Malheur Wildlife Refuge Takeover Is No Wounded Knee

Ammon Bundy, right, shakes hand with a federal agent guarding the gate at the Burns Municipal Airport in Oregon on Friday, Jan. 22, 2016. (photo: Keith Ridler/AP)

 

Dennis J. Bernstein | Reader Supported News | January 24, 2016

or forty years now, Leonard Peltier, leader of the American Indian Movement (AIM), has been imprisoned as a result of the armed raid by the federal government on Indian land at the historic Wounded Knee in 1973. Bill Means, veteran of the Vietnam War and the standoff at Wounded Knee, said, “The Feds didn’t serve us coffee and pizzas. They came heavily armed, ready to do battle, and opened fire before they asked the first question.” Means is a co-founder, along with Leonard Peltier, of AIM, and is now on the board of the International Indian Treaty Council.

“The laws are recast and enforced in order to suppress any type of minority movement,” said Means, “to shift all the power of recognition to the white community. So that when the posse comitatus or bunch of racist ranchers take over a piece of land, they do it in the name of their country, and they become immune to the criminal laws of the United States.”

Means reflected on how this scenario might have played out quite differently, if it had been AIM that decided to lead an armed takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. “We know exactly what they’d do. We experienced that back in 1973,” Means told me in a January radio interview. “We were immediately surrounded by over 7 or 8 federal jurisdictions: FBI, U.S. marshals, U.S. Border Patrol, BIA police. I’m missing a few, but you can understand the type of response we get as Indian people.”

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40 Years On, the Vietnam War Continues for Victims of Agent Orange

  Tran Thi Le Huyen, 23, in a wheelchair at her family home in Danang, Vietnam, in 2007. Her family once lived near the highly contaminated Danang Airbase; her father was a driver for the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government during the war. (David Guttenfelder / AP)

 

Marjorie Cohn | Truthdig | December 17, 2015

The war in Vietnam resulted in the deaths of more than 58,000 Americans and more than 3 million Vietnamese. Twenty years ago, the United States and Vietnam normalized diplomatic relations in an effort to put the terrible legacy of the war behind them. But for the survivors—both Vietnamese and American—the war continues. About 5 million Vietnamese and many U.S. and allied soldiers were exposed to the toxic chemical dioxin from the spraying of Agent Orange. Many of them and their progeny continue to suffer its poisonous effects.

Agent Orange was a chemical, herbicidal weapon sprayed over 12 percent of Vietnam by the U.S. military from 1961 to 1971. The dioxin present in Agent Orange is one of the most toxic chemicals known to humanity.

Those exposed to Agent Orange during the war often have children and grandchildren with serious illnesses and disabilities. The international scientific community has identified an association between exposure to Agent Orange and some forms of cancers, reproductive abnormalities, immune and endocrine deficiencies and nervous system damage. Second- and third-generation victims continue to be born in Vietnam as well as to U.S. veterans and Vietnamese-Americans in this country.

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Why Don’t Americans Know What Really Happened in Vietnam?

Christian Appy | The Nation | February 9, 2015

A napalm strike erupts in a fireball near US troops in South Vietnam, 1966 during the Vietnam War. (AP Photo)

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

The 1960s—that extraordinary decade—is celebrating its 50th birthday one year at a time. Happy birthday, 1965! How, though, do you commemorate the Vietnam War, the era’s signature catastrophe? After all, our government prosecuted its brutal and indiscriminate war under false pretexts, long after most citizens objected, and failed to achieve any of its stated objectives. More than 58,000 Americans were killed along with more than 4 million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.

So what exactly do we write on the jubilee party invitation? You probably know the answer. We’ve been rehearsing it for decades. You leave out every troubling memory of the war and simply say: “Let’s honor all our military veterans for their service and sacrifice.”

For a little perspective on the 50th anniversary, consider this: we’re now as distant from the 1960s as the young Bob Dylan was from Teddy Roosevelt. For today’s typical college students, the Age of Aquarius is ancient history. Most of their parents weren’t even alive in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson launched a massive escalation of the Vietnam War, initiating the daily bombing of the entire country, North and South, and an enormous buildup of more than half a million troops.

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Pentagon whitewashing Vietnam War with $15 million website

Why the Culture War Will Never Die

Paul Waldman | The American Prospect | September 28, 2014

Depending on how you define it, the American culture war between liberals and conservatives can stretch back all the way to the nineteenth century. But I prefer to date its current iteration to the 1960s, when the hippies and the squares gazed across a high school football field at one another and said, “Man, I hate those guys.”

However the actual 1960s played out, in our memories, the hippies were definitely the good guys, and the winners in the end. (This is in no small part because liberals created all the novels, TV shows, and movies that chronicled the period.) They may have been a little silly, but there’s one thing that’s undeniably true: They had all the fun. While the squares were getting buzz cuts, convincing themselves that the Vietnam War was a great idea, and nodding along with Richard Nixon’s encomiums to the Silent Majority, the hippies were getting high, dancing to cool music, and above all, getting laid.

