Graham not so godly

Dear Editor:

We have seen the corporate media’s hyperbole about America’s fire and brimstone preacher which totally eliminated the stain from the real life of Billy Graham.

The real Billy Graham (the prince of war) approved weapons of mass destruction, and was friendly towards South American despots who were murdering and torturing people. He approved of arms sales to Saudi Arabia and back Johnson and Nixon’s slaughter in Vietnam.

He conferred regularly with J. Edgar Hoover, and networked with the CIA reporting on citizens that were demonstrating against the war in Vietnam.

Graham’s politics earned him some strange bedfellows. He praised Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his assault on Constitutional rights, and defended (“I’m not a crook”) Nixon after the Watergate break-in.

During an hour and a half conversation with the foul mouthed Nixon, he denigrated the American Jews which he later said “he had no memory of.” However, in 2002 the released Nixon tapes revealed that he did in fact make that statement.

In 1989, in a memo to Nixon, Graham state that “if the Paris peace talks failed, that he should step-up the war in Vietnam and bomb the dikes which would overnight destroy the economy of North Vietnam.” According to Nixon’s own estimate, at least a million men, women and children would be killed. When the German high commissioner in occupied Holland (WWII) breached the dikes, he was later sentenced to death at the Nurmburg war crimes trials.

Graham’s fire and brimstone ministry stood in solid opposition to everything that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood for. Graham’s message was principally stepped in fear. Fear of a wrathful god; fear of communists and socialists; fear of homosexuals; fear of unions; and fear of Catholics.

Graham supported police repression of peaceful Vietnam war protester’s civil rights marchers. He also opposed the tactic of civil disobedience, one of the basic tenets of a free society.

According to the ad nauseum statements he made throughout his life, he seemed to favor a police state over a democracy.

Fred Rakevich

Elma