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Saturday, September 30, 2017

Secrets of JFK Assassination Finally To Emergen

Secrets of JFK Assassination Finally To Emergen

If Trump doesn’t block their release.

Will Trump finally reveal 54-year-old secret FBI and CIA files on JFK assassination next month?

  • The National Archives has until October 26 to disclose the remaining files related to Kennedy's 1963 assassination, unless Trump intervenes 
  • The CIA and FBI, whose records make up the bulk of the batch, won't say whether they've appealed to the president to keep them under wraps
  • The documents include more than 3,000 that have never been seen by the public and more than 30,000 that have been previously, but with redactions

Scholars are eagerly awaiting the anticipated release of thousands of never-before-seen government documents related to President John F. Kennedy's assassination.
Now, they're waiting to see whether President Donald Trump will block the release of files that could shed light on a tragedy that has stirred conspiracy theories for decades.
The National Archives has until October 26 to disclose the remaining files related to Kennedy's 1963 assassination, unless Trump intervenes. 
The CIA and FBI, whose records make up the bulk of the batch, won't say whether they've appealed to the Republican president to keep them under wraps.
Scholars are eagerly awaiting the anticipated release of thousands of never-before-seen government documents related to President John F. Kennedy's assassination
Scholars are eagerly awaiting the anticipated release of thousands of never-before-seen government documents related to President John F. Kennedy's assassination
The still-secret documents include more than 3,000 that have never been seen by the public and more than 30,000 that have been released previously, but with redactions. 
'The American public deserves to know the facts, or at least they deserve to know what the government has kept hidden from them for all these years,' said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
It's unlikely the documents contain any big revelations about Kennedy's killing, said Judge John Tunheim, who was chairman of the independent agency in the 1990s that made public many assassination records and decided how long others could remain secret.
Now, they're waiting to see whether President Donald Trump will block the release of files that could shed light on a tragedy that has stirred conspiracy theories for decades
Now, they're waiting to see whether President Donald Trump will block the release of files that could shed light on a tragedy that has stirred conspiracy theories for decades
Sabato and other JFK scholars believe the trove of files may provide insight into assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's trip to Mexico City weeks before the killing, during which he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies. 
Oswald's stated reason for going was to get visas that would allow him to enter Cuba and the Soviet Union, according to the Warren Commission, the investigative body established by President Lyndon B. Johnson, but much about the trip remains unknown.
Among the protected information up for release are details about the arrangements the U.S. entered into with the Mexican government that allowed it to have close surveillance of those and other embassies, said Tunheim, a federal judge in Minnesota.
The National Archives has until October 26 to disclose the remaining files related to Kennedy's 1963 assassination, unless Trump intervenes. In this November 22, 1963 photo, President John F. Kennedy waves from his car in a motorcade approximately one minute before he was shot in Dallas
The National Archives has until October 26 to disclose the remaining files related to Kennedy's 1963 assassination, unless Trump intervenes. In this November 22, 1963 photo, President John F. Kennedy waves from his car in a motorcade approximately one minute before he was shot in Dallas
Kennedy experts also hope to see the full report on Oswald's trip to Mexico City from staffers of the House committee that investigated the assassination, said Rex Bradford, president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, which publishes assassination records.
The White House didn't immediately respond to emails seeking comment.
The FBI declined to comment on whether it has asked Trump to keep the files hidden. 
A CIA spokeswoman would say only that it 'continues to engage in the process to determine the appropriate next steps with respect to any previously-unreleased CIA information.'
Congress mandated in 1992 that all assassination documents be released within 25 years, unless the president asserts that doing so would harm intelligence, law enforcement, military operations or foreign relations.  
The files that were withheld in full were those the Assassination Records Review Board deemed 'not believed relevant,' Tunheim said. 
The still-secret documents include more than 3,000 that have never been seen by the public. In this  1963 photo, the limousine carrying mortally wounded President John F. Kennedy races toward the hospital seconds after he was shot in Dallas
The still-secret documents include more than 3,000 that have never been seen by the public. In this 1963 photo, the limousine carrying mortally wounded President John F. Kennedy races toward the hospital seconds after he was shot in Dallas
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Its members sought to ensure they weren't hiding any information directly related to Kennedy's assassination, but there may be nuggets of information in the files that they didn't realize was important two decades ago, he said.
'There could be some jewels in there because in our level of knowledge in the 1990s is maybe different from today,' Tunheim said.
The National Archives would not say whether any agencies have appealed the release of the documents.
The Archives in July published online more than 440 never-before-seen assassination documents and thousands of others that had been released previously with redactions.
There could be some jewels in there 
Judge John Tunheim
Among those documents was a 1975 internal CIA memo that questioned whether Oswald became motivated to kill Kennedy after reading an AP article in a newspaper that quoted Fidel Castro as saying 'U.S. leaders would be in danger if they helped in any attempt to do away with leaders of Cuba.'
'Oswald might have had a clear motive, one that we have never really understood for killing Kennedy, because he thought that by killing Kennedy he might be saving the life of Fidel Castro,' said Philip Shenon, a former New York Times reporter who has written a book about Kennedy's assassination.
Some of the files will likely remain under wraps, experts say.
It's unlikely the National Archives will release some IRS records, including the tax returns of Jack Ruby, the man who killed Oswald, Bradford said.
Sabato said he also suspects that some key records may also have been destroyed before the 1992 law ordered that all the files be housed in the National Archives.
And even a full release of the documents isn't likely to put to rest conspiracy theories that have swirled around the young president's death for more than five decades.
'People will probably always believe there must have been a conspiracy,' Tunheim said. 'I just don't think that the federal government, in particular, is efficient enough to hide a secret like that for so long,' he said.




