tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69712855161390008622024-02-08T03:59:09.898-08:00Ron Young VIEWSAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.comBlogger36125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-61359558238279814582018-06-11T07:43:00.002-07:002018-06-11T07:56:45.717-07:00A Time for Turning - WA Ballot Initiative 1631<br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A
Time for Turning, WA Ballot Initiative 1631<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">By
Rev. Carol Jensen and Ron Young<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In the popular contemporary Christian hymn, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Canticle of the Turning,</i> the refrain
ends with the hopeful words, “the world is about to turn</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>T</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">he famous Jewish philosopher, Martin
Buber, tells us, “the power of turning never reveals itself outside of crisis.”
A near total (97%) consensus among scientists tells us that we face a profound crisis
today over dangers from global warning, primarily caused by human activity and
specifically by over use of fossil fuels. A Gallup Poll in 2017 tells us that 84%
of Americans worry “a lot” or “some” about global warming, while only 16% worry
“not at all.” A poll this Spring reveals that most registered voters believe
the United States should reduce polluting greenhouse gas emissions, while only 4%
of voters believe the U.S. should not reduce its emissions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Washington
state is playing a unique, leading role in the nationwide response to the problem
of pollution and scientifically verifiable dangers of global warming. The Trump
administration seems to ignore or deny the problems, pulling out of the Paris
Agreement on Climate Change, and prompting the EPA to gut long-standing health
and environmental protections, and cancel new positive regulations to reduce
CO2 emissions. This is the context in which signing, circulating and urging
others to sign WA Ballot Initiative 1631 is important, urgent, and the right
thing to do.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span class="MsoHyperlink"><a href="https://yeson1631.org/">Initiative 1631</a></span> is already endorsed by
<span class="MsoHyperlink"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><a href="https://yeson1631.org/coalition/"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">more than 100
Washington state organizations</span></a></span></span>, including faith
communities, businesses, labor unions, environmental and clean energy advocates,
health professionals, Washington tribal nations, and communities of color
advocates. This may well be the broadest support of any initiative in
Washington state history. We all do our part to keep Washington clean, but
right now the largest polluters can pollute for free while we all pay the
costs. I-1631 would put a fee ($15 per ton) on the state’s largest polluters,
including the oil industry and utilities that have not switched to clean energy,
and would invest in protecting our air and water, clean energy infrastructure, and
in new jobs across the state.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">In
addition to incredibly broad-based support for the initiative, another unique
feature of this proposal of a fee (different than a tax) is the requirement
that the revenue collected from I-1631 cannot simply be used by the state
government as general funds but will be allocated by a broad-based, publicly
accountable board, made up of experts and trusted community leaders. As
examples, I-1631 will invest in developing job generating clean energy
alternatives, including wind, solar and other renewable resources,
transportation alternatives, better home and building energy efficiency, and it
will provide support to communities hardest hit by pollution because the
neighborhood you live in shouldn’t determine if your air is clean and your
water is safe to drink.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">It’s
almost impossible any more, no matter who you voted for in 2016, to ignore the
threats of pollution and global warming. Even with Trump appointees heading all
the national intelligence agencies, the Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S.
Intelligence Community recently warned,<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“The impact of the long-term trends toward a warmer
climate, more air pollution, bio-diversity loss, and water scarcity are likely
to fuel economic and social discontent, and possibly upheaval…The last few
years have been the warmest on record. Extreme weather events in a warmer world
have the potential for greater impacts and can compound with other drivers to
raise the risk of humanitarian disasters, conflict, water and food shortages,
population migration, labor shortfalls, price shocks, and power outages.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="color: black;">Our state has a legacy of
protecting the home we all share. </span></span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">W</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">e
know if we don’t act now, the threats from pollution and global warming will
only get worse and cause more harm to our communities and risks for our children’s
future. I-1631 is a practical first step in our state to ensure clean air and
clean water and represents a significant contribution in the larger campaign to
reduce the threat of global warming.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Faith
communities are supporting Initiative 1631 based on deep concern about the
disproportionate impact of pollution and climate change on communities of color
and on already impoverished people, as well as a fundamental commitment to care
for creation, a responsibility entrusted to us by our Creator. It will take faithful,
intelligent, persistent citizen efforts and action over many years on many
levels – local, state, national, and international – to creatively meet the
challenges of global warming. In the next weeks and months, the most important
contribution we can make here in Washington State is to get Initiative 1631 on
the Ballot and approved by Washington voters in November.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Rev. Carol Jensen is
Co-Chair of the statewide Faith Action Network.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Ron Young is an activist
and author. Ron’s memoir, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Crossing
Boundaries<o:p></o:p></i></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">in
the Americas, Vietnam and the Middle East </span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">was published in 2014.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Carol
and Ron are married and live in Everett. <o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Ron
can be contacted at <span class="MsoHyperlink"><a href="mailto:ronyoungwa@gmail.com">ronyoungwa@gmail.co</a>m</span></span></i></b></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">(This Commentary appeared in The Everett Herald on Sunday, June 10, 2018.)</span></i></div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-60629535621059821312018-06-01T13:36:00.000-07:002018-06-01T16:21:38.416-07:00Veterans Group Says "NO" to Emmy for PBS Vietnam War Documentary<br />
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<b><i>You all know that I offered critical commentaries on each of the ten episodes of the PBS Vietnam War Documentary. Given all the Documentary's distortions and shortcomings, I agree with Veterans for Peace that it does not deserve and should not be awarded an Emmy. I hope, if you agree, you will share this with others.</i></b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt;"><a href="https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/05/31/veterans-group-says-no-emmy-pbs-vietnam-war-series" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="color: #1155cc;">Common Dreams</span></a></span></i></b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt;"></span></i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt;">Thursday, May 31, 2018</span></i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #336699; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 24.0pt;">Veterans’ Group Says
“No” to Emmy for PBS Vietnam War Series</span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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“In this war-torn world, what is desperately needed – but what Burns and Novick
fail to convey – is an honest rendering of that war to help the American people
avoid yet more catastrophic wars.”</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #336699; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;"><br />
By <u><a href="https://www.commondreams.org/author/mike-ferner" target="_blank"><span style="color: #336699;">Mike Ferner</span></a></u></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;">A national veterans’
organization is weighing in on this year’s Emmy awards with a full-page ad in
Variety, saying Ken Burns and Lynne Novick’s “Vietnam War” series does not
deserve a “Best Documentary” award.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<u><span style="color: #336699; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;"><a href="http://www.veteransforpeace.org/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #336699;">Veterans For Peace</span></a></span></u><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;"> (VFP), headquartered in St. Louis, with 175 chapters in
the U.S. and six overseas, will run the Variety ad prior to the awards
on September 17, to generate discussion about the series and the lasting
impact it will have if “crowned with an Emmy.”</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;">The ad says that
because “The Emmy Award is a powerful recognition of truth in art,” Emmy judges
are asked to consider whether, “In this war-torn world, what is desperately
needed – but what Burns and Novick fail to convey – is an honest rendering of
that war to help the American people avoid yet more catastrophic wars.”</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;">The ad (attached)
identifies what it considers the fundamental flaw of the PBS series: Burns and
Novick “assert at the beginning that the war ‘was begun in good faith by decent
people, out of fateful misunderstandings.’” Questioned about this in
a </span><u><span style="color: #336699; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/arts/television/ken-burns-and-lynn-novick-tackle-the-vietnam-war.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0" target="_blank"><span style="color: #336699;">New York Times interview</span></a></span></u><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;">, Burns admitted that might have been “too
generous to our leaders,” but he stuck by it.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;">VFP’s ad quickly
responds to that “generous” remark, saying, “Even a cursory reading of the
Pentagon Papers disclosed by Daniel Ellsberg,” (inexplicably missing from this
history) “demonstrates the falseness of this claim of American
innocence.” The painful truth, according to the ad, is that the United
States “rained incredible violence on the Vietnamese people merely to replace
France as the dominant power in Southeast Asia.”</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Another shortcoming in
last fall’s series was it paid far too little attention to the millions of
civilian deaths the U.S. caused in Southeast Asia, skips over the millions of
people still suffering from the effects of Agent Orange and ignores some
700,000 tons of unexploded ordnance still lurking in the fields of Vietnam,
Laos and Cambodia, still killing and injuring today.</span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;">Acknowledging that
Burns and Novick were “justifiably critical of American presidents and military
leaders” the veterans say the filmmakers, “mainly focus on the harm to U.S.
