#viet

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years. ↗

— Muhammed Ali

#freedom #jail #slavery #vietnam-war #equality

Respectable opinion would never consider an assessment of the Reagan Doctrine or earlier exercises in terms of their actual human costs, and could not comprehend that such an assessment—which would yield a monstrous toll if accurately conducted on a global scale—might perhaps be a proper task in the United States. At the same level of integrity, disciplined Soviet intellectuals are horrified over real or alleged American crimes, but perceive their own only as benevolent intent gone awry, or errors of an earlier day, now overcome; the comparison is inexact and unfair, since Soviet intellectuals can plead fear as an excuse for their services to state violence. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#consensus #fear #hypocrisy #intellectuals #international-law

I would say that the Pentagon Papers case of 1971 - in which the government tried to block the The New York Times and The Washington Post that they obtained from a secret study of how we got involved in the war in Vietnam - that is probably the most important case. ↗

— Floyd Abrams

#case #got #government #how #i

Well, the Communists at that moment were very strong in Italy and the Italian Communist Party was the biggest Communist Party outside Soviet Union, there's no doubt about that. ↗

— Gianni Agnelli

#biggest #communist #communist party #communists #doubt

I hope I'm wrong, but I am afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy - worse than Vietnam, not in the number who died, but in terms of its unintended consequences and its reverberation throughout the region. ↗

— Madeleine Albright

#am #american #american foreign policy #consequences #died

The war in Vietnam I thought a dreadful mistake. ↗

— Stephen Ambrose

#i #mistake #thought #vietnam #war

The consequences of President Johnson's campaign of deliberate deception regarding Vietnam could hardly have been more catastrophic for the nation, the military, the president, his party, and the presidency itself. ↗

— Eric Alterman

#campaign #catastrophic #consequences #could #deception

It came as a great shock to me when I heard that England and Soviet Russia had become allies. So much so that I thought that the people responsible in London were acting in a manner that no longer coincided with British imperial interests. ↗

— John Amery

#allies #become #british #came #england

I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution and capital punishment. ↗

— Aldrich Ames

#capital #capital punishment #exposing #full #gave

I said in court a long time ago that I didn't see that the Soviet Union was significantly helped by the information I gave them, nor that the United States was significantly harmed. ↗

— Aldrich Ames

#court #gave #harmed #helped #i