Viet Nam War

Global War deceptions & mass manipulation, fear-mongering terror schemes and propaganda in the Age of the Bomb
hoi.polloi
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Viet Nam War

Unread post by hoi.polloi »

The Viet Nam war seems to have been a real stinker.

It featured: insane new levels of propaganda, military corruption, military profiteering, apparently an insane amount of death and mayhem, NASA's Apollo shenanigans, JFK's disappearing act, transitions to LBJ and Nixon, stories of the mistreatment and abuse and (perhaps positive) disillusionment of soldiers, creation of anarchistic bike gangs and hippie communes, and incredibly manipulative false prophets and precedents for all future protests and gatherings in America. To this day, neocon politicians comment on how Viet Nam was bad for the military's "image" because they didn't manipulate and deceive people enough into accepting it.

I would be curious to hear users' thoughts on what went down during this strange time, what was real about the Viet Nam tragedy, what was propaganda and what was counter-propaganda.

I feel a lot about our present dilemma might be answered by an examination into this relatively recent war and the behavior of everyone around it.
Lazlo
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Re: Viet Nam War

Unread post by Lazlo »

The Reality of The War

The reality of that war came home to me when I saw someone I knew really well came home with the "50 yard stare." I have heard it was all about drugs and the U.S. having its own ready supply vs Turkey and the Middle East where we didn't have the hegemony that we have now. One of the goals of the drug trafficking was to opiate the population at home to keep down dissension a need for which has since been obviated by some other function. A good starting point is a book I just finished entitled: Vietnam: The Australian War. It is a rather odd book in that it seems that the Aussies fought a parochial war over there without the usual amount of direct coalition with other allies, odd, but it depicts well the quotidian slog of fighting in Vietnam. Another quirk of this book is that it shows how, at least from Australian input, that Vietnam was a Catholic war. Support by Aussie Catholics was rabid at first as they saw it as a crusade; later they were very sorry and showed even more remorse than any other nationality.
hoi.polloi
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Re: Viet Nam War

Unread post by hoi.polloi »

Thanks for the interesting ideas. I was too young to experience these protests first hand, but my parents' generation was not.

The reality I have seen of the war has mainly been the aftermath in America; veterans with extreme grudges, mental issues (no doubt a combination of normal trauma and unusually drug-induced trauma) and stories from both sides of protest lines. How quickly we have forgotten American military flying helicopters to gas American citizens, and cops beating on young people to quell the riots.

Feel free to hit the "mute" button and ignore the mainstream narrative of the video ("protesters helped North Viet Nam win the war by stalling negotiations!" Well, duh, the point was to get America uninvolved no matter who "won") but this is an interesting compilation of some of the types of brutality used back in the day.


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVQK8fU99Sc

If you pay attention to recent protests in America you see both sides still getting quite a bit more organized than the 1970's footage shown here depicts protesters and police. The protesters are more and more 'sanctioned' and organized by protest groups, more 'de-escalators' instead of antagonists at the front of things, and the police side more and more resembles military operation, with steady marches of stormtroopers, cameras and recordings and press badges getting confiscated, and so on.

To me it seems there is something very ugly but important about this conflict that survives in the American mentality, and which mainstream media is desperately trying to belittle and retroactively erase. Even much of "alternative media" prefers to take a conservative look back and blame the protesters for expressing themselves, but then turn around and say how shocking it is that security forces do military training exercises in American cities.

Also, what's with creepy figures associated with the Chicago 8, such as Abbie Hoffman? Is his death from depression-induced drug use real or another celebrity "offering" to the populists?
Lazlo
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Re: Viet Nam War

Unread post by Lazlo »

"protesters helped North Viet Nam win the war by stalling negotiations!"
That is an epic lie. Just look at Afghanistan and Iraq where with a much more modern and sophisticated military we got our asses kicked. I do a lot of research and am not an academic, so I don't take notes like I should but I am pretty sure I remember George Seldes saying that in WWI they could shoot reporters for going into Germany after the Armistice. I surmise that the reason for this is that they didn't want anyone peeking behind the curtain to see how the whole thing was choreographed. Witness to a Century: Encounters with the Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs http://www.amazon.com/Witness-Century-E ... pd_sim_b_2

