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Me#1You#10
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Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 6503
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 Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2005 9:48 pm Post subject: Bill Buckley: John Kerry's America (what he said about us) |
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William F. Buckley's thoughts from 34 years ago are as fresh and pertinent today as tomorrow's headlines...
| Quote: | John Kerry’s America
What he said about us.
By William F. Buckley Jr.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the text of William F. Buckley Jr.'s June 8, 1971, commencement address to the United States Military Academy at West Point. The speech appears here as it is in Let Us Talk of Many Things : The Collected Speeches.
The morale in the armed services was low, reflecting the impasse and progressive demoralization in Vietnam, and especially the trial of Lieutenant William Calley for the massacre at Mylai. A drastic charge, flamboyantly made by decorated veteran John Kerry (now a United States senator from Massachusetts), had been rapturously received. Kerry ascribed to our soldiers in Vietnam uncivilized, barbarous practices. I devoted my talk to asking about Mr. Kerry's charges and reflecting on their implications.
A great deal has been written lately on the spirit of progressivism at West Point. I note that a generation ago, cadets were not permitted to read a newspaper, whereas today, each cadet room receives a daily copy of the New York Times. I know now what it means to be nostalgic for the good old days.
I read ten days ago the full text of the quite remarkable address delivered by John Kerry before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. It was an address, I am told, that paralyzed the committee by its eloquence and made Mr. Kerry — a veteran of the war in Vietnam, a pedigreed Bostonian, a graduate of Yale University — an instant hero.
After reading it I put it aside, deeply troubled as I was by the haunting resonance of its peroration, which so moved the audience. The words he spoke were these:
"[We are determined] to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more, so that when, thirty years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say 'Vietnam!' and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning."
"Where America finally turned." We need to wonder: where America finally turned from what?
Mr. Kerry, in introducing himself to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made it plain that he was there to speak not only for himself, but for what he called "a very much larger group of veterans in this country." He then proceeded to describe the America he knows, the America from which he enjoined us all to turn.
In Southeast Asia, he said, he saw "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."
A grave charge, but the sensitive listener will instantly assume that Mr. Kerry is using the word "crime" loosely, as in, "He was criminally thoughtless in not writing home more often to his mother." But Mr. Kerry quickly interdicted that line of retreat. He went on to enumerate precisely such crimes as are being committed "on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." He gave tales of torture, of rape, of Americans who "randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravages of war."
Mr. Kerry informed Congress that what threatens the United States is "not Reds, and not redcoats," but "the crimes" we are committing. He tells us that we have "created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who have returned with a sense of anger."
Most specifically he singled out for criticism a sentence uttered by Mr. Agnew here at West Point a year ago: "Some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse." Mr. Kerry insists that the so-called misfits are the true heroes, inasmuch as it was they who "were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dared to." As for the men in Vietnam, he added, "we cannot consider ourselves America's 'best men' when we are ashamed of and hated for what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia."
And indeed, if American soldiers have been called upon to rape and to torture and to exterminate non-combatants, it is obvious that they should be ashamed, less obvious why they have not expressed that shame more widely on returning to the United States, particularly inasmuch as we have been assured by Mr. Kerry that they have been taught to deal and to trade in violence.
Are there extenuating circumstances? Is there a reason for our being in Vietnam?
"To attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom . . . is . . . the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart." It is then, we reason retrospectively, not alone an act of hypocrisy that caused the joint chiefs of staff and the heads of the civilian departments engaged in strategic calculations to make the recommendations they made over the past ten years, to three Presidents of the United States: it was not merely hypocrisy, but criminal hypocrisy. The nature of that hypocrisy? "All," Mr. Kerry sums up, "that we were told about the mystical war against Communism."
The indictment is complete.
It is the indictment of an ignorant young man who is willing to condemn in words that would have been appropriately used in Nuremberg the governing class of America: the legislators, the generals, the statesmen. And, reaching beyond them, the people, who named the governors to their positions of responsibility and ratified their decisions in several elections.
