1968

"Khe Sanh, one of the major battles in the Vietnam War, was just one little piece of a huge malignant disaster in a war that was criminal from its inception, and that had no purpose beyond perpetuating the neocolonialist control by the US of a long-subjugated people who were fighting to be free, just as our own ancestors had done. The over 58,000 Americans who died in that war, who contributed to the killing of over 2 million Vietnamese, many or most of them civilians, may have engaged in personal acts of bravery, but they were not, as a group, heroes. Nor were they over there fighting for American freedom. Some, like Lt. , who did not die, were no doubt murderers. Most, though, were simply victims–victims of their own government’s years of lying and deceit. If we memorialize them, it should be by vowing never again to allow our government to commit such crimes, and to send Americans to fight and die for such criminal policies. Sadly, we’ve already allowed that to happen, though, over and over again–in the Panama, in Grenada, in Iraq, and now in Afghanistan and perhaps, before long, Iran and/or Pakistan."

"Where unjust social, political, economic and cultural inequalities are found, there is a rejection of the gift of the Lord's peace, even a rejection of the Lord himself."

"Solidarity with the poor ... means that we make ours their problems and their struggles, that we know how to speak with them. This has to be concretized in criticism of injustice and oppression, in the struggle against the intolerable situation which the poor person has to tolerate."

"War has its own laws and one of the oldest and most persistent is that those who have surrendered and civilians, where possible, should be spared. Yet we all know the stories or have seen pictures of the sacking of cities, the execution of prisoners of war, the shelling of churches filled with refugees, or the farm buildings deliberately set on fire, and we remember names such as Oradour or Wounded Knee or Nanjing. For any American who lived through the Vietnam War the incident at My Lai, when a representative group of ordinary American soldiers rampaged through a village, has come to represent the barbarism of much of that war. (The Vietnamese forces committed their own atrocities, but Vietnam has been slow to come to terms with them.) In 1968 American reporters in the country started to hear stories about the murder in cold blood of some 500 villagers, of all ages, by an American patrol. One courageous helicopter pilot who was there did his best to save the Vietnamese and later filed a report with his superiors, who did nothing."

"We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism; and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Vietcong. We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers that hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum. We learned the meaning of "free-fire zones," "shoot anything that moves," and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals. We watched the United States' falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against “oriental human beings,” with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in a European theater -- or let us say a non-third-world people theater."

"That day it was just a massacre. Just plain right out, wiping out people."

"As it happened, the fifth anniversary of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam occurred at the time of the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee. It was difficult to miss the analogy between the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre and My Lai, 1968. Alongside the front-page news and photographs of the Wounded Knee siege that was taking place in real time were features with photos of the scene of mutilation and death at My Lai. Lieutenant William "Rusty" Calley was then serving his twenty-year sentence under house arrest in luxurious officers' quarters at Fort Benning, Georgia, near his hometown. Yet he remained a national hero who received hundreds of support letters weekly, who was lauded by some as a POW being held by the US military. One of Calley's most ardent defenders was Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia. In 1974, President Richard Nixon would pardon Calley."

"It was terrible. They were slaughtering villagers like so many sheep"

"The My Lai killings weren’t indiscriminate. The GIs weren’t killing just anyone. They were killing everyone. They were killing everything: chickens, pigs, dogs, rabbits, cows, water buffalo, grandmothers, and children. Young girls, wounded boys, toddlers, infants. More than half of the 504 people murdered in Pinkville that morning were minors. The GIs were following orders and the orders were: to kill everything. Kill everything that breathes. Kill everything that moves."

"After nearly four hours of gunfire, there was silence. There was silence, even though the order only applied to American soldiers. There was silence because none of the in the village were firing back. There was silence because the Viet Cong had never fired on US troops that day. There was silence because there were no Viet Cong in the village that day. There was silence because most of the people who were in the village that day were dead."

"Would an alien outsider judge America's performance by My Lai and Wounded Knee or by Lincoln and Jefferson?"

"The first martyr in the American national war of liberation against the British colonialists in the eighteenth century was an African descendant, ; and both slave and free Africans played a key role in Washington’s armies. And yet, the American Constitution sanctioned the continued enslavement of Africans. In recent times, it has become an object of concern to some liberals that the U.S.A. is capable of war crimes of the order of My Lai in Vietnam. But the fact of the matter is that the My Lais began with the enslavement of Africans and American Indians. Racism, violence, and brutality were the concomitants of the capitalist system when it extended itself abroad in the early centuries of international trade."