Re: Abby Hoffman etc. that is another whole can of worms. I am just beginning to delve into mind control and it is a difficult topic to handle. But many of the "lights" of the movement appear to have been compromised in one way or another, were change agents, or were merely trying to make a buck ala Alex Jones. Many of the best and the brightest to borrow a term from that era seem to have either direct or tenuous roots that lead back to the CIA and thought control experiments.
fbenario
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Re: Viet Nam War

Unread post by fbenario »

Lazlo wrote:Many of the best and the brightest to borrow a term from that era seem to have either direct or tenuous roots that lead back to the CIA and thought control experiments.
... which we've also seen with the new stars of the late 60s/early 70s music industry ("protest" artists like J.Morrison, F.Zappa, blah blah blah), as set forth in Dave MacGowan's Laurel Canyon series. I think Hoi's right, the Vietnam War was likely a cover for TPTB initiating all the fake and/or controlled crap that has poisoned the last 50 years.

EDIT: Why does the title of this thread divide the word 'Vietnam" into the 2-word neologism "Viet Nam"? Am I missing a subtlety?
hoi.polloi
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Re: Viet Nam War

Unread post by hoi.polloi »

In my recent readings of the country name, it has always been divided into Việt Nam, Viet Nam, or various full names in transliterated Vietnamese. I figured it's 'their' country after all, not 'our' war lands, so to try to get perspective on just what this event was, I dropped the official name of the 'war theater' and called it what it is: a war in a foreign country that we quite ignorantly got ourselves involved in. Hence, it's not "Nam" or "The Vietnam War", it's a war in Viet Nam.

And I am not sure if I said that I think this Viet Nam War really was all pure "distraction". On the contrary, I was suggesting fake news stories were used during the 60's and 70's to cover real facts about and atrocities of the war, and to smother and disempower a righteous sort of American character embodied by Civil Rights activists. War is surely a sham on many levels, and perhaps even the number of deaths is deliberately exaggerated in proportion to the outcry from peace movements.

What do I know? I didn't live during the time, but I am told by those who did that there was "progress" being made and it was cut short by the stories that suddenly came out during this time, which were killing motivation and inspiration: assassinations, the Kent State massacre, and so on. Perhaps a more realistic guess about the war's relation to fake news stories is different; knowing the non-violent movements' aversion to violence, the CIA made it clear that violence would increase in proportion to the peace. Real on the ground level and staged on other levels. (After all, they apparently don't like to "waste" powerful people.)

Perhaps 'mind control' or crowd control was also being experimented with and the war served as a distraction from that, while not outright being pure distraction. I don't quite understand it myself, but to say that invading a country is just pure fake distraction I think misses the point of the complexities of this era and what may have been lost and what may have been gained.
eyesopenwider
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Re: Viet Nam War

Unread post by eyesopenwider »

Việt Nam is how it's referred to in Việt Nam (been living in HCM for several years).
Also of note, the war is referred to as the "American War" from the Vietnamese perspective and prior to 1990 the War Remnants Museum was named the Exhibition House for US and Puppet Crimes.
icarusinbound
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Re: Viet Nam War

Unread post by icarusinbound »

[/quote]
EDIT: Why does the title of this thread divide the word 'Vietnam" into the 2-word neologism "Viet Nam"? Am I missing a subtlety?[/quote]
Yes, I believe so.

Contemporary MSM reporting had this original 'split' title for the country name, so for those of us learning about the war at school in the '60s, and from the TV of the time, it looks familiar and...right. Wiki claims http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Vietnam to support this split-named format. As well as being the current official format for UN naming purposes, it was (is?) the original classic format.

I've a notion (perhaps better than subjective) that European/non-US reporting may have favoured the singularised name 'Vietnam', and that it became more commonly conjoined when mentioning that other playground, as in the phrase 'Vietnam and Cambodia'. I reckon there's become a bit of historicisied alliteration with the term 'vietnam vet' (there is a possible related dimension to this, that people who were, or claimed to be, veterans of the conflict (of any side) would tend to use the two-word 'Viet Nam' format, conversely, modern-day historians have tended to anglofy it into 'Vietnam'.