Vietnam Déjà Vu

Vietnam Déjà Vu

Eric Margolis on more hisnonest, dishonorable imperial wars.


Much of America, including yours truly, has been watching the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) series, ‘Vietnam.’  Instead of clarifying that confusing conflict, the series has ignited fiery controversy and a lot of long-repressed anger by soft-soaping Washington’s motives.

This march to folly in Vietnam is particularly painful for me since I enlisted in the US army at the height of the war.  Gripped by youthful patriotism, I strongly supported the war.  In fact, the TV series even showed a pro-war march down New York’s Fifth Avenue that I had joined.  Talk about déjà vu.

At the time, 1967, the Cold War was at full force.  We really believed that if the US did not make a stand in Vietnam the Soviets and Chinese would overrun all of South Asia.

No one in Washington seemed to know that China and the Soviet Union had split and become bitter enemies.  As ever, our foreign human intelligence was lousy. We didn’t understand that Vietnam deserved independence after a century of French colonialism.  Or that what happened in Vietnam was of little importance to the rest of the world.



Three American presidents blundered into this war or prolonged it, then could not back out lest they lose face and risk humiliation.  I don’t for a moment believe that the ‘saintly’ President John Kennedy planned to end the war but was assassinated by dark, rightwing forces, as is claimed.  This is a charming legend.  Richard Nixon, Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all feared that a withdrawal from Vietnam would lose them the next election.   Republicans were still snarling over ‘who lost China’.


The current 17-year old US war in Afghanistan has uncanny resemblances to the Vietnam War.  In Kabul and Saigon, the US installed puppet governments that command no loyalty except from minority groups. They were steeped in drugs and corruption, and kept in power by intensive use of American air power.   As in Vietnam, the US military and civilian effort in Afghanistan is led by a toxic mixture of deep ignorance and imperial arrogance.

The US military understands it has long ago lost the Afghan War but cannot bear the humiliation of admitting it was defeated by lightly-armed mountain tribesmen fighting for their independence.  In Vietnam, Washington could not admit that young Vietnamese guerillas and regulars had bested the US armed forces thanks to their indomitable courage and intelligent tactics. No one outside Vietnam cared about the 2-3 million civilians killed in the conflict.

Unfortunately, the PBS program fails to convey this imperial arrogance and the ignorance that impelled Washington into the war – the same foolhardy behavior that sent US forces into Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq and perhaps may do so in a second Korean War.  The imperial spirit still burns hot in Washington among those who don’t know or understand the outside world.  The lessons of all these past conflicts have been forgotten:  Washington’s collective memory is only three years long.

Vietnam was not a ‘tragedy,’ as the PBS series asserts, but the product of imperial geopolitics.  The same holds true for today’s Mideast wars.   To paraphrase a famous slogan from Vietnam, we destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria to make them safe for ‘freedom.’