"Senior officers in Vietnam and later in Washington did their best to cover the incident up. In 1969 one of America’s most respected journalists, Mike Wallace, interviewed Paul Meadlo, one of the soldiers responsible, who admitted freely that he had fired at point-blank range into helpless civilians. ‘And you killed how many?’ asked Wallace. It was hard to tell, replied Meadlo, because with an automatic rifle you just spray the bullets about. Possibly, he added, ten or fifteen. ‘Men, women, and children?’ Yes, said Meadlo. ‘And babies?’ said Wallace. ‘And babies.’ Meadlo’s mother, who was interviewed by Seymour Hersh, who had first broken the story, said of her son, ‘I gave them a good boy and they sent me back a murderer."

"Es war wirklich unmenschlich. Die Gefangenschaft mit Folter und speziellen Zellen, die mit der Ausrüstung für Henker ausgestattet sind, um Menschen zu quälen. Daher ist es sehr wichtig, das auszusprechen. Ich möchte Sie vor diesem Problem warnen, dem die Welt gegenüberstehen kann, wenn wir es nicht zusammen stoppen. Die Russen haben kein Mitleid. Sie sind gnadenlos. Und sie wollen ganz Europa den Willen Russlands aufzwingen. Das haben sie mir gesagt, als ich in Gefangenschaft war."

"<!--"In einer idealen Welt gäbe es ein ‚Recht auf Wahrhaftigkeit‘""

"Daher, Frau Innenminister, wäre es möglich, einmal neue Wege zu gehen und zu überlegen, ob man nicht vielleicht mit der Hercules-Maschine abschieben könnte, denn dann könnten sie da drinnen schreien, so laut sie wollen."

"Natürlich hat es gute Seiten am Nationalsozialismus gegeben, nur die hören wir heute alle nicht mehr. Alle lechzten nach Beschäftigung, nach ein bisschen Hoffnung, und als dann der Führer gekommen ist, der dann angefangen hat mit verschiedenen Bauideen, oder Straßenbau – die Autobahnen sind damals entstanden – das hat den Leuten Hoffnung gegeben. Und ich glaube schon, dass in so einer Situation, wo man wirklich ganz unten ist, die Leute dieses alles dankbar aufnehmen."

"Wer noch Kinder bekommen möchte, sollte desertieren und weglaufen."

""Ein ehrlicher Politiker, das ist ein Widerspruch in sich.", Wächter des Morgen, München 2012, ISBN 978-3453314115"

"Denn jeder Schritt der Menschheit ins Morgen stellt eine Verletzung der Gesetze von heute dar."

"Die Macht fühlt sich immer von der Kunst bedroht, und anscheinend von einer kleinen Frau besonders."

"Wenn ich diese Frauen sehe, dann denke ich mir: Das sind Menschen zweiter Klasse."

"Jeder Streit ist eine Gelegenheit sich besser kennenzulernen"

"Ich kann nichts. Außer einem: Ich traue mich."

"Geld verändert die Menschen nicht – aber Geld potenziert, wer und was du bist! Bist du gut, macht Geld dich besser. Bist du ein großes Arschloch, wirst du ein Riesen-Arschloch!"

"Es ist ein Fehlglaube, anzunehmen, dass mehr Wettbewerb immer für niedrige Preise sorgt."

"Klimaschutz ist kein Luxus in Boomzeiten – sondern unser Weg aus der Krise. Es muß nicht heißen: Erst einmal nicht. Sondern: Jetzt erst recht!"

""Kylie und ich sind uns gar nicht unähnlich, wir stehen beide für die Dance-Sache"

"Auf dem Velo ist er ein Tier, da hält ihn nichts zurück […]."

"Wir wollten immer rocken, Weiber und Geld."

"Es ist nicht leicht! Jahre, Jahrzente lang nur Knäckebrot und Drogen fressen ist ungesund. Aber Freunde, jetzt ist Zeit für Discothek."

"Auch wenn ich hier nicht mehr leben wollen würde: Wir sind ganz klar eine Stuttgarter Band. Wir sind hier groß geworden, unsere Familien sind hier, unser Management auch […] und untereinander reden wir lustig schwäbisch."

"Strunz! Strunz ist zwei Jahre hier, hat gespielt zehn Spiele, ist immer verletzt. Was erlauben Strunz?"

"Literatur eignet sich nicht zur Darstellung von Sachverhalten, wohl aber zur Manipulation des Lesers und meiner selbst."

"Individuell kann ich am besten allein sein."

"Du bist nicht Opfer, sondern Schöpfer deiner Welt."

"Das Schwierigste ist die Leichtigkeit"

"Aus dem Single-Charts-Horror halte ich mich raus. Ich konkurriere nicht mit Klingeltönen, tut mir leid."