The point I want to raise is this: If America is everything that John Kerry says it is, what is it appropriate for us to do? The wells of regeneration are infinitely deep, but the stain described by John Kerry goes too deep to be bleached out by conventional remorse or resolution: better the destruction of America, if, to see ourselves truly, we need to look into the mirror John Kerry holds up for us. If we are a nation of sadists, of kid-killers and torturers, of hypocrites and criminals, let us be done with it, and pray that a great flood or fire will destroy us, leaving John Kerry and maybe Mrs. Benjamin Spock to take the place of Lot, in reseeding a new order.
Gentleman, how many times, in the days ahead, you will need to ask yourselves the most searching question of all, the counterpart of the priest's most agonizing doubt: Is there a God? Yours will be: Is America worth it?
John Kerry's assault on this country did not rise fullblown in his mind, like Venus from the Cypriot Sea. It is the crystallization of an assault upon America which has been fostered over the years by an intellectual class given over to self-doubt and self-hatred, driven by a cultural disgust with the uses to which so many people put their freedom. The assault on the military, the many and subtle vibrations of which you feel as keenly as James Baldwin knows the inflections of racism, is an assault on the proposition that what we have, in America, is truly worth defending. The military is to be loved or despised according as it defends that which is beloved or perpetuates that which is despised. The root question has not risen to such a level of respectability as to work itself into the platform of a national political party, but it lurks in the rhetoric of the John Kerrys, such that a blind man, running his fingers over the features of the public rhetoric, can discern the meaning of it:
Is America worth it?
That is what they are saying to you. And that is what so many Americans reacted to in the case of Lieutenant Calley. Mistakenly, they interpreted the conviction of Calley as yet another effort to discredit the military. And though they will not say it in as many words, they know that if there is no military, it will quickly follow that there will be no America, of the kind that they know, that we know. The America that listens so patiently to its John Kerrys, the America that shouldered the great burden of preserving oases of freedom after the great curtain came down with that Bolshevik subtlety that finally expressed itself in a Wall, to block citizens of the socialist utopia from leaving, en route even to John Kerry's America; the America that all but sank under the general obloquy, in order to stand by, in Southeast Asia, a commitment it had soberly made, to the cause of Containment — I shall listen patiently, decades hence, to those who argue that our commitment in Vietnam and our attempt to redeem it were tragically misconceived. I shall not listen to those who say that it was less than the highest tribute to national motivation, to collective idealism, and to international rectitude. I say this with confidence because I have never met an American who takes pleasure from the Vietnam War or who desires to exploit the Vietnamese.
So during those moments when doubt will assail you, moments that will come as surely as the temptations of the flesh, I hope you will pause. I know, I know, at the most hectic moments of one's life it isn't easy — indeed, the argument can be made that neither is it seemly — to withdraw from the front line in order to consider the general situation philosophically. But what I hope you will consider, during these moments of doubt, is the essential professional point: Without organized force, and the threat of the use of it under certain circumstances, there is no freedom, anywhere. Without freedom, there is no true humanity. If America is the monster of John Kerry, burn your commissions tomorrow morning and take others, which will not bind you in the depraved conspiracy you have heard described. If it is otherwise, remember: the freedom John Kerry enjoys, and the freedom I enjoy, are, quite simply, the result of your dedication. Do you wonder that I accepted the opportunity to salute you?
National Review Online |
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republicanveteran
Commander
Joined: 29 Jul 2004
Posts: 333
Location: Texas
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| Posted: Fri Dec 02, 2005 4:51 am Post subject: |
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| Once a stinking traitor, always a stinking traitor...How did that idiot Kerry ever get into the senate??? |
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LewWaters
Admin
Joined: 18 May 2004
Posts: 4042
Location: Washington State
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| Posted: Fri Dec 02, 2005 6:16 am Post subject: |
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Another question would be, how has he remained in the Senate?
Although change always happens, I still wonder where is the America I left in 1969. |
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BuffaloJack
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy
Joined: 10 Aug 2004
Posts: 1637
Location: Buffalo, New York
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| Posted: Fri Dec 02, 2005 12:18 pm Post subject: |
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| LewWaters wrote: | Another question would be, how has he remained in the Senate?
