Bush's Legacy will Serve Him Well in Jacksonville Florida it Seems?
Patrick Lockyer
January 12, 2009
Link to the Jacksonville loves Bush?
http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2009-01-11/bushs_legacy_history_will_serve_him_well_in_jacksonville?page=1
In answer to Bush lovers in the Times-Union.
Submitted by BritPatJax on Sun. 1/11/2009 at 5:42 pm
In answer to Bush lovers in the Times-Union. I was interested to read the words of a fellow Brit. I think it interesting to read of how many Jacksonville people are Bush fans. Is that just a result of Jax being a military city? It clearly suits the military to have an ongoing offensive but how much does that suit the nation? I was not aware so much in England of this continual patriotic support of the military and indeed is it really healthy? At the time of my own military service in 1961 there was no real patriotic Brit thing about serving. I mostly went into service, as things had not worked out for me in other fields.
I think it fair and obvious to say that many Middle Americans join up for financial reasons more than for patriotic reasons although I appreciate that 9/11 resulted in a spike of recruiting figures. I served in Germany for five years and spent time in Berlin right in the front line against the RED threat. I drove senior NATO officers through Check Point Charlie just to establish that we could and on one occasion drove a war hero Col Eberhardie up to the Russian War Memorial to flex his muscles. The Russian Guard marched right out of the ground and faced the Col for a full ten minutes silently before he returned to my staff car and we whisked away. I also spent time in Spandau Prison Berlin, where the only inmate was Rudolf Hess the Hitler henchman.
We were in reality an occupational force although a low profile one and we did not have immunity to the legalities in fact a guy who became a Brit icon on TV in the series ´Eastenders´ Leslie Grantham served time in Germany I believe for killing a taxi driver. I saw the tendency for the occupational force to misbehave although nothing on the scale of Abu Ghraib. There were also types of soldier more likely to misbehave like the Para´s and SAS. Many of these special groups are trained to be brutal and should not be used in locations like Iraq where you are just dealing with civilian ´insurgents´. They, after all are not the caliber of German Stormtroopers. I saw misbehavior of Brit troops on a small scale. It was in the way they drove badly and dangerously. Soldiers firing out of the backs of trucks after being on the firing range and concealing live ammunition. Drinking and fighting with the locals. Getting German girls pregnant. Occasional rapes. I was the Squad leader on exercise in Germany one night when we happened on a German consensual gangbang. The six or so Germans and the girl probably would not have objected to my men joining in and there was nearly a mutiny when I forcibly dragged them away. How difficult might that have been in a war zone? We do NOT need to put our troops where they can put our name in the toilet. There are bad elements in all groups of people and making the military like ´Gods´ is dangerous. Have Americans ever sat for a moment and wondered what all the other nations NOT at war do to feel proud at Memorial Day equivalent when the injured and limbless are paraded? How on earth do the hundred of peaceful nations ever maintain the levels of recruitments without any bloodshed to display? I know that ´Remembrance Day in November in the UK is a somber event with no drumbeat celebratory music and all dressed in black. It is cold and drab instead.
I have seen the few servicemen and women who are/were not proud of what has happened in their name in Iraq and they are in the minority. I saw such heroes in the series about the aircraft carrier. I remember when it was treason to even suggest it wrong to invade and occupy or even protest at collateral damage in the name of far too many civilian Iraqi deaths. There is ruthlessness inherent in the American psyche I feel and I have seen in repeatedly on PBS programs about the history of this nation. Whether we are talking about the civil war and the acceptance of brother killing brother or whether we talk of the Appalachian miners being killed by the mercenary ´detectives´, so like the Blackwater group. The ruthless Andrew Jackson just such a short time ago stealing the friendly Cherokee lands and setting them on a forced march to Oklahoma at the expense of five thousand deaths. Yes there has been record of such ruthlessness all over Europe as well but not recently. How long will it take for America to hate war also?
