One of the most hyped “events” of American television, The Vietnam War, has started on the PBS network. The directors are Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Acclaimed for his documentaries on the Civil War, the Great Depression and the history of jazz, Burns says of his Vietnam films, “They will inspire our country to begin to talk and think about the Vietnam war in an entirely new way”.
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"The true scandal is the insidious assumption of power by sinister war-making vested interests for which no American voted. The rapid ascendancy of the Pentagon and the surveillance agencies under Obama represented an historic shift of power in Washington. Daniel Ellsberg rightly called it a coup. The three generals running Trump are its witness."
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To the north, in Quang Tri province, more bombs were dropped than in all of Germany during the Second World War. Since 1975, unexploded ordnance has caused more than 40,000 deaths in mostly “South Vietnam”, the country America claimed to “save” and, with France, conceived as a singularly imperial ruse.
Quoting Robert Taber’s The War of the Flea, Lansdale said, “There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination. There is only one way to control a territory that harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert.”
Where are the ghosts of the great anti-war demonstrations that took over Washington in the 1970s? Where is the equivalent of the Freeze Movement that filled the streets of Manhattan in the 1980s, demanding that President Reagan withdraw battlefield nuclear weapons from Europe?
[dropcap]B[/dropcap]arack Obama provided the apotheosis, with seven simultaneous wars, a presidential record, including the destruction of Libya as a modern state. Obama’s overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government has had the desired effect: the massing of American-led Nato forces on Russia’s western borderland through which the Nazis invaded in 1941.
Obama’s “pivot to Asia” in 2011 signalled the transfer of the majority of America’s naval and air forces to Asia and the Pacific for no purpose other than to confront and provoke China. The Nobel Peace Laureate’s worldwide campaign of assassinations is arguably the most extensive campaign of terrorism since 9/11.
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JOHN PILGER—The ascendancy of the Pentagon and the surveillance agencies under Obama represented an historic shift of power in Washington. Daniel Ellsberg rightly called it a coup. The three generals running Trump are its witness. All of this fails to penetrate those “liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics”, as Luciana Bohne noted memorably. Commodified and market-tested, “diversity” is the new liberal brand…
Many well-intentioned people wondered why and how a regime like the Nazis could ever come to power in a technologically developed and highly cultural society like Germany in the nineteen thirties. Was it the lure of extending power over other territories or a revival of German prowess dating back to the Empire? Many obvious propagandist projects were admired within like the Autobahn still a major traffic network or the creation of such as the popular and still produced Volkswagen (People’s Car). But to subdue its territorial expansionism and nefarious effects on other people such as Jews and Slavs not to… Read more »
As predicted the Trump presidency has released a maelstrom of divergent opposition, demonstrations, renewed activism and a plethora of diverse written viewpoints. Trump is indeed a catalyst for potential change. The influence of this aware resistance is spreading to Western Europe as recently noted in Paris Despite the obvious internecine battles between factions of the establishment, Trump is a break from the constitutionalized status quo and the outwardly visible policy vagaries reflect the uncertainties that the permanent regime is facing. So far none of the pseudo- and real resistance against Trump is working, but by and by circumstances for maintaining… Read more »
I don’t see the same thing. The media discussion has been a tangle of Clinton-style opposition to a Republican president, mixed in with middle class elitism and the occasional obligatory negative white stereotyping. Resistance took root in Europe, then (sort of) drifted this way. The bulk of the media marketed to middle class liberals continue to promote right wing ideology, to the beat of a rock and roll song. Sometimes the middle class seem oblivious to how deeply we (those who aren’t on the right wing) have been split apart.
I didn’t want to watch what I was sure would be more historic revisionism, so I am not qualified to say anything about “The Vietnam War.” On the today’s issue of protest, “the revolution was cancelled.” History repeats, and this time around, much of the media marketed to liberals (since the 1990s) have served powerfully to divide and conquer those who aren’t on the right wing, pitting us against each other by class and race, making it impossible for the “masses” to unite on any issue. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, our media effectively control the message, thereby shaping public… Read more »
Well, despite Fabian’s statement of not seeing the same thing, our perceptions are very much the same. Or maybe this was a reaction to Pilger’s (otherwise excellent) article. Though the analysis of what the media does by Fabian is correct, I refer to my two other comments elsewhere which put forth that the media is but a reflection of what goes on in a particular society. The argument is thus stood on its head, not that we are played by the media but that the media is a mirror (cf Warhol) of present societal problems. After all the media is… Read more »