Terrorism and War (Open Media Series) by Howard Zinn

Author:Howard Zinn [Zinn, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781609803148
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2011-01-03T23:00:00+00:00

The Freedom of Information Act was one of the remarkable gains that came out of the 1960s. It has been tremendously useful for scholars and for citizens who want to find out more about what our government and what our presidents have done. It’s very instructive for American people to learn what motivated our presidents in making their decisions, and that’s why Bush is obviously trying to clamp down on public access to government records.

So much of this reminds me of Stalinism, really. You wipe out history; you close the books. Stalin did not want the Russian people to know who was involved in the Russian Revolution because he was killing off the leaders of the Russian Revolution. In this case, I think Bush does not want the American people to learn the crass motives behind the decisions of American presidents.

Maybe he was led to this by the public disclosure of facts that we recently learned through the opening up of the tapes of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. We’ve learned how little we can trust the government to act upon decent motives. We learned that Kennedy was willing to make a decision about whether or not to pull troops out of Vietnam based on his election chances in 1964. Johnson was also making crucial decisions about whether the United States would escalate the war in Vietnam based on his own political future.

Johnson told Richard Russell, a Senator from Georgia, a very conservative man who turned out in the case of the Vietnam War to be cautioning Johnson, that he knew a lot of people would be killed in Vietnam. But, he said, “[T]hey would impeach a president that would run out, wouldn’t they?”67 Talk about courage. Johnson would rather go into a war, would rather sacrifice the lives of countless people, than face the possibility that he might be removed from office.

And then we have seen in these tapes numerous revelations about Nixon and his rabid anti-Semitism, among other issues.

Bush does not want the American people to know how their government works. Kids go to junior high school and they get textbooks with diagrams illustrating the structure of the U.S. government, with its “checks and balances.” But that’s not the real story, and if Bush has his way, we’re not going to learn how governments really function.

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