{"id":20841,"date":"2016-05-29T18:44:15","date_gmt":"2016-05-29T23:44:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20841"},"modified":"2016-05-29T18:44:15","modified_gmt":"2016-05-29T23:44:15","slug":"silencing-america-as-it-prepares-for-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20841","title":{"rendered":"Silencing America as It Prepares for War"},"content":{"rendered":"

Silencing America as It Prepares for War<\/a><\/h3>\n

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Orlok<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Shutterstock.com<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019s rigged convention. \u00a0The great counter revolution had begun.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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, \u201cFreedom\u2019s just another word for nothing left to lose\u201d, she spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of America\u2019s victims in faraway places.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom. Now don\u2019t you forget it.\u201d \u00a0So 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.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cWhich side did you fight on?\u201d<\/p>\n

A few years ago, I attended a popular exhibition called \u201cThe Price of Freedom\u201d at the venerable Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The lines of ordinary people, mostly children shuffling through a Santa\u2019s grotto of revisionism, were dispensed a variety of lies: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved \u201ca million lives\u201d; Iraq was \u201cliberated [by] air strikes of unprecedented precision\u201d. The theme was unerringly heroic: only Americans pay the price of freedom.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Silencing America as It Prepares for War Orlok\u00a0|\u00a0Shutterstock.com 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[130,5493,7743,694,827,862],"class_list":["post-20841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-china","tag-counterpunch","tag-john-pilger","tag-russia","tag-united-states","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20841"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20841\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20842,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20841\/revisions\/20842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}