One of the craziest things about the Vietnam War has rarely been acknowledged:  even at peak deployment, the 550,000 US soldiers in Vietnam were outnumbered by North Vietnamese fighting units.

That’s because the huge US military had only about 50,000 real combat troops in the field. The other half million were support troops performing logistical and administrative functions behind the lines:  a vast army of typists, cooks, truck drivers, psychologists, and pizza-makers.

Too much tail to teeth, as the army calls it. For Thanksgiving, everyone got turkey dinner with cranberry sauce, choppered into the remotest outposts. But there were simply not enough riflemen to take on the Viet Cong and tough North Vietnamese Army whose Soviet M1954 130mm howitzer with a 27 km range were far superior to the US Army’s outdated WWII artillery.

Poor generalship, mediocre officers, and lack of discipline ensured that the US war effort in Vietnam would become and remain a mess.  Stupid, pointless attacks against heavily defended hills inflicted huge casualties on US troops and eroded morale.

The monumentally stupid war mismanagement of Pentagon chief Robert McNamara, a know-it-all who knew nothing, turned the war into a macabre joke.  This was the dumbest command decision since Louis XV put his girlfriend Madame de Pompadour in charge of his armies.

We soldiers, both in Vietnam and Stateside, scorned the war and mocked our officers. It didn’t help that much of the US force in ‘Nam’ were often stoned and rebellious.

The January 30, 1968 Tet Offensive put the kibosh on US plans to pursue the war – and even take it into south-west China.  Tet was a military victory of sorts for the US (and why not, with thousands of warplanes and B-52 heavy bombers) but a huge political/psychological victory for the Communists in spite of their heavy losses.


I vividly recall standing with a group of GI’s reading a typed report on our company barracks advising that the Special Forces camp in the Central Highlands to which many of our company had been assigned for immediate duty had been overrun at Tet, and all its defenders killed.  After that, the US Army’s motto was ‘stay alive, avoid combat, and smoke another reefer.’

The war became aimless and often surreal.  We soldiers all knew our senior officers and political leaders were lying.  Many soldiers were at the edge of mutiny, like the French Army in 1917.  Back in those ancient days, we had expected our political leaders to be men of rectitude who told us the truth.  Thanks to Vietnam, the politicians were exposed as liars and heartless cynics with no honor.

This same dark cloud hangs over our political landscape today.  We have destroyed large parts of the Mideast, Afghanistan and northern Pakistan without a second thought – yet wonder why peoples from these ravaged nations hate us.  Now, North Korea seems next.

Showing defiance to Washington brought B-52 bombers, toxic Agent Orange defoliants and endless storms of napalm and white phosphorus that would burn through one’s body until it hit bone.

In spite of all, our imperial impulse till throbs.  The nightmare Vietnam War in which over 58,000 American soldiers died for nothing has been largely forgotten.   So we can now repeat the same fatal errors again without shame, remorse or understanding.

