John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN SCOOPY WEB

 

“A new art installation at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, called “Above and Beyond,” features over 58,000 replica dog tags — one for each American soldier killed in the Vietnam War.”

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Response to another reader who asked where are the million dog tags for the Vietnamese killed:

 

Indeed, and the number is actually greater.

Total estimated losses for Vietnam are 3 million.

After all, America tried every new filthy idea it could come up with there, from massive carpet bombing to early versions of cluster bombs, to say nothing of napalm.

In the CIA’s Operation Phoenix, somewhere between 20 thousand and 40 thousand alone had their throats cut in the middle of the night by belly-crawling American special forces. These victims were civilians, typically people such as village mayors and other officials. It was an effort to destroy leadership and dispirit the people.

Add to that the horrors of landmines and a sea of Agent Orange left behind to kill and mangle and cause birth defects for decades more.

Of course, another million died in Cambodia’s Killing Fields.

And who was responsible for toppling the neutralist government of Cambodia, a government which remained peaceful despite American pressure, allowing the Khmer Rouge guerillas to take over the country?

You’re right if you guessed the United States with its long series of illegal, secret bombings and mini-invasions (“incursions”).

And after the bloody Khmer Rouge took over and started its slaughter, the United States did absolutely nothing to stop them. Finally, the Vietnamese, despite their own years of immense war suffering, attacked them.

It’s a glorious record for America, to be sure.

One to be proud of. A genuine holocaust begun just 20 years after the Nazi Holocaust.

Certainly, something to commemorate.

It is why I thought the Vietnam War Memorial was remarkably, surprisingly appropriate when it first appeared, a plain dark wall of names sunk into the ground almost as though to commemorate shame. Washington has since managed to spoil the effect with various groups of heroic bronze statues.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

 

Please, yet another “conspiracy theories” put-down.

You’ve done at least three of them in the last few weeks, almost as plentiful as attacks and put-downs on Jeremy Corbyn.

This kind of article is just about as brainless as the conspiracy mutterings of a poor homeless schizophrenic.

Thoughtful people do not need preaching to on this subject.

The truth is we live in a civilization in which conspiracies – genuine ones – are a normal part of our landscape.

And why is that?

Because where great wealth and power are at risk – as they frequently are in our western world of unprecedented affluence – there is the constant attraction to manipulate events to remove the risk, thus conspiracies.

In recent decades, we so many events which have been secretly manipulated, thus rendering them conspiratorial in nature, it seems to me laughable when someone publishes a piece such this one.

For example, the United States overthrew governments secretly in Guatemala, Iran, Chile, and kept a huge secret operation against Castro going for decades, a genuine secret terrorist operation which made bin Laden’s mountain redoubt resemble a boy scout camp. Troops were trained, weapons distributed, assassins launched, bombings undertaken (including one Cuban airliner), and immense resources squandered on America’s trying to get its own way.

The genuine holocaust of America’s invasion of Vietnam (3 million left dead there) was launched with a staged provocation called the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Later secret bombings and surreptitious incursions into peaceful Cambodia resulted in the fall of a neutral government and gave the world “the killing fields,” and ultimately the deaths of another million people.

The fall of Sukarno in Indonesia – an event manipulated by the CIA – resulted in a massive terror campaign. Half a million people were hacked to death as though in a spontaneous uprising and had their bodies thrown into rivers. The American State Department was burning the telephone wires into the night submitting lists of names of “communists” it regarded as suitable for such treatment.

The Soviet downing of Korean Air lines 107 was held up as an example of Soviet brutality, but what we learned later from Sy Hersh, the world’s best investigative reporter, was that the plane was on a secret mission for the CIA to test Soviet air defences.

America has launched dozens of lesser coups, interventions, and minor invasions in the last fifty years. The invasion of Panama, on the pretext of drugs, removed a disliked leader. Recent manipulations in Venezuela have destabilized that government. The first Gulf War was just such an operation with America’s ambassador in Iraq having told Saddam the U.S. had no interest in what he did in Kuwait, then using his minor invasion as a pretext for a massive war and horrible aftermath.

How about the supply of poison gas to Saddam during the long (American manipulated) Iraq-Iran War? It was used to kill thousands of Iranian soldiers, and no war crimes accusations were made.

Look at events in Syria. What a completely deceitful destruction just to topple a leader America and Israel hate. And to this day, there’s no honesty about what has gone on, the only truths we’re receiving coming out of Russia’s government-invited intervention.

Look at the mess made of Libya.

Look at the mess made of Iraq, once the Mideast’s most progressive and economically capable state. How was that miracle of destruction accomplished? A river of lies and manipulations about “weapons of mass destruction,” false papers about purchases of yellowcake, and even the CIA career of an honest Republican figure’s wife ended over his refusal to go along with the lies of Bush and Cheney.

The Dr. Kelly incident, about which we’ve never been told the truth. Kelly knew where the bodies were buried in the business of weapons – including importantly what happened to South Africa’s fissile stockpile after the fall of the apartheid government. Did it go to Israel? Dr. Kelly’s handedness made completely implausible the published version of his death.

The recent Sarin poison gas incidents in Syria are completely fraudulent. The gas was used on some poor people, but it was not used by Assad’s army, it was used by the ISIS or al-Nusrah terrorists up until now secretly supported by America. It was to provide a pretext for an American air assault – thus creating another Libya – but the Russians foiled the plot.

Israel’s entire modern history is riddled with such activity. It is not for nothing that Mossad’s motto is, “By way of deception, thou shalt do war.” The Lavon Affair. The bombing of the King David Hotel. The assassination of Count Bernadotte. The manipulation of events to create the 1967 War which Israel knew it could win while grabbing Palestinian and other land they coveted. The long air assault on the USS Liberty. America’s refusal to come to the ship’s aid. Israel’s lame stuff about a mistake. Secret assistance to ISIS and al Nusrah.

One could continue writing along these lines for a long time, so the article and its predecessors are nothing but propaganda to discredit those with genuine doubts and concerns.

Oh, and we shouldn’t forget the journalism practices of the newspapers belonging to David Cameron’s country-house buddy, Rupert Murdoch. Corruption and lies and manipulation on quite a grand scale, and likely never to be all sorted out.