Tag: Vietnam
“The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?” [Review of John Marciano’s Book]
In classical mythology, the Acheron is one of the rivers of the Underworld. It marks the boundary between the living and the dead. The ferryman…
READ MORE “The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?” [Review of John Marciano’s Book]Barbarism in Words and Deeds. Barbarism of U.S. Imperial Wars is Unmatched
“What Russia is sponsoring and doing [in Syria] is not counter-terrorism it is barbarism” Samantha Power, US Representative to the United Nations The US representative…
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Vietnam War and Yemen False Flags
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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The Killing of History
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 […]
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A Look at “Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam”
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” […]
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Hiroshima, Vietnam, Cuba: A Hegemonic Power Never Says Sorry…
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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What We Still haven’t Learned from the Vietnam War
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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The Vietnam War is not History for Victims of Agent Orange
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 […]
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Past All Reason: The Vietnam War
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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American Rape of Vietnamese Women was Considered “Standard Operating Procedure”
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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War Crimes: Agent Orange, Monsanto, Dow Chemical and Other Ugly Legacies of the Vietnam War
The poisonous spraying continued for a decade until it was stopped in 1971 […]
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Two War Photographs: Bosnia vs. Vietnam
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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My Lai massacre (Vietnam): 49 years later
I have personally known many Vietnam veterans who were destroyed by their experiences in Vietnam […]
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Mainstream news and USA’s heroics in Vietnam: Why the silence about the 7 million dead?
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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