Another Republican Crime
Today is Wednesday, 4 August 2010.
Today is the anniversary of the death, in 1886, of one of the least-remembered presidents of the USA/USE, Samuel J. Tilden, the 19th.
The presidential election of 1876, the “Centennial Election”, featured Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, governor of Ohio, and Democrat Tilden, governor of New York. Tilden won the popular vote by some 250,000, but with 184 electoral votes, fell 1 short. Hayes had 165 electoral votes. The votes of Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina (all still occupied by Federal troops) and Oregon, totaling 20, were contested. To find a way out of the impasse, Congress created a special electoral commission, with 7 Democrats, 7 Republicans, and 1 independent. When the independent resigned to take a seat in the Senate, he was replaced by a Republican, and Hayes "won", earning him the nickname “Rutherfraud”.
Southern Democrats agreed to theft of the election due to Hayes’ commitment to fulfill his campaign promise to remove the remaining troops from the formerly treasonous states and end Reconstruction, thus returning them to white supremacist rule and beginning the era of segregation, The Second Slavery. (Since 1965, we’ve lived in The Third Slavery, the culture of discrimination.)
The obscene alacrity with which the Republican leadership traded the rights of Blacks for the office of president demonstrates the actual sense in which the War of Rebellion was “about” slavery.
For the leaderships of the North and South, the War was not fundamentally about the moral evil of slavery. The War was about the fact that the South insisted on clinging to an obsolete economic model: agricultural commodity production through slave labour. This model was a strong impediment to the evolution of the USA/USE from a predominately agricultural economy to an industrial economy.
The Republican Party embrace of white priority is often, and mistakenly, dated to Barry Goldwater’s adoption of the “Southern Strategy” in the 1964 presidential campaign. It in fact dates to the Republican Party betrayal of Blacks by the Great Theft of 1877.
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On this date in 1964, torpedo boats of the navy of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam (“North Vietnam”) supposedly attacked two USN destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. The attack never took place: it was a fantasy based on jittery nerves, foul weather, and the misinterpretation of radar and sonar information. The jittery nerves were a result of an actual attack on one of the destroyers two days before.
The American government claimed that the attacks were unprovoked. In truth, the American warships were covertly supporting Republic of Vietnam ("South Vietnam") military units engaged in attacks on DRVN targets, and were thus “fair game”.
The attacks were used as the pretext to deceive Congress into passing the Southeast Asia Resolution (usually known as the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution”) on 7 August, authorizing the president to conduct overt offensive war against the DRVN. The resolution was in fact illegal, since the Constitution requires instead a vote to declare war.
Today is the anniversary of the death, in 1886, of one of the least-remembered presidents of the USA/USE, Samuel J. Tilden, the 19th.
The presidential election of 1876, the “Centennial Election”, featured Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, governor of Ohio, and Democrat Tilden, governor of New York. Tilden won the popular vote by some 250,000, but with 184 electoral votes, fell 1 short. Hayes had 165 electoral votes. The votes of Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina (all still occupied by Federal troops) and Oregon, totaling 20, were contested. To find a way out of the impasse, Congress created a special electoral commission, with 7 Democrats, 7 Republicans, and 1 independent. When the independent resigned to take a seat in the Senate, he was replaced by a Republican, and Hayes "won", earning him the nickname “Rutherfraud”.
Southern Democrats agreed to theft of the election due to Hayes’ commitment to fulfill his campaign promise to remove the remaining troops from the formerly treasonous states and end Reconstruction, thus returning them to white supremacist rule and beginning the era of segregation, The Second Slavery. (Since 1965, we’ve lived in The Third Slavery, the culture of discrimination.)
The obscene alacrity with which the Republican leadership traded the rights of Blacks for the office of president demonstrates the actual sense in which the War of Rebellion was “about” slavery.
For the leaderships of the North and South, the War was not fundamentally about the moral evil of slavery. The War was about the fact that the South insisted on clinging to an obsolete economic model: agricultural commodity production through slave labour. This model was a strong impediment to the evolution of the USA/USE from a predominately agricultural economy to an industrial economy.
The Republican Party embrace of white priority is often, and mistakenly, dated to Barry Goldwater’s adoption of the “Southern Strategy” in the 1964 presidential campaign. It in fact dates to the Republican Party betrayal of Blacks by the Great Theft of 1877.
______________________________________
On this date in 1964, torpedo boats of the navy of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam (“North Vietnam”) supposedly attacked two USN destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. The attack never took place: it was a fantasy based on jittery nerves, foul weather, and the misinterpretation of radar and sonar information. The jittery nerves were a result of an actual attack on one of the destroyers two days before.
The American government claimed that the attacks were unprovoked. In truth, the American warships were covertly supporting Republic of Vietnam ("South Vietnam") military units engaged in attacks on DRVN targets, and were thus “fair game”.
The attacks were used as the pretext to deceive Congress into passing the Southeast Asia Resolution (usually known as the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution”) on 7 August, authorizing the president to conduct overt offensive war against the DRVN. The resolution was in fact illegal, since the Constitution requires instead a vote to declare war.
posted by HH at 11:05 AM
3 Comments:
In 2001, an historian in the NSA (National Security Agency) concluded that information obtained in the Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 1964 was deliberately falsified to make it appear that North Vietnamese gunboats attacked an American destroyer patrolling in international waters.
It was widely assumed that the attack was a mistake caused by phantom radar blips, worsened by an edgy crew who were aware of a legitimate attack two days previous on another American ship. Although most people assumed it was an honest mistake, the NSA historian has determined that two "mid-level employees" purposefully manipulated intelligence information and deliberately falsified the NSA's communications intercepts to make it appear as though the attack actually occurred.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/10/31/MNG99FGN521.DTL
Although in his national television address, LBJ described the attacks on two American destroyers as "unprovoked", the ships had, in fact, been monitoring South Vietnamese raids against two North Vietnamese islands, and these raids had been planned by US military advisors. It appears that the Gulf of Tonkin incident may best be described as a snare deliberately set by American "agents provocateurs."
In any event, the incident gave LBJ the green light he wanted to (illegally) escalate the war.
So many crimes; so little time...
Thank you, "fubarbeliever". I was unaware of this article.
"Anonymous": I'm dancing as fast as I can.
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