politics and how things work

remember that little spanish american war thing where the evil spanishies sank the USS Maine, blew it up in the harbor, and provoked war with the US?


well, it turns out that the whole thing was a propaganda thing involving the newspapermen to stir up american war sentiment.


and the main was probably auto- destructed although you can probably find a historian to say anything about it.


you see what i mean?


do you understand that people in positions of power dont think like you and me?


id like to have somebody at least just reply and say they agree about the spanish american war (its pretty common knowledge) just so people who are kind of ignorant about history understand that things like this do happen.


brad

From The War of 1898: The United Stes and Cuba in History and Historiography by Lous A. Perez Jr.


"The Maine-as-cause construct. . .served a. . .function: plausible denial of the proposition of war as an instrument of policy for the purpose of territorial expnsion. The Main provided the critical explanatory element for the rendering of the war as a mission inspired by noble intentions, a selfless undertaking to liberate an oppressed people from iniquitous colonial rule, and only after the ship was destroyed. The Maine was a useful means through which to create a usable past that served at once to reflect and reinforce generally shared assumptions about the character of the U.S. purpose. The war was thus thansformed into the final chance element in a series of random events, one in which the United States was overtaken by events it could not control.


A war that happened to seve as a means of territorial expansion was thus represented as an accident and newly acquired territories, subsequently adminstered as colonial possessions, appeared as an incidental and wholly unforeseen outcome of this accident--not a product of policy calculations.


Effrots to replace the 'accident' thesis of 1898 with more conceptually coherent explanations have encountered resistance and predictably, the Maine has been invoked as rebuttal."


We lusted after Cuba for a hundred years, directed our policy toward getting it, and then claimed it came to us unintended, by accident.


All politicians are liars, and very little they say should be believed.