Anthony Bourdain was right, and it's never too late to track down and prosecute war criminals like Henry Kissinger.

“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and remaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.”
― Anthony Bourdain, A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines

Or, as recently noted at NAC: As if today's world isn't grim already enough, let's revisit Pol Pot and the Killing Fields of Cambodia. In honor of Henry Kissinger's meeting with Donald Trump later this afternoon ...

 ... it's worth remembering that Kissinger should be in prison.

During his brief tenure at the forefront of U.S. foreign policy, Kissinger got a lot done. In his first two years in office, he helped Richard Nixon sabotage Vietnamese peace talks for his own political gain, expanded that war into Laos and Cambodia (the destabilizing effects of which would pave the way for the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the death of up to two million people), and advocated the bombing of, in his own words, “anything that moves.”

In 1971, Kissinger backed Pakistan in its war against Bangladesh despite evidence of massacre and rape. In ‘73, he orchestrated a military coup against the democratically elected Allende regime of Chile, installing in its stead the violently oppressive Pinochet dictatorship. And in ‘75, the then-Secretary of State lent his tacit support to President Suharto of Indonesia ― himself a despot already responsible for the mass killings of hundreds of thousands―in the deadly conquest of East Timor. Kissinger himself, in proposing an intervention in Cyprus, summed up his philosophy best: “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

Appalling though this all may be, Kissinger’s most enduring legacy is subtler in its malignance. The foreign policy of Henry Kissinger is defined, above all, by an utter contempt for human life and absolute pursuit of “American interests.” For every one of Kissinger’s crimes that goes unpunished and for every bit of praise he receives, the belief that the United States can do whatever it wants with the rest of the world is further concretized. Behind every thoughtless, disastrous intervention since then―behind the mujahideen and the Contras, behind the Iraq war and the El Mozote Massacre―is the work of Henry Kissinger.

"Ideology as History": critiquing Burns and Novick’s The Vietnam War documentary.

I'm suddenly struck by the number of times we walked into a bar or restaurant in Belgium and Holland, only to find not even one functional television. Heavenly.

While we were gone, the documentary event of the season debuted.

Vietnam: 'The war in south-east Asia is now the subject of an epic 10-part, 18-hour series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick."

I'm struck by this observation in The Guardian's article: "Two thirds of Americans who served in Vietnam are no longer alive ... while the majority of Vietnamese people were born after the war."

It's why history matters.

Even before pre-truth became post-truth, the tricky part has always been getting the history right, and that's why people like Howard Zinn matter.

Learn about Howard Zinn and “What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire.”

Howard Zinn died in 2010. A few years ago, when I tried listing the most influential books in my life, Zinn's A People's History of the United States was not among them, and this was an unfortunate omission, to be rectified in a future update.

Now more than ever, you need to know these things.

It's about sifting though the evidence and following it to a conclusion, not cherry-picking the parts that support pre-existing beliefs -- and in the case of the new series about the Vietnam War ...

Ideology as History: a Critical Commentary on Burns and Novick’s “The Vietnam War”, by Chuck O'Conell (CounterPunch)

After watching Episodes One and Two of the Burns and Novick Vietnam War series, I am reminded of the old adage asserting a valuable point for students of history: the class that controls the means of material production controls also the means of mental production. Listening to the narrator scroll through the list of financial sponsors cautioned me to lower my expectations that the series would break away from the predictable liberal narrative that has been dominant in discussions about the Vietnam War.

What is that liberal narrative? It is a bundle of intertwined claims: Vietnamese opposition to the French and then the Americans was motivated by a nationalist desire for independence, the Saigon government of the South was a legitimate government, the rebellion of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam against the U.S. supported Saigon regime was directed by the communist Hanoi government of the north, the military conflict in Vietnam was thus a civil war, and U.S. military involvement in support of the South was the result of a series of mistakes by American political leaders. It’s a narrative that has a certain plausibility not least because it has been repeated over and over for fifty years.

