# Think Tank > History >  So Barry Goldwater wanted to nuke Vietnam?

## muh_roads

The family brought this up tonight so I researched it and found this...

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/06/post_9.html

google Barry Goldwater with nuke and it makes me wonder why Paul wanted to associate himself with him...or was the media lying about Goldwater?

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## UnReconstructed

no, what you found on goldwater is true.  i'm not sure why people were feigning over him.

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## brandon

It's true.

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## AuH20

He wanted to defoliate major infiltration routes with tactical nuclear weapons. Goldwater wanted to end the war quickly as opposed to wasting manpower and resources for another 11 years.

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## dr. hfn

ya, lyndon johnson ran a "daisy" ad ONE time with a nuke exploding on america saying goldwater would get america nuked and start a nuclear war.

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## KCIndy

> The family brought this up tonight so I researched it and found this...
> 
> http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/06/post_9.html
> 
> google Barry Goldwater with nuke and it makes me wonder why Paul wanted to associate himself with him...or was the media lying about Goldwater?



From the above-cited article:

_Atomic bombs have been used only once in human history. The United States dropped them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945_

I think that makes it *twice* that they were used...  can't the editorial writer count?



Okay, nitpicking aside, I certainly would not have agreed with Goldwater's view of using nukes to defoliate the forests concealing the North Vietnamese supply routes.  

Unfortunately the alternative the U.S. *did* use was arguably just as bad.  Ever hear of Agent Orange?  How many people, both among our own soldiers as well as the civilian population, died from that horrible carcinogen?

They only ones to profit - literally - from Agent Orange were.... *ahem*  stellar U.S. companies Dow and Monsanto.

I can understand Goldwater's desire to end the war quickly.  Sadly, he didn't understand we had no business being there in the first place.

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## emazur

Here's what the History Channel has to say:
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...rticle&id=1373



> Goldwater said that the United States should do whatever it took to support U.S. troops in the war and that if the administration was not prepared to "take the war to North Vietnam," it should withdraw. Although Goldwater discussed the possibility of using low-yield nuclear weapons to defoliate infiltration routes in Vietnam, *he never actually advocated the use of nuclear weapons against the North Vietnamese.*

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## LibertyEagle

I don't know guys.  The Commies were taking over country after country and were actively involved in trying to overthrow our own form of government.  Goldwater wanted to put an end to it and stop pussyfooting around.  But, of course TPTB wanted it to drag out, because it benefited their plans.

Oh, that commercial by Johnson was pure and unadulterated BS.

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## emazur

Just finished a great article in Reason:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/28337.html



> Goldwater had surely earned his reputation as a gunslinger with his proposal to use tactical nukes to defoliate Vietnam, his repeated calls to give NATO armies the right to use atomic weapons on their own, and his constant refrain that U.S. strategists shouldn't let fear of nuclear war keep them from standing up to the Soviet Union. But, as Perlstein notes, Goldwater in this case was a mere echo of the mainstream foreign policy thinking in the Democratic Party. When it came to the Cold War, the two parties were both unremittingly hawkish. Goldwater's decree that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" was merely the Reader's Digest version of Kennedy's Inaugural Day promise that "we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty."
> 
> The most white-knuckle act of nuclear brinkmanship in American history was Kennedy's blockade of Cuba during the missile crisis. A close second was his nationally televised 1961 speech in which he bluntly threatened to go to war with the Soviets over Berlin, putting long-range bombers on 15 minutes' alert and warning Americans to start building fallout shelters. Perlstein calls the speech "the most terrifying of the Cold War" and adds: "Later Barry Goldwater would say the same kinds of things during the 1964 presidential campaign, and people would call him a madman."
> 
> Perlstein is equally merciless when it comes to Vietnam. Goldwater, he notes, insistently and correctly argued that Kennedy and Johnson had gotten the United States far more deeply involved than anyone realized, that we were sliding into an impossible "defensive war" that neither Congress nor the American public had ever authorized. Johnson replied, straight-faced, with the most notorious lie in the history of American politics: "We are not going to send American boys nine or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." As he spoke, his best and brightest advisors were putting the finishing touches on a deployment plan that would have nearly 200,000 American soldiers in Vietnam within a year.


And here's the commercial if anyone's interested:
http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/media/daisyspot/

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## muh_roads

> I don't know guys.  The Commies were taking over country after country and were actively involved in trying to overthrow our own form of government.  Goldwater wanted to put an end to it and stop pussyfooting around.  But, of course TPTB wanted it to drag out, because it benefited their plans.
> 
> Oh, that commercial by Johnson was pure and unadulterated BS.


I view it the other way around.  TPTB need to find enemies to go kill to fund the military industrial complex.  Back then it was "commies"...today it is "terrorists".

I thought Vietnam wasn't that big of a deal?  We just wanted to get in there and "kick some ass".  Using the false gulf of tonkin incident as an excuse?


EDIT: btw thanks emazur for your posts.

