White House as part of the "war on terror."

Only then does the public get a glimpse of the grim reality, th

bloody and brutal tactics that have been deemed "necessary"


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for more than two centuries in the defense of the purported

"national interests."

Peter Dale Scott is an author and poet whose books have

focused on deep politics, the intersection of economics,criminality and national security. (For more, go to

http://www.peterdalescott.net/) Robert Parry is a veteran

Washington investigative journalist. (For his books, go to

http://www.neckdeepbook.com)

2010 Consortium News All rights reserved.

Comments (48)

Sort by: Date Rating Last Activity

30 weeks ago

This article "owes it all" to Howard Zinn's "People's history of the United

States".

Read it and weep.

2 replies active 30 weeks ago

30 weeks agoGood morning! Happy wake up in the real world who has known that for

sure for the past two hundred years. A giant intellectual step indeed.
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22/30



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30 weeks ago

That total war was invented in 1860 is ludicrous. Way back in the Old

Testament that was the Jews favorite means of waging war. There was

a period when it was not all the easy, In the modern age it returned to

favor. Look at Dresden, Cologne, Frankfurt Darmstadt and on and on.

Have a nice day.

30 weeks ago

very sad history in deed !!

30 weeks ago

what a miserable catalogue of american exceptionalism. where's the

surprise?

30 weeks ago

Im surprised...Wheres the rest? This article hardly touched the

Subject!!!

Still...ALL readers on ICH know what a brutal regime the US always has

been!

And a side note: What to do with all the governments that STILL even

talk to The U.S.!In my opinion THEY are Supporting Terror!

And their excuse is?

30 weeks ago
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23/30



ReporRe l

wagelaborer +3

ReporRe l

me, again +3

ReporRe l

An interesting corollary article from several years ago:

http://www.starchiefpress.com/articles/article12....

1 reply active 30 weeks ago

30 weeks agoNo, no. The America of Perpetual Innocence would never participate in

such atrocities!

Each new revelation must be met with shock, shock! and utter dismay

at the betrayal of American principles!

Never before has such a thing been done by our heroes!http://wagelaborer.blogspot.com/2009/02/memory-ho...

30 weeks ago

and they call today Muslims "terrorists". the americans ought to know

what a 'terrorist' is like the back of their hand. they embody the word.

and even today, they say that the people of the nations they

occupy(ied), burned down, and killed man, woman and child by the

hundreds of thousands, with horror movie tactics, 'uncivilized'. the sheer

brutality of their tactics is beyond 'uncivilized'. the use of the language

to obfuscate the american minds, that are truly below grade one level of

education, is 'uncivilized' in every sense of the word. how's that saying

go? right: "those who wish control what we say also attempt to control

what we think". Attempt? No. They Do. just listen to any americanspeak one day. tell me they don't parrot what they hear on their boob

tube. like a parrot, they don't even know what the meanings are, they

are just mimicking. just like the brutality used in their yester-year
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24/30



brian +4

ReporRe l

Embed video Check S ellin

30 weeks ago

'The American people are largely oblivious to this hidden tradition'

not really...thats like the perpetrators using the M (Mistake) word..for

their atrocities...These atrocities are known by people,..just notacknowledged, because it conflicts with the patriotic idea people have of

themselves and the tradition they are linked to.

People are happpy to ascribe atrocities to others..but dare to say their

kind have peropetrated them at your peril.

eg:

'In his memoirs, Lansdale boasted of one legendary psy-war trick usedagainst the Huks who were considered superstitious and fearful of a

vampire-like creature called an asuang.

"The psy-war squad set up an ambush along a trail used by the Huks,"

Lansdale wrote. "When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the

ambushers silently snatched the last man on the patrol, their move

unseen in the dark night. They punctured his neck with two holes,vampire-fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood, and

put the corpse back on the trail.'

what war memorial would admit proudly to this or of behavior! If it were

done to a fellow citizen, thered be outrage...

1 reply active 30 weeks ago

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