soldiers” and “reinvigorate Cold War myths that the Vietnamese anti-colonial
struggle was merely an extension of Soviet and Chinese communist expansion.”</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;">Another shortcoming in
last fall’s series was it paid far too little attention to the millions of
civilian deaths the U.S. caused in Southeast Asia, skips over the millions of
people still suffering from the effects of Agent Orange and ignores some
700,000 tons of unexploded ordnance still lurking in the fields of Vietnam,
Laos and Cambodia, still killing and injuring today.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;">Many VFP members have
first-hand knowledge of the broad anti-war movement, some as participants in
the active-duty G.I. resistance where they conducted peaceful protests,
sabotage and outright mutiny, and some in the civilian peace movement after
their military service. Nowhere in 18 hours of programming does
the G.I. resistance movement merit mention and “instead of honoring the
civilian peace movement for its accomplishments, activists are generally
belittled as self-interested and self-indulgent, with stress on its supposed
deep antagonism toward American soldiers,” the ad protests. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;">VFP concludes its ad,
just above an iconic photograph of protesting G.I.s holding a banner emblazoned
with, “We won’t fight another rich man’s war,” by saying that if the
Burns/Novick series is “crowned with an Emmy, this defective history of the
Vietnam era will become required viewing for generations of young Americans—a
seductive, but false, interpretation of events.”</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-86164985574528092652018-04-30T11:35:00.000-07:002018-04-30T11:35:42.015-07:00U.S. Missile Attacks on Syria Hurt American Children More Than the Assad Regime<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In response to recent
missile attacks, Syrian President Bashar Assad seems as defiant and determined
as ever to pursue war to preserve his regime in power. Most analysts agree that
given Russian and Iranian backing and the reality that most deaths and
destruction have been caused by conventional weapons, attacks on the regime’s
chemical war capacity will have little effect on, and may even further complicate,
the already very complex dynamics of the conflict. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">What is even more clear,
as President Eisenhower wisely warned us, every missile fired robs children who
are homeless or hungry and not fed. At a
cost of $1 million for each missile, the attacks have added millions to the more
than $4 trillion spent so far on wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. This is
a staggeringly large spending which could have been allocated to reducing
spiraling inequality and eliminating poverty. It is morally outrageous and
socially disastrous that the United States has the second highest overall poverty
rate among rich countries and a significantly higher child poverty rate than 30
other industrialized nations, including Poland and Mexico. The poverty rate
among children of color in the U.S. is three times the rate among white
children.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">To make a convincing
case for a radical revision in national priorities requires addressing why
avoiding war in favor of diplomacy and why spending at much higher levels to
eliminate poverty make sense and are interdependent policies. Taking-up the
poverty issue first, many conservatives argue that the U.S has spent a lot on
safety net programs to reduce poverty, but they haven’t worked. That’s not
true. Studies, including recently one by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and
Policy Priorities, show that while benefits of an expanding economy and
tightening labor market have gone disproportionately to the wealthy, government
assistance programs, including Food Stamps, Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax
Credit, and the Child Tax Credit have made significant contributions to
lowering the child poverty rate. The lesson learned about eliminating poverty
is that, in addition to advocating for workers’ rights, a much higher minimum wage,
strict enforcement of federal housing anti-discrimination laws, increased
spending on education, and some version of a guaranteed minimum income, safety
net programs that are proven to work need to be substantially expanded.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">That won’t happen
without challenging the war economy and the grossly distorted Federal Budget from
which more than half of discretionary spending goes to the military. And that won’t
happen without challenging our conceited, corporate and fear-driven foreign
policy, often marked more by ignorance and arrogance than by wisdom and sound
strategy. Since the end of World War II, starting with Vietnam, our foreign
policy has gotten us into wars, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria
that we later regret and that we could have and should have avoided. All these
wars had the goal of regime change. Whether that goal was achieved or not, in
addition to resulting in huge numbers of dead and wounded, and millions of
refugees, the wars generated violent instability and often led to strengthening
the very political forces they were supposed to defeat. An essential lesson
from these wars, as President Trump may be learning, is that it’s much easier
to get into a war than to get out of a war.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Beside the horrific
human toll, in terms of economic costs, over a fifteen-year period from 2001 to
2016, the wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan are estimated to have cost more
than $300 billion per year. That is more than the combined total amount
allocated in any of these years for the federal departments of education,
energy, labor, interior, and transportation. The need for a radical revision of
our national priorities is clearer and more urgent than ever.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">One important sign of
hope is the emerging new version of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call
for Moral Renewal. The Campaign is challenging the interconnected evils of
systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, and the threat of ecological devastation.
The Campaign is calling on participants to commit to a Covenant of Nonviolence.
Recently, training sessions in nonviolence have been held in 46 cities in 30
states, including Olympia, Seattle and Spokane here in Washington State. During
forty days in May and June, mass nonviolent actions are planned in state
capitals in every region of the country to launch a multi-year-campaign,
uniting people across communities, issues, and geography. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Much more than
commemorating the campaign led by Martin Luther King in 1968, this Poor
People’s Campaign is carrying King’s vision forward with new determination,
energy, and urgency.</span> <span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In
his last Sunday sermon at the Washington National Cathedral, just days before
he was assassinated, Martin Luther King prophetically warned, “America is going
to hell if we don’t use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible
for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life.”</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">April
2018<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif;">Ron
Young is an activist, author who lives in Everett WA. He marched with Martin
Luther King in Selma, Chicago and Washington, DC, and coordinated the March on
Washington for Peace in Vietnam November 13-15, 1969. Ron’s memoir, <i>Crossing Boundaries in the Americas, Vietnam and the Middle East, </i>was
published in 2014. Ron can be contacted by e-mail at ronyoungwa@gmail.com.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-44955354273617287462018-03-30T12:59:00.002-07:002018-03-30T12:59:56.115-07:00Remembering M.L. King and the Kerner Commission Fifty Years Later<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In
March 1968, President Johnson, who had successfully launched important voting
rights and anti-poverty initiatives, under pressure from the military, decided
to send additional troops to join the more than half a million already in
Vietnam to fight and eventually lose a war that cost the U.S. $100 billion.
That same month, the bi-partisan Kerner Commission, appointed by Johnson in
1967 in response to riots in dozens of American cities, concluded that a
massive national investment, estimated at $80 to $100 billion in employment,
education, welfare and housing was essential to prevent our Nation from
becoming “two societies, one black and one white – separate and unequal.” The
Commission briefly considered recommending reducing and reallocating resources
from the war in Vietnam but decided that would be too controversial.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Fearing
the political costs of losing the war in Vietnam and facing deepening racial
division and white backlash at home, Johnson ignored the Kerner Commission Report
and, in a televised address to the nation on March 31, announced he would not
seek a second term as President. Five
days later, on April 4, Martin Luther King, who praised the Kerner Report, was
assassinated in Memphis where he had come to support the struggle of striking
sanitation workers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">A year
earlier, in his famous Riverside Church sermon, “A Time to Break Silence,” on
April 4, 1967, King carefully, yet controversially, explained why he opposed
the Vietnam War, including how the U.S. supported France keeping Vietnam as a
colony. He spoke about the triple threats of racism, poverty and militarism. Reflecting
his view that the war threatened Johnson’s Great Society initiatives, King
declared, “There was hope for the poor – both black and white – through the
poverty program, then came the build-up in Vietnam.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Had he
lived, there is little doubt that King would have opposed the U.S. wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, not only based on his principled commitment to
nonviolence and against war, but because, like the Vietnam War, these wars
robbed our nation of essential human and economic resources, estimated so far
at more than $4 trillion - resources as desperately needed today as they were
fifty years ago to address problems of poverty, racism, and growing inequality.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">On the
anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report, several articles appeared reporting
on some progress over fifty years but also cataloguing conditions that have remained
the same or gotten worse. Among the most revealing and troubling indicators is,
while the overall percentage of Americans living in poverty has remained about
the same since 1968, the percentage of American children living in poverty and the
percentage of people living in “deep poverty” (on incomes less than half the
poverty level have both increased. Shockingly, the United States has one of the
highest rates of child poverty of any developed country. While percentages of
Black and Hispanic children in poverty are higher than for whites, one-third of
all American children living in poverty are white.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> Fred Harris, sole surviving member of the
Kerner Commission, and Alan Curtis, President and CEO of the Eisenhower
Foundation, have edited a new book, <i>Healing Our Divided Society,</i> an updated
review of the challenges our country faces and what can be done<i>. </i>The book</span> <span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">includes
two dozen articles by prominent economists, educators, journalists,
sociologists and others, with recommendations for major national investments in
economic development, employment, education, healthcare, housing and
neighborhood investment. It also includes critical articles addressing crime
prevention and criminal justice policy, and the need for effective messaging to
engage the media, something the Kerner Commission failed to do fifty years ago.
