Sucking up to a war criminal
Are you having a peaceful day? Devoid of aggravation and annoyance, but secretly hold masochistic tendencies? No prob. Just tune into Netflix and watch the new documentary about the Viet Nam War (military conflict), which ended 50 years ago, 1975, only eight years after Nixon was voted into office, promising to end the war with “peace and honor.”
If the show — “Turning Point: The Viet Nam War” — doesn’t make your blood boil, then you might need a transfusion.
Carefully crafted, no one really knew what that hollow phrase even meant, “peace and honor,” but “Tricky Dick” Nixon was voted in as this nation’s 37th president, and it only took him eight years for us to pull out our last troops.
By then, the U.S. had dropped more bombs (approximately 7.5 million tons) than during all of WW II. (Source: BunkHistory. org.) Thus, further enriching this nation’s military-industrial complex, which Eisenhower had warned us about in his farewell address, January 1961.
So what does this have to do with Trump and Putin? Yawn. Give me a minute and I’ll get there.
The Nam documentary shows why Bush and Cheney kept the news media on a tight leash during our disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (AKA, “embedded troops”). If not for the brave journalists reporting from Nam, free to report on what they saw and heard — our brave troops dying, receiving horrific wounds — then LBJ, Nixon, Robert McNamara, and General Westmoreland could both have continued the lie indefinitely — we are winning the war.
Uh, no, we weren’t, and too many troops, including innocent Nam civilians, were dying in the process (the 1968 My Lai massacre, etc.).
CBS Steps Up
When CBS’s Morley Safer filed a report in August ’65, “The Burning of Cam Ne,” after traveling through the jungle with a company of Marines in a “search and destroy” mission, LBJ claimed Safer was undermining America’s role there and demanded CBS fire him. Contrary to what we’re seeing today from news media, many either sued by Trump or cowed into submission not to report the facts, CBS’ president basically said, screw you, and kept reporting the facts – America was fighting a war with no end in sight.
After CBS’s Walter Cronkite (AKA, “the most trusted man in America”) went to Nam in early ’68 to see for himself what was going on, and then described the war as a “stalemate,” LBJ dropped out of that year’s presidential race. “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America,” said Johnson.
Meanwhile, while guys like Dick Cheney were escaping the draft thanks to multiple college deferments, blacks, Hispanics, and poor whites were dying in disproportionate numbers.
“I need more troops,” Westmoreland kept demanding.
Here’s where the Netflix documentary gets interesting. Actually, the whole show is interesting, albeit heartbreaking, if one considers the American lives lost – approximately 58,000, of which the RGV, often described as this country’s most patriotic region based on military enlistment per capita, lost too many: Between April and June of 1968, the two most prominent anti-war voices in America – Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy – were assassinated. Even today, we’re supposed to consider that to be a coincidence.
Sure thing. In Paris, which the Netflix documentary shows, LBJ, to his credit, had peace talks underway, to which the Viet Cong had reportedly already agreed. Johnson even called an end to the bombing.
Can’t have that. Nixon secretly convinced South Viet Nam that he could cut a better deal for them once he got elected, so they backed away from the peace table.
The tricky Dickster got elected, and bombs away, while tax dollars flowed to the American companies manufacturing them.
Nam, Laos, and Cambodia. Ka-boom.
More tax dollars spent producing toxic chemicals like Agent Orange dropped on our troops.
The whole Netflix show is depressing but should be required viewing for all high school seniors, so they know what this country is capable of when the wrong people are in control. Aren’t they always?
Rhetorical question. Like what’s going on now. A proven war criminal – “Vlad the Bad” Putin – gets the red-carpet treatment last week on American soil, while Zelenskyy gets hammered last February in the Oval Office for not thanking us enough.
Meanwhile, Russia continues shelling cities in Ukraine, killing women and children, but Trump lays down the red carpet in Alaska last week for the war criminal, shakes Putin’s hand, and even pats the back of it in a real show of brotherly love.
For a real history lesson on what can go wrong if the wrong people are in power (in this new century, both Biden and Trump for starters), the Netflix documentary — “Turning Point: The Viet Nam War” — is worth the time to watch.