Showing posts with label Korean War (1950-1953). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Korean War (1950-1953). Show all posts

Monday, May 19, 2025

EARTHA KITT, 1993: When the wars were over, you didn't tell us not to hate them. You didn't retrain us. And then on top of all of that, you took the industry out of the United States and gave the American jobs to the enemy!

Eartha Kitt, 1927-2008.

This was from a 1993 interview she did on the Whoopi Goldberg Show.  Find it on YouTube in Part I and Part II.  The segment above is found in Part II of the interview.  Enjoy.  Find my transcript of the segment below.

It is something like what Perot has done today but in a much bigger way but of course nobody was doing it. First of all, people thought that I was invited to the White House to sing my songs, "Baby, I Want to Be Evil," 1954 and "Just an Old-Fashioned Girl," 1956.  That was not the case at all.

50 of us women were invited there to give our opinions as to why there was so much juvenile delinquency in the streets of America.  That was the question.  I kept raising my hand.  Every time somebody said something I raised my hand.  Mrs. Johnson was saving me for last it seems.  First of all, I want you to know that President Johnson was not supposed to be there.  But everybody was wondering if he's coming.  It was like waiting for Cary Grant, "Is he coming, is he not coming?" And all of a sudden, the Walls of Jericho opened up and here comes President Johnson with cameras in back of him, you know.  He puts his arm on the rostrum and he actually, I swear to God, cross my heart and hope to die if I'm not telling you the truth, the man said, "I want you all to know how fortunate it is that you are all here today to have lunch with the world's most important family.  I would like for you to go back to your communities and tell your communities what a wonderful family you have here."  

I'm not lying. I'm telling you the truth, Whoopi, may the gods strike me dead if I'm not telling you the truth, anyway . . . .

1:26.  Also, Whoopi, I said to her,

We were taught to hate the Germans because we had to fight that war.

We were taught to hate the Koreans because we had to fight that war.

We were taught to hate the Vietnamese because etc., etc.

We were taught to hate the Japanese.  

When the wars were over, you didn't tell us not to hate them.  You didn't retrain us.  And then on top of all of that, you took the industry out of the United States and gave the American jobs to the enemy!  How can you possibly expect us to accept that when you never told us any differently?  And now you're telling us that we are a problem?  And we came home from these wars without a job?  

2:14. And look at the Gulf War.  These boys came home and didn't even find practically enough money to pay their mortgages, and they're considered undesirables!?  

The poor boys who came back from Vietnam were not even considered first class citizens when they came back.  They were hated!  Undesirables!  And you're now telling us that we should love one another . . . without jobs?  You tell us that we should be good . . . without jobs that you gave to what you told us was the enemy? What are we supposed to do now?  Walk the streets that's what they were doing . . . well, I mean I may be exaggerating a bit now because every time I think about it I just get so angry and annoyed inside about what that government, these governments, are doing to us as Americans citizens.  "MY country 'tis of thee!" as the man said on the voice, the boys who came back from the Vietnamese Wars.  "Great land of bigotry!" What happened?  Why aren't we correcting these situations?  When you bring foreigners into the country, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Japanese, and they're walking all over us in our jobs and you expect us to be nice, sweet, loving people when the community is being broken apart.  Now the taxes are so high that both parents have to work and we are latchkey kids. What do you expect of the children?  

3:40.  Anyhow, one lady got up way over in the corner of the room and she said, "Miss Kitt, I'll have you know I have eight sons and I would be glad to donate each one of them to Vietnam."

How can I talk to you?. 

3:57.  Jack Anderson called me in January 1974, I remember it very well, because I was packing up the car taking my daughter and the big Saint Bernard dog up to the mountains to a friend of my daughter's, and the phone rang, and it was Seymour Hirsch from The New York Times who was asking me permission to print what they had found.  And he told me what he found.  He said what I'm sending . . . he sent me a bit of it, it was only a smidgen of what the CIA had on me.  Now the way they put you out of work, of course, Lyndon Baines Johnson. called the networks across the nation, the media in general, all the media, and said "I don't want to see that woman's face anywhere" because he was escalating the wars obviously it seems to me.  And according to my dossier at the bottom of the page it says, "Specifically requested by Lyndon Baines and Ladybird Johnson."  He sent out the FBI to go out to the venues that I had been working in, or that I might be working in, because every place that I'd ever worked at always had return engagement clause in it.  And if the FBI is on the doorsteps of these venues then you are considered a problem.

5:05.  The Ambassador Hotel I had a contract there about 3 weeks later and suddenly they couldn't find the contract it was a signed contract on both parties side all of a sudden the agents don't want to know you even your friends don't want to know you nobody called I was up there in my house and La Colima Drive wondering what happened So eventually I never left this country I will never leave this country I love this country basically I love what America stands for she has a lot of problems and I'm perfectly willing to help her solve her problems so I'm not afraid to open my mouth even though you get your face slapped but I went to Europe, and different places in South America Australia, anywhere that I could find work. And to this day, you still don't know who is remembering, and said, "Well, that mother-in-law said, 'Yes, Eartha, I believe in what you said.  I agree with what you said, but did you have to say it?'" Even my girlfriends who have sons that were about to be at an age to be sent to Vietnam, they were at an age to be sent to Vietnam, who said to me, "I think you should apologize to our friends because of what you did."

