John Pilger, an Australian journalist, has written for Telesur on “Silencing the United States as It Prepares for War”. He frames it as a Memorial Day piece.
“We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom. Now don’t 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?”
The vague repetition of “Support the troops.” and “Support veterans.” and “They died for your freedom.” is beginning to royally piss me off this year. It is an enforced loyalty without human content.
I know of the person behind one name on the Vietnam Wall. A classmate of mine in freshman honors chemistry and math, an engineering student, Army ROTC unlike my Air Force ROTC. ROTC was mandatory in 1964-66 at Clemson University, a legacy of its 1890s establishment as a military land grant university; Southern agricultural and technical universities were like that. I found out about his death by searching who of my college classmates listed in their “Roll of Honor” I recognized. Most were from after I transferred to Johns Hopkins; I recognized none from there. So who is it that I personally remember this day. One random affable guy who occasionally was in a homework group for this subject or another. And who was forgotten until his name popped up on a deliberate search for that information.
Veterans of Vietnam, that’s different. An old friend was an MP, wrote his war memoir a decade ago. His biggest stories were about arranging his assignment away from the hot areas, one area as an MP whose squad apparently had a protection racket on brothels so they could get free sex.
Another friend survive his tour as point on patrols. His memory. I was scared shitless the whole time. When the first round came of a fight I was first on the ground. Damn lucky there was no booby trap where I landed. No doubt he now is one of the ones strutting in camos and his old pins.
A third was assigned as a cook in the Saigon officers mess. He saw what the generals were eating while his buddies out in the field were eating K-rations (I think I’ve got the right era). He was one angry guy about the war.
Those are the folks I remember this memorial day from the Vietnam War.
My dad, after classification finished with him, worked in classification in Santa Monica CA for most of the war.
His brother served in the US Navy on the island of Fernando de Naronha off the Brazilian coast.
My father-in-law was an MP in the Pacific. At the end of the war, he was stationed on Tinian, in the squad guarding the first atomic weapons. Prior to that, duty was guarding Japanese prisoners of war.
All survived the war.
My grandfather enlisted in the Spanish-American War and was sick for most of the very short campaign.
I have to go back to the Civil War to find one of the dead in either side of my family. My great-great grandfather was captured at Spotsylvania Court House by United States troops, transported to Elmira NY and died of dysentery at a prison camp that was beset with the same problems as Andersonville GA.
I don’t think any of them though they were “fighting for freedom”, for country maybe. Most all of them were drafted. The acquaintance from Clemson was fulfilling the ROTC contract that paid for his last two years of college.
And then there was my friend who was drafted, yes drafted, into the US Marine Corps in 1968. He spent his tour at a desk in Camp LeJeune NC.
Think there’s a reason why we are prodded to remember generic warriors rather than real ones?
But that is where Pilger starts. And pivots to what we refuse to remember on Memorial Day or any other day.
The 2016 election campaign is remarkable not only for the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders but also for the resilience of an enduring silence about a murderous self-bestowed divinity. A third of the members of the United Nations have felt Washington’s boot, overturning governments, subverting democracy, imposing blockades and boycotts. Most of the presidents responsible have been liberal – Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.
Only because the remainder–Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Bush–are one less than the “most”. How wide do you want to open that frame? All the way to Jefferson’s invasion of the shores of Tripoli? For now, let’s argue that all of the post-World War II administrations have been that way.
James Bradley, the best-selling author of Flags of Our Fathers and son of one of the US marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, said, “[One] great myth we’re seeing play out is that of Obama as some kind of peaceful guy who’s trying to get rid of nuclear weapons. He’s the biggest nuclear warrior there is. He’s committed us to a ruinous course of spending a trillion dollars on more nuclear weapons. Somehow, people live in this fantasy that because he gives vague news conferences and speeches and feel-good photo-ops that somehow that’s attached to actual policy. It isn’t.”
As his term winds down, Obama is looking like a Harry Truman national security President. Not having any experience in foreign policy himself before taking office, having only a short time in the US Senate being exposed to foreign policy hearings and legislation, he did what most Presidents in his position did: he sought out people in the national security apparatus that he could trust, appointed those who drew consensus approval, and kept close those who performed to his satisfaction. Like Truman, he faced a hostile and jingoistic Congress–and not just the Republicans–exactly what Truman faced.
On Obama’s watch, a second cold war is under way. The Russian president is a pantomime villain; the Chinese are not yet back to their sinister pig-tailed caricature – when all Chinese were banned from the United States – but the media warriors are working on it.
Neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders has mentioned any of this. There is no risk and no danger for the United States and all of us. For them, the greatest military build-up on the borders of Russia since World War Two has not happened. On May 11, Romania went “live” with a Nato “missile defence” base that aims its first-strike American missiles at the heart of Russia, the world’s second nuclear power.
Victoria Nuland was the author of the European-Eurasian policy, marking a turn from using the National Security Council to using the desks at the State Department to guide policy. Both Clinton, as Secretary of State, and Obama, as President, signed off on the actions taken in Ukraine and in diplomacy with Russia. In fact, the new hard line has complicated and in some instances made silly our policy with regard to eliminating Daesh/ISIS/ISIL and our policy towards a post-Iran-agreement Iran.
Pilger continues about the US strategy of encircling Eurasia.
As a direct consequence, China reportedly has changed its nuclear weapons policy from no-first-use to high alert and put to sea submarines with nuclear weapons. The escalator is quickening.
Did you know about China’s change in policy?
Pilger recounts the standard litany of Clinton’s foreign policy experience. Someone check this please. What did Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State succeed at?
The election of Trump or Clinton is the old illusion of choice that is no choice: two sides of the same coin. In scapegoating minorities and promising to “make America great again,” Trump is a far right-wing domestic populist; yet the danger of Clinton may be more lethal for the world.
“Only Donald Trump has said anything meaningful and critical of US foreign policy,” wrote Stephen Cohen, emeritus professor of Russian History at Princeton and NYU, one of the few Russia experts in the United States to speak out about the risk of war.
Stephen Cohen knows the region well from the Cold War, but “Donald Trump has said” is pretty thin soup for a meal.
Pilger quotes Cohen offering questions that Trump has asked:
[W]hy is the United States “everywhere on the globe?”
What is NATO’s true mission?
Why does the US always pursue regime change in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine?
Why does Washington treat Russia and Vladimir Putin as an enemy?
Those are important questions that must be asked of all three candidates–of Sanders only to see if there is any daylight there between him and Clinton and Trump multiple times to get the sample set of his views.
The hysteria in the liberal media over Trump serves an illusion of “free and open debate” and “democracy at work.” His views on immigrants and Muslims are grotesque, yet the deporter-in-chief of vulnerable people from America is not Trump but Obama, whose betrayal of people of colour is his legacy: such as the warehousing of a mostly black prison population, now more numerous than Stalin’s gulag.
Trump as continuity, and Clinton? This really goes to the power of the Congress to screw people. And what fights Obama chose to fight.
Pilger compares Obama’s establishment Democratic policies with Blairism. Clintonism certainly will tend in the direction of their good friend Tony Blair. They headed similar political movements.
That way, you stop the monster and preserve a system gagging for another war.
That is, voting for the Democratic candidate–in Pilger’s opinion, as surely as voting for LBJ in 1964 was voting for escalation of the Vietnam War.
The best way to honor the dead and remember the veterans is to have no more wars.
When will the US look in the mirror?