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## UnReconstructed

Here's an article by Rothbard where he mentions Goldwater and the New American Right that followed after the death of  Taft.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard46.html

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## Conza88

Goldwater = neocon. 

If only I hadn't bought his book...

You folks do realise that the Soviet Union would collapse inevitably and that in fact the US was propping it up?

And in terms of war, the Soviet Union was far less hostile than the US - i.e empire.

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## Aratus

in the dispute between douglas macArthur and harry S. truman way back in 1951,
 i think good ole "barry AuH2O" was a big Mack person... and not too upset that thah 
"big mack" had 50 tactical nukes under his U.N police action command way back then...

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## LibertyEagle

> Goldwater = neocon. 
> 
> If only I hadn't bought his book...


Bull$#@! Conza.  Goldwater was almost opposite from a neocon.  He however wasn't a wimp and didn't believe in letting a country overthrow our own.  




> You folks do realise that the Soviet Union would collapse inevitably and that in fact the US was propping it up?


The Russian communists had spies in our country, had infiltrated our government, schools and media, tried an end run around our sovereignty by establishing the League of Nations and when that didn't work, the United Nations.  Nah, they were no threat.  

Yes, it was being propped up by some frickin' traitors over here and was being used by some to execute their agenda.  That doesn't change the fact that the Soviets were actively trying to overthrow our form of government.




> And in terms of war, the Soviet Union was far less hostile than the US - i.e empire.


Not back then, we weren't.  It may not matter to you, Conza, because you're not an American, but some of us didn't want to become part of the USSR.

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## Aratus

true... LE... tis totally true! 
what you done just said!!!

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## Pericles

I think a more accurate view of Goldwater's position re: Vietnam would be (A) don't go there, but (B) if you go there, go all out to win. Anything else is a disservice to the country. 

Re: Soviet Union - fact is that the SU was engaged in spreading their form of communism as a matter of policy. After WWII, the US had no nuclear weapons, the Berlin Blockade put the US in a panic and started a rearmament program, and the arms race was on. BTW, who detonated the fist H-bomb? (Hint - it was not the US). The notion that the Cold War was the result of US policy is rubbish.

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## Unspun

> Bull$#@! Conza.  Goldwater was almost opposite from a neocon.  He however wasn't a wimp and didn't believe in letting a country overthrow our own.


I don't entirely agree.  While I do think that he is better relative to the neoconservatives we have today, he was indeed a typical Cold War Conservative in most senses of the term.  He supported large welfare programs and also fed the military industrial complex machine that continued to feed the fear of communism (or whatever enemy that happens to be timely) that spread throughout the world.  This, at least to me, is the definition of neoconservatism, or rather as it was touted by Bill Kristol, "compassionate conservative".  He had highly controversial views on many things I can agree with, but many I disagree with.  This is not to say he was a bad or evil man, but that he drank the kool-aid for which was being served. 

This is not to say I completely agree with Conza.  Maybe military posturing was necessary, I don't necessarily believe that people wanted to be under Soviet rule, or communist rule for that matter.  However, I do believe a lot of the "Red Scare" was trumped up to such a degree that the general psyche of the American mind was behind it to a far greater degree than is generally healthy.

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## LibertyEagle

He did not support large welfare programs.  I call BULL$#@! again.  And no, he wasn't a neocon.  But, if a country is going to attack our own, we damn sure shouldn't sit on our asses and twiddle our thumbs.  The USSR was actively trying to overthrow our form of government.  What about that do you guys not understand?  Now, if you'd like to discuss whether the USSR was being used by TPTB to enact their agenda, well, that's another issue entirely.  Heck, Trotsky was bankrolled by some in our own country.  Did you ever read the Reece report?  How about the Ford Foundation's Gaither's statement about comfortably merging us with the Soviet Union?

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## Aratus

LE knows that its ronnie reagan who was the total FDR democrat in the tyme and clyme 
when barry goldwater sr. was a bona 'fide true' blue cloth coat robert taft republican!!!

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## Aratus

LE... people tend to confuse the early years of barry goldwater's life which are before his 1952 senate run with

the tradecoat party switch "young ronnie reagan" made at about the tyme of those bombastic  h.u.a.c hearings!

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## krazy kaju

Anyone with any intellectual honesty and knowledge of American political history could tell you that Goldwater did not want to "nuke" Vietnam in the conventional use of the term, but he only *suggested* in Congress we use small nuclear "bomblets" instead of agent orange to defoliate the jungle. Goldwater wasn't even entirely sure of the idea himself. These bomblets probably would have been similar to the nuclear "bunker busters" we use today.

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## acptulsa

It doesn't take more than a rudimentary knowledge of Richard Milhous Nixon to understand that Goldwater was the side of the G.O.P. to support back in the day...

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## Aratus

yes, there were "davy crockett" small nukes on roaming missles who had their deployments
and small trolley lines, as well as subs and jets who could shoot off or drop a small nuke that had 
less of a footprint than the 1947 era "fatman"--- yes... i remember an old filmstrip that was atoms for peace
that i saw in grade school where someone had the bright idea that the ole panama canal was way too
narrow, and we could use small nukes in nicaragua insted of dynomite. go figure! the techie guys!