I don´t know if the work ethic of America and the lack of time to respond to the Rwanda issues is the reason for a feeling that all too many here don´t know or even care what happens beyond the shores of this continent. You also see it in the way that Roosevelt had to shake the necks of America to realize the danger of Hitler and the folly of ignoring it. I guess that ´Pearl Harbor´ was the wake up call. All the time that UK stood alone helped the US to re tool and to build a decent ´military reserve´ that has now become almost an obsession? I think it ridiculous that many ask how can we afford to help the poor but would never consider contesting the money spent militarily? How can Obama get enough to get health care when we need all this money to provide Poland with a ´force field´? How CAN we afford to supply Poland with a force to deny Russia dominance in that region? How can we even kid ourselves that such a power can be exulted in this day and age? How did the Russians respond to the issue of having missiles in Cuba? They clearly realized that protecting Cuba from attacks aimed at ridding them of US directed missiles would be impossible. Russia has the reality to accept what is reasonable but the USA seems to have lofted ideas of protecting Georgia and such nations. That seems very naive to me. The danger has been demonstrated of having small nations conceive that they can be successfully embrace the Western Powers and ´coock a snook´ at the regional giant power. Have we just got too big for our boots having gone from the reticence of helping Britain from a tyrant wanting power of the world to antagonizing nations far far away? Now there is an almost unhealthy adulation of military activity and might?
Is it that Andrew Jackson was the first President to think he was ´King´? He was the ´white´ King dictator who decided that he spoke for everyone and he could stomp over people and especially blacks and native Indians? Does that answer why no one wants to worry about Arab deaths in Iraq or Lebanon or Palestine mattering so much as the fact that Bush talked to God? Is that why Jacksonville is out of step with the whole wide world in seeing that the standards of humanities treatment of fellow humans should be held to a point that you do not go beyond. That only those who have no compassion and who only have themselves to mind can accept the transgressions and actually glorify them. Only isolationists can see the Bush era as something we all might one day favor?
I was often over the last seven years applauded for Mr Blair being so supportive and I in my truth had to admit that most Brits thought him a ´poodle´. To be in favor of all is not patriotic and to swoon as Blair did is unmanly. If you want to see the real message from the UK about Iraq and Bush you must watch Hugh Grant as Prime Minister in ´Love Actually´. I also despair at this theory of Bush having kept this nation safe. The aftermath of 9/11 has been far worse than the actual damage and deaths incurred. They may have planned that atrocity for years and meanwhile seemed to be leading the life of the American Dream. They enjoyed the life of allied students and came from wealthy Saudi families that could not have been any further from the ones on the receiving end of the US military might. I think that all the Iraqi population did to deserve the invasion was to have celebrated 9/11 as did many other Arab nations? Iraq was to be made an example of. There is no need for Al Qaida to try to top the 9/11 attacks The waste of funds and lives has not made the US one iota safer and where my British friend also mentions the IRA so do I have memories of that era. I did hate the Irish for a short time. I saw something that made me feel that they were less than human. Had the event been an English moment I would have been equally horrified. My problem with Bushies and the general feeling towards torture is that I doubt that seeing the Scottish Wallace, hanging, drawing and quartering of ancient London would have raised an eyebrow with some Americans for a certain time after 9/11. Happily that mood has been silenced at last..
The event I hated to see was in Belfast. A lot of people don´t understand that British troops are/were in Northern Ireland to keep opposing sides from annihilating each other. It might be said that the British Army had a bias for the Protestant over the Catholic but without the presence the majority Protestants would have slaughtered the minority Catholics but then the majority in the south or Eire would have massed to overcome that? Soldiers of all four UK nations served in NI. Even Irishmen and there was a funeral procession where two Brit soldiers were mistakenly caught up in it and brutalized in a way that wolves will tear up a rabbit. This was captured by TV stations in helicopters and can be googled on ´two corporals´. It was awful and Neanderthal. There is no place in my heart for behavior like that and peoples like the Germans who denied knowledge of atrocities in their name were hard for me to accept although I have an affiliation for the German nation and the retribution we performed on them. I forgave the Irish and I forgave the Germans and I hope that the Irish and the Germans and the Iraqi´s and Lebanese and Palestinians can all forgive us for our bias and our disproportionate butchery. We remember the Romans and the Germans and the Japanese. Who next?
I don´t think that America have anything to be proud about in the world nor even Britain right now, even though I know that Brits did not and would not give their government carte blanche. Jacksonville is not a reflection of the American nation I am glad to say and I have watched with bated breath as my chosen nation to retire in comes out of the fog of false patriotism. I am not intending to travel the world right now but I have done. I have been in almost every capital city in Europe and can stand strong and debate my legacy of being a Brit with my head held high even despite the debacle of Blair. Not so Americans. You are able to be isolationist due to the size and geographical nature of your location. I am used to being close to my neighbor countries and that is a good thing. There is no nation in Europe with the differences that require a wall these days. That is a good thing.
