CHRISTOPHER KOCH—It’s the lack of accountability, the failure to prosecute those who lied to get us into the war, who encouraged battlefield tactics that resulted in the massacre of women and children, who authorized the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets, who drenched Vietnam in chemical poisons that will cause birth defects and death for generation. In order to maintain this central lie, Burns and Novick must establish a false balance between good and evil on both sides. Every time the United States is shown doing something bad, Burns and Novick show us how the Vietnamese also did bad things.
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WANTED: MEDIA FELONS
All abject servants of the plutocracy
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
Well said and thank you. Eisenhower said in 1953 that we needed to maintain control of Vietnam because it provided essential tungsten, tin and rubber. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/ps7.htm
Oh, it’s just so pitifully depressing and sad—that we can’t get it right yet. That Vietnam still isn’t the object lesson to us that it should be. We fucked up, and as a country we can’t yet admit to our folly and lack of a moral center. I served in Vietnam as a Foreign Service Reserve Officer. I worked for the organization that eventually became the Phoenix Program, a fascist-like program of assassinations and dislocations of Vietnamese civilians who might be sympathetic to the notion that Americans had no business in their country. And now comes Burns and Novick to… Read more »
Of course, it also treats the Vietnam War as a tragedy. Hey, as they used to say in SDS, “Two, Three, many Vietnams.” The US lost and this probably limited its military actions in the world for a while. Plus it showed the US could be defeated. At an incredibly huge human cost, no doubt. This victory for the courageous Vietnamese people was a gift to humanity. As for Eisenhower’s quote, it is silly. The US spent a few hundred billion dollars for the meager natural resources of Vietnam? It was about military power and sending messages to China (after… Read more »