The regular US Army invaded and occupied part of Vietnam in the 1960-1970s committing terrible crimes of genocide against the local civilians. A total death toll of civilian population in the North Vietnam is 587.000 […]
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The American neo-conservatives predicted the 21st century would be a «New American Century». Instead, it is becoming a «New Chinese Century», with the United States still believing, wrongly, that it is the «leader of the free world» and a «super power» […]
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Our War-mongering Nation has 900 Unaffordable, Fully-equipped and Well-defended Military Bases outside our Borders. The Censored-out Truths that War Documentaries Tend to Leave on the Cutting Room Floor […]
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John McCain is only a “hero” in the settler-colonialist mind. By the letter of the law, he was a war criminal. We Americans may praise McCain for opposing Bush-era waterboarding, or for standing up to the bigot who called Obama a Muslim at a campaign rally, or for casting the deciding vote that saved millions of Americans’ health insurance […]
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The amount of bombs dropped by Americans on the innocent citizens of tiny French Indochina was more than twice the amount of bombs dropped in Europe, Africa and Asia during the Second World War […]
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March 16, 2017, was the 49th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre, located in Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam. It was Saturday morning, March 16, 1968, when approximately 115 U.S. Army soldiers of the Americal Division’s Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, landed in helicopters just outside the village of My Lai 4. Over the course of the next four hours, these American soldiers, and their Military High Command, who were flying overhead in helicopters observing the massacre, took part in a horror show far beyond the human imagination […]
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Amyloidosis, Chronic B-cell Leukemias, Chloracne, Type II Diabetes Mellitus, Hodgkins Disease, Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, Ischemic Heart Disease, Multiple Myeloma, Parkinson’s Disease, Peripheral Neuropathy, Porphyria Cutanea Tarda, Prostate Cancer, Respiratory Cancers (including lung cancer), Hairy Cell Leukemia, Soft Tissue Sarcomas and spina bifida in infants of Agent Orange exposed Vietnam veterans […]
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My hypothesis is that a market economy requires a permanent state of war. Behind the crocodile tears for the human disasters and ‘white man burden,’ people and nature are of value in themselves and war does a good job at consuming both very quickly […]
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Washington’s objective is to impose the terms of Korea’s reunification. The NeoCons “Project for a New American Century” (PNAC) published in 2000 had intimated that in “post unification scenario”, the number of US troops (currently at 37,000) should be increased and that US military presence could be extended to North Korea. In a reunified Korea, the military mandate of the US garrison would be to implement so-called “stability operations in North Korea” […]
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The missile attack on a US ship off the coast of Yemen was a major news event, but the subsequent follow up story, that it may never have happened, was either ignored by mainstream media or intentionally covered up. The whole thing has the same odor as the Gulf of Tonkin incident that never occurred […]
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In the early 1970s, I went to Quang Ngai province, where in the village of My Lai, between 347 and 500 men, women and infants were murdered by American troops (Burns prefers “killings”). At the time, this was presented as an aberration: an “American tragedy” (Newsweek ). In this one province, it was estimated that 50,000 people had been slaughtered during the era of American “free fire zones”. Mass homicide […]
Read More →The ethos of the US’s Vietnam attack plan was “embodied most fully” in Secretary of Defense (1961-68) Robert McNamara. The plan, which was carried out with “corporate”, “businesslike”, “scientific”, “assembly line … efficiency”, was fairly simple: to kill so many people that the independence/communist movement would “give up the fight” […]
Read More →Just before his trip to Japan, Obama also visited Vietnam a country that the US had attacked brutally in the sixties and seventies allegedly in order to stop the advance of communism. What the US fought against was essentially a nationalist movement which had defeated its French coloniser and was in no mood to yield to another imperial power […]
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Fifty years ago today, in 1967, nearly 100,000 Americans marched on Washington, DC, to protest the Vietnam War. In those days there was a mandatory draft in place, and the risk was very real that a young man just out of high school could quickly wind up 13,000 miles away, fighting an unseen enemy in jungles that didn’t need tanks or B-52 bombers to inflict fear […]
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In one of its most serious omissions, the series gives short shrift to the destruction wreaked by the US military’s spraying of deadly chemical herbicides containing the poison dioxin over much of Vietnam, the most common of which was Agent Orange. This is one of the most tragic legacies of the war […]
Read More →The new series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick is mesmerizing. But it doesn’t answer the questions about the Vietnam War that many are still seeking […]
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Rape of Vietnamese women by US troops “took place on such a large scale that many veterans considered it standard operating procedure.” It was “systematic and collective”; an “unofficial military policy”. One soldier termed it a “mass military policy.” Indeed, rape followed by murder of Vietnamese women was “so common that American soldiers had a special term for the soldiers who committed the acts in conjunction: a double veteran” […]
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