Oct. 4, 2017 - Steve Pieczenik
08:46
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi, this is Dr. Steve Pachenk and this is Steve Talks. | |
| Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. | |
| This is Dr. | |
| Steve Kuchenek. | |
| Number one, I want to wish the Catalans the best of spirits, best of hope, and a successful outcome. | |
| I would hope that the United States support Catalan independence, as will the rest of the world. | |
| Now for the issue that I really want to talk about, Ken Burns and Len Novick's Vietnam War. | |
| Overall, it's a very good picture of the war itself. | |
| And the anti-war movement. | |
| What it does not mention and what is important to mention is the fact that this war was really created, like many of our other wars, for the military-industrial complex. | |
| Ken Burns makes no mention of the fact that Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Colt, Remington, a whole group of military-industrial entities which continued on into the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War, We're very much a part of the Vietnam War. | |
| He doesn't mention the fact that the CIA really initiated the war, even though he quotes Don Gregg, for whom I have great respect. | |
| He doesn't really analyze somebody like Leslie Gelb, whom I knew had some respect and some caring for, but turned out to be kind of what I call the moral weasel. | |
| Leslie Gelb was typical of the Vietnam War. | |
| A young Jewish boy who went to Harvard, got an MA in Harvard, got a PhD at Harvard, and then worked, quote, for the Pentagon. | |
| My suspicion is he worked for the CIA, but be it whatever, he was there. | |
| He was there during the Phoenix program, he was there during the pacification program, and he was there during the Pentagon Papers. | |
| What makes Leslie Gelb the personification of a failed war is that he was failed as an individual. | |
| He was what I considered a moral coward, intellectually bereft of really understanding anything about the culture in Vietnam or anywhere else. | |
| He didn't speak French. | |
| He didn't understand Vietnamese. | |
| He didn't speak English. | |
| He was a nice kid from Brooklyn, Bronx, who really kind of sucked his way up the power ladder. | |
| I met him in the Carter administration, but he had also worked in the Nixon administration. | |
| He had also worked for Westmoreland and he had worked for McNamara, one of the worst men who ever existed in our history. | |
| McNamara, who made up the war and created fictional numbers, should have been indicted as a war criminal. | |
| He wasn't. | |
| John F.K., who was sick with Addison's disease, should have been immediately identified as someone who could not run the United States government. | |
| Nobody talked about the fact he had Addison's. | |
| Nobody talked about the fact that he had steroids and amphetamines. | |
| And in turn, we ended up in wars in Guatemala, Vietnam, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. | |
| Ken Burns made it sound as if he just was very indecisive, but a very understanding man. | |
| The truth of the matter was, JFK was sick, and as a result of that, there was a military coup. | |
| The coup was basically initiated by Alan Dulles, And LBJ and Nixon was part of it, as Bush Sr. | |
| was, and there was an assassination. | |
| It wasn't something that just happened. | |
| It happened because he had irritated, aggravated, and exasperated the deep state as well as the industrial complex. | |
| In turn, we had LBJ, who was by his very nature sociopathic, A man who was a self-aggrandizer, who could care less about this country, never served in our country, yet Ken Burns doesn't really look into his psychology other than the fact that the war was his to run and his to be made so that he could run again for a successful presidency. | |
| Well, he failed, but what he did was to kill more thousands of American young men Brought in a greater draft number. | |
| I was subsequently drafted because I was Cuban. | |
| I had no choice. | |
| And in the military, in my medical class at Cornell, I was the only one, perhaps with someone else, to be drafted into the military. | |
| My first assignment was to Fort Meade for intelligence because I spoke French. | |
| Eventually, it went on through the Public Health Service, NIMH, and then ended up in the Intelligence Service and the State Department with its Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. | |
| But that's the side note to my own involvement in the Vietnam War. | |
| I was involved with Elizabeth Bunker and the retreat and retrieval of individuals from the fall of Saigon. | |
| I eventually had to put Elizabeth Bunker in a small room and discharge him, as I did Graham Martin, who was then eventually arrested with confidential papers. | |
| My involvement was not very successful. | |
| I was very unhappy when I had to work for Kissinger. | |
| And one of the conditions that I was involved with Kissinger was that I was a Navy captain at the time where I had switched from the Public Health Service to the Navy and at the same time received the Deputy Assistant Secretary designation. | |
| And I saw Henry that I would not Work with him. | |
| I wouldn't even speak to him. | |
| I considered him a war criminal, even while I was serving the country and withdrawing from Vietnam. | |
| Most importantly, what I realized was that the characters who had that moral deficiency, the Leslie Gelds, and another man by the name of General Colin Powell, literally resurfaced again and again in subsequent administrations. | |
| What are I talking about? | |
| Ken Burns doesn't mention the fact that in Nilay, even though Lieutenant Calley was charged with murder and rape and the massacre of 530 people, it was really... | |
| General Colin Powell, who white-watched the whole incident, he was a major, he was not in combat, and eventually became what we call a political general and worked his way up through the Nixon administration, the Ford administration, and eventually became a four-star general. | |
| He was always considered a political general, and what happened subsequently is, like Leslie Gelb, who had no moral core, Colin Powell also revealed himself to be a liar, to have no moral code, And after 9-11, he was the one who showed the world that there was anthrax in a little bottle. | |
| And now everybody understood that Colin Powell was nothing more than the house servant to the white men who had created the war in Vietnam. | |
| Why am I saying this now? | |
| Because that picture and the whole series is important to General Mattis, McMaster, Don For and to Trump. | |
| To understand that we are going back into a combat situation in Afghanistan, which has lasted over 16 years, which I first saw in the first years of its war, is to see a repetition of the failure that we had in Vietnam, in Korea and everywhere else in the world. | |
| We are not a fighting nation when it comes to the notion of just creating a military-industrial complex. | |
| Unless we fight for freedom and democracy, we have no other rationale to go overseas. | |
| There is no terror. | |
| There is no war on terror that was created by Bush, Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell. | |
| The very same people who had given you the Vietnam War and also avoided serving in Vietnam. | |
| At the same time, many of our present-day generals, Mattis and Kelly, came out of the Vietnam War. | |
| Their strategy and their tactics are antiquated. | |
| For the most part, we have no present-day strategy for Afghanistan, we have no present-day strategy for Yemen, and we have no present-day strategy for Syria. | |
| I asked President Trump to look at this video with a clear understanding that we may be repeating the very mistakes and absurdities and committing the same crimes that we had done for Vietnam. | |
| I will end with a quote by Oscar Wilde. | |
| No rich man is wealthy enough to buy back his past and his malfeasant history. |
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