March 29, 2009 · 4:00 am
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“What If…”

A very cool animation based on Ron Paul’s powerful speech before the House of Representatives last month regarding America’s tragically misguided foreign policy. Original video (Windows media) can be viewed here.

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8 Responses to “What If…”

  1. Sebastian Ronin
    March 29, 2009 at 7:16 am

    “……the quest for empire eventually destroys all great nations.” Easily said, not so easily acknowledged nor acted upon.

    A nuclear state cannot help but be a fascist state. Alex Jones might be interested to know that such predates his birth. Out-going president Dwight D. Eisenhower laid it on the line on January 17, 1961. For all you cerebral types, he made no bones about pulling the scientific community into the American fascistic cosmos.

  2. Gayle
    March 29, 2009 at 7:48 am

    Another great statement that will go unheeded. Maybe it will be trotted out in history classes 200 years from now.

  3. redtory
    March 29, 2009 at 10:05 am

    SR — It’s always surprised me that Ike’s speech didn’t have more influence at the time. People have been continually drawn to it since, but just as an ominous (and entirely prescient) warning — one that’s been completely ignored however. Strange.

  4. Sebastian Ronin
    March 29, 2009 at 11:11 am

    Red, IMO, there was a “Cold War” going on, the culture was seeped in Leave It To Beaver and building bomb shelters, television automobile commercials had the aura of priesthood, electronic gadgets were leading the way to the brave new world. Plus, it was a one-off, there was no way of recording it for further dissemination. The intelligentsia was still smarting from McCarthyism. A very young Bob Zimmerman may have twigged on it.

    Lastly, as nuanced as it was with a careful selection of words, it likely just flew over heads. It was a mass announcement to a mass audience. The audience was American. In the famous (or infamous) words of Allen Dulles, lead investigator of the Warren Commission, when asked how he could have offered the Warren Report with its inconsistencies to the American people, he is reported to have said, “The American people don’t read.”

  5. Sebastian Ronin
    March 29, 2009 at 11:17 am

    …it is only with the advent of the Internet that the speech has been given not a second life, but actually a first life.

  6. Cameron
    March 29, 2009 at 11:21 am

    Ron Paul is an interesting guy, but for me the problem with him is that he always wanders off course at some point in every speech I’ve ever head him give.

    It’s just the faint odor of truther about him I guess.

  7. redtory
    March 29, 2009 at 12:39 pm

    SR — That statement from Dulles sounds like something Gore Vidal would have said (most likely he has).

  8. Rob H.
    March 30, 2009 at 7:38 am

    Excellent video.. unforunately, the system doesn’t permit free thinkers.. and as I said in my blog last week – same old, same old with Obama..

    The really ironic thing is that I am a big believer that the best offense is “living well”. I travelled to Moscow and Leningrad (then) in 1979, before the fall of the Soviet Union – and I could see quite clealry then the crumbling blocks of communism – not because of threats or intimidation from Ronald Reagan, but from the intrusion of knowledge that there was a better way to live..

    If we are patient, and don’t contribute to the fear and ignorance which extremists seeks to instill upon their people – they will, eventually, crumble from within.. as citizens see a “better way to live”.

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