In his speech August 22, 2007 President George W. Bush, displaying a profound and dangerous misunderstanding of American History and our involvement in World War II, the Korean Conflict, and the Vietnam War, took a sentence from Senator J. William Fulbright's The Crippled Giant and mangled it out of context.
In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: "What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they've never seen and may never heard of?"...The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be...
It has been over thirty years since I read the book. If memory serves me correctly, Senator Fulbright asked a rhetorical question and was not dismissing the aspirations of "nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers." His point was that in the desperate struggle to survive, the battles for control of the government "in some distant capital" was not the focus of their daily lives.
Fulbright went on to say that he hoped that one day the democracy would be attainable for them.
When I have the book in hand, I will post the remainder of Fulbright's thoughts, HERE.
It is despicable that a United States President would twist the words of a heroic United States Senator and portray Fulbright as suggesting that democracy is of little consequence to impoverished people.
If Bush wished to quote Fulbright, he might have noted:
We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do, and we seem to do it about every 10 minutes.
We are trying to remake Vietnamese society, a task which certainly cannot be accomplished by force and which probably cannot be accomplished by any means available to outsiders.
The rapprochement of peoples is only possible when differences of culture and outlook are respected and appreciated rather than feared and condemned, when the common bond of human dignity is recognized as the essential bond for a peaceful world.
The cause of our difficulties in southeast Asia is not a deficiency of power but an excess of the wrong kind of power which results in a feeling of impotence when it fails to achieve its desired ends
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The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust our own government statements. I had no idea until then that you could not rely on them.
Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations - to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image.
www.waxingamerica.com