Clearly, given the current context, substantial investments are also needed to address
the national opioid crisis and the challenge of global warming, and to rebuild
the country’s infrastructure. This Eisenhower Foundation book is even more convincing
and useful because it includes several evidence-based essays documenting what
federal programs actually have worked, what ones haven’t, and why. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Where this book and most of the articles
updating the Kerner Report fail is in not addressing our country’s
exceptionally high level of military spending (roughly half of the Federal
government’s discretionary spending) and factors in U.S. foreign policy that,
since the end of World War II, have gotten our country into wars we later
regret. Currently, U.S. military spending is higher than that of the next eight
countries combined. Ironically, the Eisenhower Foundation book totally ignores
President Eisenhower’s wise moral insight that, </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">“</span><span style="color: #454545; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Every gun that is made, every warship
launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those
who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”</span><span style="color: #454545; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">President
Trump and his new National Security Advisor John Bolton, who seems eager to get
us into more wars, want to increase military spending and decrease spending on
social needs. <b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<span style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"> There is no use pretending:
if we are serious about healing our divided society, as Martin Luther King prophetically
declared, we need a revolution in our cultural values and a radical shift in
our national priorities, away from violence and militarism to nonviolence and effective
policies and programs to meet people’s real needs for living wage employment,
housing, healthcare, and education. Recent mass marches led by women and young
people, combined with voter registration campaigns, offer hope that our country
can make the right critical choices</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-37876931285277003682018-03-01T09:32:00.000-08:002018-03-29T11:24:50.311-07:00“Just Kids” or Conscience of a Nation<span style="font-size: large;"><b>“Just Kids” or Conscience of a Nation</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span>
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Student survivors of the violent assault at the Parkland Florida High School that took seventeen lives are sad, frustrated, and angry. They took their protest for stricter gun control to the State Capital in Tallahassee and they’re inspiring popular protests by tens of thousands of youth and others across the country. The students are demanding universal background checks, banning assault weapons, like the AR-15, and raising the age for purchasing a gun to 21, all measures with substantial majority public support. They’re calling for a national protest on Saturday, March 24 and they’re warning politicians, many of whom face elections this year, not to cave-in to the NRA.</div>
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<br />
Many observers of the protests predict that youthful energies and enthusiasm will fade, and the protests will die down. After all, these are “just kids.” Some more critical conservative responses have alleged that the youth are being manipulated by adult anti-gun organizations. A particularly vicious response launched by an extreme rightwing radio talk show host and given a thumbs-up “like” from Donald Trump, Jr. accused one of the student protest leaders of being a “crisis actor” trained and played like a puppet by his former FBI agent dad.<br />
<br />
What many commentators are failing to acknowledge is how many times, in how many countries over the past century, the world witnessed students and youth serving as the conscience of their nation and as the vanguard for major social change. It’s worth recalling a few of the many examples to appreciate the potential power of youth acting together based on their hopes for a better future, and on their bold belief and daring determination that they can help achieve it.<br />
<br />
Watching the Olympics recently, I was reminded of how in 1960 in South Korea, facing brutal police violence, it was student protests that inspired broader mass popular protests which finally forced President Syngman Rhee, a corrupt, repressive dictator, to flee the country. Tapping into this same positive political, cultural vein, South Korea’s current President, Moon Jae-In, was elected on the back of waves of students protesting corruption. Moon believes in negotiating with the North and offers some hope that the two Koreas will find a way other than war to resolve their conflicts.<br />
<br />
In South Africa, students and youth played a major role over four decades in the struggle to end Apartheid. While everyone knows the name of Nelson Mandela, many people may not remember how in 1976 high school students in Soweto organized a protest for a better educational system for blacks. Police responded with tear gas and bullets, killing 600 people. A year later, Steve Biko, one of the organizers of the Soweto protest, was arrested and died in police custody from severe brain damage, likely a result of police beatings. The Soweto story and continued action by students inspired worldwide anti-Apartheid protests. Nelson Mandela often is credited with inspiring the anti-Apartheid movement; and it is a fact when he was released in 1990, after spending 54 years in prison, Mandela led the movement and was elected South Africa’s first black president. It is equally true that the popular movement from below, especially the movement of South African students and youth, was responsible for inspiring and supporting Mandela..<br />
<br />
The Arab Spring in 2010-11, sparked by the self-immolation of a young street vendor in Tunisia, was a wave of pro-democracy protests and uprisings against poverty, corruption, and repression in the Middle East and North Africa. In Egypt the uprising began on January 25, 2011 when diverse youth groups issued online calls via social media urging public protest against increasing police repression and brutality. The uprising consisted of demonstrations, marches, occupations of plazas, non-violent <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_resistance">resistance</a>, acts of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience">civil disobedience</a> and strikes. While tragically the Egyptian military eventually reimposed violent repressive rule, in the interim the Eygptian uprising forced the dictator Hosni Mubarak to resign and caused new free and fair elections to be held. A little-known story about the uprising is how The Montgomery Story comic book, originally published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1957, making the case for nonviolence, was translated into Arabic and thousands of copies distributed among Egyptian youth.<br />
<br />
Reference to the Montgomery bus boycott reminds us of the major role played by students and youth in the American Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement to end the War in Vietnam. In Birmingham in 1963-64, both before and after the church bombing that killed four young girls attending Sunday School, thousands of black children and youth braved mass jailings and attacks from powerful fire hoses and police dogs. The dramatic events of the “Children’s Crusade” in Birmingham provided the context and impetus for passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In March 1965, hundreds of black Selma high school students were joined by black and white college students from across the country, and Christian and Jewish clergy to march with Martin Luther King, Jr. for voting rights. Events in Selma, including the arrest of hundreds, beatings and killings of several young and older activists, and the successful Selma to Montgomery March led directly to President Johnson’s successful push for the Voting Rights Act and to his speech in which, taking a line from the movement’s anthem, the President famously declared, “And we shall overcome!”<br />
<br />
Tragically, Johnson's commitments to civil rights, the War on Poverty and other socially beneficial programs were deeply undermined by decisions he made, despite not seeing any way of winning, to escalate the U.S. war in Vietnam.<br />
<br />
As American doubts and debates about Vietnam heated-up, young people played a major role in building opposition to the war. The first large anti-war march on the nation’s capital was organized in April 1965 by Students for a Democratic Society, many of whose young leaders were already activist organizers in the Civil Right Movement. A few months later, inspired by Vietnamese Buddhist monks and student peace protests in Saigon, several young Americans publicly burned their Draft Cards, and a young Catholic seminarian, Roger LaPorte, immolated himself in front of the United Nations. Resistance to serving in the U.S. War in Vietnam grew, both as resistance to the draft and within the military in the form of soldiers seeking Conscientious Objector status, refusing to fight, going AWOL, or deserting, with some men escaping to Canada or Sweden. By Fall 1967, thousands of young men, many of them students who gave-up their privileged Student Deferments, turned in or burned their Draft Cards in large public protests as part of the “We Won’t Go” movement. In November 1969 500,000 people, most of them young, participated in the March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam. Another 250,000 participated in a parallel march in San Francisco. Thousands of high school and college students volunteered in nationwide summer door-to-door educational and organizing campaigns that eventually led Congress to stop funding the war.<br />
<br />
Given the sad history of how little changed after mass murders at Columbine High School, Sandy Hook Elementary School, at churches in Charlotte North Carolina and Sutherland Springs Texas, and at the music concert in Las Vegas, it would be a mistake to think making change this time will be easy or certain. It would be an even bigger mistake, however, to underestimate the potential power of activist young survivors of the Parkland Florida massacre tapping into and helping to mobilize substantial majority sentiment in support of stricter gun control. The Florida students’ demands - requiring universal background checks, banning assault weapons, and raising the age for purchasing a gun to 21 - are achievable.<br />
<br />
I think people are fed-up with the NRA’s stranglehold blocking sensible gun control. Recent responses by many companies distancing themselves from the NRA, including the announcement by Dick’s Sporting Goods that they no longer will sell military assault-style weapons, are encouraging. People should demand that Bass Pro Shops and its subsidiary, Cabela’s, do the same. Joining our voices with the calls from the Florida student survivors, we can achieve change this time. Elections are coming later this year. We all should pledge not to vote for any candidate who won’t support stricter gun control.<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-82594484121366395572018-02-15T10:11:00.000-08:002018-03-29T11:25:57.242-07:00How Many Deaths Will It Take ‘Til Politicians Support Stricter Gun Control?<span style="font-size: large;"><b>How Many Deaths Will It Take ‘Til Politicians Support Stricter Gun Control?</b></span><br />
<br />
In the wake of many mass murders in our country, including the latest in Florida that took the lives of 17 people and the apparent planned assault by a student here in Everett Washington prevented by a caring, courageous grandmother, finally, public opinion among both Democrats and Republicans, including NRA members and national police organizations, has shifted to where majorities support expansion of background checks and restrictions on purchase of assault weapons. The question is whether politicians will pay attention to people’s views and support sensible stricter laws or, as most politicians have done up until now, march in lock step to lobbying by the NRA.<br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="4000468214102726030"></a></div>
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The NRA wasn’t always a big-moneyed lobby and wasn’t always against restrictions on guns. Growing-up in New Jersey as a teenager in the 1950s, I joined the NRA and remember its major emphases were on teaching good marksmanship and gun safety. In the1930s, responding to the deadly use of machine guns by gangsters, the NRA supported restrictions adopted in the National Firearms Act and the Gun Control Act. Following the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Bobby Kennedy in 1968, the NRA worked with the White House and Congress to support extending and tightening gun control legislation.<br />
<br />
It was during the 1970s, and dramatically in 1980 with its endorsement of Ronald Reagan for President, that the NRA reversed direction. Now, the NRA lobbies against any gun control measures and gives politicians grades which, combined with providing or withholding crucial campaign funds can determine if a candidate is elected or not. The conflict between growing majority popular support for some more controls and the NRA’s rigid opposition to any gun restrictions is dramatic and should be disturbing to all Americans who want to prevent violence and who believe in democracy.<br />
<br />
NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre and NRA Public Communications director Dana Loesch rightly criticize Hollywood’s sick addiction to violence. While Hollywood provides culturally destructive inspiration for violence, by promoting massive gun sales and resisting even modest gun control measures, the NRA consistently contributes to more people possessing more and more weapons. Americans own more guns per capita than residents of any other country.<br />
<br />
A few facts from reliable recent polls reveal how popular views have changed and how out-of-step the NRA is in relation to majority opinion among Americans. According to Gallup polls, just eight years ago the percent of Americans who believed laws controlling firearms should remain as they are was nearly equal to the percent who believed the laws should be made stricter. Today, almost twice as many Americans (60% to 33%) believe gun control laws should be stricter.<br />
<br />
Polls in 2016-2017 by CBS, CNN, Quinnipiac University in Connecticut and Washington University in Missouri show that between 84% and 94% of American voters (Democrats and Republicans) support requiring background checks on all gun buyers. A Pew Research Center poll reveals that 79% of Republicans or Republican-leaning gun owners who are members of the NRA would support measures “preventing the mentally-ill from purchasing guns” and 72% support “barring gun purchases by people on no-fly or watch lists.” I assume similar or even greater numbers of NRA members would support keeping guns out of the hands of persons with serious criminal records.<br />
<br />
A Pew poll in spring 2017 showed that majorities of both Democrats and Republicans supported banning assault-style weapons. While 80% of Democrats supported such a ban, sadly so far, while a majority, only 54% of Republicans supported a ban.<br />
<br />
Appreciating how studies show that some stricter gun control laws can help protect police as well as the public, the National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence, which includes nine national law enforcement organizations, supports expanding required background checks. And seven of the nine national organizations, including the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) and the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCC), also support a “ban on new semi-automatic assault weapons.”<br />
<br />
The NRA opposes all of these sensible restrictions on guns, and will work with big money to defeat candidates for office who support them<br />
<br />
In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, people should demand that every candidate for city, state or federal office declare support publicly for expanding background checks on all potential gun buyers and for banning purchase of assault weapons. Allowing the NRA to block these majority-supported sensible stricter gun control measures not only represents a threat to the lives of more innocent people, but also represents a threat to democracy.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-39720536946799054672018-01-22T10:51:00.002-08:002018-01-22T10:51:36.212-08:00<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: center 3.25in left 393.0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“Friends”
Like These Imperil Israel’s Survival<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> President Trump’s decision to recognize
Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and his tweet that “we’ve taken Jerusalem off the
table” clearly had more to do with keeping a promise to his billionaire donor
Sheldon Adelson and to his and Vice President Pence’s evangelical Christian
fundamentalist friends than it did with the Administration’s claim to be
seeking a great peace agreement for Israelis and Palestinians. Trump’s moves on
Jerusalem, taken together with his allies’ apparent support for the Israeli
rightwing version of a “one-state solution” could doom chances for peace with
the Palestinians and imperil Israel’s survival.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In the
region, predictably, Israel’s Likud-led rightwing government welcomed Trump’s
announcement, while Israeli supporters seeking peace with the Palestinians,
including many senior retired Israeli military and security officials, opposed
it. Trump’s move greatly angered Palestinian Muslims and Christians, as well as
Saudi and other Arab leaders, on whom the Administration seems to be depending
for support of its peace effort. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">At
home, Trump’s politically motivated alliance with Adelson and Christian fundamentalists
on moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem disregarded the views of most mainstream
American Protestants, Roman Catholics, and the clear majority of American Jews.