Turning a blind eye to Arab disproportionate deaths does no American a favor. You are no further forward in Arabian eyes than when Osama Bin Laden conveyed that the reason for 9/11 was partly the bias in Palestine. Will you once more state it is their hatred of our freedom that caused the new atrocity as it was the cause of the last one? We in the UK had to talk to the people who bombed Maggie´s Hotel and secreted a bomb in the plaster three weeks before and who killed Louis Mountbatten, the Queens cousin whilst on his small pleasure boat. These perpetrators were released from prison to become politicians who could sit in Parliament. Should we have been as oblivious as Brits to Belfast bombing and slaughter of Irish ´insurgents´ just in the name of patriotism? What would the world be saying about the British if we had? Would we have gotten away with it as the USA gets away with bias and veto in favor of Israel brutality? Oh Yeah the Romans got away with feeding Christians to the lions for long enough? Is it a size matter as some of my fellow bloggers on Jacksonville.com would have me believe? What a thought?
I knew we needed a change and for me Obama was/is a Godsend. Lots of people say ´what has he done´? They don´t seem to comprehend that it is what he has not done that makes him so popular and the fact that he represents the courage to stand afar from the mainstream and the mindset of the ´mighty right´. The ´righties´ want to call him unpatriotic and made issue of his ´badgewearing´. The mighty right have little guilt it seems to me in their ruthless racist background. They seek to desecrate the black person who might have felt that America had NOT been a wonderful nation to their heritage. How dare this black person not think that the USA is the most wonderful nation God created? I hear Hannity say that very often. There are many here who actually think that to be true. Never for a minute would it be the case that European misfits who could not make it at home came here to ruthlessly wrest the land from the natives with superior weaponry, as did the Spanish Horseman in South America. That same ruthlessness exists today in the way that some live their lives. Even in this day and age a New York gangster can execute his neighbor over a simple traffic accident involving his son and make sure he is in sunny Florida on vacation when the neighbor is melted in a bath of acid and then I read that London is dangerous? There is much to be proud about in the USA and I am not deterred but to convince oneself that it does not matter what is done in your nations name and not seeing where ´gun law´ and crime are rampant and inexcusable is just burying your head in the sand. If Bush is the best you can do and are proud then heaven help you is all I can say. Then again the way you give a group of youngsters celebrity status all over a couple of won football games leaves one gasping. I guess they fill the gap until we can all freak over ´American Idol´ and until Paris or Britney reemerges?
http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2009-01-11/bushs_legacy_history_will_serve_him_well_in_jacksonville?page=1
In answer to Bush lovers in the Times-Union.
Submitted by BritPatJax on Sun. 1/11/2009 at 5:42 pm
In answer to Bush lovers in the Times-Union. I was interested to read the words of a fellow Brit. I think it interesting to read of how many Jacksonville people are Bush fans. Is that just a result of Jax being a military city? It clearly suits the military to have an ongoing offensive but how much does that suit the nation? I was not aware so much in England of this continual patriotic support of the military and indeed is it really healthy? At the time of my own military service in 1961 there was no real patriotic Brit thing about serving. I mostly went into service, as things had not worked out for me in other fields.
I think it fair and obvious to say that many Middle Americans join up for financial reasons more than for patriotic reasons although I appreciate that 9/11 resulted in a spike of recruiting figures. I served in Germany for five years and spent time in Berlin right in the front line against the RED threat. I drove senior NATO officers through Check Point Charlie just to establish that we could and on one occasion drove a war hero Col Eberhardie up to the Russian War Memorial to flex his muscles. The Russian Guard marched right out of the ground and faced the Col for a full ten minutes silently before he returned to my staff car and we whisked away. I also spent time in Spandau Prison Berlin, where the only inmate was Rudolf Hess the Hitler henchman.
We were in reality an occupational force although a low profile one and we did not have immunity to the legalities in fact a guy who became a Brit icon on TV in the series ´Eastenders´ Leslie Grantham served time in Germany I believe for killing a taxi driver. I saw the tendency for the occupational force to misbehave although nothing on the scale of Abu Ghraib. There were also types of soldier more likely to misbehave like the Para´s and SAS. Many of these special groups are trained to be brutal and should not be used in locations like Iraq where you are just dealing with civilian ´insurgents´. They, after all are not the caliber of German Stormtroopers. I saw misbehavior of Brit troops on a small scale. It was in the way they drove badly and dangerously. Soldiers firing out of the backs of trucks after being on the firing range and concealing live ammunition. Drinking and fighting with the locals. Getting German girls pregnant. Occasional rapes. I was the Squad leader on exercise in Germany one night when we happened on a German consensual gangbang. The six or so Germans and the girl probably would not have objected to my men joining in and there was nearly a mutiny when I forcibly dragged them away. How difficult might that have been in a war zone? We do NOT need to put our troops where they can put our name in the toilet. There are bad elements in all groups of people and making the military like ´Gods´ is dangerous. Have Americans ever sat for a moment and wondered what all the other nations NOT at war do to feel proud at Memorial Day equivalent when the injured and limbless are paraded? How on earth do the hundred of peaceful nations ever maintain the levels of recruitments without any bloodshed to display? I know that ´Remembrance Day in November in the UK is a somber event with no drumbeat celebratory music and all dressed in black. It is cold and drab instead.
