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Not to put too fine a point on it, but the whole f*king nuclear program was/is a threat to blow up entire civilizations.

Well, you gotta hand it to... *checks notes* Henry Kissinger? Nope. Never mind. Forget everything I just said.

This is how WW2 veteran Bill Mauldin covered it at the time:

WTF is wrong with this guy? ‘Our toughest presidents’?

Nonsense! Over a million Vietnamese people died in the Vietnam War. We may not have announced it but we did it.

Is this just a backhand to the Bushes?

What a gem Richard Nixon was. I had never heard that one.

Our histories hagiography deserves a more exacting look. The way we Don't get after it; you'd think that learning Hurt!

We slaughtered internally too…until we confront the permission structure of brutality for private profit, but public expense then nothing changes. www.history.com/articles/tul...

"My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes." - Ronny Raygun, Jokingly (?).

He probably didn't go on air saying "I think me might need to bomb all the Vietnamese people". To be fair. Though yeah, the fact he might have thought so and obviously didn't care is relevant, sure.

My Lai massacre.

We haven’t fought a just war in my lifetime. The list of elected leaders we’ve overthrown is pages long and the chaos from those coups has destabilized entire regions for decades. And then we have the audacity to denigrate refugees fleeing from the countries we fucked up. It’s insanity.

Khanna is an idiot

Khanna seems to be a decent guy. But he should know about Nixon.

👍

Nixon was horrible, and while he didn't care about civilians dying in military strikes (and that is a war crime in my book) that is different than threatening an entire civilization. A whole different scale of crime.

That was a surprise to me as well. That he agreed with the rest of Nixon's bombing strategy was not.

Also Cambodia and Laos.

Kissinger never cared about civilians, for one

You can hate Nixon while saying these are not close to equal.

Reagan’s “The bombing starts in ten minutes” joke is close.

It makes us feel safer and more secure to do it. I believe until very recently Bush2 was the worst modern President. Wars built on lies but covered with a professional glean (also fake)- and yet his decisions and lies ended the lives of at least 1/4 million people. We have to tear the GOP myth down.

Lol!

No one show @rokhanna.bsky.social this it’ll go against his PR team!!!

Nixon paid a price for it, too.

Imagine being more of a moral monster than Henry Kissinger!

To be fair, Nixon and Kissinger weren’t tweeting their conversation out to the world.

Khanna has a pretty stilted view of those men. They were monsters, although not as breathtakingly stupid as Trump.

What, and break the free form Weave? Madness 😠!

We never threatened to blow up the Vietnamese people? No, they just did it. The USA killed over 500,000 Vietnamese civilians.

I think it is a matter of scale of war crimes. Previous Presidents haven’t threatened genocide, or the destruction of water and power plants that would kill millions.

Imagine Kissinger giving a shit about civilians. How quaint.

Why is he saying being a cruel pos is toughness? It's not. It's weakness. I don't trust Khanna.

You're giving Kissinger too much credit. He went on to say "I’m concerned about the civilians, because I don’t want the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher."

People doing all these mental gymnastics when Trump says the quiet part out loud. Just because past presidents weren't upfront about their intentions, didn't mean that they didn't intend to do it. It was a veneer to keep people in line.

Well, it's an aspiration (of sorts).

Obama also knowingly killed civilians and jokingly threatened to drone strike the jonas brothers

I think Gingrich took that idea out behind the barn and shot it back in the 90's.

"But it's not who we are!" People! We must press politicians: limit and hold them strictly to our will.