Friday, September 29, 2017

Death of the Playboy: Hugh Hefner’s World

Death of the Playboy: Hugh Hefner’s World

Featured image: Hugh Hefner (Source: The Gazette Review)
“The style he created wasn’t just about women, it was about connoisseurship.” – Camille Paglia, Playboy, May 1995
A dream factory based on flesh; a vision packed with sexuality, sharp commentary and a specific taste. A publication for the successful capitalist of a certain persuasion, keeping company with the scantily clad, a fantasy of the affluent and the desperate. But the founder of Playboy magazine wanted more.
“I never thought of it as a sex magazine,” Hugh Hefner would reflect. “I always thought of it as a lifestyle magazine in which sex was one important ingredient.”[1]
Hefner would reiterate this point on several occasions, though he would always speak of the dangers not creating his caste of bunnies and playmates would have led him to embrace.
“Without you,” he told his assemblage of Playmates on the occasion of a party to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Playboy, “I’d have been a publisher of a literary magazine.”[2]
Hefner caught the waves of sexual prodding pursued in the work of Alfred Kinsey, who insisted on fornicating early, often and in every possible way. Kinsey gave sex a scientific carapace, even though his statistics were decried by such individuals as W. Allen Wallis of the American Statistical Association as adventurously “appalling”.
Hefner was confident that he had the cerebral ammunition to spread a gospel of sex. “Kinsey was the researcher,” he claimed, “I was the pamphleteer.” Both profited, in a sense, from a strong sense of the voyeur, and with that came the conviction of crusader emancipation.
Hefner made sure to punt on various social agendas, juggling the sumptuousness of celebrity centrefolds with biting commentary drawn from exemplary writing talent. It could not be any other way in a society precariously perched between the dictates of the bible and the allure of mammon. Hefner, explained bombing throwing critic Camille Paglia, created “a whole motif, a style for men that was a departure from the World War One rough-and-ready type – the kind in the action magazines.”[3] 
The front cover of the first issue of Playboy, December 1953 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
New York litterateur August Comte Spectorsky was charged with matters of the mind, twinning Hefner’s porn press with high-brow, or at the very least upper middle-brow, digestion. Through the 1960s, the magazine would run issues skirting over 200 pages, featuring writers of heavy weight persuasion: James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Vladimir Nabokov. Reading and consumerism, surmises Taylor Joy Mitchell, was given a masculine sprucing, a form of reclamation from the female world.
Hefner did not stop at the impact of image, the pictography and the magazine. His project was beyond script. He supplied more than a demagogy of pleasure and ambition. It wound its way into an architectural legacy – bachelor pad escapism; porn structured design; eternal production of fantasy within changing and shifting stages. The central theme here: opening, exposing and revealing the interior world of bachelordom in which there was only one true resident: the playboy, king of the modern castle.
In the words of long time Playboy editor Gretchen Edgren, such an inhabitant might be “a sharp minded young business executive, a worker in the arts, a university professor, an architect, or engineer. He can be many things, provided he possesses a certain point of view.”
Life is not to be considered miserable, but a moment of happy engagement. It is engaged affluence. A Hefner explained in “The Playboy Philosophy” (1964),
“Playboy was not planned as a publication for the idle rich, so much as in recognition that with the prosperity of post-war America, almost everyone could have a piece of what we described as the playboy life – if he were willing to expend the necessary effort.”
Two years before Playboy made it to the shelves, Hefner had vainly sought to convince the Chicago Daily News to feature his own apartment as exemplar of a certain point of view. His proposed headline was elementary: “How Does a Cartoonist Live?” Despite the paper’s cool response, he clung to the idea with school boy stubbornness.
In May 1959, Hefner found inspiration in the home of bachelor Harold Chaskin. The magazine ran a piece on it. Such a place situated intimacy, authenticity, the appropriate setting. The gaze, latched to undressed flesh, could be set in place. Invitations galore enticing women to disrobe and display abounded. (Chaskin’s own contribution to the Hefner vision of bachelor paradise was a glass-walled room paired with an interior pool.)
Those examining the Hefner contribution in that sense can sound rather glum, deterministic, total. Beatriz Preciado in Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics (2014) is most representative of this view.
“The bad news is that Playboy’s pornotopia is dying. The good news is that we are all necrophiliacs.”
Such power, if we are to believe this; such persuasiveness.
The Hefner world, this view of connoisseurship, was bound to sit uneasily with women who, after all, supplied the vision rather than shared in it. Gloria Steinem felt that a “woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual”.
A far more subtle appraisal was provided by former editor of Esquire, Rosie Boycott. It was Hefner’s insistence on women having desire and more to the point “that we had the right to desire, just as society assumed men had” which entrenches a very specific, if peculiar legacy of the sexual revolution.[4]
The Playboy empire adapted with various degrees of success. Rougher competitors in the market drove away market share after the heyday of high circulation during the stale 1970s; readers began deserting the publication in the 1980s. Daughter Christie Hefner took over the reins, pushing the enterprise into the world of cable television. Hefner, in the meantime, retreated into a galaxy of pneumatic blondes and Viagra.
The nude centrefold would eventually be scrapped from Playboy. Such are the times: no longer can its editors rely on fleshy figures allied to delicious and wicked prose. Like the way of other projects, including Hefner himself , Playboy risks going the way of all flesh.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
Notes

The Painful Truth: War is a Racket on Behalf of Wall Street and the Bankers

The Painful Truth: War is a Racket on Behalf of Wall Street and the Bankers

Our War-mongering Nation has 900 Unaffordable, Fully-equipped and Well-defended Military Bases outside our Borders. The Censored-out Truths that War Documentaries Tend to Leave on the Cutting Room Floor

