American Right-Wing Merchandise

[Rheghead]

First I thought this thread was about collecting bits off US military hardware.

[scorrie]

First I thought this thread was about collecting bits off US military hardware.

Well, you sure as hell need to work on your interpretation skills. As you were wandering about like a Colon Ostrich, while the rest of us were on topic!!

[scorrie]

Amusing T shirts. I like the oil one, it summs up the problem right away.

I wish I could share the amusement of the notion that education should be ditched in favour of building more bombs. The inference is that, people who can afford to educate their kids can do so, while poor people should not have government money wasted on educating THEIR offspring. More Arabs can be bombed and more Oil taken, if money is spent on "Defence" instead.

Hilarious!!

[Melancholy Man]

Alternatively, it's a tasteless spoof simply designed to make a few bob for the site owners. The paleo-con mentality it's aping is more likely to have *opposed* Iraq or Afghanistan: no American blood for Arabs or Afghans or big business; keep the money to be spent here, and leave them to languish under Saddam or the Taleban.

Which is precisely what the likes of the Stop the War Coalition has been saying for several years now.

[JAWS]

Ohn dear scorrie, back to the same tired old party slogans. Do try and come up with something original I've heard all the old jokes before.
By the way, did you not hear about the Russian Blackjack nuclear bomber which was within thirty seconds flying time from Hull?

More than one Country has armed forces. Funny how some people are happy to pretend it is otherwise and can only squawk about the same one all the time.
Here are some figures for you to think about

Total Number of Armed Forces Personnel
China - 2,810,000 (admittedly only to be expected, it is rather a big Country)
Russia – 1,529,000
US – 1,366,000
India – 1,303,000

Arms Exports
Russia – 6.2 billion dollars
US – 5.5 billion
France – 2.1 billion
Britain – 0.9 billion

Keep banging the drum scorrie, you never know, the little Red Star might twinkle in the darkness of the night once again sometime, but don’t hold your breath.

Do you remember the site you found the badges on? I rather fancy some of them, they look great.

By the way, are Man City now under Arab ownership? That would be a bit ironic

That's another good reason why I support Man Utd. They are owned by honest, hard working good ol' boys I'm glad to say.

[Bruce_H]

I wish I could share the amusement of the notion that education should be ditched in favour of building more bombs. The inference is that, people who can afford to educate their kids can do so, while poor people should not have government money wasted on educating THEIR offspring. More Arabs can be bombed and more Oil taken, if money is spent on "Defence" instead.

Hilarious!!

With all due respect, I don't know how it works in Caithness, but in the US we do in fact buy the oil - for about US $120 a barrel.

Bruce

[oldmarine]

I doubt very much they laughed. Equally, though, they soon came to terms with it and didn't have the face the continued conventional bombing raids which, in Toyko that year alone, had killed as many.

A US Marine veteran of WWII posts here. There's a very good chance he was on Iwo Jima at the time, hoping against hope he was not going to have to do this again and again. Had Truman not authorized the A-bombs, he should have been impeached.

<ducks and runs>

I may be the US Marine veteran of WWII referred to here. I was on Okinawa training for the landing that we were to make on the Japanese home land when the two A-bombs were dropped. One of our regiments went into Japan and saw the defenses the Japanese Empire would make with old men, women and children as the defense force. The estimate was that at least 2-1/2 million lives would be lost. The losses were much less during the dropping of the two A-bombs. Truman was my hero then, but I became less supportive of him when he attempted to combine all the American forces under a unified command. Fortunately, there were many veterans in Congress who resisted his attempt. He became quite angry at the Marine Corps and referred to them as the Navy's police force. He later apologized for his remarks. Most US Marines were sent to China (I among them even though I had spent 36 months in the Pacific island hopping and making four combat landings on Japanese islands). Fortunately I spent only 3 months in China before returning home to the States. The US Marines kept a presense in China for nearly 4 years before the Chinese Communists took over and all Marines were pulled out of China. Thanks for your post.

[Melancholy Man]

I may be the US Marine veteran of WWII referred to here.

And your mates would have said to St. Peter on arrival at the Pearly Gates, another Marine reporting to you, sir, I can tell, I've served my time in Hell. No amount of reading academic history and dry research can compensate for salty eyewitness accounts, such as your post or the writings of James Jones.

Alexander Sorukov's The Sun was eye-popping - a war council discusses Soviet incursions and, on going outside, we run into GI jeeps; the utterly-childlike Emperor; the petrified Japanese American officer - but lacks the sense of personal desolation in John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific, as Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune exorcize their own demons.

