Silencing America as It Prepares for War
Silencing America as It Prepares for War
Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by
the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with
1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin,
preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with
the salivating violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Party's
rigged convention. The great counter revolution had begun.
The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King, had dared
link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When
Janis Joplin sang, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to
lose", she spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of America's victims
in faraway places.
"We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending
your freedom. Now don't you forget it." So said a National Parks
Service guide as I filmed last week at the Lincoln Memorial in
Washington. He was addressing a school party of young teenagers in
bright orange T-shirts. As if by rote, he inverted the truth about
Vietnam into an unchallenged lie.
The millions of Vietnamese who died and were maimed and poisoned and
dispossessed by the American invasion have no historical place in young
minds, not to mention the estimated 60,000 veterans who took their own
lives. A friend of mine, a marine who became a paraplegic in Vietnam,
was often asked, "Which side did you fight on?"
A few years ago, I attended a popular exhibition called "The Price of
Freedom" at the venerable Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The
lines of ordinary people, mostly children shuffling through a Santa's
grotto of revisionism, were dispensed a variety of lies: the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved "a million lives"; Iraq was
"liberated [by] air strikes of unprecedented precision". The theme was
unerringly heroic: only Americans pay the price of freedom.
The 2016 election campaign is remarkable not only for the rise of
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders but also for the resilience of an
enduring silence about a murderous self-bestowed divinity. A third of
the members of the United Nations have felt Washington's boot,
overturning governments, subverting democracy, imposing blockades and
boycotts. Most of the presidents responsible have been liberal - Truman,
Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.
