Thursday, May 11, 2006

Those That Don't Learn From History

Ohh....

So one of the only things I remember regarding the Gulf of Tonkin from my history classes was, well, that essentially the Vietnam War was ratcheted up by Johnson(?) based on a supposed attack on a US warship in the Gulf of Tonkin. Followed by some mumbling about how they never found any evidence to support the claim of attack.

Well, here we are again. Three years into a quagmire (oops. Not supposed to use the real term. Try "Operation" instead.) and history has just repeated itself. Only this time we did really get attacked and we did really, uh, attack the folks responsible -- but we sorta kinda got attack-happy after that and invaded another country that wasn't really related to the first attack... so we had to make up a fake excuse (WMDs) to justify the second attack... whew!

Yup, that's history repeating itself again. The same old tricks working again on a new generation of schmucks. Could this mess have been averted if we'd only been taught history better in school?

A friend of mine once stated that it is in the interest of politicians to keep us as dumb as possible. Forty years of school funding cuts does seem to support that theory.

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