At a raucous meeting of the graduate school student union, held just hours after Kerrey's presentation, speakers—some on the verge of tears—took turns denouncing Kerrey's performance, the board of trustees, and one another; about 40 percent of those in attendance voted in favor of a resolution calling for Kerrey's resignation. A second resolution was passed asking Kerrey to meet with the student union and provide detailed responses to what many said would be much tougher questions. Barring satisfactory answers, the student union pledged to call for Kerrey's resignation.
Twenty-four-year-old Adele Ray is a graduate student in the New School's communications department. Adele's mother is Vietnamese, her father a Vietnam veteran, and so she has closely followed the controversy on campus. She is troubled by the whole debate, she says, because "it's still all about us, everyone is talking about me, me, me—America, America. What about everyone else affected by this, what about the Vietnamese?"
Adele has been back to Vietnam with her family, seen the poverty and the damage, the people with missing limbs. She's listened to her brother and her mother talk about planes roaring over during Tet, the bombs falling, and the screams.”
(Copyright 2001 Village Voice)-------------------
*(People's Liberation Armed Forces of Vietnam labeled 'Viet Cong' [all Communists] by Ngo Dinh Diem, dictator of the US and French created 'nation' of ‘South Vietnam’ - and of course picked up by American media and military.)
This then is the nation of America today - an endorsement from a prominent American, whose prominence, for millions, is from his 'trial' on "60 minutes" and from his photo on the front pages of newspapers and covers of magazines as a pathetic victim of the desire for violence implanted in an ambitious young mind by the virulent and unceasing war promoting, war justifying, and war glorifying by corporate owned and military-industrial complex influenced US commercial entertainment/news media.
And if Senator Hillary becomes the Democratic candidate she may run against yet another example of America’s blind eye for its own terrorism; Senator John McCain, who bombed Hanoi twenty-three times, though he must have known that President Eisenhower wrote that Ho Chi Minh would have won by over 80% of the vote in the all Vietnam election that the Geneva accords signed by the defeated French called for - had Ike permitted that election. (In general, Americans, McCain included don’t feature democracy if the 'wrong side' is going to win.)
We are never told, and we wonder if McCain has ever asked, how many Vietnamese his bombs killed and maimed, especially now, when the U.S. has backed for World Trade Organization membership, that very same government that defeated the murderous efforts of six administrations from Truman to Ford, to overthrow it.
In 2004, many Americans had compassion for candidate John Kerrey, who said he killed a South Vietnamese on his reenlistment second tour of duty before realizing it was wrong.
More Americans love Muhammad Ali, who did have to go to Vietnam to know it was wrong. Ali never shamed himself or his country.
Did these three now highly placed Americans serve us when they killed in a war now excused as a mistake? They all had a fine college education, which must have included a history of colonialism and the brutality of French colonial subjugation of the Vietnamese. They must have known that Ho Chi Minh was decorated by our OSS as a dedicated ally of ours against the Japanese and Vichy French. They 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? Hardly! At that time, a top cabinet minister of our ally, the French government was also a communist, but that was acceptable.
Hearts go out to these famous American veterans, Kerrey, Kerry and McCain, more than to those French colonized Indochinese they killed. The dead Vietnamese - who died innocently in their own country, often in their own homes - they are free now. They are honored by their relatives. Any compassion from American media now for the Vietnamese would come horribly late and be suspect. Even the infamous My Lai Massacre saw only Lieutenant William Calley serve a mere 3½ years of house arrest in his quarters at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Doubt either Hillary Clinton or John McCain could get an endorsement from Vietnamese survivors of what Vietnamese themselves more appropriately call “The American War”. Knowing these two senators’ hawkish stand on today’s American wars of occupation from watching them on CNN in Vietnam, the Vietnamese would more likely go for Gravel, Kucinich or Paul.
Well, who knows, maybe Bob Kerrey’s endorsement will do Hillary some good. In return she posted on her official Hillary Clinton For President web site, "I am deeply honored to have his support and counsel.” One hand washes the other. The last time Kerry popped up in the news was as a member of the 9/11 Commission. Huh?
‘Pretty much an expert on terrorism’ - the other members the Commission must have thought.
Suggestions:
Write to Senator Clinton. Tell her to ask Bob to pull the media into the dock with him.
Write to President Bob Kerrey c/o New School University 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY, 10011
Ask top university education authority Kerry to use his now well publicized ghastly but tragic mistake as an opening to drag the giant conglomerate owned entertainment/news industry, so beholden to the military-industrial complex, into the dock of war criminality for all the calculated manufacturing of public consent through fearful misrepresenting the history of colonialism and current events in-order to promote and justify homicide and war in third world nations.
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