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## Young Paleocon

> I think a more accurate view of Goldwater's position re: Vietnam would be (A) don't go there, but (B) if you go there, go all out to win. Anything else is a disservice to the country. 
> 
> Re: Soviet Union - fact is that the SU was engaged in spreading their form of communism as a matter of policy. After WWII, the US had no nuclear weapons, the Berlin Blockade put the US in a panic and started a rearmament program, and the arms race was on. BTW, who detonated the fist H-bomb? (Hint - it was not the US). The notion that the Cold War was the result of US policy is rubbish.


I thought Wilson aided the Reds in the Civil War, and weren't we selling Stalin weapons before we entered the war.  Didn't we ally ourselves with Stalin to fight....Hitler...  Good choices there.  Then FDR, Stalin, and Churchill split up Europe.  That might not have been as direct as our intervention in other countries, but that sounds like we weren't necessarily isolated from their assent.  And LE on the whole fighting the communists thing, shouldn't we have enough trust in capitalism to know that planned economies will always collapse.  To me the cold war didn't seem like a war between superpowers, but rather a war between a country that benefited from the vacuum created by the end of WWII and a paraplegic behemoth.  Maybe this analysis seems too naive but in retrospect I think it sums up the situation pretty well.

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## Pericles

> I thought Wilson aided the Reds in the Civil War........


The American Expeditionary Force Siberia was commanded by Major General William S. Graves and eventually totaled 7,950 officers and enlisted men. The AEF Siberia included the U.S. Army's 27th and 31st Infantry Regiments, plus large numbers of volunteers from the 13th and 62nd Infantry Regiments along with a few from the 12th Infantry Regiment and was not on the side of the Reds .....

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## acptulsa

> The American Expeditionary Force Siberia was commanded by Major General William S. Graves and eventually totaled 7,950 officers and enlisted men. The AEF Siberia included the U.S. Army's 27th and 31st Infantry Regiments, plus large numbers of volunteers from the 13th and 62nd Infantry Regiments along with a few from the 12th Infantry Regiment and was not on the side of the Reds .....


...but of the Whites.  That said, Wall St. did some interesting contributions and manipulations at the same time...

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## Pericles

> Here's an article by Rothbard where he mentions Goldwater and the New American Right that followed after the death of Taft.
> 
> http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard46.html


Why bother to read Goldwater for yourself when you can have Rothbard and Rockwell think for you. After all, it is not like Goldwater left any legacy of his own behind, is it?

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## Pericles

> ...but of the Whites. That said, Wall St. did some interesting contributions and manipulations at the same time...


The oders were not to take sides, but he also had orders to evacuate the Czechs, which were fighting the Reds, and his protection of the Czechs caused the Reds to think the US was on the side of the Whites, while the US support of the Whites was almost non existent, other than operating the railway.

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## Young Paleocon

Alright, woops on the Civil War one.

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## erowe1

> The family brought this up tonight so I researched it and found this...
> 
> http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/06/post_9.html
> 
> google Barry Goldwater with nuke and it makes me wonder why Paul wanted to associate himself with him...or was the media lying about Goldwater?


Did you really have to google that? I thought if there was one single thing everybody knew about Goldwater, that was the one.

When did Ron Paul ever associate himself with Barry Goldwater? What was the context? Goldwater also said a lot of good things that RP agrees with.

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## dgr

The real issue of Viet nam was it never needed to happen. While we were busy defeating japan after saving Europe, by giving a large chunk to Russia, the people's asses we saved were busy divinding up the spoils of war. Viet Nam wanted to be united as one free democratic country and when it was divided the north went communist and the South was left on it's own, with a French occupation that failed, just like the British occupation of Iraq. we went in after the french gave up. Sound familar.
But we did not attack the enemy, we wouldn't even bomb the north, we just keep sending troops to be killed. 50,000 

Sat Night Live did a famous skit, the army wanted to bomb a dam so they bought in a civilian who was familar with the dam,  'SO HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS AREA AND THE TARGET?"

"I HELPED BUILD THE DAM WHEN I WAS IN THE PEACE CORPS  "

If you do not learn from history, you are bound to repeat it, and we or at least our leaders have yet to learn

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## torchbearer

If you are going to go to war- it must be because the life of your nation is genuinely at risk.
If that is the case. to win- and to win at all cost is the answer.
I always thought Goldwater was just thinking- that if this is a war- and we mean to win it- then why not just win it. We have the weapon to do it.

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## AuH20

> LE knows that its ronnie reagan who was the total FDR democrat in the tyme and clyme 
> when barry goldwater sr. was a bona 'fide true' blue cloth coat robert taft republican!!!


Reagan never had the will to chip at those pesky New Deal programs, even if he was operating under the eye of a democratic Congress. Goldwater was always the authentic paleoconservative, with Reagan being the cheap facisimile. Goldwater was one of the few to go on the record in lambasting the Federal Reserve, the CFR and the Trilateral Commission.

