DANCING WITH WOLVES AND MEDIA PRAISE ON VIETNAM VETERANS DAY
IN FOCUS, 5 Apr 2010
Vietnamese wonder — praise for killing us? Why aren’t they still killing us? Our government is still the same communist led one as back then. Our flag is red.
In Dancing With Wolves, Kevin Costner, as Lieutenant John Dunbar, then living as a Dakota, is demanded an answer to a question from an American soldier who has just beat him up. Kostner (Dunbar) answers in the Dakota language after spitting out some blood “You are not worth talking to.” That he speaks in a language the soldiers can’t understand (translated for the movie goers in a subtitle below the film footage) as if emphasizing in his own mind that these American soldiers are not worth being talked to.
People that are incapable of caring about right from wrong and massive senseless violent death are beyond communication.
Whether for their self-indulgent, materialist, egotistical lifestyle having been taught to them from birth by commercial advertising, controlled corporate media, or for some other collective fear and insanity, onlookers who are compassionate know it’s not their fault. Americans, in general, seem to have become mentally disadvantaged and simply require medical attention.
And the Vietnamese are vastly compassionate in their gentle Buddhist cause and effect no-fault belief.
Americans, long known and feared for bombing, napalming, torturing, invading, destroying and occupying nations weaker than their own, are also known by billions watching conglomerate-network, satellite-network news videos for praising military personnel with disregard for the millions fallen in harm’s way of U.S. armed forces. This frightening ‘why us worry’ indifference to foreign death at U.S. hands has now become legendary. A national complicity in criminal insanity and praising it would seem to require some expert mass psychoanalysis.
Your writer, and Veterans For Peace member, will not make any attempt here at curing the heartlessness of what has been going on for so many many years of military madness. Albert Einstein tried for years to no avail. Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace are supremely aware of the horror of suffering they were made to put on the largely peasant population of what were three colonies of Indochina, and keep trying with scant success.
Evolution or revolution, but not by talking or writing, nor showing the photos of My Lai massacres, or of napalmed children, or of soldiers torching humble homes with cigarette lighters, nor the sight of tons upon tons of bombs being dropped at high altitude from planes painted with the American flag have any effect. Americans are familiar with all these photos. They still put up with official praise for the duped young men, many of whom lost limbs and saw their buddies die.
Are Americans as a nation hopeless — to put up with such disgusting hype praising the very young men fooled into thinking they were defending their folks back home in killing poor Vietnamese fighting the occupiers of their nation, after having already fought the French and Japanese occupations.
Damn! It was never an officially declared war. Congress fudged, never called it a war on Vietnam, or North Vietnam or South Vietnam where Kennedy authorized the first bombing and napalming in the Delta. Why the official praise? For the ears of the next group of Americans to be suckered into killing and dying unconstitutionally but honored to the hilt afterwards.
How about a ‘My Lai Day‘ for the men, women and children machine-gunned at point blank range in ditches just that one afternoon during an American thirty year admittedly mistaken war by six American presidents and more Congresses?
Will Media and Congress some day proclaim an ‘Afghan War Veterans Day’, an ‘Iraq War Veterans Day’? (Those were also military actions against a population without Congressional constitutional authority.) How about an official day praising America’s NATO allies?1
‘Dominican Republic Invasion Veterans Day’, ‘Lebanon Shelling Veterans Day’, a ‘Somalia Veterans Day’, a ‘Grenada Veterans Day’? Why not be more democratic and even-handed in praise?. Why do state governments proclaim a Day selectively for those of us who were had in Vietnam?
If conglomerate media could have an honest moment, they could push for a ‘Praise War Day’, and include all veteran victims of propaganda in carrying out illegal orders.
Better yet, a ‘War Promotion Media Day’ or still better a ‘David Rockefeller Bilderberg, Council on Foreign Relations Tri-lateral Commission Day’. That would be fundamental.
When network-attractive, empty-minded, script-reading anchors say how thankful all Americans are for the dead soldiers “giving their lives for us and their country” in a war that Obama once called a “dumb war” or Sec. McNamara called an “miscalculation”, some us don’t feel American.
In any case, if the world sees Americans are not worth taking to, it must be because Americans, themselves, are not talking, not even much about their country having been taken away from them by bankers, media and military.
Note:
1. NATO Killed School Children and Pregnant Women Tries to Silence a Truth-Teller by Derrick Crowe – Warning — This video contains disturbing images. [↩]
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Jay Janson, spent eight years as Assistant Conductor of the Vietnam Symphony Orchestra in Hanoi and also toured, including with Dan Tai-son, who practiced in a Hanoi bomb shelter. The orchestra was founded by Ho Chi Minh,and it plays most of its concerts in the Opera House, a diminutive copy of the Paris Opera. In 1945, our ally Ho, from a balcony overlooking the large square and flanked by an American Major and a British Colonel, declared Vietnam independent. Everyone in the orchestra lost family, “killed by the Americans” they would mention simply, with Buddhist un-accusing acceptance. Jay can be reached at: tdmedia2000@yahoo.com.
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