Comments on: I Hate the Army / Randy Said Freeze

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 11:59:55 +0000

Dr F,
Nice disinformation campaign, political slant and revisionist history theory. You stated “as a graduate student at MIT in 1980, Randall Forsberg started the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign at a time when the Reagan administration was threatening nuclear war with the Soviet Union.” I only minored in history but I can tell you there was no Reagan administration in 1980 however there definitely was a Carter administration. I also particularly enjoyed reading “holding its first national conference in March 1981, the Freeze began organizing all across the country.” If this date is actually correct then this means the Reagan administration was actually in office for approximately two months, way too early to threaten a nuclear power after just inheriting the Carter administration’s major military spending cuts and force reductions. I would want to believe you honestly mixed up dates or administrations but I can find no conclusive evidence of Reagan or Carter threatening the USSR with nuclear weapons. I appreciate you using Presidential quotes to support your point of view that the Freeze organization greatly influenced Reagan’s actions. Unfortunately you start off very weak because you simply have no supporting evidence or quotations to confirm your historical view of Reagan in the first place.

If you really are a doctor then you know as well as I do that this article would never make it into a peer reviewed journal or be published as a scholarly article. You have simply bypassed this route to misinform an uniformed public. I understand you are trying to memorialize a person however lying does not help the process. If you believe I am incorrect then I challenge you to prove it from one scholar to another.

By: pengovsky

pengovsky — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 09:53:32 +0000

I was about to write that the world was a much safer place during the cold war than it is now, but I having thought about it I realized that this only applies to Europe. In every other respect I guess one can only say that the prospect of mutually assured destruction by the superpowers kept them from goiing into a full scale war, although they both fought a number of proxy wars – especially in the post-Cuban crisis period.

While dr. Randy’s anti-nuclear goals are (were) noble and have apparenlty left a mark, I don’t think they apply today. Namely: the prospect of a nuclear exchange is far less likely. Especially with Iran. Although “Bush et al.” try to paint the government in Tehran as a bunch of nuts I think they’re actually following a clear foreign policy goal and are on the verge of getting it. And this does NOT include the use of nuclear weapons because it would not serve their goals. The prospect of a conventional war is, however, all the more likely.

And finally: the notion of having an army purely for self-defence thus rendering it useless is – again – very noble, but utterly wrong. Because it presumes that attack come only in form of one country using its armed forces against another country. Historically, most wars were fought over resources, few were fought over ideas (the latter were usually just a smoke-screen). And so it is with wars of today. Not much has changed from thr 19th century. War (as von Clausewitz puts it) is still only an extension of politicg, ableit using different means.

A different approach would require a change of entire foreing policy by the West (which, btw, is today paying the bill for foreign policy screw-ups in the seventies), because it would mean letting the small but rich-in-resources countries to join the big league and treat them like equals.

@Luka: you think so? Or is that just a perception, because it is socially unacceptable to say so at this time? Take a look at nationalist Zmago Jeličič in Slovenia. The polls predicted something below 10% for his presidential bid, but he got about 20%. Because people who voted for him knew that it is unacceptable to admit their nationalistic choise.

So I think that if the Japanese constitution were actually changed, plenty of people would not mind at all.

By: dr.filomena

dr.filomena — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:57:50 +0000

@Luka: I sure hope you’re right and yes, it does sound nice. Imagine.

By: Luka

Luka — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 00:44:22 +0000

@dr.filomena: Of course we are all aware that such constitution was only possible, because the victorious country imposed it to a defeated one, but it still sounds nice, neh? Anyway I guess the change of this article is a realistic possibility, but on the other hand, there have been attempts to chage it for decades already, but the Japanese people seem to have kind of attached to this specific article and pride themselves upon it. So even if the government tries to change it won’t happen without a fight.

By: dr.filomena

dr.filomena — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:38:49 +0000

@Luka: Perhaps along those lines, but definitely not with that content for the same reasons that this particular Constitution happened to be adopted. And I did have an interesting ‘chat’ with the Japanese ambassador to Slovenia back in November I think on the subject of the planned changes to the quoted Article of the Constitution (apparently, this is a realistic possibility?)… besides, not having an army apparently does not stop one from producing and trading in arms.

@Abraham: Thank you for your thoughtful response. It is good to see that the wool has not been pulled over all Americans’ eyes. I suspect some of the ones on whom the process was successful are starting to see through it as well. Sure, the army is but a tool of politics, but if it didn’t exist, that’d be a tool not to be counted on. I know it’s utopian, but one can always imagine. Changes do come about and one has to start small. In ones family, neighbourhood, region, country… the world.

By: Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:34:46 +0000

Our government is nuts and the people in it are too. The president and vice president are trying to get into another war. The congress has no backbone about stopping it or stopping the funding for it. There is something called “COG” (change of government) that these people are trying to establish and it was helped along by 911. The Patriot Act was or is one step in getting rid of some of the Constitution. It is a mad mess we are in and there is no way out. Talking about not being for armed forces is good but the people in control also control those armed forces and would like, very much, for you to be defenseless without arms. So that constitution right is still working but COG will change it.

I like your post a lot but wonder if you are aware of some of these things?

By: Luka

Luka — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:20:41 +0000

Well, we should probably write more constitutions somewhere along these lines.