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## Conza88

> Bull$#@! Conza.  Goldwater was almost opposite from a neocon.  He however wasn't a wimp and didn't believe in letting a country overthrow our own.


You warmonger. I have primary sources, what you got?  


*Chapter 11 - The Decline of the Old Right
Chapter 12 - National Review and the triump of the New Right
Chapter 13 - The Early 1960's from Right to Left*

"By the late 1950s, Barry Goldwater had been decided upon as the political leader of the New Right, and it was Rusher and the National Review clique that inspired the Draft Goldwater movement and Youth for Goldwater in 1960. Goldwaters ideological manifesto of 1960, The Conscience of a Conservative, was ghostwritten by Brent Bozell, who wrote fiery articles in National Review attacking liberty even as an abstract principle, and upholding the function of the State in imposing and enforcing moral and religious creeds. Its foreign policy chapter, The Soviet Menace, was a thinly disguised plea for all-out offensive war against the Soviet Union and other Communist nations. The Goldwater movement of 1960 was a warm-up for the future; and when Nixon was defeated in the 1960 election, Rusher and National Review launched a well-coordinated campaign to capture the Republican Party for Barry Goldwater in 1964.

It was this drastic shift to all-out and pervasive war-mongering that I found hardest to swallow. For years I had thought of myself politically as an extreme right-winger, but this emotional identification with the right was becoming increasingly difficult. To be a political ally of Senator Taft was one thing; to be an ally of statists who thirsted for all-out war against Russia was quite another. For the first five years of its existence I moved in National Review circles. I had known Frank Meyer as a fellow analyst for the William Volker Fund, and through Meyer had met Buckley and the rest of the editorial staff. I attended National Review luncheons, rallies, and cocktail parties, and wrote a fair number of articles and book reviews for the magazine. But the more I circulated among these people, the greater my horror because I realized with growing certainty that what they wanted above all was total war against the Soviet Union; their fanatical warmongering would settle for no less.

Of course the New Rightists of National Review would never quite dare to admit this crazed goal in public, but the objective would always be slyly implied_. At right-wing rallies no one cheered a single iota for the free market, if this minor item were ever so much as mentioned; what really stirred up the animals were demagogic appeals by National Review leaders for total victory, total destruction of the Communist world. It was that which brought the right-wing masses out of their seats._ It was National Review editor Brent Bozell who trumpeted, at a right-wing rally: I would favor destroying not only the whole world, but the entire universe out to the furthermost star, rather than suffer Communism to live. It was National Review editor Frank Meyer who once told me: I have a vision, a great vision of the future: a totally devastated Soviet Union. I knew that this was the vision that really animated the new Conservatism. Frank Meyer, for example, had the following argument with his wife, Elsie, over foreign-policy strategy: *Should we drop the H-Bomb on Moscow and destroy the Soviet Union immediately and without warning (Frank), or should we give the Soviet regime 24 hours with which to comply with an ultimatum to resign (Elsie)?*"




> The Russian communists had spies in our country, had infiltrated our government, schools and media, tried an end run around our sovereignty by establishing the League of Nations and when that didn't work, the United Nations.  Nah, they were no threat.  
> 
> Yes, it was being propped up by some frickin' traitors over here and was being used by some to execute their agenda.  That doesn't change the fact that the Soviets were actively trying to overthrow our form of government.


Lmao. You irrational conspiracy theorist, just like the establishment, believing their bull$#@! - hook, line and sinker. 




> *Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Screen by Butler Shaffer*
> 
> _Recorded 10/15/2004 at Radical Scholarship: The Guerrilla Movement for Liberty [19:29]_
> 
> "You might also be aware of Operation North woods scam"
> 
> "That in the early 1960's the Joint Chiefs of Staff had put together a plan directed towards an eventual attack on Cuba. And part of this plan would be for people in the United States to be shot in the streets, planes to be hijacked and destroyed, terrorist acts to be carried out in major cities, bombings and so forth. Innocent people to be framed for these bombings. All for the purpose of blaming Castro, in order to rationalize a war in Cuba."
> 
> "The Cold War itself was premised on an international communist conspiracy. And those of us who denied this and saw the Cold War as a scheme for perfect state interests were attacked by the anti-conspiracy league as "paranoid conspiracy theorists".
> ...


"In the first place, we began to rethink the origins of the Cold War that we had opposed for so long; we read the monumental work of D.F. Fleming, The Cold War and its Origins, and the seminal books of the founder of New Left historiography, William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) and The Contours of American History (1961). And we concluded that our older isolationism had suffered from a fatal weakness: the implicit acceptance of the basic Cold War premise that there was a Russian threat, that Stalin had been partly responsible for the Cold War by engaging in aggressive expansion in Europe and Asia, and that Roosevelt had engaged in an evil sellout at Yalta. We concluded that all this was a tissue of myth; that on the contrary Russia had not expanded aggressively at all, its only expansion having been the inevitable and desirable result of rolling back the German invasion. 