According to an American Jewish Committee poll earlier this year, only 16% of
American Jews favored making this move immediately. Both the pro-Israel/pro-peace national
organization JStreet and the Union for Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish
religious denomination, raised concerns about the wisdom and timing of Trump’s move.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> What appears to matter more than peace to the President
is that Sheldon Adelson gave $25 million to his campaign for the Presidency and
another $5 million to his inaugural events. It’s an open secret Adelson was feeling
frustrated that, after almost a year in office, Trump had not yet fulfilled his
promise to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It’s also widely
known that, while Adelson sometimes is described as a “strong supporter of
Israel,” his political leanings and loyalties in Israel are almost exclusively
with the Likud and other rightwing Israeli factions that oppose a two-state
solution with the Palestinians. Adelson has consistently been a loud supporter
and source of funds for expanding Jewish settlements and for holding on to the
Territories. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Even
historically hawkish Israeli prime ministers have recognized that expanding
settlements deeper into the West Bank and maintaining Israeli military control
over all or large portions of the Occupied Territories would very likely make
peace impossible. Both Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert broke away
from Likud over their views of how keeping control of Gaza and the West Bank
threatened the survival of Israel. Sharon withdrew Israeli forces from inside
Gaza in 2005. <span style="background: white; color: #293340;">In 2007, then Prime
Minister Olmert publicly declared,</span></span> “<span style="color: #353434; font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">If the day comes
when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style
struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of
Israel is finished." Based on his view of the threat to Israel’s survival,</span><span style="background: white; color: #293340; font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> in 2008, after multiple rounds of secret
talks, Prime Minister Olmert offered a draft two-state peace agreement and
Palestinian President Abbas came very close to accepting it. Abbas declined to sign the draft because at
the time Olmert was drowning in scandal, facing legal prosecution, and was about
to resign from office. Reflecting progress, he and Olmert had made, President
Abbas urged President Trump to restart negotiations based on that draft
agreement. </span><span style="color: #353434; font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="color: #353434; font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> If President Trump is serious about
wanting to accomplish a great peace deal for Israelis and for Palestinians, and
for important U.S. national security interests, it makes no sense at all for his
Administration to align with Sheldon Adelson or with the fundamentalist,
evangelical Christian leaders assembled as White House advisors. These leaders,
who don’t speak for all evangelicals, arrogantly ignore the urgent pleas of
Palestinian Christians; they support Israel largely based on arguable
“end-times” theology, according to which Israel finally doesn’t survive; and
they tend to understand “prophesy” in ways that promise the same eventual fate
for Jews who don’t convert to Christianity as Christian anti-Semites have
predicted over the centuries. In this view, Jews who don’t convert to
Christianity go to Hell.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="color: #353434; font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> What would make sense is that
President Trump present a Framework for a two-state peace agreement to Israel
and the Palestinians along the lines of that proposed by Ambassador Daniel
Kurtzer (See Kurtzer, <i>Parameters: Model
Framework for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations)</i> and, in coordination with
the Quartet (U.S., E.U., Russia and the U.N. Secretary General), present the
Framework to the U.N. Security Council for endorsement. That’s a plan of action
for peace that I believe would evoke active, strong support from leaders and
constituents of major American Jewish, Christian and Muslim national religious
organizations, and majority public support among American Jews and Christian
Evangelicals, especially among millennials whose views have changed, reflecting
concern for Palestinians as well as for Israelis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: right;">
<span style="color: #353434; font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">January 2018<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="color: #353434; font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Ron Young is Consultant with heads of
twenty-five Jewish, Christian and Muslim national religious organizations that
compose the National Interreligious Leadership Initiative for Peace in the
Middle East (NILI). This commentary represents Ron’s personal views, <i>not</i> the views of NILI. Ron’s memoir, <i>Crossing Boundaries in the Americas, Vietnam
and the Middle East, </i>was published in 2014<i>. </i>Ron lives in Everett, WA and can be contacted by e-mail at </span></b><a href="mailto:ronyoungwa@gmail.com"><b><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">ronyoungwa@gmail.com</span></b></a><b><span style="color: #353434; font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-23897224545140923962018-01-12T11:34:00.002-08:002018-01-12T11:54:04.244-08:00<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Jerusalem:
Capital of One or Two Peoples?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="background: white; color: #293340; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">On December 6, President Trump announced, “It
is time to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.” For twenty-two
years Presidents, both Democrat and Republican, including President Trump six
months ago, signed a security waiver postponing this move to avoid complicating
and harming prospects of achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Last week, President Trump declared boldly, “Jerusalem is Israel’s
capital. This is nothing more, or less, than recognition of reality.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="background: white; color: #293340; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">What President Trump and his White House team
failed to recognize is that “reality” about Jerusalem is complicated by the
city being the geographical and cultural center of legitimate bone-deep national
aspirations of not one, but two peoples – Jews and Palestinians, and the heart
of three religious traditions. That reality has led everyone involved in
seeking peace to agree that the status of Jerusalem realistically can only be
resolved in the context of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and reaching
an agreement on a formula for sharing the City.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="background: white; color: #293340; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">According to a recent University of Maryland
Critical Issues Poll, two-thirds of Americans oppose the U.S. unilaterally
making this move now, and even Republicans are closely divided. According to an
American Jewish Committee poll, less than 20% of American Jews support taking
this step immediately. The Union of Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish
religious denomination, and pro-Israel/pro-peace JStreet both raised concerns
about the wisdom and timing of the move. President Trump did deliver on a
promise to some of his base, including his rightwing billionaire big donor
Sheldon Adelson and a slim majority of fundamentalist Evangelical Christians. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="background: white; color: #293340; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In the
Middle East, while the President’s announcement pleased supporters of Israel’s
current rightwing government, many Israeli advocates of peace opposed the move.
The announcement deeply angered
Palestinians and frustrated Saudi and other Arab leaders on whom the White
House appears to be depending for help in reaching a peace agreement. The announcement completely ignored examples
of two popular Israeli national heroes, Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin, who
understood the complex, sensitive realities about Jerusalem.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="background: white; color: #293340; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In Fall 1967, shortly after Israel won the Six
Day War and occupied Jerusalem, a young impetuous Israeli soldier raised the
Israeli Flag over the city. General Moshe Dayan immediately ordered the flag to
be taken down, warning that Jerusalem was too sensitive to be treated in such a
cavalier manner.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #293340; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Five decades later in 1995
during the Oslo negotiating process, Republican Senator Bob Dole and
Representative Newt Gingrich introduced a Bill to mandate moving the U.S.
Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Bill won overwhelming support in
Congress. Despite strong support for the Bill from AIPAC (viewed as the
American lobby for Israel), Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and many
Israeli and American Jewish supporters of the peace process were worried by the
Bill. Rabin, who staunchly supported Jerusalem as Israel’s Capital, was
concerned that the Bill could derail peace negotiations with the Palestinians.
