Updated 1-2 times/week.
I put NSFW because I'm sure if your boss found out, s/he would be wondering why you were reading "commie stuff."
Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with the salivating violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Partys rigged convention. The great counter revolution had begun.
The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King, had dared link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When Janis Joplin sang, Freedoms just another word for nothing left to lose, she spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of Americas victims in faraway places.
We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom. Now dont you forget it. So said a National Parks Service guide as I filmed last week at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. He was addressing a school party of young teenagers in bright orange T-shirts. As if by rote, he inverted the truth about Vietnam into an unchallenged lie.
The millions of Vietnamese who died and were maimed and poisoned and dispossessed by the American invasion have no historical place in young minds, not to mention the estimated 60,000 veterans who took their own lives. A friend of mine, a marine who became a paraplegic in Vietnam, was often asked, Which side did you fight on?
A few years ago, I attended a popular exhibition called The Price of Freedom at the venerable Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The lines of ordinary people, mostly children shuffling through a Santas grotto of revisionism, were dispensed a variety of lies: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved a million lives; Iraq was liberated [by] air strikes of unprecedented precision. The theme was unerringly heroic: only Americans pay the price of freedom.
Read the rest at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/...pares-for-war/
Note:
If you have questions, I will answer in one or two liners most of the time. I am not interested in lengthy "debate."
I put NSFW because I'm sure if your boss found out, s/he would be wondering why you were reading "commie stuff."
Quote:
Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with the salivating violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Partys rigged convention. The great counter revolution had begun.
The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King, had dared link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When Janis Joplin sang, Freedoms just another word for nothing left to lose, she spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of Americas victims in faraway places.
We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom. Now dont you forget it. So said a National Parks Service guide as I filmed last week at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. He was addressing a school party of young teenagers in bright orange T-shirts. As if by rote, he inverted the truth about Vietnam into an unchallenged lie.
The millions of Vietnamese who died and were maimed and poisoned and dispossessed by the American invasion have no historical place in young minds, not to mention the estimated 60,000 veterans who took their own lives. A friend of mine, a marine who became a paraplegic in Vietnam, was often asked, Which side did you fight on?
A few years ago, I attended a popular exhibition called The Price of Freedom at the venerable Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The lines of ordinary people, mostly children shuffling through a Santas grotto of revisionism, were dispensed a variety of lies: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved a million lives; Iraq was liberated [by] air strikes of unprecedented precision. The theme was unerringly heroic: only Americans pay the price of freedom.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/...pares-for-war/
Note:
If you have questions, I will answer in one or two liners most of the time. I am not interested in lengthy "debate."