Marjorie Cohn: US Government Sanitizes Vietnam War History
With
George W. Bush’s wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and Barack Obama’s drone
wars in seven Muslim-majority countries and his escalating wars in Iraq
and Syria, we have apparently moved beyond the Vietnam syndrome. By
planting disinformation in the public realm, the government has built
support for its recent wars, as it did with Vietnam.
Now the
Pentagon is planning to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam
War by launching a $30 million program to rewrite and sanitize its
history. Replete with a fancy interactive website, the effort is aimed
at teaching schoolchildren a revisionist history of the war. The program
is focused on honoring our service members who fought in Vietnam. But
conspicuously absent from the website is a description of the antiwar
movement, at the heart of which was the GI movement.