I have seen the few servicemen and women who are/were not proud of what has happened in their name in Iraq and they are in the minority. I saw such heroes in the series about the aircraft carrier. I remember when it was treason to even suggest it wrong to invade and occupy or even protest at collateral damage in the name of far too many civilian Iraqi deaths. There is ruthlessness inherent in the American psyche I feel and I have seen in repeatedly on PBS programs about the history of this nation. Whether we are talking about the civil war and the acceptance of brother killing brother or whether we talk of the Appalachian miners being killed by the mercenary ´detectives´, so like the Blackwater group. The ruthless Andrew Jackson just such a short time ago stealing the friendly Cherokee lands and setting them on a forced march to Oklahoma at the expense of five thousand deaths. Yes there has been record of such ruthlessness all over Europe as well but not recently. How long will it take for America to hate war also?
I don´t know if the work ethic of America and the lack of time to respond to the Rwanda issues is the reason for a feeling that all too many here don´t know or even care what happens beyond the shores of this continent. You also see it in the way that Roosevelt had to shake the necks of America to realize the danger of Hitler and the folly of ignoring it. I guess that ´Pearl Harbor´ was the wake up call. All the time that UK stood alone helped the US to re tool and to build a decent ´military reserve´ that has now become almost an obsession? I think it ridiculous that many ask how can we afford to help the poor but would never consider contesting the money spent militarily? How can Obama get enough to get health care when we need all this money to provide Poland with a ´force field´? How CAN we afford to supply Poland with a force to deny Russia dominance in that region? How can we even kid ourselves that such a power can be exulted in this day and age? How did the Russians respond to the issue of having missiles in Cuba? They clearly realized that protecting Cuba from attacks aimed at ridding them of US directed missiles would be impossible. Russia has the reality to accept what is reasonable but the USA seems to have lofted ideas of protecting Georgia and such nations. That seems very naive to me. The danger has been demonstrated of having small nations conceive that they can be successfully embrace the Western Powers and ´coock a snook´ at the regional giant power. Have we just got too big for our boots having gone from the reticence of helping Britain from a tyrant wanting power of the world to antagonizing nations far far away? Now there is an almost unhealthy adulation of military activity and might?
Is it that Andrew Jackson was the first President to think he was ´King´? He was the ´white´ King dictator who decided that he spoke for everyone and he could stomp over people and especially blacks and native Indians? Does that answer why no one wants to worry about Arab deaths in Iraq or Lebanon or Palestine mattering so much as the fact that Bush talked to God? Is that why Jacksonville is out of step with the whole wide world in seeing that the standards of humanities treatment of fellow humans should be held to a point that you do not go beyond. That only those who have no compassion and who only have themselves to mind can accept the transgressions and actually glorify them. Only isolationists can see the Bush era as something we all might one day favor?
I was often over the last seven years applauded for Mr Blair being so supportive and I in my truth had to admit that most Brits thought him a ´poodle´. To be in favor of all is not patriotic and to swoon as Blair did is unmanly. If you want to see the real message from the UK about Iraq and Bush you must watch Hugh Grant as Prime Minister in ´Love Actually´. I also despair at this theory of Bush having kept this nation safe. The aftermath of 9/11 has been far worse than the actual damage and deaths incurred. They may have planned that atrocity for years and meanwhile seemed to be leading the life of the American Dream. They enjoyed the life of allied students and came from wealthy Saudi families that could not have been any further from the ones on the receiving end of the US military might. I think that all the Iraqi population did to deserve the invasion was to have celebrated 9/11 as did many other Arab nations? Iraq was to be made an example of. There is no need for Al Qaida to try to top the 9/11 attacks The waste of funds and lives has not made the US one iota safer and where my British friend also mentions the IRA so do I have memories of that era. I did hate the Irish for a short time. I saw something that made me feel that they were less than human. Had the event been an English moment I would have been equally horrified. My problem with Bushies and the general feeling towards torture is that I doubt that seeing the Scottish Wallace, hanging, drawing and quartering of ancient London would have raised an eyebrow with some Americans for a certain time after 9/11. Happily that mood has been silenced at last..