Motivated by Rabin’s concern and her own, Senator Diane Feinstein, a dedicated
supporter of Israel, successfully introduced an amendment to the Bill that
enabled the President to sign a waiver every six months, postponing moving the
Embassy based on “national security considerations.”</span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 21.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 21.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #293340; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Attempting to reassure critics
who viewed his Jerusalem announcement as provocatively partisan, President
Trump declared, </span><span style="color: #293340; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“This
decision is not intended, in any way, as a departure from our strong commitment
to facilitate a lasting peace agreement. We want an agreement that is a
great deal for the Israelis and a great deal for the Palestinians. Positively,
the President did also nuance his announcement by stating clearly, “We are not
taking a position on any final status issues, including the specific boundaries
of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, or the resolution of contested
borders. Those questions are up to the parties involved.” On January 2,
appearing to contradict this nuanced position, President Trump tweeted, “We’ve
taken Jerusalem off the table.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 21.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 21.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="color: #293340; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The Jerusalem announcement and this latest
tweet have cast a dark cloud of doubt and pessimism over the Trump
Administration’s promise soon to unveil a plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace
and over U.S. creditability as mediator.
The simplest step the President could take to clarify the U.S. position
and help restore confidence and creditability would be to announce that as the
U.S. currently recognizes (West) Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel, so as part
of a mutually acceptable two-state peace agreement, the U.S. will recognize (East)</span><span style="color: #293340; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> Jerusalem as the Capital of Palestine. Such an announcement would help mitigate
the harmful effects of the move and could, indeed, kick start negotiations for
a realistic two-state peace agreement</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-9809324537606608692017-12-19T07:09:00.000-08:002017-12-22T12:03:44.119-08:00<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span class="Heading2Char"><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 16pt; line-height: 115%;">Please share this urgent post with others. If
any of them want to receive my future posts, suggest that they e-mail me at
ronyoungwa@gmail. com</span></i></span><span class="Heading2Char"><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 16pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span class="Heading2Char"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 16pt; line-height: 115%;"><b>Preventing War in Korea:
<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span class="Heading2Char"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 16pt; line-height: 115%;"><b>Lessons from </b></span></span><b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%;">the Iran Nuclear Deal<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The
possibility of war in Korea presents the greatest danger of nuclear war since
the Cuba Missile Crisis. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The danger is
compounded by the fact that both North Korea and our own country currently are headed
by erratic and potentially irrational leaders.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Despite
clear differences in the two situations, there are lessons from successfully negotiating
the Iran Nuclear Deal that can provide guidance for what we need to do related
to North Korea. Here are six lessons:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b><u><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">First</span></u></b><b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> - Just as urgency to keep Iran from
developing nuclear weapons provided impetus for negotiating a deal, so dangers
of war on the Korean Peninsula provide urgency for resolving this crisis by
diplomacy.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .55in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l3 level4 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">·<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">I</span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">n
1950-53 the Korean War, memorialized in David Halberstam’s book, <i>The Coldest Winter,</i> caused 4 million
deaths. And the war never ended. Estimates of how many would die in war in
Korea today range from tens of thousands to millions, if nuclear weapons are
employed, which then also would risk worldwide nuclear war.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .55in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">·<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Experts agree that a preemptive U.S. attack
on N. Korea would have unpredictable but likely catastrophic consequences.
Congress should act immediately to prevent President Trump from starting a war
without congressional authorization, by supporting H.R.4140/S.2016 and S 2047.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<b><u><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Second</span></u></b><b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> - Remembering history accurately is
essential, and not something we Americans are good at doing.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .55in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">·<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Our tendency to see the world as “good vs.
evil” (and, of course, we are “the good”) leads to dangerous misunderstanding
and unrealistic policies. In his 2002 State of the Union address George W. Bush
ignorantly and dangerously declared “Iran, Iraq and North Korea the “axis of
evil.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .55in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">·<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">In relation to Iran, most Americans bitterly
remember the hostage crisis of 1979-80, but tend to forget that in 1953 the U.S. orchestrated the overthrow of the elected Iranian government of Mohammad
Mossadegh and in 1988 we shot down an Iranian passenger plane killing 300 people.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .55in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">·<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">In relation to North Korea, Kim Jong-Un’s and
Donald Trump’s wild rhetorical threats are scary news, but news media mostly fail
to remind us that in 1950 President Truman publicly threatened to use nuclear weapons
against the North, and that the US introduced nuclear weapons into South Korea
in1958, apparently violating the Armistice and ignoring the warnings of our
allies. That was fifty years before the North developed its own nuclear
weapons. Remembering this history is essential to understanding North Korea’s
fears of us<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b><u><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Third</span></u></b><b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> - Both unilateral and multilateral
communications are important.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .55in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">·<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">We learned from the Cuban Missile crisis and
from the Iran negotiations that one on one communication between leaders is
very helpful and that having a direct “hotline” is vitally important in a
crisis.. The US needs a hotline with North Korea. (Frankly, I’d prefer if Secretary Tillerson or
Mattes were on our end of the hotline.)<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .55in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">·<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Multi-lateral negotiations P5+1 (Five
Permanent Members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, with the U.S.
delegation headed by a woman, Wendy Sherman) were key to achieving the Iran
Nuclear Deal.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .55in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">·<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Six-Party talks involving China, N. Korea,
Japan, S. Korea, Russia and the US succeeded in reaching agreement in 1994 that
delayed N. Korea’s weapons program for a decade. After that agreement broke
down, neither side pursued new talks with sufficient creativity and
determination. Negotiations involving all these parties are needed again now,
aimed at reducing the immediate threat of war and, in the longer run, aimed at finally
ending the Korean War and achieving permanent peace.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<b><u><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Fourth</span></u></b><b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> – Popular Movements and
People-to-People Diplomacy Can Help Push Governments Toward Peace<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .55in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo6; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">·<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Growing international momentum to abolish
nuclear weapons, including the July 7, 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of
Nuclear Weapons, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize this year, and Pope Francis’ recent declaration
condemning not only the use, but possession of nuclear weapons provide powerful
positive pressure for resolving the Korea crisis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .55in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l5 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">·<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The most dramatic and important people to
people initiative in relation to Korea is “Women Cross DMZ,” endorsed by the National
Councils of Women of both South and North Korea, urging a three point program:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">“A freeze on North
Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile program in exchange for a US security
guarantee and suspension of US-S. Korea joint military exercises; start of a
peace process, including significant involvement by women, to end the Korean
war; and a liaison office in Washington and Pyongyang to heal legacies of the
war, including retrieving remains of soldiers </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">killed in the war and
helping reunite Korean families.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .55in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l4 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">·<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">South Korea’s newly elected President Moon
Jae-In who favors pursuing talks with the North makes the women’s initiative
even more relevant and timely. The U.S. should more actively seek President Moon’s
advice.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<b><u><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Fifth</span></u></b><b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> - Sanctions can serve a useful role by
increasing pressure for reaching a resolution, but without diplomatic efforts
and negotiations, sanctions will not be sufficient.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .55in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l4 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">·<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Sanctions were useful in pressing for a deal
with Iran, but clearly it was the serious give and take of multilateral negotiations
that produced the agreement.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .55in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l4 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">·<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Rather than trying to pressure China to
increase sanctions on North Korea, the U.S. needs to cooperate with China, and
with South Korea, Japan and Russia to develop a common strategy for
multilateral negotiations.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<b><u><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Sixth</span></u></b><b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> - Effective serious negotiations
require both parties to give as well as get and “the gives” and “the gets” have
be perceived as being equivalent.</span></b><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%; text-indent: -0.25in;">It is totally unrealistic to expect N. Korea
to agree to the US ultimate goal as a precondition for negotiations. Indeed, it seems negotiations have to begin realistically acknowledging N. Korea already possesses nuclear weapons.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Some version of “Freeze for freeze,” as in
China’s view or the Women’s Call makes sense and is a more realistic goal.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .55in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo5; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">·<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Negotiations to reduce tensions and prevent
war should be combinedwwith developing a process aimed at the longer term goal
of ending the war and achieving peace and normalization on the Korean
Peninsula.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">*A Hopeful Scenario Involving the Iran Nuclear Deal, North Korea and Israeli-Palestinian Peace. </span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Preserving the Iran Nuclear Deal is essential
both for what it accomplishes related to Iran and as an example to encourage a
negotiated resolution of the crisis with North Korea. President Trump has
promised to kill the Iran Deal, in part because of Iran’s support of threats to
Israel from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, though these issues were
never part of negotiations with Iran. Killing the Iran Deal would very likely kill the prospect of negotiating a deal with North Korea.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">President Trump also has promised to achieve the "unltimate deal" between Israel and the Palestinians. If there is progress toward
Israeli-Palestinian peace in the form of a mutually acceptable two-state solution
with peace and security for both peoples; and the U.S. positively builds on
accepting West Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel by announcing it will accept
East Jerusalem as the Capital of Palestine, this would have significant positive effects in the region and on Iran. It would strengthen
President Rouhani and moderate elements in Iran and very likely lead to Iran
supporting the peace agreement and ending support for threats against Israel. That, in turn, would contribute to preserving the Iran Nuclear Deal and encourage a diplomatic deal with North Korea.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">December 2017<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; tab-stops: 200.25pt;">
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-40004682141027260302017-11-09T11:52:00.001-08:002017-11-09T11:52:25.013-08:00<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">On
GUN Control: People are More Principled And Practical Than Many Politicians<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> In
the wake of many mass murders in our country, including the latest last weekend
at a church in the small Texas town of Sutherland Springs, public opinion,
among both Democrats and Republicans, including NRA members and national police
organizations, has shifted to where majorities support expansion of background
checks and restrictions on purchase of assault weapons. The question is whether
politicians will pay attention to people’s views and support sensible stricter
laws or, as most politicians have done up until now, march in lock step to
lobbying by the NRA.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> The
NRA wasn’t always a big-moneyed lobby and wasn’t always against restrictions on
guns. Growing-up in New Jersey as a teenager in the 1950s, I joined the NRA and
remember its major emphases were on teaching good marksmanship and gun safety.