That, indeed, the United States (with the aid of Britain) was solely responsible for the Cold War, in a continuing harassment and aggression against a Soviet Union whose foreign policy had been almost pathetic in its yearning for peace with the West at virtually any price. We began to realize that, even in Eastern Europe, Stalin had not imposed Communist regimes until the United States had been pressing it there and had launched the Cold War for several years. We also began to see that, far from Roosevelt selling out to Stalin at Yalta and the other wartime conferences,9 that the sellout was the other way around: as Stalin, in the vain hope of seeking peace with an implacably aggressive and imperialistic United States, repeatedly sold out the world Communist movement: scuttling the Communists of Greece in a sellout deal with Churchill; preventing the Communist partisans of Italy and France from taking power at the end of the war; and trying his mightiest to scuttle the Communist movements of Yugoslavia and China. In the latter cases, Stalin tried to force Tito and Mao into coalition regimes under their enemies; and it was only the fact that they had come to power by their own arms and not in the wake of the Soviet Army that permitted them to take over by telling Stalin to go to hell.

In short, we had come to the conclusion that the most astute analysis of the events of World War II and of the Communist movement was that of the Trotskyites; far from expanding vigorously in Europe and Asia, Stalin, devoted only to the national security of the Soviet Union, had tried his best to scuttle the world Communist movements in a vain attempt to appease the American aggressor. That Stalin had wanted only national security and the absence of anti-Soviet regimes on his borders was shown by the contrasting developments in Poland and Finland; in Poland, aggressive anti-Sovietism had forced Stalin to take full control; in Finland, in contrast, there had emerged the great statesman Paasikivi, who pushed a policy of conservative agrarianism at home and peace and friendship with the Soviet Union in foreign affairs; at which point Stalin was perfectly content to leave Finland at peace and to withdraw the Soviet army.

In contrast to the uniformly peaceful and victimized policies of the Soviet Union, we saw the United States using World War II to replace and go beyond Great Britain as the worlds great imperial power; stationing its troops everywhere, presuming to control and dominate nations and governments throughout the world. For years, the U.S. tried also to roll back Soviet power in Eastern Europe; and its foreign policy was particularly devoted to suppressing revolutionary and pro-Communist movements in every country in the underdeveloped world. We saw too that the Soviet Union had always pushed for disarmament, and that it was the U.S. that resisted it, particularly in the menacing mass-slaughter weapons of the nuclear age. There was no Russian threat; the threat to the peace of the world, in Europe, in Asia, and throughout the globe was the United States Leviathan. For years, conservatives and libertarians had argued about the external (Russian) and the internal (Washington) threats to individual liberty, with libertarians and isolationists focusing on the latter and conservatives on the former. But now weLeonard and Iwere truly liberated; the scales had fallen from our eyes; and we saw that the external threat, too, emanated from Washington, D.C."

...

"Meanwhile, on the larger political scene, things grew more dismal as the National Review game plan finally succeeded, and Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination. I personally grew frantic; at long last, the fingers of my old National Review associates were getting close to the nuclear button, and I knew, I knew to my very marrow that they were aching to push it. I felt that I had to do something to warn the public about the menace of nuclear war that Goldwaterism presented; I felt like a Paul Revere come to warn everyone about the threat of global war that these people were about to loose upon the world.

Second, I tried to hive off some conservative and libertarian votes from Goldwater by recalling to them their long-forgotten libertarian heritage. In contrast to many fair-play minded liberals, I was not at all horrified at the famous Democratic TV spot showing a little girl picking flowers while a Goldwaterite nuclear explosion loomed to annihilate her. On the contrary, I rejoiced at what I believed to be, at last, a zeroing in on the true dimensions of the Goldwaterite menace.

I could, however, play only a very small direct role in the stop- Goldwater crusade. The Standard was now defunct, and so the most I could do was to write in the Southern California anarcho-Randian newsletter, The Innovator, warning the readers of Goldwaterite war and fascism (which can be defined, after all, as global war, anti-Communist crusading, suppression of civil liberties, and corporate statism *disguised in free-market rhetoric*which delineated the New Right). I succeeded, however, only in alienating the stunned readership.12

_(12. Among the Rightists, again it was doughty Felix Morley who, virtually alone and unheeded, denounced the Goldwater movement in no uncertain terms as akin to the early days of the Nazi movement, as he had observed it in Germany.)_"




> Not back then, we weren't.  It may not matter to you, Conza, because you're not an American, but some of us didn't want to become part of the USSR.


The US became more like the USSR, because of the Cold War! What is the soviet union - collectivism = totalitarianism. Well wtf happens during wars LE? Does the size of the State grow?  *Crisis and Leviathan by Robert Higgs* - you need to read this.

