His Name Should Become a Synonym for Murderer.
A harsh judgment on a man who richly deserves it--Henry Kissinger--in Michael Yates' review of the Vietnam episode of Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States. Beyond that nice turn of phrase, Yates is appalled that Barack Obama is commemorating what Oliver Stone shows to be a a true crime against the peoples of Southeast Asia.
It is appalling but, as Yates points out, Americans have no sense of the destruction we wreaked in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Our national myths will never allow us to honestly acknowledge our responsibility for that destruction. Maybe the reason we must continue to commemorate the Vietnam War (the American War to the Vietnamese) is because it we can never escape the fact that it was a crime based on a lie compounded by ignorance, arrogance and greed. So we keep piling on the patriotic bullshit to keep that truth away.
And because we refuse to learn that lesson we continue to wage war. And need ever more of that bullshit to cover our doubts.
I'll pass on the commemoration. I saw that shit in Vietnam and learned that lesson. I haven't forgotten.
Labels: disaster, national insecurity, vietnam
posted by Rez Dog at 9:14 PM
1 Comments:
I watched the Vietnam war on t.v., every evening on the news, as I was growing up. I would see Walter Cronkite do the news & then they would have this report on how many people died that day, Americans that was. I never unstood that war when I was growing up. I thought it was crazy. Now all these yrs later I still think it was crazy.
The Americans have not learned from their mistakes. They invaded Iraq & Afghanistan. Its a repeat of Vietnam. Only the military contractors made money, the only ones who benefited. It certainly wasn't the Vietamese.
That war destroyed a generation of young men. They should be remembered but the war, no. It was evil & corrupt.
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