In the1930s, responding to the deadly use of machine guns by gangsters, the NRA
supported restrictions adopted in the National Firearms Act and the Gun Control
Act. Following the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator
Bobby Kennedy in 1968, the NRA worked with the White House and Congress to
support extending and tightening gun control legislation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">It was during the
1970s, and dramatically in 1980 with their endorsement of Ronald Reagan for
President, that the NRA reversed direction. Now, the NRA focuses on lobbying
against any gun control measures and gives politicians grades which, combined
with providing or withholding crucial campaign funds can determine if a candidate
is elected or not. The conflict between growing majority popular support for
some more controls and the NRA’s rigid opposition to any gun restrictions is dramatic
and should be disturbing to all Americans who want to prevent violence and who
believe in democracy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">NRA CEO Wayne
LaPierre and NRA Public Communications director Dana Loesch rightly criticize
Hollywood’s sick addiction to violence. While Hollywood provides culturally
destructive inspiration for violence, by promoting massive gun sales and
resisting even modest gun control measures, the NRA consistently contributes to
people possessing more and more weapons to commit violence. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> A
few facts from reliable recent polls reveal how popular views have changed and how
out-of-step the NRA is in relation to majority opinion among Americans. According
to Gallup polls, just eight years ago the percent of Americans who believed
laws controlling firearms should remain as they are (approximately 43%) was
nearly equal to the percent who believed the laws should be made more strict.
Today, almost twice as many Americans (60% to 33%) believe gun control laws
should be more strict.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Polls
in 2016/2017 by CBS, CNN, Quinnipiac University in Connecticut and Washington
University in Missouri show that between 84% and 94% of American voters
(Democrats and Republicans) support requiring background checks on all gun
buyers. A Pew Research Center poll reveals that 79% of Republicans or
Republican-leaning gun owners who are members of the NRA would support measures
“preventing the mentally-ill from purchasing guns” and 72% support “barring gun
purchases by people on no-fly or watch lists.” I assume similar or even greater
numbers of NRA members would support keeping guns out of the hands of persons
with serious criminal records like Devin Kelley who committed the mass murder
in Sutherland Springs Texas.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">A Pew poll in spring
2017 showed that majorities of both Democrats and Republicans support banning
assault-style weapons. While 80% of Democrats support such a ban, sadly so far,
while a majority, only 54% of Republicans support a ban. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Appreciating
how studies show that some stricter gun control laws can help protect police as
well as the public, the National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun
Violence, which includes nine national law enforcement organizations, supports
expanding required background checks. And seven of the nine national organizations,
including the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) and the
Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCC), also support a “ban on new
semi-automatic assault weapons.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> The
NRA opposes any and all of these sensible restrictions on guns, and will work
with big money to defeat candidates for office who support them</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> In
this election season and in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, people
should demand that every candidate for city, state or federal office declare
support publicly for expanding background checks on all potential gun buyers
and for banning purchase of assault weapons. Allowing the NRA to block these
majority-supported sensible stricter gun control measures not only represents a
threat to the lives of more innocent people, but also represents a threat to
democracy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-34321478011297442892017-10-30T14:25:00.001-07:002017-10-30T14:25:48.447-07:00<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“Faith
Over Fear” Conference in Everett<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Challenges
Islamophobia Industry<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><i><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By Ron Young<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Many
of us may know people who fear Muslims, and we may have heard how hate crimes
against American Muslims have increased dramatically in the last two years. But
only a few of us may be aware that there is a well-funded industry using
mis-information and lies to generate the fears and hatred. That was the focus
of a conference at Trinity Lutheran Church in Everett, Washington this week
attended by local faith and civic leaders, including city and state officials
and two Police Officers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">This
is one in a series of programs entitled “Faith Over Fear: Standing with Our
Muslim Neighbors” being held in a dozen cities and towns across Washington
State, sponsored by Neighbors in Faith, the American Muslim Empowerment Network
(AMEN), and Faith Action Network. The
program provides a model that organizers hope will be copied in other states.
The two speakers were Aneelah Afzali of AMEN and Reverend Terry Kyllo of
Neighbors in Faith. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In a
time when there is a lot of popular anxiousness and anger, spawned by people’s
experiences of economic , cultural and national insecurity, it’s easy to
stir-up fear and hatred against other people whom we do not know. Most of us
don’t know any Muslims personally. We’re probably unaware but affected
negatively by how Islam is featured in primetime news coverage more than any
other religion and how the images of Muslims in the media and in movies and TV
series are overwhelming negative and frightening. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Suggesting
that awful actions of some Muslims are representative of Islam or all Muslims is like saying that beliefs and
actions of the Ku Klux Klan are representative of Christianity and all
Christians. But that’s exactly what the multi-million dollar Islamophobia
Industry does. Read the report <b>Fear,
Inc.: Islamophobianetwork.com. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Well-documented
facts can help counter the false negative images of Islam and American Muslims.
See <b>Islamfactcheck.org</b> for common
false assertions and factual responses, and visit the <b>Southern Poverty Law Center’s</b> online guide that monitors
anti-Muslim extremist groups like “Act for America.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Here
are a few examples of what many of us learned at the conference: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">A 2009 Gallup Poll found that American Muslim
women are the second most highly educated religious community in the U.S. and
are just as likely as American Muslim men to have a college degree. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">A 2011 Gallup Poll found that, “Of the major
religious groups studied, Muslim Americans are the staunchest opponents of
military attacks against civilians.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Sharia is an Arabic term that refers to
Islamic practices and path. American Muslims follow the path by practicing
charity, praying, taking care of family and neighbors, and performing other
compassionate acts. American Muslims believe in respecting the U.S.
Constitution and obeying the laws of the land.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Very similar to the “Golden Rule,” in Jewish
and Christian teachings, Prophet Mohammad taught, “None of you will have faith
until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">While
facts like these can help overcome false images of Muslims, even more effective
is getting to know Muslims personally. Speakers
at the conference suggested that we find ways of publicly meeting and welcoming
our Muslim neighbors: arrange to visit a Mosque or invite a Muslim to come speak
at our church or host an interfaith exchange or forum. (Neighbors in Faith or
the Council on American-Islamic Relations can help organize such activities.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Speakers
also urged us as individuals and as communities to respond actively and
publicly to hateful rhetoric and threats toward Muslims. Speak out, including
on social media when you hear hate speech directed at Muslims, and encourage
your friends to speak out. Show up with signs and support when there is threat
to a Mosque or a hate crime incident. Urge your church, synagogue, neighborhood
association or work place to post a sign of solidarity with Muslims. Write an
op-ed article or letter-to-editor about American Muslims you know and how we
must stand together in support of American values of religious freedom,
tolerance and diversity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">People
of faith and goodwill in neighborhoods across our state, and all across our
country, have power to assert what is central to all our faith traditions: Love
of God and love of neighbor. Now is the time to act. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: .3in; margin-right: .3in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: center;">
<b><i><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Ron Young is Consultant with
twenty-five American Jewish, Christian and Muslim national religious leaders
working together for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Ron lives in Everett and can be
contacted at ronyoungwa@gmail.com.<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-87343475045788965662017-10-20T10:06:00.000-07:002017-10-20T10:06:26.841-07:00<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">HOW “A NICE GIRL LIKE
ME” CAME TO LEVITATE THE PENTAGON<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
I was cold, huddled amid a mass
of others sitting on a concrete ramp leading down toward an entrance to the
Pentagon. We had marched, climbed over a falling-down piece of fence, and there
we were...six hundred disparate souls come together to say no to the Vietnam
War and the draft. We wanted to raise
that symbol of the war off its foundation and say yes to what we believed
America stood for.<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I was twenty-four years old that October in 1967. A child of
refugees who fled Austria after Hitler’s Anschluss, I now often wonder if my
parents would gain entry into this country under the current administration’s
immigration policies.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In Vienna during World War I, my mother’s family was
poverty-stricken and through a program of the American Friends Service
Committee (Quakers), she and her sister were sent to Holland to be housed and
fed for a time. When my parents came to America, she, a Catholic and my father,
a non-practicing Jew, decided to affiliate with a Quaker meeting. I grew up
there, absorbing the teaching that there is a light common to all people and we
strive to honor that light which is common to all of us by standing against war
and discrimination.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We had music! My father studied and sang opera in Vienna
though he later decided on a career in aerospace engineering. We sang. We made
music together. There was Beethoven’s Fidelio and Ninth Symphony and Mozart’s
Magic Flute, odes to finding and giving voice to freedom. My brother brought
home Joan Baez, The Kingston Trio, The Weavers. Music and words were
increasingly woven into my expression of belief. My own “personal troubadour” was Phil Ochs.