I mean really LE, there is someone trying to take over the US government - "WHAT THE HELL DO YOU CALL THE NEO-CONSERVATIVES?!@!?!? These national-socialist trotskyite straussian dbags are basically the same deal, except as Ron Paul points out:

_Congressman Ron Paul
U.S. House of Representatives
September 10, 2002
_



> *QUESTIONS THAT WON'T BE ASKED ABOUT IRAQ*
> 
> Soon we hope to have hearings on the pending war with Iraq. I am concerned there are some questions that wont be asked- and maybe will not even be allowed to be asked.  Here are some questions I would like answered by those who are urging us to start this war.
> 
>     1. Is it not true that the reason we did not bomb the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War was because we knew they *could* retaliate?
> 
>     2. Is it not also true that we are willing to bomb Iraq now because we know it *cannot* retaliate- which just confirms that there is no real threat?



You minarchists are retarded. Someone is trying to take over the US government "zomg International Communist Conspiracy" - instead of advocating ENDING THE INSTITUTION of violence, you want to cause *MORE* senseless, immoral and unethical violence... wow.. just wow.... 

How retardedly irrational is that. So much for limited government... 




> I don't entirely agree.  While I do think that he is better relative to the neoconservatives we have today, he was indeed a typical Cold War Conservative in most senses of the term.  He supported large welfare programs and also fed the military industrial complex machine that continued to feed the fear of communism (or whatever enemy that happens to be timely) that spread throughout the world.  This, at least to me, is the definition of neoconservatism, or rather as it was touted by Bill Kristol, "compassionate conservative".  He had highly controversial views on many things I can agree with, but many I disagree with.  This is not to say he was a bad or evil man, but that he drank the kool-aid for which was being served.
> 
> This is not to say I completely agree with Conza.  Maybe military posturing was necessary, I don't necessarily believe that people wanted to be under Soviet rule, or communist rule for that matter.  However, I do believe a lot of the "Red Scare" was trumped up to such a degree that the general psyche of the American mind was behind it to a far greater degree than is generally healthy.


Imperialism isn't the answering, increasing the size of the state, destroying civil liberties - all the $#@! that happens during War - in terms of the State power grab, happened during the Cold War. 

Now please, why would any Ron Paul supporter - support this? 




> Anyone with any intellectual honesty and knowledge of American political history could tell you that Goldwater did not want to "nuke" Vietnam in the conventional use of the term, but he only *suggested* in Congress we use small nuclear "bomblets" instead of agent orange to defoliate the jungle. Goldwater wasn't even entirely sure of the idea himself. These bomblets probably would have been similar to the nuclear "bunker busters" we use today.


I suggest to a criminal organization, like the mafia, they should use more lethal weaponry - causing an increase in the death and destruction of innocent civilian life through collateral damage. Violating both the non aggression axiom & private property. 

What's that make me?  _Natural justice_ fail.




> If you are going to go to war- it must be because the life of your nation is genuinely at risk.
> If that is the case. to win- and to win at all cost is the answer.
> I always thought Goldwater was just thinking- that if this is a war- and we mean to win it- then why not just win it. We have the weapon to do it.


*Killing in War by David Gordon*

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## Pod

> The real issue of Viet nam was it never needed to happen. While we were busy defeating japan after saving Europe, by giving a large chunk to Russia, the people's asses we saved were busy divinding up the spoils of war. Viet Nam wanted to be united as one free democratic country and when it was divided the north went communist and the South was left on it's own, with a French occupation that failed, just like the British occupation of Iraq. we went in after the french gave up. Sound familar.


I don`t think Vietnameese wanted to be democratic. The communist had the most legitimacy there. But this was because the communists took the most hard line concerning independence and opposed the colonialist and imperialist powers the most fiercely.

Had the US restrained France from re-colonialising Vietnam instead of supporting it the non-communists would have had more of a chance of being seen as legitimate.

In any case the Vietnamese (American allies against the Japanese in WWII) wanted independence and unification. Their struggle was an outgrowth of legitimate desire of the Vietnamese to decide their own matters for themselves. It wasn`t any grand communist plan to take over the world one domino at a time. Just years after the Vietnam war ended, the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia to topple Pol Pot (who had persecuted ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia) and fought a brief but bloody war with communist China. 





> The oders were not to take sides, but he also had orders to evacuate the Czechs, which were fighting the Reds, and his protection of the Czechs caused the Reds to think the US was on the side of the Whites, while the US support of the Whites was almost non existent, other than operating the railway.


Of course then there is the expedition in Archangelsk which interfeared in the civil war more deeply. In any case the Reds saw all the interfearing expeditions, the French, the British, the Americans, the Japanese as a block with much the same motivations.

_______________

In any case Goldwater is interesting because I think an issue like this really shows the generational gap. I don`t know if Goldwater wanted to nuke anything, but he certainly wanted a brief escalation to be followed by a withdrawal. He wasn`t one for just turning on your heels and leaving. That is one thing I think the new generation will not stand for.