I was on Okinawa training for the landing that we were to make on the Japanese home land when the two A-bombs were dropped. One of our regiments went into Japan and saw the defenses the Japanese Empire would make with old men, women and children as the defense force.

As if the multiple Masadas of Okinawa weren't bad enough. In Europe, Hitler had resolved to burn Germany and punish the people for their perceived weakness at the likes of Stalingrad. The Japanese militarists, racist and right-wing though they were, were not nearly as irrationally demented, but were still willing to sacrifice any number of Japanese to avoid the 'dishonour' of defeat. Those instant sun-rises over Hiroshima and Nagasaki can actually be said to have given the douters a way out: thus, the Japanese people had been defeated not by weakness but by science.

The oft-made comparison of two warring Imperial designs or of contrasting the A-bombs to Pearl Harbour is either ill-informed or plain racist, I'm afraid. Racist because it airbrushes out Nanjing or the diabolical Unit 731, whose effects you'd have seen in China, or the Java famine.

Tens of millions of East Asians also welcomed the A-bombs.

With all due respect, I don't know how it works in Caithness, but in the US we do in fact buy the oil - for about US $120 a barrel.

Surely it's also that the cheap price of fuel is down to domestic reserves? And Alberta.

[scorrie]

Ohn dear scorrie, back to the same tired old party slogans. Do try and come up with something original I've heard all the old jokes before.
By the way, did you not hear about the Russian Blackjack nuclear bomber which was within thirty seconds flying time from Hull?

More than one Country has armed forces. Funny how some people are happy to pretend it is otherwise and can only squawk about the same one all the time.
Here are some figures for you to think about

Total Number of Armed Forces Personnel
China - 2,810,000 (admittedly only to be expected, it is rather a big Country)
Russia – 1,529,000
US – 1,366,000
India – 1,303,000

Arms Exports
Russia – 6.2 billion dollars
US – 5.5 billion
France – 2.1 billion
Britain – 0.9 billion

Keep banging the drum scorrie, you never know, the little Red Star might twinkle in the darkness of the night once again sometime, but don’t hold your breath.

Do you remember the site you found the badges on? I rather fancy some of them, they look great.

That's another good reason why I support Man Utd. They are owned by honest, hard working good ol' boys I'm glad to say.

Party Slogans?

I don't know what YOU are on about but I know that the purpose of this thread was to question the merits of supposed humorous merchandise which deals with American attitude concerning their role in world events. I have no doubt whatever that similar merchandise/attitudes exist in other countries, aimed right back at the USA. Just because that is the case, it does not make it right to go about wearing a tee shirt stating "Jihad?, I'll give you Jihad you rag-headed, heathen, Bar Steward"

As a country that is considered "more civilised" by some of it's people, the USA should surely be above playground name-calling and labelling some of it's own citizens as Liberal Chickens, whilst glorifying bombing of other countries.

I mentioned Hiroshima purely to question whether it was humorous to have names written on bombs, particularly atomic bombs. I fully realise that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought an end to a war that could otherwise have dragged on for an unknown amount of time. My point, on this occasion, was whether such events are a source for humour.

With regards to the images I posted, the site I copied them from IS genuine. I made my way through the secure checkout, right up to the point where I had to submit my order. If you do want the merchandise, I can PM the website to you. International shipping is $7 for the item I was about to "purchase", which was a T-shirt rather than a badge. The badges are only for those with small cojones I suspect, as I would imagine it takes bigger "Bawz" to go about wearing a more visible display of your "Politics". Perhaps that explains why Sporran has not seen many "Patriots" sporting the hilarious merchandise

[George Brims]

The names Fat Man and Little Boy for the two nuclear weapons were not jokes. They were simply names. Every piece of military hardware has to have some kind of name. These came from the fact that Fat Man was a spherical implosion device using plutonium, while Little Boy was a gun type device (cylindrical in shape) using uranium.

There's a picture here: http://www.atomicmuseum.com/Tour/dd2.cfm

[scorrie]

Personally though I'd like to see all replica shirts banned (notwithstanding my live and let live atittude in certain areas)...especially on middle age fat blokes.

Middle aged fat blokes wearing NFL shirts are exempt from this, sensible, ruling as applied to soccer shirts. While a Lardy would never appear in a Premiership side, he has his place in any good NFL line.

Check out Sam Adams, a lineman who has had more clubs than Jack Nicklaus:-



He is listed at 350lbs but I suspect he wouldn't weigh as little as that if they weighed him on the Moon!!

[scorrie]

The names Fat Man and Little Boy for the two nuclear weapons were not jokes. They were simply names.

