Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.
He offers his own reflections on organizing and the state of America's declining empire....
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Saturday, July 31, 2010
THE DIRTY & DEADLY CONNECTION
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They have continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story published by City Lights. Their next book Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire will be published February, 2011.
I'm not quite a connoisseur of late nite cable teevee, since they took Courage the Dog, Powerpuff girls and Johnny Bravo and stuck them somewhere in Cartoon Hell obscurity.
ReplyDeleteBut I did notice a trend, they don't do the Rambo trilogy much. First Blood where he lays waste to the Oregon State Police, I can almost understand where that would make them cringe a little, The middle one where he goes in Single Handed and lays waste to the Nation of VietNam, both avenging the humiliating defeat of the Might Makes Right faction AND demonstrating that "we could have won if only we hadn't been forced to play by the rules" and of course R3, where he goes into Afghanistan and pals around with the Taliban.
Which was pure propaganda and had the Pentagon and Reaganite stamp of approval on every scene. It's that level of supportive hype from the Exalted Ancestral Ones whose spirit guides the Right Wing today. Even though the Exalted Ancestors haven't all gone into the sunset yet.
I suppose they WOULD like for people to forget that Reagan and Gingrich et al actually supported the ones they want to slaughter now.
They do basically the same thing for their support for the Montagnard tribal groups on the Thai/Laos/Cambodia/Viet patches of what they called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, only a lot more muted because their support for them wasn't all that public anyway.
And they say Moral Relativism is a Liberal thing.
I posted the last comment before watching the video. Most of what the documentary covered in the segment on this page happened before the Reaganite propaganda blitz. In fact it happened largely when I was a kid. (Two score and ten years have been the tale of my Pilgrimage in this Vale of Tears) The Afghan side of the story was pushed onto a back burner at the time, But the propaganda focus hasn't changed, in effect. Just in he principal actors. There was a book I read AFTER the movie was made, starring John Wayne, but BEFORE I ever watched it, "The Green Berets" by Barry Sadler.
ReplyDeleteIn the book were admissions made by Sgt Sadler to the claims later denied by him, the Pentagon, the Nixon Administration and somebody who couldn't possibly know one way or another, John Wayne.
Admissions of using Special Forces and Air Force operations against sovereign nations against whom we have never declared war. Using American Special Forces along the Lao and Thai and Cambodian segments of The Trail and using native tribal groups, like the Hmong and other "montagnard" people as a counter to the VietMinh. The Hmong in particular would embarrass the Right Wing because their cash crop was Opium.
The allegation is that the U.S. military actually smuggled drugs for among others the Hmong. Including a much purer than usually encountered heroin called "china white". Because the military sellers didn't cut the smack, stepping on it along the way with if you're lucky sugar or something similarly harmless.
Sounds familiar, vis a vis the "Taliban Connection" opium sub-war. And the Medellin connection in the Iran-Contra affair. A couple of key names come up in all these stories. North and Secord.
As to, Would the Pentagon smuggle smack and crack and whatever else? Hell, they KILL for a living. What other crimes could hold a candle to THAT?
As for being accurate in "guessing" what the videos have to say, not prescient or uncanny, it's just a pattern of the Pro-War "information" packages we've been handed since the 60s.
One could be accurate just by doing a contrarian analysis of what gets said by the Pentagon. That doesn't speak highly of Military Sources of information.