There is a desk somewhere in D.C. where complaints against the U.S. military are excised with the precision of a meat cleaver. It is in this cubicle that torturers are cleared, murderers are absolved, and gross negligence is shrugged off as unavoidable mistakes. “Patriots” defend the war crimes and the rest cry foul.
American media assists these desk jockeys, as NBC did in the wake of footage captured by Kevin Sites, when it wrangled the cat-out-of-the-bag as only a complicit propagandist would, by ginning up fear the bodies might have been wired with bombs and downplaying evidence that despite the five men being disarmed and treated by medics the day before, some were shot again seconds before Sites entered the mosque and filmed an American soldier executing one still alive. SBS‘ Dateline, in Shoot the Messenger, airs the complete footage largely ignored by American media and questions the long-term effects of such cover-ups, as Sites is now doing, despite the hate mail and death threats he’s received since the story first aired.
The Pentagon report clearing American soldiers of any wrongdoing in the death of intelligence officer Nicola Calipari has caused a public outcry in Italy. Giuliana Sgrena has also called it a “slap in the face,” and no wonder, considering her testimony and that of the other intelligence agent was ignored.
Danny Schechter has filed some of the best coverage of this non-event, and if you haven’t seen it yet, his excellent documentary Weapons of Mass Deception is a real gut check. Schechter is focussing on Vietnam this week because the 30th anniversary of the “end” of that war is this Saturday, and Gallery Viet Nam will be screening his film on “Saturday at 5 PM at 345 Greenwich Street in NY during the Tribeca Film Festival Street Fair.”
I put “end” in scare quotes for many obvious reasons, the landmines and bombies, the generational effects of napalm and agent orange, the terms of a so-called peace treaty signed two-years before the fall of Saigon that were never honoured, the decades of trade restrictions. How many “patriots” who blame antiwar folks for helping the Khmer Rouge to power are oblivious to U.S. gov’t support of them despite their atrocities, or as William Blum in his incredible book Killing Hope writes, “after their subsequent defeat by the Vietnamese, both by defending their right to the United Nations Cambodian seat, and in their military struggle against the Cambodian government and its Vietnamese allies. In November 1980, Ray Cline, former Deputy Director of the CIA, visited a Khmer Rouge enclave in Cambodia in his capacity as senior foreign policy adviser to President-elect Ronald Reagan. A Khmer Rouge press release spoke of the visit in warm terms. This was in keeping with the Reagan administration’s subsequent opposition to the Vietnamese-supported Phnom Pehn government. A lingering bitter hatred of Vietnam by unreconstructed American cold warriors appears to be the only explanation for this policy.”
p. 139
In The Anti-Empire Report, No. 20, Blum observes:
When, it has to be wondered, will the scores of victims of US imperial aggression begin to complain about American history textbooks? As one example, the last I knew, in the pages of these books, the United States never “invaded” Vietnam. Will future American history texts speak of the US “liberation” of Iraq and Afghanistan? Is there any current textbook that conveys to the minds of young Americans the god-awful consequences of Washington’s roles in Indonesia 1965, Greece 1967 or Angola 1975, to name but a few?
Frances Fitzgerald, in her study of American history textbooks, observed that “According to these books, the United States had been a kind of Salvation Army to the rest of the world: throughout history, it had done little but dispense benefits to poor, ignorant, and diseased countries. … the United States always acted in a disinterested fashion, always from the highest of motives; it gave, never took.”{6}
The State Is Coming for Its Stupid Children
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April 28 is Take Your Sons and Daughters To Work day and Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon are hosting Captain America and Spiderman for your photographing pleasure (cameras in authourised areas only.) The superheros will be passing out Marvel’s Special Limited Edition “Salute to Our Troops” comic book.
In the eighties Marvel produced “The Nam,” written by Vietnam veteran Dick Murray, “no superheroes here.” It continues to receive praise for dealing realistically with death and the authenticity of its stories. This is one issue (pdf) that subject Chris Noel says depicts an event that didn’t actually occur but is similar to many encounters she had whilst touring. When public interest in the series waned, Marvel insisted upon adding a superhero to boost sales, an editorial policy that led to Murray abandoning the comic after 5 years.
Noel, a “blonde Hollywood bombshell” who became a DJ for Armed Forces Radio Network hosting a daily radio show called, “A Date with Chris,” now runs two homeless shelters for Vietnam vets. Suffice to say this is not the date Chris promised all those years ago. The tradition of sending half-naked blondes to war zones continues. It must be quite the treat for female soldiers in the units. Dolly Parton has thrown her pair into the mix, appearing at the Grand Ole Opry with Donald to show her support for the war effort.
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America, from cradle-to-grave, is a carefully constructed commercial. That might be a flag in the little boy’s hand but the position of his arm is a chilling Zieg Heil. The gov’t thrives on such optical illusions, a win-win situation operated on the wink-wink principle. Don’t you see the nice black serviceman and his daughter in the background, the refined folks in Dolly’s audience might tell you, the white man is benevolent, we freed our slaves and we’re freeing Arabs, now. Those signing up to do the actual fighting would simply tell you those sand niggers are going down for being too stupid, and too lazy, to know what’s good for them.
It’s a powerful image, and it should resonate with children raised on history books that slice and dice information until it supports the notion America is all-good, all-knowing, and only moves in God-like directions; and beholden to a media that enforces it.
Imagine a superhero convincing the rest of the world of it. That America sends its children into that world on the wings of such fiction is barbaric.