A more comprehensive scholarly reading of history produces a more accurate narrative: First, without discounting the significance of nationalism in Vietnamese society, a more important factor in the war was the goal of land reform offered by the communists to the peasants who comprised the majority of the population. The military struggle was in large part a social revolution against the landlord class and its foreign backers. Second, the Saigon regime that emerged after the failed French war of re-conquest was a U.S. creation financed and managed by the Americans who built its military and prodded it into fighting against the Vietnamese revolutionary forces. When an army such as the South Vietnamese Army is funded and trained by a foreign power to maintain the foreigner’s domination of that same country, that army is not fighting a civil war – it is fighting a war of counterinsurgency and is essentially an army of collaborators. Third, the National Liberation Front was an autonomous Southern political entity that emerged from the failure of the Hanoi government to press a fight against the southern regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. Dominated by communists it was in liaison with Hanoi as the North gradually gave greater assistance to the rebels’ efforts. Fourth, the U.S. involvement was not the result of a series of mistakes but was the result of a series of deceptions and provocations made by every U.S. administration running from Harry Truman all the way to Richard Nixon on the basis of the perceived political-economic imperatives of advanced capitalism in Southeast Asia. Let me amplify these points ...

Vietnam: 'The war in south-east Asia is now the subject of an epic 10-part, 18-hour series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick."

I've always been a documentary freak. I remember the impact of Vietnam: A Television History when the documentary series debuted in 1983. My VCR was set religiously, and friends of like mind interrupted the usual prowling and partying to join me for viewings.

TV: 13-PART HISTORY OF VIETNAM WAR ON PBS, by John Corry (NYT; 4 Oct 1983)

 ... In a curious way, the documentary also suggests that American hawks and doves were right and wrong in equal measure. The hawks were right in saying that only the most massive firepower, constantly applied, could win the war; even so, they underestimated Vietnamese tenacity, and they were wrong about monolithic Communism. In Southeast Asia, it was splintered.

The doves, meanwhile, were right about withdrawing from Vietnam. In the absence of an all-out war, there was no hope of victory, anyway. The doves, however, were wrong about Communist intentions and Communist morality.

I'm struck by this observation in The Guardian's article: "Two thirds of Americans who served in Vietnam are no longer alive ... while the majority of Vietnamese people were born after the war."

It's why history matters.

Ken Burns returns to take on Vietnam – 'a war we have consciously ignored', by David Smith (The Guardian)

Burns’s new 10-part, 18-hour epic film covers the conflict from all sides, and hopes to ‘shape more courageous conversations about what took place’

 ... The war in south-east Asia is now the subject of an epic 10-part, 18-hour series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Burns is America’s premier documentary film-maker, renowned for his 1990 masterpiece on the civil war as well as series on jazz, baseball, the Roosevelts and the second world war. Ten years and millions of dollars in the making, covering the conflict from all sides, The Vietnam War could be the closest thing yet to a definitive account of what Burns believes is the most important event in American history in the second half of the 20th century.

The time for a conversation “about a war we have consciously ignored” has come, Burns, 63, told the National Press Club in Washington earlier this month. “We have said: ‘We don’t want to talk about it. We’re not gonna teach it, we think it’s about this, or my own personal politics at this moment has actually determined what I should say about Vietnam regardless of what I felt when it was taking place.’ We have this dissonance going on.

“We hope that the film will contribute in some way, shape or form to more courageous conversations about what took place, because let us also be very clear that the divisions that we face today, the lack of civil discourse, the inability to talk with each other but only at each other, had their seeds planted in the Vietnam war, so if we understand it then we also understand our present moment.”

Hanoi Hannah has died.

Hanoi Hannah -- and Axis Sally, Eastern Jewel, Lord Haw-Haw, Pyongyang Sally, Tokyo Rose and Seoul City Sue. They're no longer needed. Afterall, we have the Internet.

By zapping the truth through an ostrich-like policy censorship, deletions, and exaggerations U.S. Armed Forces Radio lost the trust of many GIs when they were most isolated and vulnerable to enemy propaganda. It wasn't that Hanoi Hannah always told the truth - she didn't. But she was most effective when she did tell the truth and US Armed Forces Radio was fudging it.

As usual, The Economist's obituary is elegant.

The music of English

Trinh Thi Ngo (“Hanoi Hannah”), broadcaster for Voice of Vietnam, died on September 30th, aged 87

The voice was faint, for the signal was weak between Hanoi and the Central Highlands. Nonetheless, at 8pm Saigon time, after a day spent avoiding mantraps and pursuing the ever-elusive Vietcong, GIs would try to unwind by listening to the young woman they called “Hanoi Hannah”. As they cleaned their rifles, smoked herbs and broke out a beer or two, their precious radios, strapped up for protection with ragged black tape, crackled with tones that might have been those of a perky high-school cheerleader. “GI Joe, how are you today?” asked the sweet-sounding girl, of men to whom any girl would have sounded sweet. “Are you confused? Nothing is more confused than to be ordered into a war to die or be maimed for life without the faintest idea of what’s going on. You know your government has abandoned you. They have ordered you to die. Don’t trust them. They lied to you.”