He once came to a teach-in and even though there were only 5 people in
attendance, he sang his heart out.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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‘I can’t add my name to the fight when
I’m gone...<o:p></o:p></div>
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I can’t try to right what is wrong when
I’m gone...<o:p></o:p></div>
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I guess I won’t be singing on this song
when I’m gone...<o:p></o:p></div>
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So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m
here.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I still hear your voice, Phil.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As I recall, the night before we levitated the Pentagon, a
group of us went to hear Judy Collins. And she sang me to the next day.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I was on the cusp of the Baby Boomer generation, born a year
or two before its official start. So I
was in some ways traditional, anticipating college, grad school, marriage,
family, job...and in others part of the huge social and personal changes
sweeping our country.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In high school I joined members of our Meeting who went to
Ft. Detrick to protest against research into biological and chemical warfare. I
walked along US 1 with two Indian pacifists who were teaching non-violence
along their journey.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In college I joined civil rights and peace activities and
along with my passion for the revolutionary writer/artist William Blake, I
thrilled to hearing IF Stone and Carl Oglesby. From them I began to understand
the connection between individuals and the institutions we people...and what is
required of an involved citizenry in times of crisis.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One college professor (of Shakespeare, alas) failed one of
my papers because it was late after I attended a peace rally. He told me I
would never amount to anything with my attitude and behavior. I told him I
wanted both schooling and social action. It shocked him when I won a graduate
fellowship and honorable mention in another, despite his rants. It was to
further study William Blake and archetypal patterns in literature that I
entered grad school in Toronto (William Blake and DH Lawrence: The Politics of
Art)... and drove a young draft resister who was refused conscientious objector
status across the border.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After grad school I was engaged by the Canadian and American
Friends Service Committees to work on peace education and with high school
students on social issues. A group of young people wanted to talk with draft
board clerks, the women who staffed the Selective Service System offices where
young men registered for the draft. The
students thought we could convince these clerks that sending young men to die
via an inequitable draft in an undeclared war was wrong. It wasn’t that simple. Those women showed
they believed just as deeply in what they did as we in what we were saying and
doing. How to bridge that divide?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We organized a peace caravan that traveled to various cities
meeting with civic and religious groups to speak and engage in conversation
about the war and the draft. At one meeting in a crowded church basement a man
stood up after I’d spoken and said: “If
I had a daughter like you I’d be so ashamed and I’d want her dead.” Shock. Some fear. Anger.
I wanted to scream at him all the swear words I knew. But something in me led me to ask him the
question that led us to a conversation, if not resolution: Why?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I went on to a career in nonprofit social action (Women
Strike for Peace, Clergy and Laity Concerned, the ACLU, Save the Children to
name a few). I was arrested with a group of interfaith clergy for praying for
peace in the Capitol rotunda. I visited American POW’s in North Vietnam and
brought them letters from family and to one a pair of glasses as he’s broken
his. And subsequently I went on to hold
a senior position in a global communications and advertising firm where I
focused on helping companies communicate successfully with their stakeholders.
Carrying on, I am now an executive and career/life coach working with corporate
leaders and individual people in their 20’s to their 80’s to achieve their
“next.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Levitating the Pentagon was my first act of civil
disobedience. We sat on that ramp and the police came with huge hoses and
sprayed us with icy water as we heard the paddy wagons approach. I got
pneumonia.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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That levitation and the events of October ’67 were a
milestone for disparate individuals and organizations which came together for
common cause. Labor, religious, women’s
rights, student, civil liberties and other organizations convened (not always
easily and cohesively) because the war had to end... and because we all knew we
had to help make that happen together.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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As I string together these pieces of my younger life and
subsequent living, levitating the Pentagon is one of my proudest stories. In
committing to lift that symbol of the war off its foundations, I know that for
me and for the many movements that converged, it was we who we who were lifted
and, I pray, are rising still.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Trudi Schutz<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
October 2017<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%;">T</span><span style="line-height: 115%;">rudi Schutz was National Coordinator of the March Against Death in Washington,</span></i></b><b><i><span style="line-height: 115%;"> DC November. 13-15,
1969, in which more than 38,000 Americans </span></i></b><b><i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">walked single file in state by state delegations, starting with
Alabama, from Arlington Memorial Cemetary to the Capitol, carrying the names
and calling out the names at the White House of American soldiers from their
state who had been killed and the names of Vietnamese villages destroyed in the
war.</span></i></b></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-37127127163171709782017-09-29T15:39:00.002-07:002017-11-05T11:19:56.170-08:00<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">PBS
Vietnam War Documentary – Commentary on Episode Ten<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Episode Ten deals with the
end of the war, with the Vietnam Memorial Wall and memories, and with some of
the war’s legacy issues. There’s much in
this episode that stirs me, brings tears to my eyes, renews my anger at the
war, and reminds me of lessons yet to be learned to prevent future wars.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The film’s images of tragic
division among Vietnamese at the war’s end– victorious NVA and southern NLF
fighters and fearful, fleeing south Vietnamese reminds me of what Madame Nguyen
Thi Ninh told my wife and me in March on our visit to Vietnam. Leaning close to
us as a way of making sure we knew what she was about to say is very important,
she said, “More terrible than all the bombing and violence is the way America
divided Vietnamese society, divided Vietnamese as a people.” Madame Ninh
supported and served the National Liberation Front and her country in several posts, including after the war as Vietnam’s Ambassador to the European Union; her brother served as a Captain
in ARVN, the U.S-backed South Vietnamese army.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
have said that the Vietnam War was a tragedy, which certainly is true. While there is wisdom in the film’s
publicized slogan that, “There is no single truth in war,” Burns also has said,
“At the war’s end, a country disappeared.” That is not true. As the film
repeatedly reveals, while never having the courage to explicitly acknowledge, the “country” that
disappeared at the war’s end was created and sustained by the United
States Even when the U.S. provided
Saigon with more than a half million American soldiers and massive aid and weaponry, “our
side” wasn’t winning. As Episode Ten dramatically reviews, when the U.S.
withdrew, ARVN collapsed and the Saigon regime of Generals Thieu and Ky fell. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Duong
Van Mai Elliott, who worked on the Rand Corporation’s Pentagon Papers study and
most of whose family fled at the war’s end, is quoted saying, “There were many
mistakes made by the Americans, but the biggest mistake was creating the sense of
dependency.” The film shows that it was much more than “a sense of dependency.”
From our earliest involvement supporting the French, Americ</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">a’s war, rationalized by
anti-Communism, was a war against Vietnam’s independence. What the war’s end
actually marked was the completion of the Vietnamese struggle for national independence.
Vietnam is one country and after one hundred years, in Spring 1975 it was finally free from
foreign military control and occupation.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">There
were two other images in Episode Ten that particularly stuck with me. One was
of U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin resisting preparations to evacuate, as he
stubbornly insisted that Saigon was not about to fall. While the film suggests
he may have been suffering mentally from a bout of Pneumonia, Martin’s view
also represented how deeply and dangerously delusional U.S. policy was. The
other image, which also appears in the book, <i>The Vietnam War, </i>by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (page</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">561) is of Henry Kissinger and five other
white men in suits standing and sitting comfortably in the White House,</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">joking and laughing aloud, at the same time
as Saigon is falling and Vietnamese dependents of America’s War are fleeing for
their lives.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> The
aftermath of the war was bound to be difficult and painful. While the film
makes a point of acknowledging that the “bloodbath” so loudly and often
predicted by defenders of the war never happened, the process of recovery and
reconciliation was very hard, including the forced reeducation for many supporters
of the Saigon regime. At the time this was happening, the same NLF woman leader
my wife and I met in March publicly criticized her government's reeducation program as being much too
rigid and lasting too long. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Other legacy issues include
unexploded ordinance which has claimed many thousands of Vietnamese lives,
mostly of children, since the end of the war, and the multi-generational
effects of massive spraying of Agent Orange. The U.S. government has been
shamefully slow and reluctant in dealing with the effects of Agent Orange on
American soldiers. Inspiringly, many American veterans are involved partnering
with and supporting Vietnamese who are working on addressing these ongoing
effects of the war. Both the film and the accompanying book could have informed
us about how to make contributions to American/Vietnamese projects, like the
Mine Action Center in Dong Ha or Peace Trees Vietnam, dedicated to healing these wounds of war. Unfortunately,
they didn’t do this.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The other major issue I need
to comment on is how the anti-war movement is portrayed, not just in Episode
Ten, but in the whole eighteen hours of the film. Frankly, given Burns and
Novick’s claim that one of the film’s two major goals is to understand what was
happening on the home front during the war, their portrayal of the anti-war movement is pathetically weak,
two-dimensional and, at some points, deliberately biased.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In my responses to the other
nine episodes, I’ve cited specific examples of when and how Burns and Novick
ignore or provide very sketchy treatments of significant actions and persons in
the anti-war movement starting with their failure even to mention the
self-immolation of three Americans - Alice Herz, Norman Morrison and Roger
LaPorte in 1965.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Burns and Novick give almost no film time to tracing the growth of draft
resistance and resistance within the military, and none to the role of religious communities and women's organizations in inspiring and expanding the anti-war movement. Their treatment of Martin Luther King's decision to publicly oppose the war is simplistic and much too brief. While they interview and quote
dozens of veterans, except for one activist, Bill Zimmerman, they don’t do interviews or
personal stories of any war resisters. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The growth of anti-war
demonstrations from a few hundred participants to thousands and more than a
million in the Vietnam Moratorium deserves much more attention, including
interviews with some of the persons who organized these demonstrations, as well
as with participants. Just as debates about military strategies were a focus in
the film, so there should have been more attention to debates about
strategies within the anti-movement.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">As Todd Gitlin writes in his
essay on the anti-war movement in Geoffrey Ward’s book accompanying the film,
“The millions who passed through it –and they were many millions – were as
various as America itself. . . .the
movement encompassed members of the armed forces and the clergy, women’s
groups, trade unionists, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans,
doctors, lawyers, businessmen, nurses, teachers, social workers, scientists,
architects, and city planners.” The various, multiple stories about the
movement are told poorly if at all in the PBS film.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">As I skimmed through the index to Geoffrey Ward’s book which also
pretty closely reflects what is and isn’t covered in the film, I was shocked by
how few, if any, references there are to national organizations that played
major roles in educating and organizing Americans in opposition to the war.
