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The Killing of History


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2017 Sep 30, 6:57am   2,734 views  7 comments

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In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its “exceptionalism”, Burns’ “entirely new” Vietnam war is presented as “epic, historic work”. Its lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in Vietnam.

Burns says he is grateful to “the entire Bank of America family” which “has long supported our country’s veterans”. Bank of America was a corporate prop to an invasion that killed perhaps as many as four million Vietnamese and ravaged and poisoned a once bountiful land. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed, and around the same number are estimated to have taken their own lives.

It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings”.

The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of “false flags” that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971.

There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me – as it must be for many Americans — it is difficult to watch the film’s jumble of “red peril” maps, unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences.

In the series’ press release in Britain — the BBC will show it — there is no mention of Vietnamese dead, only Americans. “We are all searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy,” Novick is quoted as saying. How very post-modern.

All this will be familiar to those who have observed how the American media and popular culture behemoth has revised and served up the great crime of the second half of the twentieth century: from The Green Berets and The Deer Hunter to Rambo and, in so doing, has legitimised subsequent wars of aggression. The revisionism never stops and the blood never dries. The invader is pitied and purged of guilt, while “searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy”. Cue Bob Dylan: “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?”

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.”

Nothing has changed. When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations on 19 September – a body established to spare humanity the “scourge of war” – he declared he was “ready, willing and able” to “totally destroy” North Korea and its 25 million people. His audience gasped, but Trump’s language was not unusual.

His rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, had boasted she was prepared to “totally obliterate” Iran, a nation of more than 80 million people. This is the American Way; only the euphemisms are missing now.

Returning to the US, I am struck by the silence and the absence of an opposition – on the streets, in journalism and the arts, as if dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground.

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?

The sheer energy and moral persistence of these great movements largely succeeded; by 1987 Reagan had negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev an Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) that effectively ended the Cold War.

Today, according to secret Nato documents obtained by the German newspaper, Suddeutsche Zetung, this vital treaty is likely to be abandoned as “nuclear targeting planning is increased”. The German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has warned against “repeating the worst mistakes of the Cold War … All the good treaties on disarmament and arms control from Gorbachev and Reagan are in acute peril. Europe is threatened again with becoming a military training ground for nuclear weapons. We must raise our voice against this.”

But not in America. The thousands who turned out for Senator Bernie Sanders’ “revolution” in last year’s presidential campaign are collectively mute on these dangers. That most of America’s violence across the world has been perpetrated not by Republicans, or mutants like Trump, but by liberal Democrats, remains a taboo.

What is known in the US as “the left” has effectively allied with the darkest recesses of institutional power, notably the Pentagon and the CIA, to see off a peace deal between Trump and Vladimir Putin and to reinstate Russia as an enemy, on the basis of no evidence of its alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.

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.

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, not the class people serve regardless of their gender and skin colour: not the responsibility of all to stop a barbaric war to end all wars.

Much More: https://off-guardian.org/2017/09/24/the-killing-of-history/#comments

#War #Vietnam #AmericanWarMachine #TheyDontMindWeDontMatter


Comments 1 - 7 of 7        Search these comments

1   RWSGFY   2017 Sep 30, 8:27am  

anonymous says
reinstate Russia as an enemy, on the basis of no evidence of its alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.


Bullshit: Russia has reinstated itself as an enemy by starting landgrabs in Europe. And that treaty on medium-range missiles the author is so fond of? Russia has violated that one too.
2   HEY YOU   2017 Sep 30, 9:15am  

Vietnam- Weapons testing.
Fuck Burns & BOA.

Iraq has WMD.
Republicans have established America as a Terrorists nation.

Carter doctrine: That's our oil over there!
Democrats will do whatever they need to,to be able to take a Sunday drive.

anonymous says
There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous.


White male Democrats & Republicans.
3   Ceffer   2017 Sep 30, 11:12am  

History is re-written for each new generation of tyrants' and oligarchs' convenience.

Vietnam was a corporate war instigated by drunk, paranoid chain smokers left over from WWII, but controlling our covert agencies with no checks or balances, and whorishly condoned by LBJ in exchange for his seat of power after killing Kennedy.

Iraq was a corporate war as well, promulgated by Bush and the Texas cowboys, and pretty much a descendant of corporate malfeasance and disinformation since WWII.
4   anonymous   2017 Sep 30, 11:31am  

@patrick login doesn't work any more.
5   anonymous   2017 Sep 30, 11:57am  

anonymous says
The narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings”.

The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of “false flags” that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971.


The origin of the Vietnam war goes back considerably before the Gulf of Tonkin. Back to when the US totally screwed our WWII ally ho chi min. Roosevelt had agreed to back ho chi min post WWII. The state department , over strong objections of the OSS (now the cia) convinced Truman to hand Indochina (vietnam for the history challenged) back to the french.

The state department was staffed by mostly right-wing anti-communists who could not tell the difference between "Nationalists" like ho chi min and "Communists". They also were instrumental in backing gangster war lord, Chiang Kai Shek who spent all of WWII stealing everything the US sent and using to fight the communists instead of the Japanese. These same state department ivy league idiots came up with the domino theory because they couldn't tell the difference between the rise of communism and the fall of colonialism, making the post colonial period across the globe much worse than it needed to be. .
6   Patrick   2017 Sep 30, 11:59am  

anonymous says
patrick login doesn't work any more.


Please send me an email with your username and I'll fix it.
7   NDrLoR   2017 Oct 1, 7:40am  

BayArea says
I guess you've never ridden Eurorail? When you flush you can see the tracks
Unless things have changed, I think train toilets have always been that way, the waste goes directly onto the tracks, which shouldn't be a problem, it's biodegradible after all. And there were signs that said "Please do not flush while in station". It would make a lot more sense than having some huge holding vat that had to be cleaned every few days.

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