I’m more astonished by the day. It’s mass hysteria based on fear and multiplied by the echo chambers. There is a psychological explanation for events coming together as we witness today. The Red Menace of the sixties and the Vietnam War was quite low level compared to today. Russia is barely providing poverty level sustainability for its citizens with 90% of this great nation living in harsh conditions. As was mentioned elsewhere, it’s economy is ranked lower than the state of California. Due to western provocation over the past decade, are we now living in fear of the Russian bear? What a bs. Internet and social media are proprietary US assets and used in a global war of cheating and espionage. Played a role in the Arab uprising and a major cyberattack on the sovereignty of Iran and its people. Don’t underestimate the sophistication and performance of the Russian people in theoretical sciences. Looking back on the resistance to the Nazi German invasion and the siege of Leningrad, Russians know how to persevere and survive. There is no moral standing on how the west has aggravated Russia after 1989. Ukraine is more Russian than Prussian based on the high level of endemic corruption for all to see.
Rand corporation, Robert McNamara and the domino theory … how well we did bombing the hell out of the North. Even managed to censor the iconic image of US war crimes in Vietnam. To mister Obama, the United States needs more whistleblowers, not less to provide a balance view of how decisions are made and its consequencies on foreign states!
○ The Pentagon Papers
○ Barack Obama, in 2009, championed the cause of government transparency …
○ The Iraq War victims and Chelsea Manning
A single photo that changed history of a war in SE Asia
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Kim Phuc's journey from war to forgiveness, living in CanadaFacebook briefly removed and quickly reinstated one of the most powerful images to emerge from war–a 1972 photograph of a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl–after initially saying the image violates the company’s policies on displaying nudity. A censorship battle ensued.
Espen Egil Hansen, the editor-in-chief of Norway’s Aftenposten, slammed Mark Zuckerberg for a perceived abuse of power, calling the CEO of Facebook “the world’s most powerful editor.”
Vietnamese people in the aftermath of Agent Orange
His 1983 book, Waiting for an Army to Die, denounced the deception of the Pentagon and the industry that ignored the Vietnam veterans until most of them died. They simply did not want to implicate the manufacturers of Agent Orange with the dioxin harm of their weed killers, which were also sprayed in the United States for decades. Indeed, 2,4-D is still in the American farmers’ armory.
His Scorched Earth (Seven Story Books, 2011) completes the story of why, in fact, the spraying of the Agent Orange was pernicious, especially to Vietnam and its people. He visited Vietnam where he interviewed soldiers who had been sprayed by Agent Orange. “I wanted to listen to their stories,” he said, “and to hear if their accounts were similar to those of American veterans.” That process led him to Vietnamese who have been trying to survive “serious illnesses” and the “sorrow of knowing that their plight, their destiny, is irrevocable.” He also talked to medical doctors trying to cope with the monstrous health effects Agent Orange left on its victims.
1975: The Start and End of Conflict in Southeast Asia (Year 2015)
This year, we commemorate the 40th anniversary of the end of Vietnam War, a two-decade conflict that pitted a poor and divided Asian nation against the rich and powerful United States. Understandably, it was a politically significant moment in world history.
But there were other equally memorable events that took place in Southeast Asia in 1975. Aside from the end of war in Vietnam, elsewhere in the region, the year also marked the start of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the escalation of Muslim rebellion in the southern parts of Thailand and the Philippines.
When the army from the communist North Vietnam arrived in Saigon on April 30, 1975, the war had already been raging on for two decades. The war killed at least three million Vietnamese and more than 50,000 Americans. While Vietnam may have `won’ the war, it was a devastated country in 1975. Its rural and urban centers were in ruins and its economy was devastated.
If Vietnam succeeded in expelling American troops, it failed to remove the bombs left behind by the invading army. Over the past 40 years, more than 100,000 Vietnamese have been killed or injured by these bombs and land mines. Another grim legacy of the war is the poisonous impact of Agent Orange, which the Americans used against the Vietnamese Army. The chemical warfare not only destroyed Vietnam’s agriculture but also affected residents who were exposed to it. About three million people, including 150,000 children, suffered from defects caused by Agent Orange.
Another country which was ravaged by the war was Vietnam’s neighbor, Laos. Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Laos to cut off the supplies of communist guerrillas operating along the borders of Vietnam and Laos.
The “invincibility” of the US returned with papa Bush’s succesfull military campaign to liberate Kuwait from former ally Iraq and Saddam Hussein. There is always some irony in history. For the wise, history teaches us lessons. For the unwise, history easily repeats itself. The western world is participating in a teutonic wave to fascism similar to 100 years ago …