I mean what shock do Americans need to back off from accepting, cheering on, and aping corporate media entertainment/news adulation of war?
This is a heart breaking subject for one, who has lived in Hanoi among Vietnamese who all lost family during what the Vietnamese call “The American War.” “Killed by the Americans”, they would answer with an expression of Buddhist equanimity on their faces upon inquiry during a festive annual dinner in their traditional custom of honoring of a deceased family member.
The U.S. government now makes nice with the same Vietnam communist dominated government presidents from Truman through Ford sought to destroy, seemingly oblivious to the incredible loss of life. America has come to respect the Vietnam it could not defeat, and could not cut in half.
That is why this writer, was jolted to read in the Jan. 23, 2008 Huffington Post article, Swiftboating, John Kerry’s insensitive references to, “the Swift Boats we loved while we were in uniform on the Mekong Delta" ... “the boats we honored when we were in uniform in Vietnam”.
What chilling lack of compassion and poor taste, to call attention, even in retrospect, to their having “honored” and “loved” war equipment that brought undeserved death and destruction to Vietnam.
These unthinking hurtful written remarks are especially sickening for those of us who, like Jane Fonda, were on the side of the Vietnamese who fought first the Japanese, then the French, and thereafter endured years of carpet and napalm bombing by the U.S. during their American crucifixion.
What is most appalling about Kerry’s slip of conscience, is that we have always supposed that given the memory of Kerry’s famous brave action saving his ship and the lives of his comrades by shooting to death a Viet patriot about to launch a rocket, that Kerry must have nightmares about that Viet soldier’s grieving family.
Is this the same John Kerry who denounced the U.S. war in Vietnam as an atrocity in testimony before a congressional committee?
No, one guesses it is the John Kerry who thirty-five years later saluted the Vietnam Veterans, warriors who fought a near defenseless population in a poor Asian French colony of rice farmers, parading across the stage with large American flags to thunderous applause at the convention that would nominate him the Democratic presidential candidate? During his campaign, Kerry and commercial media made the 'Vietnam War' strangely heroic again.
With all the U.S. rapprochement in backing that same communist government for World Trade Organization membership, one wonders if Kerry ever try to contact the family of that Vietnamese patriot he shot to death in combat?
One wonders why Kerry would not be embarrassed to recall love for his swift boat. What of his memory that the crews of those boats participated in a war on the Vietnamese that Kerry testified to have been an atrocity?
Kerry reenlisted for a second tour of 'duty', but took discharge to run for Congress. Did he not know when he enlisted the first time, that Eisenhower had written in his book Mandate for Change in 1963, that if there had been an all Vietnam election (blocked by Ike himself), that Ho Chi Minh would have won by a plurality of more than 80%? Oddly enough Kerry would run in his election in part on his military service record in Vietnam fighting to prevent Ho Chi Minh from becoming elected president.
Why does Kerry now believe that he or any Vietnam vets 'served' their country by taking part in a war that killed Vietnamese in their own country, often enough in their own neighborhoods and homes as he deplored in his testimony at the time?
Kerry had a fine college education, which must have included a history of colonialism, which would have included the brutality of French colonial subjugation of the Vietnamese. He must have known that Ho Chi Minh was decorated by our OSS as a dedicated ally of ours against the Japanese and Vichy French. He must have known that Truman, against Roosevelt's promise, had brought the French army back in US ships to fight an 8-year war against our former allies, the Vietnamese. All this because Ho Chi Minh was a communist? A top cabinet minister of the U.S. allied French government was also a communist, but that was OK. Martin Luther King spoke of this history in his 1967 condemnation of U.S. imperialist wars.
Perhaps it useless to fault the mature John Kerry for a commonly held American attitude of disinterest in the suffering of families of the millions slaughtered in America’s mistaken and unwinnable wars and nostalgia for his stint in the Navy.
Recruiting our boys to go kill around the world is made easier for the ‘glory’ now associated with the massive killing of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians. ‘U.S. Big Brother’ media has turned the pre-1975 [shame] into [fame] in the new millennium. No more mention of the war having been ‘a terrible mistake’, and every single politician who ‘served’ in Vietnam is acclaimed as a hero!
Musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England and the US, and now resides in New York City.
You're exactly right, & the point can't be emphasized enough
The officially-condoned US attitude towards our country's almost 3-decades-long atrocity in Vietnam speaks volumes about America's military madness. It's astonishing -- & very revealing -- that Americans are so conscious of the great crimes of the Nazis, while being almost entirely unaware that the second-greatest crime of the 20th century was probably the US aggression in Vietnam. (OK, one could perhaps argue that King Leopold in the Congo was worse, in the early years of that bloody century.)
There's no question that public standards of permissible political speech (such as Kerry's grotesque parading around as a "hero") and powerful shapers of culture such as Hollywood are key elements in keeping our population unable to perceive the crimes it commits.
As Chomsky & Herman have pointed out, Americans would immediately grasp the implications, if a German citizen was asked how many Jews were killed by the Third Reich, & the citizen guessed an absurdly low number like 50,000. Yet polls have shown that most Americans, whose armed forces slaughtered perhaps 3 million innocent Vietnamese from 1962-1975, are ignorant by a similar factor of how many innocent people they murdered.
To attain this level of murderousness, with so little awareness of it, is a shocking but truly stupendous feat of mass mind-control. If American society was to really embark on any significant course of healing, part of the process should be a US president having a very candid "chat" with the American people. In this chat, one of the first things he or she should say is, "My friends, we must face the fact that as a society, we have committed many terrible crimes, and we owe humanity an apology for these crimes. And the worst of our crimes which we must acknowledge, was what we did in Vietnam..."
by
Richard Mynick (2 articles, 3 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 1230 comments)
on Monday, February 4, 2008 at 11:29:12 AM
1 comments
Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/opednews/public_html/maxwrite/database.inc.php on line 48
Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/opednews/public_html/maxwrite/database.inc.php on line 48
Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/opednews/public_html/maxwrite/database.inc.php on line 48
How would you rate this?
You must be logged in (if signed up) to do ratings.
It's free to signup! And easy. And takes just a minute or two....
1
1
1
Must Read (
News (
Funny (
Supported (
Interesting (
Inspiring (