For Suddeath, "Draft evasion dampens memories of Ali."

Overall in his opinion piece, the last reporter to cover the New Albany city beat 259 days ago prior to relocating to Glasgow to serve as editor for yet another CNHI chain entity ... um, where was I?

Right: Suddeath does as balanced a job as could be expected in weighing the experiences of the generation drafted to fight in Vietnam.

DANIEL SUDDEATH: Draft evasion dampens memories of Ali

While Ali certainly deserves respect and acknowledgment for his courage in the face of racism and his pure athletic talent, his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War and some of the subsequent comments after his death by those attempting to justify his decision do not stir heroic sentiments in my book.

But he gives the game away in the header, and it's an object lesson about why language matters. Suddeath uses neither "conscientious objector" nor "draft dodger," both nouns describing persons, but with radically different meanings. He refers instead to "draft evasion" in the sense of the action taken -- artistic, though it still clearly suggests what side the writer is about to take.

Let's review Muhammad Ali's statement at the time. Suddeath fails to mention that the US military was desegregated only after World War II.

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.

Then there's this point of view (thanks GS).

Muhammad Ali was no draft dodger, but here are a bunch of famous people who were, by Jack Hunter (Rare)

... But Ali didn’t “dodge” anything. As Rare’s Tom Mullen explains, “Ali never dodged the draft; he opposed it, accepting the legal consequences without any attempt to evade them.” “He didn’t flee to Canada or enroll in college to obtain a deferment,” Mullen noted. “From the moment he learned of his induction, Ali stood firmly in the proud tradition of civil disobedience, saying ‘just take me to jail.”

How Donald Duncan's second obituary came to be written.

Photo credit: New York Times.

First there was an obituary.

Donald W. Duncan, 79, Ex-Green Beret and Early Critic of Vietnam War, Is Dead, by Robert D. McFadden (NYT)

Mr. Duncan, who died in obscurity in 2009, wrote in 1966 of witnessing atrocities by American troops and helped organize antiwar protests.

The, a week later came the explanation. It sheds light into the editorial process at a newspaper (just imagine if ours attempted any such), and suggests that it's still possible to disappear in plain sight in places like ...

An Obituary Runs Seven Years After the Subject’s Death. What Happened?, by William McDonald

Obituaries editor William McDonald explains why The Times decided to remember a once-famous activist who had slipped into obscurity, seven years after his death.


... In sum, Mr. Duncan made an appreciable impact on the national discussion of the war; he had for a time been a newsmaker, and by The Times’s rule of thumb his death was thus newsworthy. The obituary ran online on May 6, and in the paper on May 8.

What was unusual about the obituary, however, was how belated it was. Mr. Duncan had died seven years earlier, on March 25, 2009. And therein lies a tale, about a life in which notoriety gave way to its flip side, obscurity, and about a journalistic decision in which one imperative of reporting — to be timely — deferred to a greater one: to simply get the story out.

 ... Madison, Indiana, where Donald Duncan's death notice appeared seven years ago.

Duncan's 2009 obituary in the Madison Courier.

The death of Vo Nguyen Giap.

Who knew he was still alive after all this time?

Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, Who Ousted U.S. From Vietnam, Is Dead, by Joseph R. Gregory (NYT)

Vo Nguyen Giap, the relentless and charismatic North Vietnamese general whose campaigns drove both France and the United States out of Vietnam, died on Friday in Hanoi. He was believed to be 102.

Did the general achieve success by throwing manpower into a meat grinder? Probably. But one has to admire his prescience in another aspect of war.

He knew something else as well, and profited from it: that waging war in the television age depended as much on propaganda as it did on success in the field.

These lessons were driven home in the Tet offensive of 1968, when North Vietnamese regulars and Vietcong guerrillas attacked scores of military targets and provincial capitals throughout South Vietnam, only to be thrown back with staggering losses. General Giap had expected the offensive to set off uprisings and show the Vietnamese that the Americans were vulnerable.

Militarily, it was a failure. But the offensive came as opposition to the war was growing in the United States, and the televised savagery of the fighting fueled another wave of protests. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had been contemplating retirement months before Tet, decided not to seek re-election, and with the election of Richard M. Nixon in November, the long withdrawal of American forces began.