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Anti-Vietnam War Activists Comment on Burns’ Sentimental Lies About Vietnam

Lemisch; Gehan; Collins; McReynolds; Mirelowitz; Young Portside
The current PBS series on the war in Vietnam is stirring discussion throughout the country on the U.S. war in Vietnam; the longest war in Afghanistan; and now Donald Trump's threat to use nuclear weapons to annihilate the people of North Korea. Portside readers have responded to posts about the series in emails and posts on Facebook. Here are comments by Portside readers on the Burns and Novick series. Reposting by Portside is with permission of the writers.

Tidbits - May 11, 2017 - Reader Comments: GOP Health Plan = Death Squads; Trump Tax Plan; Locked Up for Being Poor; Politics of Questioning Civil War and Slavery; Time to Save Net Neutrality; Building Bridges Across the Generation Gap: more...

Portside
Reader Comments: GOP Health Plan = Death Squads; Trump Tax Plan - More for the Rich; It Could Have Been Me (protests then and now); Locked Up for Being Poor; Politics of Questioning the Civil War (and the end of Slavery); Time to Save Net Neutrality; Announcements: Building Bridges Across the Generation Gap: Shared Struggles; Michelle Alexander and Susan Burton; Posters - Reclaim! Remain! Rebuild: Affordable Housing, Gentrification & Resistance; and more...

And It Could Have Been Me

Holly Near Kent and Jackson State 1970-1990
Twenty years after the murders of students at Kent State (May 4) and Jackson State (May 15), in 1970, Holly Near wrote "And It Could Have Me." in 1990. "The song has grown over the years, new verses being added as violence continues to interrupt human potential." Today with Trump as President and a right-wing GOP-cabal in control, the song has new meaning - "it could have been me; But instead it was you; So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two."

Demobilizing America - A Nation Made by War and a Citizenry Unmade By It

Tom Engelhardt TomDispatch
As they launched their Global War on Terror after 9/11, top Bush administration officials remained obsessed with memories of the Vietnam mobilization. They were eager for wars in which there would be no prying journalists, no ugly body counts, and no body bags heading home to protesting citizens.

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The War He Survived Was Vietnam

Michael Yates CounterPunch
Liberal opinion holds that the Vietnam War was a mistake. The right continues to see it as a noble cause. Author Michael Uhl calls the slaughter in Vietnam planned and deliberate, saying that the United States would not tolerate then or now efforts by people in the Global South to escape the imperialist trap. Uhl writes as a participant, first as an intelligence officer and then as an historian, to paint a merciless and highly detailed picture of US policy at its rawest.

The Rebel Who Came In From the Cold: The Tainted Career of Bayard Rustin

James Creegan Portside
Black History Month is a time for looking back on the civil rights movement and the lives of its pioneers. One of them was a man whose name is far less widely known than those of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks or James Farmer. He was Bayard Rustin, whom some have sought to celebrate in recent years as an unsung hero of the movement, one who never received his due recognition because he was gay.

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An American Communist Saga

Paul Buhle Portside
Herbert Aptheker, to introduce the man by his highest prestige, was an early scholar of African American uprisings against slavery, and in his middle years, the director and coordinator of the W.E.B. DuBois Papers, one of the great archival triumphs of US history at large. For many in the 60s, through his books and public apperances, a generation became aware of the Communist Party, U.S.A.

Tidbits - May 14, 2015 - TPP; Stop-and-Frisk; White Americans and Police Accountability; Vietnam ,Debating the War; Remembering Jackson State Murders; more...

Portside
Reader Comments - Obama and the TPP; Stop-and-Frisk; White Americans and Police Accountability; Vietnam and Anti-War History and the Ongoing Debate; Remembering Jackson State Murders; Greece, Organizing New York; Those Who Work in Customer Call Centers; Announcements - Immigration, Work and Wages - Washington - May 21; Film Showing and Discussion - Blood Fruit - New York - May 22

Tidbits - May 7, 2015 - Baltimore; Cities as "Occupied Territory"; Bernie Sanders; Alberta NDP Victory; $15 per Hour; Israeli Soldiers Speak Out...more

Portside
Reader Comments - Baltimore, other cities as "Occupied Territory"; Drop the Charges against those arrested; Government-Sponsored Segregation; Bernie Sanders - a Long Tradition of American Socialism; Alberta NDP Victory; $15 per Hour or Bust; Israeli Soldiers Speak Out-Gaza Atrocities Were Orders; Labor Union Membership Now Just 11%; Feliks Tych - R.I.P.; Announcements - New York, Boston
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