The event I hated to see was in Belfast. A lot of people don´t understand that British troops are/were in Northern Ireland to keep opposing sides from annihilating each other. It might be said that the British Army had a bias for the Protestant over the Catholic but without the presence the majority Protestants would have slaughtered the minority Catholics but then the majority in the south or Eire would have massed to overcome that? Soldiers of all four UK nations served in NI. Even Irishmen and there was a funeral procession where two Brit soldiers were mistakenly caught up in it and brutalized in a way that wolves will tear up a rabbit. This was captured by TV stations in helicopters and can be googled on ´two corporals´. It was awful and Neanderthal. There is no place in my heart for behavior like that and peoples like the Germans who denied knowledge of atrocities in their name were hard for me to accept although I have an affiliation for the German nation and the retribution we performed on them. I forgave the Irish and I forgave the Germans and I hope that the Irish and the Germans and the Iraqi´s and Lebanese and Palestinians can all forgive us for our bias and our disproportionate butchery. We remember the Romans and the Germans and the Japanese. Who next?
I don´t think that America have anything to be proud about in the world nor even Britain right now, even though I know that Brits did not and would not give their government carte blanche. Jacksonville is not a reflection of the American nation I am glad to say and I have watched with bated breath as my chosen nation to retire in comes out of the fog of false patriotism. I am not intending to travel the world right now but I have done. I have been in almost every capital city in Europe and can stand strong and debate my legacy of being a Brit with my head held high even despite the debacle of Blair. Not so Americans. You are able to be isolationist due to the size and geographical nature of your location. I am used to being close to my neighbor countries and that is a good thing. There is no nation in Europe with the differences that require a wall these days. That is a good thing.
Turning a blind eye to Arab disproportionate deaths does no American a favor. You are no further forward in Arabian eyes than when Osama Bin Laden conveyed that the reason for 9/11 was partly the bias in Palestine. Will you once more state it is their hatred of our freedom that caused the new atrocity as it was the cause of the last one? We in the UK had to talk to the people who bombed Maggie´s Hotel and secreted a bomb in the plaster three weeks before and who killed Louis Mountbatten, the Queens cousin whilst on his small pleasure boat. These perpetrators were released from prison to become politicians who could sit in Parliament. Should we have been as oblivious as Brits to Belfast bombing and slaughter of Irish ´insurgents´ just in the name of patriotism? What would the world be saying about the British if we had? Would we have gotten away with it as the USA gets away with bias and veto in favor of Israel brutality? Oh Yeah the Romans got away with feeding Christians to the lions for long enough? Is it a size matter as some of my fellow bloggers on Jacksonville.com would have me believe? What a thought?
I knew we needed a change and for me Obama was/is a Godsend. Lots of people say ´what has he done´? They don´t seem to comprehend that it is what he has not done that makes him so popular and the fact that he represents the courage to stand afar from the mainstream and the mindset of the ´mighty right´. The ´righties´ want to call him unpatriotic and made issue of his ´badgewearing´. The mighty right have little guilt it seems to me in their ruthless racist background. They seek to desecrate the black person who might have felt that America had NOT been a wonderful nation to their heritage. How dare this black person not think that the USA is the most wonderful nation God created? I hear Hannity say that very often. There are many here who actually think that to be true. Never for a minute would it be the case that European misfits who could not make it at home came here to ruthlessly wrest the land from the natives with superior weaponry, as did the Spanish Horseman in South America. That same ruthlessness exists today in the way that some live their lives. Even in this day and age a New York gangster can execute his neighbor over a simple traffic accident involving his son and make sure he is in sunny Florida on vacation when the neighbor is melted in a bath of acid and then I read that London is dangerous? There is much to be proud about in the USA and I am not deterred but to convince oneself that it does not matter what is done in your nations name and not seeing where ´gun law´ and crime are rampant and inexcusable is just burying your head in the sand. If Bush is the best you can do and are proud then heaven help you is all I can say. Then again the way you give a group of youngsters celebrity status all over a couple of won football games leaves one gasping. I guess they fill the gap until we can all freak over ´American Idol´ and until Paris or Britney reemerges?
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