I was ignorant until now (or forgetful) of the meaning and significance of ''south'' within the nationymic word-pair: this is significant, and maybe deeply so. There are other resonances (and reasons) for the two-part name, including the internal tactical sectarian groupings of 'Viet Cong', (shorted to ''VC'', and phoneticised to 'victor charlie'...hence proto-insurgents became Hollywoodified into the insider term 'charlies') (this also became a lateral street-word for cocaine). I hadn't detected, within my mind's ear, until now, the rhyming couplet of 'Soviet- Viet' (homophonic echoes...surges-resurgents). I'm also now remembering the syllabic split made by US reporters...'Vee-et--Nam'...'Dah--Nang'....'Nom--Peng'....rarely the latinate merge-name.

There's much, much more to be said about this era... depiction by the movies, the icons+architypes it spawned, music, ersatz opposition at home.

Much of the war correspondant camerawork smacks of that implausibly-composed Nat Geo frame-and-tell style, often far too clean and pretty, so close to being staged as standard.

The whole South East Asia thing was (is?) a super-seminal channel of attitude, perception, and acceptance.

It achieved the impossible, through skillful media work, somehow on some levels totally neutering or defusing previous conflicts, trumping with the camera even WW1 (a conflict Speilberg claims is less known about in the US than the Wars of 1812...partly because of Vietnam)
bostonterrierowner
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Re: Viet Nam War

Unread post by bostonterrierowner »

Lazlo wrote: Just look at Afghanistan and Iraq where with a much more modern and sophisticated military we got our asses kicked.
Iraq has been conquered and lies firmly under Anglo-American rule , heroin is flowing undisturbed from Afghanistan and you ( I assume you are an American ) got your ass kicked ... :)

The truth is that US Military ran over these 2 countries and we are being conditioned to think that some kind of an equal struggle has been going on over there throughout the years .

If your ass was so badly kicked by the illiterate shepherds why fake war zone deaths ( see Simon's thread on the subject ) ?

You greatly underestimate your country's military might
Lazlo
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Re: Viet Nam War

Unread post by Lazlo »

bostonterrierowner wrote:
Lazlo wrote: Just look at Afghanistan and Iraq where with a much more modern and sophisticated military we got our asses kicked.
Iraq has been conquered and lies firmly under Anglo-American rule , heroin is flowing undisturbed from Afghanistan and you ( I assume you are an American ) got your ass kicked ... :)

The truth is that US Military ran over these 2 countries and we are being conditioned to think that some kind of an equal struggle has been going on over there throughout the years .

If your ass was so badly kicked by the illiterate shepherds why fake war zone deaths ( see Simon's thread on the subject ) ?

You greatly underestimate your country's military might
New York Times Has a Knack for Accuracy

That is, when they are not lying:

U.S. Considers Faster Pullout in Afghanistan
By MARK MAZZETTI and MATTHEW ROSENBERG
Published: July 8, 2013 689 Comments

WASHINGTON — Increasingly frustrated by his dealings with President Hamid Karzai, President Obama is giving serious consideration to speeding up the withdrawal of United States forces from Afghanistan and to a “zero option” that would leave no American troops there after next year, according to American and European officials.

Now, what I don't know is if this "zero option" includes the typical 30,000 to 50,000 soldiers the U.S. has a habit of leaving "in theater" after they pull out.

However, I have no reason to believe the following State Department Travel Advisory is not true: THREATS TO SAFETY AND SECURITY: The latest Travel Warning for Afghanistan warns U.S. citizens against travel to Afghanistan and states clearly that the security situation remains critical. No region in Afghanistan should be considered immune from violence, and the potential exists throughout the country for hostile acts, either targeted or random, against U.S. and other Western nationals at any time. There are remnants of the former Taliban regime and the terrorist al-Qaida network operating in various parts of Afghanistan, as well as narco-traffickers and other terrorist and insurgent groups that oppose the international community....

