Maclear's documentary stands in stark contrast to the current Ken Burns documentary, The Vietnam War, which is nothing more than historical revisionism, sprinkled with massive doses of cognitive dissonance, served up as healing.
While Burns assiduously avoids connecting the conflicts of the Vietnam War to America's on-going experiment in technofascism, Maclear's documentary is straightforward in stating several shameful truths. Foremost, that the CIA has corrupted not only the military, but America's political and judicial systems; and that, through its secret control of the media, the CIA's power to create the official version of history has left veterans of the Vietnam War, as well as every subsequent generation of Americans as well, in a state of neurotic delusion.
This is what Guy Debord meant when he said,
"Secrecy dominates this world, and foremost as the secret of domination."While Burns falsely characterizes the war as a tragedy engendered by decent men with good intentions, Maclear offers incontrovertible proof that it was a war of imperial aggression in the pursuit of counterrevolution.
Maclear gets to the heart of the matter by focusing on the CIA's Phoenix program, which Burns spends all of two minutes on. Through interviews with Bart Osborn and Jeff Stein, both veterans of Phoenix, Maclear shows what happens to combat veterans when they are made to function as judge, jury, and executioner of civilians. Mass murder and computerized genocide are the terms used in the documentary.
While Burns places combat veterans on an unassailable pedestal, and makes America's involvement in the Vietnam War "noble" based on their sacrifices, Maclear shows how the war managers indoctrinated the troops with lies, and then aimed them at innocents. As Maclear explains, by 1968, the CIA knew American military forces could not win the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people, so they turned to eliminating, through torture and terror, members of the revolution's civilian infrastructure, as well as anyone who could be said to be sympathetic to it.
Burns has no stomach for this hard truth, or the fact that Phoenix, as Maclear made perfectly clear 42 years ago, has become not only the template for policing the American empire, but for the SWAT teams and militarized police forces that control America's political and social movements on behalf of their corporate masters in the war industry.
I'll close this brief introduction by honoring Bart Osborn, who, along with several other Phoenix veterans, testified to Congress about the Phoenix program. Based on the testimony of these veterans in 1971, four Congresspersons stated that Phoenix was a policy of waging war crimes and violated the Geneva Conventions.
In 1973, Osborn, along with Air Force veterans Perry Fellwock and Tim Butz, formed the Committee for Action-Research on the Intelligence Community (CARIC) in response to revelations about the CIA's role in Watergate. CARIC exposed individual CIA officers and operations through its publication, CounterSpy.
At the same time in 1973, Norman Mailer and several of his associates created The Fifth Estate to counter the CIA's secret intervention in America's domestic political and social affairs. In January 1974, CARIC and The Fifth Estate combined to create the Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate. The plan was to organize groups on campus and in communities to investigate and expose the CIA. CounterSpy was its publication.
If only such organizations existed today.
Before the security forces and complicit media subverted CARIC and its efforts to expose the CIA, CARIC worked with the British Corporation Granada Television Inc, to produce a documentary on political prisoners in Vietnam.
Titled A Question of Torture, it too has also been suppressed, but is well worth viewing as an antidote to the Burns propaganda film, as well as to the duplicitous Vietnam War narrative Americans have had shoved down their throats for the past 40 plus years.
In the absence of any organizations dedicated to exposing the CIA, war crimes have since become official US policy, at home and abroad.
Reader Comments
People do not see how Vietnam, moreso than WWI, WWII or Korea, created the paradigm that would be used to dumb down the US 'proles'* and increase their percentage as a whole in society, thereby helping to effectuate America's downfall through the ignorance of the masses, with the more than obvious tactic of keeping folks stupid enough through working them into stupification, just as Orwell so accurately forecast... a quote I’ll here skip as I’m sure I've posted it too many times.
And yet I, you, we, keep typing in hopes that our mere words will get through to the idiot masses. I believe this internet, released so very early vis a vis all other types of technology has been done, because, just like you and I can spot a troll, this has given them the ability to find out those whose thoughts most ‘threaten’ what ‘they’ believe how the world MUST - not merely should, - but MUST be. Hence, it is us these FEMA camps exist for; and yet we still speak peaceful truth to power.
However, in releasing the net’s power, one (of many) things “they” failed to realize the power of audio/video on conveying messages. Though the MSM has controlled the overwhelming percentage of it, hopefully we will see that the makers of videos as the above might help shoulder an exponentially huge load of educating our modern, younger than us ‘proles’ so that they might have a chance to actually even be ‘aware’ of their chains. Thus, like Winston concluded, our only chance is ‘with the proles,’ and as such it appears we will only be able to get sufficient truth and wisdom to them via television, and/or A.V. Media.
We are speaking to
a land of hollow men.
Whose wasted skulls and
empty souls merely echo - like some lifeless
canyon wall in some desert planet -
the critical meanings of our heartful words;
And/Or the deceptions much louder spewed by ‘them’
are mostly but sounds, and no more,
echoed back to us and 'them' equally,
for reasons, that they, the proles, have forgotten.
Time to split and try again.
R.C.
* Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
**Having always been a reader and detester of TV- (I always realized its neuro-programming potential and brainwashing*** potential - never got one until I was 35 and that was only to watch good prerecorded movies on VHS, then DVD.) - the system never had a chance to get its claws into me. Folks who graduated high school in the US from around 1964 through 1981 (pure estimate, I guess were still taught so that they could learn for themselves; not like robotic drones, which latter objective has persevered in school policy ever since with the federalization of schools, (via Bush*t's I and II, and their flunkies: Clintons & Obysmal.)
*** Americans are both explicitly and implicitly taught that 'no one' can be 'emotionally broken' and no one can be 'brainwashed' - that mere will-power can supersede that, in truthful contrast, Such is simply not true and the countless illegal studies proving this remain 'classified.' see, e.g. to the ending of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
RC