Although change always happens, I still wonder where is the America I left in 1969. |
I think that the answer lies in the fact that he is a senator from Masachusetts, home of the Kennedys. I doubt if he could garner enough votes to become dog catcher anywhere else. After all, we only have to look at Ted Kennedy as an example of what they would vote into office.
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Swift Boats - Qui Nhon (12/69-4/70), Cat Lo (4/70-5/70), Vung Tau (5/70-12/71) |
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Me#1You#10
Site Admin
Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 6503
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| Posted: Fri Dec 02, 2005 3:32 pm Post subject: |
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| BuffaloJack wrote: | | I think that the answer lies in the fact that he is a senator from Masachusetts, home of the Kennedys. I doubt if he could garner enough votes to become dog catcher anywhere else. After all, we only have to look at Ted Kennedy as an example of what they would vote into office. |
I think, perhaps, the reason behind the longevity of Kennedy and Kerry is a complex soup of tradition and vanity fostering a willful and purposeful closing of the mind to further genuine reconsideration of facts, character and worth. This is a very human trait that dispenses with the odious prospect of, perhaps, having to acknowledge prior error(s) of thought or judgement. Compounding the syndrome, those who hold their own "intellectual" prowess in the highest esteem (can you spell MSM, academia and liberalism?) combine with a dominant civic ambivalence and distaste for pondering things "political" to produce 2 long-tenured Massachusetts nightmares.
Perhaps this has an element of "projection" to it, as I can, at any given moment, suffer from the same proclivities and can retreat, quite readily, to the comfort of my "conservative" chair. However, at the bedrock of that conservative philosophy lie fundamental principles of our Judaeo/Christian heritage that are dismissed WHOLESALE by our secularist ideological opposition...and among the greatest of these is that the END cannot justify the MEANS. One need look no further than the emergence of the "false but accurate" Rather/Mapes debacle to see the fruition of "The Big Lie" philosophy as the weaponry of choice for the political opposition. I thank God that this internet medium has emerged as such a potent force in counter-balancing the 40 year MSM reign as King of the media hill.
It's, perhaps, too late to save Massachusetts from themselves but a line, at long last, has been drawn in the sand and liberalism has met a well-armed and formidable foe. |
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dusty
Admiral
Joined: 27 Aug 2004
Posts: 1264
Location: East Texas
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| Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2005 4:57 am Post subject: |
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I think you're being too generous to the people of Ma. #1.
I think the reason Kennedy maintains his senate seat is nothing more than good old fashioned corruption. I think he has bought his way in and bought his influence and bribed and corrupted the highest officials of that state and election officials to make sure he gets elected time after time.
I think John Kerry was his protege even before Kerry went to Vietnam.
Do not underestimate the evil that is Ted Kennedy. He had this planned out in his mind for many years. Kerry was the perfect stooge for 'Uncle Teddy' and remains so to this day.
That Kerry wasn't prosecuted as he well should have been after his admission before the public during his senate testimony that he had met with the enemy leaders in Paris to negotiate with them against all our laws speaks volumes as to the strings of power that were being pulled behind the scenes by 'Uncle Teddy' to keep his protege out of trouble and even make him a hero to be advanced to the halls of power. A most convient place for his stooge to be for Mr. Kennedy.
And the partnership continues unabated to this day.
Dusty
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Stevie
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy
Joined: 25 Aug 2004
Posts: 1451
Location: Queen Creek, Arizona
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| Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2005 7:32 am Post subject: |
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Lew, I feel the same. It's been all downhill since the 60's.
(me too tho!  )
you be careful with those fancy words ME#1, next thing you know
Kerry'll be wanting to hire you to write him a speech.....
(ok, I'm just a bit to brain dead right now to soak 'em all in)
gosh guys! I get such a warm, homey feeling inside when I come
over to this msg board! 
another board I'm on, the liberals just go into a feeding frenzy when anything political or about religion comes up. Not many there will 'post up' and defend Bush, the war or Christ/God, so I sort of feel I've gotta
check it out each day incase I need to put my 2 cents in.
I think a bunch of 'em are related to Dean, Kennedy, Carvell, Matthews etc.... 
sometimes I just gotta come over here and let my BP go down....
and 'recharge' myself!
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Stevie
Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage
morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should
be arrested, exiled or hanged. |
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