My Lai Was Not An 'Incident': Seeking Full Disclosure on Vietnam
http://www.commondreams.org/further/2014/10/17/my-lai-was-not-incident-seeking-full-disclosure-vietnam
My Lai Was Not An 'Incident': Seeking Full Disclosure on Vietnam
Abby Zimet, staff writer
Friday, October 17, 2014
Language is telling; so are facts. With the approach of the "full panoply of Orwellian forgetfulness" that is a 13-year, $65 million commemoration of the Vietnam War by the same people who started it, it's nigh on impossible to reconcile Obama's "valor of a generation that served with honor fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans" with the savage years many "remember, with painful acuity, as other than glorious" - years of lies, loss, rage, trauma, protests and the deaths of millions of innocents. Seeking to "speak truth to power," Veterans For Peace are rejecting an official narrative they say sanitizes and mythologizes an unconscionable war - and likely helps legitimize further such wars - by organizing their own Peace and Justice Commemoration as part of a larger Full Disclosure Campaign. Its goal is to "truly examine what happened during those tragic and tumultuous years," and use those lessons to prevent them from happening again.
From the start, many have questioned what longtime activist Tom Hayden calls the "staggering" idea of a commemoration orchestrated by the Department of Defense. Citing the Pentagon's questionable "version of the truth" that for so long sustained an immoral war, he convincingly argues that, "If you conduct a war, you shouldn’t be in charge of narrating it." Almost everything about the project, from its website full of glossy pictures of smiling veterans to its very language - its mission to "assist a grateful nation" in thanking veterans, Obama's thinking "with solemn reverence upon the valor of a generation," its initial labelling of the massacre of 500 women, children and older men at My Lai an "incident" - bears out the notion that the project's goal is largely "an ex post facto justification of the war," or to rewrite history in order to repeat it with as little opposition as possible.
In a petition for revisions that sparked their decision to hold their own commemoration, over 500 veterans and activists argued for "an honest remembrance of what actually went on in Viet Nam." They seek recognition for the "many thousands of veterans" who opposed or came to oppose the war, who refused the draft, went to jail, left the country, marched in protests; for the millions who marched, prayed, organized; for the military establishment that for years lied, propagandized, made deadly mistakes, and lied again; for the thousands of hapless soldiers thrown into a war of choice who suffered, died, anguished and then came home broken, traumatized and often abandoned - startlingly, more Vietnam veterans subsequently died by suicide than in battle; for the millions of Vietnamese civilians killed, maimed, poisoned, traumatized, driven from their homes, crippled by land mines, their children later disfigured by Agent Orange; for the rage and regret felt by so many Americans towards the war's lies and losses that a new term was created to express their weariness - the Vietnam Syndrome.
To right those wrongs and expose those truths, Veterans For Peace are now looking for stories, ideas, articles and photos for their own commemoration. "It is incumbent on us not to cede the war’s memory to those who have little interest in an honest accounting, and who want to justify further acts of military adventurism," they argue. The war, they insist, is a cautionary tale: "What are the consequences of trying to control the fate of a people from afar with little understanding or interest in their history and culture...or their human desires? What are the consequences of dehumanized ideologies used to justify wars of aggression? To honor the Viet Nam generation and to inform current and future generations, we should make every effort to pass on a critical and honest history of the war."
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I was in country AND was in the Americal Division (198th Light Infantry Brigade) when this story broke.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_lai
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over the last 30 years.
Sitting next to me is the Pulitzer Book A Bright Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan.
It a thick paperback, worth every page of tiny print.
Gave a copy to both my kids, plus the poor dears had to grow up listening to me rant about the war for many years.
they won't buy this latest round of BS.
And I think the folks who do buy it are gonna run into the people who know why it is a lie.
After my generation, the anti-war generation, is gone, I have faith those who follow will find the truth.
Meanwhile, we do have the ear of the grandkids.......
With regard to our Oligarch leader's values, the war was a huge success, it was very "valuable". I am making the distinction because, as long as there is value in war to the Oligarch leaders, the so-called wars will continue.
The value of the Viet Nam War.
The MIC corporate owners got much wealthier along with their lapdog politicians.
The war started the desensitizing of the American public to the horrors of war.
Taxpayer dollars were used to perfect the war machine of the Oligarchs.
The war makers learned that using the draft was not the way. Keep the lower classes in poverty and offer them food and shelter for their families for fighting in wars.
As long as war is profitable to the American Aristocracy, we will have wars.
Last edited Sat Oct 18, 2014, 12:42 PM - Edit history (1)
I was sickened when I watched Obama say that. The hypocrisy was so evident I couldn't understand how he could get the words out of his mouth and that there wasn't huge backlash. But then when "War is Good" for the Republicans and now Democrats the MSM is only too happy to not invite those who disagree to appear in any discussion of what was wrong with that speech and to give an opposing view. The push back came from the few Progressive sites that still can find donations to operate and even here on DU there was little outrage because we are seemingly always in "election season" when it comes to criticism. So war is good so that we can make sure none of our Dem Candidates ever speak out about it. We are just supposed to "vote and hope..."
Older Boomers haven't forgotten Vietnam and don't believe that "Endless War" is an acceptable option.