And the squares are still mad about it, even the ones who weren’t actually born then. Here’s a report from Suzy Khimm on an event held at the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday called “Where Is Liberalism Going?” They homed in on what it’s all about:

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Martin Luther King Was a Radical, Not a Saint

Peter Dreier | Truthout | January 20, 2014

The official US beatification of Martin Luther King has come at the heavy price of silence about his radical espousal of economic justice and anticolonialism.

It is easy to forget that in his day, in his own country, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was considered a dangerous troublemaker. Even President John Kennedy worried that King was being influenced by Communists. King was harassed by the FBI and vilified in the media. The establishment’s campaign to denigrate King worked. In August 1966 – as King was bringing his civil rights campaign to Northern cities to address poverty, slums, housing segregation and bank lending discrimination – the Gallup Poll found that 63 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of King, compared with 33 percent who viewed him favorably.

Today Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is viewed as something of an American saint. The most recent Gallup Poll discovered that 94 percent of Americans viewed him in a positive light. His birthday is a national holiday. His name adorns schools and street signs. In 1964, at age 35, he was the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Americans from across the political spectrum invoke King’s name to justify their beliefs and actions.

In fact, King was a radical. He believed that America needed a “radical redistribution of economic and political power.” He challenged America’s class system and its racial caste system. He was a strong ally of the nation’s labor union movement. He was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers’ strike. He opposed US militarism and imperialism, especially the country’s misadventure in Vietnam.

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Why the Miraculous Healing Properties of Weed Are Driving a Decorated Veteran on a Mission

April M. Short | AlterNet  | December 21, 2013

Perry Parks, a Vietnam combat veteran and highly decorated retired military officer of 28 years, says killing is an unnatural act.

If you take the average person off the street, he said, he will not be able to point a gun at somebody and pull the trigger.

“They have to be trained to kill, so most people will pull the gun up at the last minute and miss,” Parks said, noting that the U.S. military got hip to this trend following WWI, when which soldiers subconsciously missed the mark about 75 percent of the time.

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NSA Spied on MLK, US Senators and Other Vietnam War Critics

“A female demonstrator offers a flower to military police on guard at the Pentagon during an anti-Vietnam demonstration. Arlington, Virginia, USA” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ed Pilkington | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | September 29, 2013

The National Security Agency secretly tapped into the overseas phone calls of prominent critics of the Vietnam War, including Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali and two actively serving US senators, newly declassified material has revealed.

The NSA has been forced to disclose previously secret passages in its own official four-volume history of its Cold War snooping activities. The newly-released material reveals the breathtaking – and probably illegal – lengths the agency went to in the late 1960s and 70s, in an attempt to try to hold back the rising tide of anti-Vietnam war sentiment.

That included tapping into the phone calls and cable communications of two serving senators – the Idaho Democrat Frank Church and Howard Baker, a Republican from Tennessee who, puzzlingly, was a firm supporter of the war effort in Vietnam. The NSA also intercepted the foreign communications of prominent journalists such as Tom Wicker of the New York Times and the popular satirical writer for the Washington Post, Art Buchwald.

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Armchair Isolationists? Nonsense!

Congressional portrait with U.S. flag in the background (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Steve Weissman | Reader Supported News | September 9, 2013

Even when he ran for president in 2004 against George W. Bush and the neocons, I had to hold my nose to vote for John Kerry. I still do when I hear his self-righteous defense of a not-so-limited military strike on Syria, his know-it-all arrogance, and the hypocritical ease with which he bends the truth, especially when he tries to hide the growing strength in Syria of the radical jihadis with ties to al-Qaeda.

But I won’t waste your time attacking yesterday’s man. Rather I want to clear the air about the millions of us whom he dismisses as “armchair isolationists.”

Speaking for myself, I’m about as far from an isolationist as anyone could be, and so are most of my friends on both sides of the Atlantic, many of whom go back to our struggle against America’s war in Vietnam. We did sit-in a lot, but never in armchairs, and we thought for a time that John Kerry was one of us.

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Agent Orange Still Ravaging Vietnam

English: U.S. Huey helicopter spraying Agent Orange over Vietnam (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Drew Brown  | McClatchy News | Reader Supported News | July 24, 2013

In many ways, Nguyen Thi Ly is just like any other 12-year-old girl. She has a lovely smile and is quick to laugh. She wants to be a teacher when she grows up. She enjoys skipping rope when she plays.

But Ly is also very different from other children. Her head is severely misshapen. Her eyes are unnaturally far apart and permanently askew. She’s been hospitalized with numerous ailments since her birth. Her mother, 43-year-old Le Thi Thu, has similar deformities and health disorders. Neither of them has ever set foot on a battlefield, but they’re both casualties of war.

Le and her daughter are second- and third-generation victims of dioxin exposure, the result of the U.S. military’s use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, when the U.S. Air Force sprayed more than 20 million gallons of Agent Orange and other herbicides over parts of southern Vietnam and along the borders of neighboring Laos and Cambodia. The herbicides were contaminated with dioxin, a deadly compound that remains toxic for decades and causes birth defects, cancer and other illnesses.

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