If I recall correctly, Napalm was called Orange Crush. If you really HAVE to give your weapons names, you might as well make them sound really friendly. A droppie o juice for e bairns of Vietnam eh? The tears of laughter would have been rolling down the bairns cheeks at that irony, if only they hadn't been chemically burnt off!!

A museum of bombs? What next? Concentration Camp theme parks?

[Melancholy Man]

Oh, this is going from bad to worse! The nicknaming of weapons was, coming from men who were in the very real danger of death and injury themselves, mordant humour. I'm not saying it was right, I'm just saying it was.

Before we drift onto Agent Orange, five other defoliants - Agents Blue, Green, Pink, Purple and White - were used, although not in such quantities. It was during their use that Agents Green, Orange, Pink and Purple were found to degrade into dioxins, and that they did more than simply remove the jungle canopy and reveal the Viet Cong. Thus, it was stopped.

This was at the time that American personnel were routinely exposed, and routine application of DDT in Western countries (including DDT parties) was taking place as we now use bug-spray. Post hoc knowledge is a wonderful thing.

The difference between war museums and concentration/death camp celebrations is that the former remember conflicts in which conventional armies opposed each other or strategic targeting of military or industrial installations (which Dresden or Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, I am sorry to say, arguably were), and do not glory in the deaths of civilians. The deaths camps and Einsatzgruppen and whatever explicitly targeted civilians of no military significance.

Scorrie, when you talk about chemical burns, my guess is that you're referring to Kim Phuc who was the victim of action by forces from the Republic of Vietnam. I have no reason to consider you as a apologist for Uncle Ho, but the massacres and repression by him and his acolytes are usually minimized in favour polemics of the USA's actions (real and fabricated).

So, why does the Republic of Vietnam not get the same Get Out of Gaol card?

On Vietnam:

Perhaps our most positive contribution to peace-making was to affirm and value Vietnamese culture in the face of the appalling destruction which we saw around us.


I believe that it is profound arrogance which initiates aid programmes which force western methods of education, medicine or agriculture on people with traditions longer than our own; {...}


I came home from Vietnam convinced that the real task of development lies at home at our own door.

Aye, right.

I know for a fact there are Vietnam veterans in Caithness. Any reading?

[scorrie]

Oh, this is going from bad to worse! The nicknaming of weapons was, coming from men who were in the very real danger of death and injury themselves, mordant humour. I'm not saying it was right, I'm just saying it was.

Who coined the term "Orange Crush" to represent Napalm then? Was it a chemist, or some poor GI in the firing line?

In the same vein, who decided to call those Atomic Bombs Little Boy and Fat Man?

Without even a casual glance at the form book, I would be willing to bet that the latter names did NOT come from men in ANY danger of death. Unless sitting in a back room, drinking gallons of coffee and eating tons of doughnuts be deemed to be "very real danger of death"

Most of warfare consists of having drones willing to follow orders without fail. I doubt that many would be pondering gentle irony whilst being instructed to kill, of an evening.

[Bruce_H]

Who coined the term "Orange Crush" to represent Napalm then? Was it a chemist, or some poor GI in the firing line?

In the same vein, who decided to call those Atomic Bombs Little Boy and Fat Man?

Without even a casual glance at the form book, I would be willing to bet that the latter names did NOT come from men in ANY danger of death. Unless sitting in a back room, drinking gallons of coffee and eating tons of doughnuts be deemed to be "very real danger of death"

Most of warfare consists of having drones willing to follow orders without fail. I doubt that many would be pondering gentle irony whilst being instructed to kill, of an evening.

Here are some more weapons system names that I have aquaintence with:

Stone Ghost
Senior Trend
Senior Year
Classic Wizard
Follow Ruby

I won't speak for the other US services, but the US Marines highly prize those who are not drones. It is one reason why they are so effective in combat and largely feared by the enemies. The Marine Corps approach is to instill in every Marine, officer to bottom rung enlisted, the seeds of leadership, critical thinking and self-reliance.

This is because many many times in battle a small unit (4 man fire team, 16 man quad) will encounter the enemy and need to respond immediately. Sadly in Iraq and Afghanistan first contact often happens when the bad guys open up with warning on a group walking through the streets to help keep order and peace. This means that many times 2-4 brave Marines are injured or even killed before the squad knows what happened. The next few seconds determines who lives and who dies. Many times the ones getting hit are the Sergeant (I am a former Sergeant myself) or the Lieutenant.