“We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth…For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it might cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.” —Patrick Henry, Virginia Convention, 23 March, 1775
“The completeness of the victory is established by this fact: that of the six hundred Moros (Muslims living in the southern Philippines at the beginning of the 20th century) not one was left alive. The brilliancy of the victory is established by this other fact, to wit: that of our six hundred heroes only fifteen lost their lives. General Leonard Wood was present and looking on. His order had been, ‘Kill or capture those savages.’ Apparently our little army considered that the ‘or’ left them authorized to kill or capture according to taste, and that their taste had remained what it has been for eight years – the taste of Christian butchers. . . .The enemy numbered six hundred – including women and children – and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.” – Mark Twain on the conduct of American soldiers in the Bud Dajo Massacre, March 5-8, 1906 (Philippine-American War), a war that has was conducted similarly to the Vietnam War 60 years later (a la the My Lai Massacre).
US soldiers pose with the bodies of Moro insurgents, Philippines, 1906
“War is just a racket…I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster…I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street…Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints…There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its ‘finger men’ to point out enemies, its ‘muscle men’ to destroy enemies, its ‘brain men’ to plan war preparations, and a ‘Big Boss’ – Super-Nationalistic Capitalism. It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to.” – Major General Smedley Butler, 1934
“There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny, backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.” — Robert McNamara in a memo to Lyndon Johnson – May, 19, 1967
“Some scholars estimate that as many as 3.8 million Vietnamese died during the war. Up to 800,000 perished in Cambodia and another one million in Laos, neighboring countries into which the U.S. expanded the war. The U.S. death toll was 58,000, about half of them people of color. It was a racist war both home and abroad.” – Eric A. Gordon
“The systemic malady that produced the Vietnam War is a close cousin to the one that has now given us President Trump.” – Ira Chernus
First published photos of the My Lai Massacre. Up to 500 totally innocent women, children and babies had been rounded up and shot in cold blood. No weapons had been found in the village. Original story at cleveland.com.
I have been dutifully watching the well-publicized ten-episode, 18 hour-long PBS series on the War in Vietnam that is, as I write, just past the halfway point. The war in Vietnam was the war that I grew up being peripherally aware of (the draft laws hadn’t been implemented yet when I was in high school), but I didn’t think much about it because I was enrolled and very busy studying in med school (1964-1968) at the University of Minnesota when the Tet Offensive began.
Med students of that era were given automatic deferments from military conscription if they promised to practice medicine in rural Minnesota, which I had always planned to do anyway. Practicing rural medicine in my home state was a no-brainer for me, having grown up in a small town, and my decision was affirmed as I saw my fellow med students (at least those who were planning to specialize) struggling with the decision about signing up for the Berry Plan (that allowed them to finish their residencies risk-free but who were then obligated them to join the military immediately afterward – with some assurance of being able to practice their specialty in the military for a period of 4 years.
I was thus spared the psychologically-traumatizing and life- and brain-altering experience of being in a warzone where my likely mission as a physician would have been serving in a field hospital treating the victims of gunshot, artillery or explosive landmine or grenade wounds). Therefore, my life story is a lot different than the life stories of many of my classmates who went to war.
I graduated from med school in 1968, the year that “everything happened”, including the widespread American anti-war demonstrations, the Tet Offensive, Eugene McCarthy’s antiwar candidacy (that resulted in LBJ’s “abdication”), the My Lai Massacre (only revealed to the public a year and a half later), the scores of other My Lai-type Massacres (that were never revealed to the public), the “fragging” (murder by fragmentation grenade) of young, gung-ho, fresh-out-of West Point officers who unnecessarily put their more experienced troops in harm’s way, Martin Luther King’s assassination, DOD Secretary Robert McNamara’s resignation, Robert Kennedy’s assassination, “Tricky Dick” Nixon and Spiro Agnew getting the nomination at the GOP National Convention, the Chicago Riots at the Democratic National Convention, world-wide anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, race riots at home in response to MLK’s murder, demands for justice for minorities, women, etc., etc.