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## emazur

> Okay, nitpicking aside, I certainly would not have agreed with Goldwater's view of using nukes to defoliate the forests concealing the North Vietnamese supply routes.  
> 
> Unfortunately the alternative the U.S. *did* use was arguably just as bad.  Ever hear of Agent Orange?  How many people, both among our own soldiers as well as the civilian population, died from that horrible carcinogen?


I just finished a recent article on Agent Orange, knowing next to nothing about it.  It seems that not only was Agent Orange "just as bad", but perhaps significantly worse and its effects are still being felt today and are not expected to dissipate anytime soon:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...t=va&aid=13974



> The Vietnamese who were exposed to the chemical have suffered from cancer, liver damage, pulmonary and heart diseases, defects to reproductive capacity, and skin and nervous disorders. Children and grandchildren of those exposed have severe physical deformities, mental and physical disabilities, diseases, and shortened life spans. The forests and jungles in large parts of southern Vietnam have been devastated and denuded. They may never grow back and if they do, it will take 50 to 200 years to regenerate. Animals that inhabited the forests and jungles have become extinct, disrupting the communities that depended on them. The rivers and underground water in some areas have also been contaminated. Erosion and desertification will change the environment, contributing to the warming of the planet and dislocation of crop and animal life.





> The U.S. government and the chemical companies knew that Agent Orange, when produced rapidly at high temperatures, would contain large quantities of Dioxin. Nevertheless, the chemical companies continued to produce it in this manner. *The U.S. government and the chemical companies also knew that the Bionetics Study, commissioned by the government in 1963, showed that even low levels of Dioxin produced significant deformities in unborn offspring of laboratory animals. But they suppressed that study and continued to spray Vietnam with Agent Orange.* It wasnt until the study was leaked in 1969 that the spraying of Agent Orange was discontinued.





> On May 15 and 16 of this year, the International Peoples Tribunal of Conscience in Support of the Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange convened in Paris and heard testimony from 27 victims, witnesses and scientific experts. Seven people from three continents served as judges of the Tribunal, which was sponsored by the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL).





> Dr. Jeanne Stellman, who wrote the seminal article about Agent Orange in the magazine Nature, testified that this is *the largest unstudied environmental disaster in the world* (except for natural disasters).





> Last week, the Bureau of the IADL, meeting in Hanoi , presented President Nguyen Minh Triet of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam with the final decision of the Tribunal.  *The judges found the U.S. government and the chemical companies guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ecocide during the illegal U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam* .

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## specsaregood

> Goldwater wanted to put an end to it and stop pussyfooting around.  But, of course TPTB wanted it to drag out, because it benefited their plans.
> Oh, that commercial by Johnson was pure and unadulterated BS.


James Perloff talked about the Vietnam war last night.  Besides the Gulf of Tonkin incident being a total setup and planned years before, the military was absolutely stopped from being able to win that war quickly via restrictive "rules of engagement".  The stuff he cited:
1. The air force was repeatedly refused permission to bomb those targets that the Joint Chiefs of Staff deemed most strategic.
2. US troops were given a general order not to fire at the vietcong until fired upon.
3. Vehicles more than 200 yards off the Ho Chi Minh trail could not be bombed.  (enemy supply trucks forewarned of approaching us planes had only to temporarily divert off the trail to escape destruction)
4. A north vietnamese MIG could not be struck if spotted on a runway, only if airborne and showing hostile intent.
5. Surface to air missile sites could not be bombed while under construction; only after they became operational.
6. Enemy forces could not be pursued if they crossed the border into Laos or Cambodia.
7. We boosted trade with the soviet bloc, which furnished 80% of the the enemies supplies -- we in effect were supplying our enemy.
From: "The Shadows of Power", pg. 122

It was before my time; but If what he said above is true, it does seem obvious that those in control did not want to win the war, let alone quickly.

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## acptulsa

> It was before my time; but If what he said above is true, it does seem obvious that those in control did not want to win the war, let alone quickly.


It was pretty damned obvious they didn't want our boys to have a fighting chance to survive, either.  Goldwater's message might have been much better received a few years later.  Why not victory, indeed?

Hug a 'Nam vet today, willya?  They deserve it.

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## Conza88

The truth hurts.  lol..

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## Aratus

Conza88 --- here is the double edged sword of guns & butter as understood by LBJ  via viet-nam and its increasing significance. 
the liberals bemoan that when we can extend a prosperity level to nearly all in our society, along comes a new war... as all
 conservatives since ww2 KNOW we have had a reluctance to go the distance once we enter the same... O! tempores! O! mores!