If they were drones, they would be struck dumb and immobile, while some thug with a gun or RPG mowed them down. Instead what normally happens is the team will instantly switch from civilian contact mode (talking to the locals, handing out candy and bottles of water) into combat mode. Typically without a spoken word. Whomever is still able to fight will divide into returning fire, treating the wounded and getting the civilians out of the line of fire.

The people of Iraq and Afghanistan have seen this enough time to learn 2 lessons. 1) You can trust the Marines (In Iraq they call us "White Sleeves") and 2) Never fight them because they will kill you. You can shoot the leaders, and they still fight.

Sorry for the ramble. Just wanted to share the difference between the common notion of "drones" and what real Marines are like.

If you want to see a movie production that shows Marines in the closest thing I have seen to accurate, go watch Aliens (the first sequel). The fellow who plays Gunny Apone is an actual Marine and re-wrote all of their dialog.

Bruce H

[Melancholy Man]

I actually have a feeling Orange Crush was an album by R.E.M.! A point still stands about nicknames, though. I remain sympathetic to the mordant humour of men in the firing-line, which reduces the further up the command we go (and would be non-existent in the case of the stickers). As discussed above, though, Little/Fat Boy were coined by technicians and scientists on the Manhattan Project, which would have included the likes of Oppenheimer. Who knows what they were thinking?

Napalm is not classed as a chemical weapon (same for white phosphorous), but as an incendiary device. Yes, it can burn skin and flesh, and burn horribly, but no more than high explosives over a limited radius. My point about Kim Phuc was that if the mythologizing of her image were entirely honourable - a true horror at innocents caught up in war - similar attention in the popular narrative would be directed towards the civilian massacres and repression by the Viet Cong.

That they're not suggests that it ain't opposition to mistreatment of civilians or of war in general, but simple opposition to anything that the USA does. There are still people, supposedly respected journalists some of them, who attempt to claim Western agencies trained the Khmer Rouge (or the Taleban). My Lai was perpetrated by American troops, but it was also halted by American troops. And multiple My Lais have been perpetrated against the Humoung in the past 30 years.

War is a series of cock-ups and mistakes which, for the victors, coalesce into a success. For the most part, its victims come to terms with their experiences (whilst not forgetting them). Post-1945, with the wretched Soviet system fueling dissent, the victims of 'Imperial' war (i.e. British, French and American) have been encouraged to feel they've been especially aggreived. There is no 'closure' for their suffering.

Imperial Japan received an alibi for the East Asian War in which multiples of the A-bomb dead died at Nanjing, and dozens of times more than that died throughout China and Korea and the Far East.

[JAWS]

Party Slogans?

I don't know what YOU are on about but I know that the purpose of this thread was to question the merits of supposed humorous merchandise which deals with American attitude concerning their role in world events. I have no doubt whatever that similar merchandise/attitudes exist in other countries, aimed right back at the USA. Just because that is the case, it does not make it right to go about wearing a tee shirt stating "Jihad?, I'll give you Jihad you rag-headed, heathen, Bar Steward"

As a country that is considered "more civilised" by some of it's people, the USA should surely be above playground name-calling and labelling some of it's own citizens as Liberal Chickens, whilst glorifying bombing of other countries.

I mentioned Hiroshima purely to question whether it was humorous to have names written on bombs, particularly atomic bombs. I fully realise that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought an end to a war that could otherwise have dragged on for an unknown amount of time. My point, on this occasion, was whether such events are a source for humour.

With regards to the images I posted, the site I copied them from IS genuine. I made my way through the secure checkout, right up to the point where I had to submit my order. If you do want the merchandise, I can PM the website to you. International shipping is $7 for the item I was about to "purchase", which was a T-shirt rather than a badge. The badges are only for those with small cojones I suspect, as I would imagine it takes bigger "Bawz" to go about wearing a more visible display of your "Politics". Perhaps that explains why Sporran has not seen many "Patriots" sporting the hilarious merchandise

If I recall correctly, Napalm was called Orange Crush. If you really HAVE to give your weapons names, you might as well make them sound really friendly. A droppie o juice for e bairns of Vietnam eh? The tears of laughter would have been rolling down the bairns cheeks at that irony, if only they hadn't been chemically burnt off!!

A museum of bombs? What next? Concentration Camp theme parks?

Napalm, Orange Crush? Yet another convenient Myth in the making. The name “Orange Crush” was a pure invention by the group REM and used in a song in 1988, long after Vietnam had ended. It never was a “friendly” name given to Napalm by the military. The name “Orange Crush” in the REM song is actually believed to be refering to Agent Orange, a defoliant used to destroy the jungle foliage used as cover for troop movements.

