Viet Nam

Is America’s folk image of itself derived from a cinematic narrative that defines its national character as one representing a ‘can-do-force’ fostering trade in the world for the common good?

The average natural born citizen in any country is continuously indoctrinated into the national culture starting about the time they begin understanding the meaning of words. There’s one country in particular where reality is staring the public in the face, but the truth has been grossly distorted for decades by government, and mass media, bias and propaganda.

Each October 7 for the last three years, the date of the US invasion of Afghanistan, members of Veterans For Peace and their allies have gathered at the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Lower Manhattan for a soulful ceremony. Their purpose: to mark another year of a war in Afghanistan and call for peace, to honor all whose lives are destroyed by war and to expand the First Amendment right to peaceably assemble.

At the same time the progressive evacuation in the 20th century of the nation-state as a means of class domination and the advent of a nomadic pirate class of financial capital, means that the practice of endemic global war has become  indifferent to national territory and so functionally infinite in its horizons for future conflict The cannibal war-machine thus consumes persons and ecologies through forms of commodity production and price speculation that profit from the systematic creation of social chaos and its re-ordering through the violence and destruction of high-tech mi

Douglas Valentine explained the purpose or at least the subject of his study of the Vietnam Phoenix Program as “terror and its role in political warfare”. He is generous, like most Americans—even critical ones—when he writes “It will show how, as successive American governments sink deeper and deeper into the vortex of covert operations—ostensibly to combat terrorism and Communist insurgencies—the American people gradually lose touch with the democratic ideals that once defined their national self-concept.

Fifty years ago in August, the US contrived an incident that led to the escalation of the US war on Vietnam. That incident, known historically as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, was said to involve an unprovoked attack by northern Vietnamese forces on two US Navy boats. As it turned out, the Vietnamese were repeatedly provoked before the incident and the US had fired first. Nonetheless, Lyndon Johnson and the US Congress used the events as a reason to intensify the war on the Vietnamese. Like so many times since, the rush to war swept all dissent aside.

With this order, the worst in living memory, the Australian government is not just gagging the Australian press, it is blindfolding the Australian public.
— Julian Assange, July 29, 2014

Phoenix was far worse than the things attributed to it.
— Ed Murphy, former member of the Phoenix program

It is enlightening to see how pugnacious the U.S. establishment, led by the Peace Laureate, has been in dealing with the Ukraine crisis. The crisis arguably began when the Yanukovich government rejected an EU bailout program in favor of one offered by Russia. The mainstream media (MSM) have virtually suppressed the fact that the EU proposal was not only less generous than the one offered by Russia, but that whereas the Russian plan did not preclude further Ukrainian deals with the EU the EU plan would have required a cut-off of further Russian arrangements.

This question is asked repeatedly in the English-language media—probably the most heavily censored data streams in the world (a point to which I will return). Why should anyone worry about a new “cold war”? Perhaps it would be more relevant to worry about the extent of current and future “hot” ones?