I said why?  Don't you have sons?  Do you want your sons to go to Vietnam?

6:19.  We want to build our country from the inside again.  As a matter of fact what the politicians, all of these politicians, Clinton, Perot, all of them, are saying exactly the same thing I told them in 1968.  You take the industry out of this country and you're going to have a big problem because everybody's going to be without a job and they're going to wonder what happened.  You can find billions of dollars to go to the Gulf.  Why can't you find billions of dollars to take care of the poor people in this country?  Why are we walking the streets?  A lot of those boys who went to wars and fought for this country.  I know that some people think I'm bitter and maybe in some respects I am bitter, and in very many ways I'm very angry because this is my country and we are entitled to fight for it from the inside.  And sometimes I think what happened?  I thought my country said that we have freedom from oppression? Freedom from hunger? Freedom of expression?  You can speak your mind as long as you're not hitting anybody over the head with a baseball bat, you're entitled to speak your mind.  We don't want to be on welfare.  We want jobs.  I want to have dignity and respect for myself, and this is what I feel about every one of us in the United States as well as the rest of the world.  But if you're going to pay people to stay poor, why not stay poor?  And if you get a job, if the job pay is as much as you can get from the welfare, you don't have to pay taxes on the welfare money but you have to pay taxes on the money that you get from a job.

7:45.  I'm terribly disappointed particularly in my own country that threw me out of work in this country for over 20 some odd years or whatever the figure might be and put me out of work.  I lost a lot of lucrative years, and then the disappointing thing too is that the American public and I didn't have a chance to grow up together, and they thought that I had either gotten out of the business, I died, or I had moved to Paris, or I had moved to some foreign country.  So no I never left America.  I have no intentions of leaving the United States.  But what goes around comes around . . . 

Monday, July 31, 2023

KOREAN WAR, 1950-1953, PROPAGANDA vs. ATROCITIES

KOREAN WAR PROPAGANDA

The war began with what Harry Truman claimed was a surprise invasion on June 25, 1950, by the North Korean army crossing the dividing line with South Korea that was devised after World War II. But the U.S. government had ample warnings of the pending invasion. According to the late Justin Raimondo, co-founder of Antiwar.com, the conflict actually started with a series of attacks by South Korean forces, aided by the U.S. military:

Barack Obama declared in 2013, “That war was no tie. Korea was a victory.”

By 1951, the Korean War had become intensely unpopular in the United States—more unpopular than the Vietnam War ever was. Truman insisted on mislabeling the war as a “police action,” but it destroyed his presidency regardless. When the ceasefire was signed in 1953, the borders were nearly the same as at the start of the war. 

While the friends of leviathan paint Truman as the epitome of an honest politician, he was as demagogic on Korea as Lyndon Johnson was on Vietnam. When Republicans criticized the Korean War as useless, President Harry Truman condemned “reckless and irresponsible Republican extremists” and “the false version of history that has been copyrighted by the extremists in the Republican Party.”

Perhaps the biggest disaster of the Korean war was that intellectuals and foreign-policy experts succeeded in redefining the Korean conflict as an American victory. As Georgetown University professor Derek Leebaert noted in his book Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan, 2011, “What had been regarded as a bloody stalemate transformed itself in Washington’s eyes; ten years later it had become an example of a successful limited war. Already by the mid-1950s, elite opinion began to surmise that it had been a victory.” Leebaert explained, “Images of victory in Korea shaped the decision to escalate in 1964-65 helping to explain why America pursued a war of attrition.” Even worse, the notion that “‘America has never lost a war’ remained part of the national myth, and the notion of having ‘prevailed’ in Korea became a justification for going big in Vietnam.” But as Leebaert noted, “in Vietnam, [the U.S. Army] had forgotten everything it had learned about counterinsurgency in Korea as well.”

KOREAN WAR ATROCITIES 

“From 1945-1948, American forces aided [South Korean President Syngman] Rhee in a killing spree that claimed tens of thousands of victims: the counterinsurgency campaign took a high toll in Kwangju, and on the island of Cheju-do—where as many as 60,000 people were murdered by Rhee’s U.S.-backed forces.”

The North Korean army quickly routed both South Korean and U.S. forces. A complete debacle was averted after General Douglas MacArthur masterminded a landing of U.S. troops at Inchon. After he routed the North Korean forces, MacArthur was determined to continue pushing northward regardless of the danger of provoking a much broader war. By the time the U.S. forces drove the North Korean army back across the border, roughly 5,000 American troops had been killed. The Pentagon had plenty of warning that the Chinese would intervene if the U.S. Army pushed too close to the Chinese border. But the euphoria that erupted after Inchon blew away all common sense and drowned out the military voices who warned of a catastrophe. One U.S. Army colonel responded to a briefing on the Korea situation in Tokyo in 1950 by storming out and declaring, “They’re living in a goddamn dream land.”