In all the Reagan obituaries, it is easy to forget that that Robert Kennedy, my political hero, died 36 years ago. With him, many of our hopes for a better world, an end to an unjust war, and end to our racial troubles, and an end to poverty. Instead, we were sentenced to 36 years(let's hope that's all) for reactionary policies, subliminal racial messages, and more and more people killed in wars.
Apparently Dean in Dixie already did a thread on RFK, at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/6/4/23150/46420, so I'll restrict this diary to a few RFK quotes on the Vietnam War which deeply affected me.
On February 1968, in response to a POW's wife who was concerned with the summary execution of a Viet Cong prisoner by a South Vietnamese soldier, which was defended by LBJ and the military chiefs.
The POW's wife wrote, "How can the United States allow public executions of the Viet Cong?My husband is a prisoner of war in North Viet Nam and I am concerned for his treatment. What has happened to Americans, do we no longer value the ideals that my brother died for in World War Two and we thought my husband fought for in this war?"
RFK would respond in a public speech, " Last week a Vietcong suspect was turned over to the Chief of the Vietnamese Security Services, who executed him on the spot - a flat violation of the Geneva Convention on the Rules of War. Of course, the enemy is brutal and cruel, and has done the same thing many times. But we are not fighting the Communists in order to become more like them - we fight to preserve our differences."
On February 8, 1968, in a major speech in response to the Tet Offensive,
"Every detached observer has testified to the enormous corruption that pervades every level of South Vietnamese official life. Hundreds of millions of dollars were being stolen by private individuals and government officials, while the American people are being asked to pay higher taxes to finance our assistance effort."
On March 18, 1968, at Kansas University
RFK called the Vietnam policy, "immoral" and "bankrupt" and said that LBJ's "only response to failure is to repeat it on a larger scale"
"I am concerned that at the end of it all, there will be more Americans killed, more of our treasure spilled out, and because of the bitterness and hatred on every side in this war, more hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese slaughtered, so they may say, as Tacitus said of Rome, 'They made it a desert, and called it peace'"
And the best one IMO, an Army officer who destroyed a village and afterwards claimed that it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.
"Where does such logic end? If it becomes 'necessary' to destroy all of South Vietnam in order to 'save' it, will we do that too? And if we care so little about South Vietnam in that we are willing to see the land destroyed and its people dead, then why are we there in the first place? Can we ordain ourselves the awful majesty of God to decide what cities and villages are to be destroyed, who will live and who will die, and who will join the refugees wandering in a desert of our own creation."
Replace Vietnam with Iraq, Communist with terrorist, and you can see that they are still relevant today. And Dumbya is far far worse than the worst of LBJ and Nixon combined.