As for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of the fathers of my childhood friends had been in the Japanese Prisoner of War Camps and, had the War with Japan continued and not been ended by those bombings, I suspect there would have been quite a few more of them who would never have returned home.

The two bombs were named as Little or Tall Boy and Fat Man. Those names were not “humourous” names written on the bombs by the military but code names given by the technicians and, if you look at the particular shape of each bomb the reason becomes quite obvious. Why did the technicians give them names, in case you think they were also comedians? Because the Manhattan Project was Top Secret and using the name “Atom Bombs” might just have given a slight hint about what they were working on.

I wish I could share the amusement of the notion that education should be ditched in favour of building more bombs.

As you were saying, it’s all about T-shirts.

Black humour has always been around. The only ones who get upset by it are those who want to use their complaints as a stick to beat people they disagree with.
The complaints are not about the humour or the contents but are simply a clandestine method of attacking those behind it.

The intention behind the thread is obvious to people who have been round the Org for a reasonable amount of time and that intent is now being shown for all to see by some of your recent posts.
Your examples are becoming wilder all the time and, as usual, all aimed in one direction and one direction only.

[scorrie]

Napalm, Orange Crush? Yet another convenient Myth in the making.

I did qualify my remark by saying "If I recall correctly" before linking Napalm and the term Orange Crush. I accept that it is probably an Urban Myth. That does not alter the fact that the US deployed chemicals in Vietnam. Agent Orange was designed as a defoliant, does that make it more acceptable to have sprayed several million gallons of it in Vietnam?

Agent Orange was a highly toxic substance and has been linked to health problems of both the troops who were spraying it and the people of Vietnam who were exposed to it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3798581.stm

You accuse me of having a one-way agenda. Where is your balanced analysis? If another country sprayed poisonous chemicals across the UK, would you accept that as fair play?

[Melancholy Man]

Is that Orange Crush? I'd never listened to the lyrics!

I did qualify my remark by saying "If I recall correctly" before linking Napalm and the term Orange Crush.

This allows a certain amount of wriggle room, but the tenor of your post pointed to believing the 'impression of truth' it presents. Furthermore, it wasn't even the correct representation of this impression! If Orange Crush did refer to a military tool, it was Agent Orange not napalm. They are nothing like each other.

I have seen dead and injured children, and was filled with horror for what they were: dead and injured children. I did not feel the desire to present their suffering as ghastly humour - a droppie o orange juice for e bairns - or triumph their anguish as a propaganda tool for just how beastly the Americans are (not that they'd been attacked by American forces): which, let's face it, is what the images of Kim Phuc has become, along with the dead of My Lai (although Hugh Thompson, Glenn Andreotta or Lawrence Colbourn ain't remembered as much).

Here's an image of a dead child which ain't going to be used much. Why? Because the horrified human being holding her is Major Mark Bieger of the US Army. Screw you Michael Moore, screw your worthless soul. This is what your minutemen are doing.

And another one.

Here's a pair of Leathernecks shielding an Okinawan child. I wonder if one is Old Marine. EDIT - checked their names, no. (Incidentally, did anyone catch the documentary on Channel Four about the Kamikaze a few months back? It interviewed a pair of Kamikaze veterans. I kid you not!)

Agent Orange was a highly toxic substance and has been linked to health problems of both the troops who were spraying it and the people of Vietnam who were exposed to it.

Agent Orange was originally deployed as a, as it was thought, non-lethal method of stripping the foliage and disrupting Viet Cong passage. At this time, dioxins were routinely used in everyday situations back home. Bombs have been linked to life-problems with troops and the Vietnamese population, but it was Agent Orange which was withdrawn when the link became known.

(Seguing onto Iraq, Falluja II could have been resolved as the Russians attempted at Grozny or the Syrians managed at Hama: with carpet bombing and chemical weaponry. Yet, the USMC was sent in and saw some of the heaviest street fighting since WWII, with the deaths of 100 men.)

You accuse me of having a one-way agenda. Where is your balanced analysis? If another country sprayed poisonous chemicals across the UK, would you accept that as fair play?

That's just the point. It wasn't the UK. So, what is your personal investment? Where is your sense of balance over the collectivization by the Viet Cong?

Seventy years ago, a country did rain death and destruction upon the UK. Thirty years ago another was prepared to do so many times fold. I will recount it, but nor will I harp on these decades later.

(DISCLAIMER - I opposed the Iraq War, and, had I been around in the 1960s, would have done so with Vietnam. It's just, I prefer Joan Baez.)

[Aaldtimer]

MM..."Screw you Michael Moore, screw your worthless soul. This is what your minutemen are doing."...
could you explain this sentence for me?