1968 was capped off in November with the sobering results of the presidential election, which showed proudly segregationist southern candidate Governor George Wallace of racist Alabama garnering 13.5% of the popular vote, despite splitting America’s right-wing racist vote with Richard Nixon (and the Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy”). Richard Nixon got 43.4 % of the popular vote, barely beating the 42.7% that the progressive, anti-racist (but pro-war) candidate Hubert Humphrey barely managed to get.
Richard Nixon with Henry Kissinger (left)
Like today’s Bernie or Bust voters, many progressive voters who usually voted Democratic had been cheated by the Democratic Party and had been battered and bruised by Chicago Boss Richard Daley’s unethical party machine (and its pro-war, police state tactics). Therefore many of those disillusioned progressives stayed home on election day, ensuring 4+ years of the futile, corrupted and doomed presidency of racist-leaning Republican Richard Nixon, whose first term produced an additional 20,000 American deaths in Vietnam and a much larger number of physical and emotional casualties and heroin addicts.
So, because of my interest in psychological trauma, I have been spending the decades since the Vietnam War trying to understand the dynamics of both the short-term and long-term negative mental health effects of combat-induced post-traumatic stress disorder – which wasn’t actually called PTSD until 1980, well after the end of the war. Even there was no accepted name, PTSD has existed since the first human with a weapon assaulted the first perceived enemy without a weapon in an argument over a property line, hunting ground or other possession.
Over the 40+ years of practicing medicine, I have come in contact with innumerable patients who were suffering from both domestic and war-related trauma-induced depression, anxiety, insomnia, functional disorders, flash-backs (usually mis-read as “hallucinations” and therefore mis-diagnosed as “schizophrenia”), etc.
In addition, I provided medical care for several years for the in-patients at a mental hospital,. During that time I came in contact with many over-medicated inpatients (invariably intoxicated with brain-altering, brain-suppressing cocktails of psychiatric drugs) – virtually all of whom had, at the beginning of their psychiatric misadventures, been victims of acute and/or chronic sexual, physical, emotional, spiritual or combat trauma. It seemed that few to none of these patients had had ever been questioned about any history of psychological trauma; and therefore their PTSD remained undiagnosed as their primary diagnosis – an important reality that would alter all future treatments or even any chances at a cure. And thus they were left with diagnoses “mental illness of unknown cause” which were destined to be treated primarily with drugs.
Later in my medical career, I spent some sabbatical time at the VA hospital at Fort Snelling and became familiar with the devastating effects suffered by Vietnam War veterans who had been belatedly but accurately diagnosed with combat-induced PTSD.
I also practiced medicine for a time at a VA out-patient clinic and dealt with traumatized veterans from every war since WWII. Sadly, I came to learn that these VA medical facilities were full of combat-traumatized war veterans (from every war) who were victims of mis-diagnoses such as paranoid schizophrenia of unknown cause, schizoaffective disorder of unknown cause or manic-depressive psychosis of unknown cause who therefore had been mis-treated with so-called anti-psychotic drugs like Thorazine, Prolixin or Mellaril until their brains had been so damaged that they had become totally disabled with drug-induced mental illness, drug-induced dementia, drug-induced suicidality, drug-induced tardive dyskinesia, drug-induced sleep disorders, drug-induced cardiac disorders, drug-induced gastrointestinal disorders, etc – all preventable disorders, as is true of combat-induced PTSD, rape-trauma-induced PTSD or any of the other trauma-related mental health disorders. An ounce of prevention is worth far more than a pound of cure. Ask any PTSD victim.
So I have gradually come to understand how important chronic stress is, especially life-threatening stress, and I know what it can do to a person’s brain and body. I have tried to warn those in my sphere of influence about the total preventability of combat-induced PTSD (simply never enter a combat zone). My generation’s war in Vietnam has produced so many haunted combat-traumatized Vietnam vets coming home to an uncomprehending society should still have taught the medical profession some hard lessons about violence and mental health. Sadly, indoctrinated war-makers, greedy war-profiteers and Big Pharma have all placed careers, duty, honor and profits ahead of human health, wellness and the avoidance of neurotoxic prescription drugs. But the temptation of our society to glorify American militarism has obfuscated the truth about war, to the great detriment of every one of us consumers and potential recruits.
Ken Burns has stated that the writers and producers of The Vietnam War made serious conscious efforts to present both the pro-war and the anti-war sides of the story, mistakenly presuming that there is any ethical equivalence between the two sides. Those balancing efforts are obvious, but even the testimony of the pro-war story-tellers can’t help but solidify the fact that the Vietnam War was an atrocity-producing situation that had no upside, unless one is talking about the points of view of amoral, sociopathic, war-mongers and other capitalist sympathizers.
