Portside

Nearly 40,000 Vietnamese have been killed since the end of the war in 1975, and 67,000 maimed, by land mines, cluster bombs and other ordnance.

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How we name and define this most controversial of American wars is not a narrow scholarly exercise, but profoundly shapes public memory of its meaning and ongoing significance to American national identity and foreign policy.

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Seeger had been blacklisted as a communist and this gutsy defiance of a corporate media giant marked his return to the mainstream cultural scene.

King went much further than simply declaring his opposition to the Vietnam War. He also declared his hostility to U.S. militarism in all its forms and asserted that such hostility was integral to his account of black freedom.

There is new interest in the slaughter and massacres that took place during the Vietnam War. This may in part be a response to the fact that last month (January 2018) marked the 50th anniversary of that war’s Tet offensive. In Vietnam many of the massacres (My Lai was by no means unique) were perpetrated by soldiers as well as their officers from the so-called “land of the free.” I use this descriptive term intentionally because one of the things that is often declared to be constitutionally “free” from rational regulation in the U.S. are guns.

It’s not that our generals don’t read. They do. They just doggedly continue to read the wrong books.