Of course you have to parse their language (I don't know what a remnant of an al-Qaida group is for example) but I think that by "narco-trafficer" (sic) they mean rival gang so it doesn't look as if their control is all that tight. Where the control is tight is here in the U.S. Where journalists are assassinated and the only reason for this is to cover up dissent from what a piss poor and uninspired job they are doing in the first place. And, just as with COINTELPRO, the main goal, although it seems unlikely, is to prevent a 5th column from forming.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/world ... wanted=all
bostonterrierowner
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Re: Viet Nam War

Unread post by bostonterrierowner »

Lazlo wrote:
bostonterrierowner wrote:
Lazlo wrote: Just look at Afghanistan and Iraq where with a much more modern and sophisticated military we got our asses kicked.
Iraq has been conquered and lies firmly under Anglo-American rule , heroin is flowing undisturbed from Afghanistan and you ( I assume you are an American ) got your ass kicked ... :)

The truth is that US Military ran over these 2 countries and we are being conditioned to think that some kind of an equal struggle has been going on over there throughout the years .

If your ass was so badly kicked by the illiterate shepherds why fake war zone deaths ( see Simon's thread on the subject ) ?

You greatly underestimate your country's military might
New York Times Has a Knack for Accuracy

That is, when they are not lying:

U.S. Considers Faster Pullout in Afghanistan
By MARK MAZZETTI and MATTHEW ROSENBERG
Published: July 8, 2013 689 Comments

WASHINGTON — Increasingly frustrated by his dealings with President Hamid Karzai, President Obama is giving serious consideration to speeding up the withdrawal of United States forces from Afghanistan and to a “zero option” that would leave no American troops there after next year, according to American and European officials.

Now, what I don't know is if this "zero option" includes the typical 30,000 to 50,000 soldiers the U.S. has a habit of leaving "in theater" after they pull out.

However, I have no reason to believe the following State Department Travel Advisory is not true: THREATS TO SAFETY AND SECURITY: The latest Travel Warning for Afghanistan warns U.S. citizens against travel to Afghanistan and states clearly that the security situation remains critical. No region in Afghanistan should be considered immune from violence, and the potential exists throughout the country for hostile acts, either targeted or random, against U.S. and other Western nationals at any time. There are remnants of the former Taliban regime and the terrorist al-Qaida network operating in various parts of Afghanistan, as well as narco-traffickers and other terrorist and insurgent groups that oppose the international community....

Of course you have to parse their language (I don't know what a remnant of an al-Qaida group is for example) but I think that by "narco-trafficer" (sic) they mean rival gang so it doesn't look as if their control is all that tight. Where the control is tight is here in the U.S. Where journalists are assassinated and the only reason for this is to cover up dissent from what a piss poor and uninspired job they are doing in the first place. And, just as with COINTELPRO, the main goal, although it seems unlikely, is to prevent a 5th column from forming.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/world ... wanted=all
how does it disprove my statements? did you just refer to nyt ?:)
Lazlo
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Re: Viet Nam War

Unread post by Lazlo »

did you just refer to nyt ?:)

Yes, even Soviet dissidents read Pravda.
MrSinclair
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Re: Viet Nam War

Unread post by MrSinclair »

It's been a long time since I saw "Hearts and Minds" but it was easily the most powerful documentary on Viet Nam I have seen. It may be of interest to some following this thread.


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d2ml82lc7s
hoi.polloi
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Re: Viet Nam War

Unread post by hoi.polloi »

That is one intense and emotionally manipulative ride. Holy moly. I don't know if this is the intention of the piece, but the feeling I got after watching it was that all Westerners — French, American, Russian and the rest — should just get the fuck out of South-east Asia unless they are really there as individuals deeply invested in individual lives as one is when one's a guest at a house, act as a part of the culture that accepted them there, and be prepared to be a gracious part of the community they are in.

What a catastrophic meeting of cultures this seems to have been. How embarrassing.
brianv
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Re: Viet Nam War

Unread post by brianv »

I read Michael Herr's Dispatches in my teens, the heroic story of Sean Flynn, erstwhile photojournalist and son of Leg-End, Errol Flynn...


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Flynn ... rnalist%29

:rolleyes:
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