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## emazur

I found something very interesting today about LBJ, nukes, and Vietnam and uploaded the clip to youtube.  Daniel Ellsberg:



> "Vietnam, by the way, turned out to be more of a nuclear crisis than people on the other side ever realized.  Because as I said, Nixon in particular, and to some degree Johnson, were secretly threatening nuclear strikes in a way that our enemies knew because they were getting these threats, but the public was never allowed to know because it would have worried them"


YouTube - Daniel Ellsberg: Nixon & Johnson secretly threatened to nuke Vietnam
I didn't really know much about the Pentagon Papers or Ellsberg - here's a excellent summary and could just as easily apply today:



> After returning from Vietnam, Ellsberg went back to work at the RAND Corporation. As a Vietnam expert, he was invited, in 1967, to contribute to a top-secret study of classified documents regarding the conduct of the Vietnam War that had been commissioned by Defense Secretary McNamara. These documents, completed in 1968, later became known collectively as the Pentagon Papers. Because he held an extremely high-level security clearance, Ellsberg was one of very few individuals who had access to the complete set of documents. *They revealed that the government had knowledge, early on, that the war would not likely be won, and that continuing the war would lead to many times more casualties than was ever admitted publicly. Further, the papers showed that high-ranking officials had a deep cynicism toward the public, as well as disregard for the loss of life and injury suffered by soldiers and civilians.*





> On June 29, 1971, U.S. Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska entered 4,100 pages of the Papers into the record of his Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds, which he had received from Ellsberg via Ben Bagdikian. These portions of the Papers were subsequently published by Beacon Press.


And I think I've posted this before, but if you missed it you mind the information about LBJ in this vid to be of interest:
YouTube - Secret Service reveals secrets of ex-presidents (and people think Ron Paul is the crazy one?)

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## heavenlyboy34

> From the above-cited article:
> 
> _Atomic bombs have been used only once in human history. The United States dropped them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945_
> 
> I think that makes it *twice* that they were used...  can't the editorial writer count?
> 
> 
> 
> Okay, nitpicking aside, I certainly would not have agreed with Goldwater's view of using nukes to defoliate the forests concealing the North Vietnamese supply routes.  
> ...


FTW!

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## Liberty Star

Is the source been verified?  It seems uncharecteristic for a moderate conserve like him. BG was one of my favorite jewish leaders until I read this.






> I don't know guys.  The Commies were taking over country after country and were actively involved in trying to overthrow our own form of government.  Goldwater wanted to put an end to it and stop pussyfooting around.  But, of course TPTB wanted it to drag out, because it benefited their plans.
> 
> Oh, that commercial by Johnson was pure and unadulterated BS.


Detonating Weapons of Mass Destruction on massive civilian population centers certainly would be no "pussyfooting around" as you put it.

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## emazur

> Is the source been verified?  It seems uncharecteristic for a moderate conserve like him. BG was one of my favorite jewish leaders until I read this.
> 
> Detonating Weapons of Mass Destruction on massive civilian population centers certainly would be no "pussyfooting around" as you put it.


Read my earlier posts in this thread

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## SimpleName

> If you are going to go to war- it must be because the life of your nation is genuinely at risk.
> If that is the case. to win- and to win at all cost is the answer.
> I always thought Goldwater was just thinking- that if this is a war- and we mean to win it- then why not just win it. We have the weapon to do it.


Is it possible Goldwater was trying to make a point? I will say I haven't really researched Goldwater in depth, but I seriously doubt he would nuke a totally irrelevant nation with no possible capability (w/o Russian aid) to seriously harm the States. It doesn't make sense nor does it go along with his philosophy elsewhere. 

I'd also like to add how LBJ used a white girl in his commercial. I realize it was to show that Goldwater was going to cause a nuclear war, but why didn't he use a Vietnamese girl? Somebody Goldwater's threats would immediately affect? Possibly to make nationalistic (and/or racist) Americans more sympathetic? Just found that interesting.

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## olehounddog

Maybe we shoulda talked to Ho.

1944-1947: Ho Chi Minh Reaches out to US; US Diplomats Note He Has No Direct Ties to Soviet Union  Ho Chi Minh is leading the Vietminha popular movement of Catholics, Buddhists, small businessmen, communists and farmersin their fight for Vietnams independence from the French. He makes a dozen appeals to US President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee for help, insisting he is not a communist and suggesting that Indochina could be a fertile field for American capital and enterprise. He even mentions the possibility of allowing a US base in Camranh Bay. Likewise, US diplomats in Vietnam in their communications to Washington note that he has no direct ties to the Soviet Union and that he is a symbol of nationalism and the struggle for freedom to the overwhelming majority of the population. Major Archimedes L. A. Patti of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) later writes that Ho pleaded not for military or economic aid, but for understanding, for moral support, for a voice in the forum of western democracies. But the United States would not read his mail because, as I was informed, the DRV Government was not recognized by the United States and it would be improper for the president or anyone in authority to acknowledge such correspondence. Instead, the US will help the Frencheven offering them two atomic bombs. Ho Chi Minh is eventually forced in 1950 to look to the USSR and China for support. [Herring, 1986, pp. 10; Pilger, 1986, pp. 188] 
Entity Tags: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh, Archimedes L. A. Patti
Timeline Tags: US-Vietnam (1947-2001)

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## Stop Making Cents

> I don't know guys.  The Commies were taking over country after country and were actively involved in trying to overthrow our own form of government.  .



And they succeeded - it just took them a while. They have a Marxist in the White House as we speak.

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