There has been a lot of footage in this documentary that I had not seen before, so there will be segments that will enhance everybody’s knowledge about this important event. I also hope that folks will view the film with an open mind and with empathy for the victimized and with understanding for the victimizing soldiers. The victimized are represented by the innocent Vietnamese women, children and old men.
But the guilty, order-obeying young soldiers deserve some empathy also, for they had been lied to about the reasons that they were there with orders to kill in a hell zone, willing to do anything necessary in a desperate effort to survive or otherwise overcome the painful experience, even if it meant committing war crimes to do it – or taking brain-altering drugs or committing suicide.
For those viewers who were already somewhat familiar with the Vietnam War, I hope that the experience will function as an important refresher course about this important phase of American and world history. Mistakes that mankind should have learned about from history’s fiascoes will be repeated most often by those who are ignorant of them. The current occupant of the Oval Office is unlikely to have learned any important lessons from history, especially about the nature of war.  No confidence should be placed in his decision-making abilities.
Hopefully younger people – especially those who may someday be tempted to sign up for the military – will be willing to tear themselves away from their hand-held electronic devices to watch this series and learn some of the lessons that even their president hasn’t learned yet. Their futures may depend on doing so, for just as World War I ruined entire generations of young military-age soldiers in England, France, Germany and Russia, the Vietnam War ruined the lives of an entire generation of immature, draft age adolescent boys – whether they died, were “just” wounded or came home seriously traumatized but with no visible wounds. The lives of combat soldiers through history were never the same again, and, if you asked their loved ones, they will tell you that the same can be said for them as well.
The damaged lives, damaged brains, damaged bodies, damaged marriages and faulty parenting methods experienced by Vietnam War veterans, their families – and their victims – have significant negative impacts on the mental and spiritual health of future generations of all those who have been touched, whether directly or indirectly, by war violence.
Our war-mongering nation has 900 unaffordable, fully-equipped and well-defended military bases outside our borders (as opposed to Russia’s 2 foreign bases) and
America has been involved in scores of regime changes and election-interference all around the world ever since 1898, when the US defeated Spain in the brief Spanish-American war (April 1898–August 1898).
It was after that war that the United States acquired Spain’s ex-colonies Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines and gave Cuba its independence (except for the Guantanamo Bay military base).
There is an eye-opening document that should wake up and then bring shame to every peace and justice-seeking individual that is concerned about America’s 20 trillion dollar debt and its trillion-dollar annual military expenditures (if one includes the interest payments on past war cost borrowing, the cost of our intelligence agencies, the cost of our nuclear weapons and the cost of providing health care to veterans). The document can be accessed here.
The document, written by historian Dr Zoltan Grossman of Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington, contains a comprehensive list of the scores of foreign interventions that the US military has made since the Massacre at Wounded Knee (1890).
From that website, I compiled the following list of the last 73 Nations that the US military has intervened in since the Korean War (aerial bombings, missiles, troops, command operations)
Korea (1950), Iran, Vietnam, Guatemala, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, China, Panama, Vietnam, Cuba, Germany, Laos, Cuba, Iraq, Panama, Indonesia, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Cambodia, Oman, Laos, Mideast, Chile, Cambodia, Angola, Iran, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Grenada, Honduras, Iran, Libya, Bolivia, Iran, Libya, Virgin Islands, Philippines, Panama, Liberia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Haiti, Zaire, Liberia, Albania, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Yemen, Macedonia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Philippines, Colombia, Iraq, Liberia, Haiti, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Syria (2014), and counting.
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Dr Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. In the decade prior to his retirement, he practiced what could best be described as “holistic (non-drug) and preventive mental health care”. Since his retirement, he has written a weekly column for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns mostly deal with the dangers of American imperialism, friendly fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, and the dangers of Big Pharma, psychiatric drugging, the over-vaccinating of children and other movements that threaten American democracy, civility, health and longevity and the future of the planet. Many of his columns are archived at 
All images in this article are from the author.