Assuming you may be familiar with at least some of these and without going into
details about what each organization did, here’s a list of several national organizations with the number
of references in the book's index: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: .2in; margin-right: .2in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">American Friends Service Committee – 0; Business
Executives Move for Vietnam Peace – 0; Catholic Peace Fellowship and Protestant
denominational peace fellowships – 0; Central Committee for Conscientious
Objectors – 0; Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam – 0; Fellowship of
Reconciliation – 0; Institute for Policy Studies – 0; War Resisters League - 1;
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom – 0; and Women’s Strike for
Peace – 1.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Here is a partial list of
organizations formed in the1960s explicitly to educate and mobilize opposition to the war
and how many times they are referenced in the index: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: .2in; margin-right: .2in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Coalition to Stop Funding the War - 0; Chicano Moratorium - 0; Committee of
Liaison (with American POWs) – 0; Indochina Peace Campaign – 1; Indochina Summer – 0; National or
New Mobilization Committee to End the War – 0; Resist – 0; Student Mobilization
Committee – 0; Vietnam Moratorium Committee - 1; We Won’t Go – 0.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Several important existing
national organizations developed strong anti-war positions as the war
developed, including the Leadership Council of Women Religious, National
Student Association, National Council of Churches, United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops, and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (Reform). None
of these organizations are referenced in Ward’s book or in the film.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> There is a special page in the book, which
features a photo of Jane Fonda sitting and expressing solidarity with a North
Vietnamese artillery battery, a clearly insensitive spontaneous and
counterproductive act for which Fonda apologized many times. Accompanying the
photo is text listing several Americans who visited Hanoi during the war,
including Cora Weiss who organized the Committee of Liaison to carry mail
between American POWs and their families. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The juxtaposition of the
photo and names of anti-war activists angered many vets and clearly was
intended to associate anti-war activism with disloyalty to country. The
anti-war activists whose names appear in that text, including Jane Fonda, and the millions of
Americans who opposed the war in Vietnam don’t deserve that biased, shoddy
treatment. In failing to portray and personalize the anti-war movement in the
way they successfully do with many veterans, Burns, Novick and Ward fail to
accomplish the goal of promoting understanding about what was happening at home during the war.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The film makes a major
contribution to understanding what happened on the battlefields of Vietnam, including some of the ways the war affected soldiers. Even in that focus, the film fails for not including more about thousands of Vietnam veterans suffering PTSD, homelessness and suicide. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We
have a lot more work to do in understanding and overcoming divisions in our
society - divisions that didn’t start with the war in Vietnam but got deeper during it, and recently are exacerbated
by Donald Trump, first as candidate and now as President.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">During the Vietnam War, as
National Youth Secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Ron
resisted the draft, led an interfaith/interracial mission to Saigon focused on
repression, carried mail from between their families and American POW’s in Hanoi, and coordinated
national peace marches on Washington, DC in November 1969 and May 1970. Ron
lives in Everett WA and can be contacted at </span></i></b><a href="mailto:ronyoungwa@gmail.com"><b><i><span style="color: #888888; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">ronyoungwa@gmail.com</span></i></b></a></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-12454657606277602672017-09-28T15:34:00.001-07:002017-09-29T12:21:07.508-07:00<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">PBS
Vietnam War Documentary – Commentary on Episode Nine<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> Episode
Nine of the PBS documentary, “A Disrespectful
Loyalty,” covers the period January 1971-March 1973, including the U.S./ARVN
offensive in Laos, the trial of
Lieutenant Calley related to the massacre at My Lai, the emergence of Vietnam
Veterans Against the War and mass anti-war demonstrations in Spring 1971, President
Nixon’s war strategy related to the1972 election campaign against Senator Mc Govern,
the North Vietnamese/ National Liberation Front 1972 “Easter Offensive, U.S
Christmas Bombing of North Vietnam in December 1972, tensions between Nixon and
President Thieu in Saigon about negotiations, and the Paris Peace Agreement on
January 27 1973, calling for withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Vietnam and the
release of Prisoners of War.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> Near the
beginning of Episode Nine, President Nixon talking about the offensive into
Laos, which is failing, says to Henry Kissinger, “It’s a win, see. . . .I don’t care what happens, this is a
win.” The cynical dismissal of what is actually happening on the ground, but
even much worse, the dishonesty and apparent
absolutely callous disregard for the many Americans and Vietnamese being sent
to their deaths on behalf of failed policies is part of what fueled the
formation of Vietnam Veterans Against War (VVAW).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">With
very few exceptions, the utter failure by senior U.S. political and military
leaders to acknowledge and take responsibility for failed American war policies
in Vietnam, policies which many of us understood were unjust and immoral in the
first place, contributed to some of the negative public reaction to Lt.
Calley’s conviction for what he and others did in My Lai. Afterall, many people
said, Calley was “just doing his duty.”</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">
</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The other even more disturbing and broader basis of support for Calley
is the view that he was “just killing</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">
</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Gooks.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Burns and Novick acknowledge
in anecdotes how racism was a significant contributing factor in America’s war
in Vietnam, but even based just on the evidence they present, the subject deserved
a much deeper treatment and accounting. Why didn’t they include one or two of
those special subject vignettes the film does well or include an essay on the role of racism in the accompanying
book by Geoffrey Ward.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> The
film’s coverage of John Kerry and John Musgrave participating in the VVAW
action at the Capitol on April 18 is good. That the film has followed Musgrave
over several episodes and allowed him to tell his personal story.is informing
and moving. If Burns and Novik had done the same with one or two men who had resisted
the draft and perhaps gone to prison, allowing them to tell their personal
stories, the film would have been less biased and been more helpful to us all
in understanding more clearly what was happening on the home front.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">As the U.S. strategy to end
the war came to rely more on negotiations, the problem presented by the Thieu
regime became more evident. Already in 1969 Thieu’s position was that four
issues were “not negotiable" - No coalition government, territorial integrity (i.e., of
South Vietnam which meant No to one government for all Vietnam, unless it’s Thieu’s government,</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">), No to participation of the Communist Party and, No to neutralism.”
All of these issues were ones that leaders and followers of Vietnam’s “Third
Force” movement viewed with more flexibility and in some cases held the exact
opposite view. For example, many in those ranks, including such key leaders as
Madame Ngo Ba Thanh, Thich Tri Quang, National </span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Assembly member and publisher of Tin Sang newspaper Ngo Cong Duc, and General Duong Vanh Minh, courageously advocated for formation of a coalition government in South Vietnam several years before the end of the war. They and their supporters viewed this as absolutely essential
to ending the war and negotiating reunification of the country. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The Thieu/Ky government was
adamant on these issues and used suspicion of disagreement with their views as
a basis for arresting and imprisoning people. In 1969, the U.S. Embassy in
Saigon publicly acknowledged that the Saigon regime was holding at least 50,000
political prisoners, most of them supporters of the Third Force. In 1970,
thanks to a hand drawn map by Loi Nyugen, a former political prisoner, members
of a US Congressional delegation on a visit to Con Son island prison were able
to find and photograph the infamous Tiger Cages where hundreds of prisoners
were tortured. The photo taken by then senate staffer, later Senator Tom Harkin
appeared on the cover of Life Magazine July 17 1970. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Burns and Novick failed to
deal substantively with the political positions and significance of the Third Force movement.The fact that there
is not even a reference to the Tiger Cages in the film or in Geoffrey Ward’s book should be a
source of serious embarrassment to all three, but I fear it is not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> Many of
the most prominent leaders of the non-Communist Third Force movement may have
died. Some also suffered under the Communist government which came to power at the end of the war. Some are still alive and
/or their friends and children could tell their stories. To the extent that the
United States had paid more attention and provided any significant support for
the ideas advocated by Third Force leaders and supporters the transition toward
the end of the war and reunification could have been less wrenching and
painful. Even more basically, if Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson had paid more
attention to these Vietnamese early on rather than ignorantly and arrogantly imposing the rule
of Ngo Dinh Diem, there wouldn’t have
been an American war in Vietnam in the first place. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0.5in;">V</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">ietnam is one of many
countries where Cold War blinders caused the United </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">States to commit disastrous policies. The costs of doing this in Vietnam, in
terms of </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">American and Vietnamese lives (and Cambodian and Laotian lives) were staggering.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The failure of the film</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">more substantially to address this basic
issue in U.S. policy and thus address deep divisions in our society resulting
from the war represents a waste of some portion of the enormous amount of resources devoted to
the film. This also represents the film's failure to shine light on deeper lessons we need to learn. In figuring out why Burns and Novick failed to do this, it may be the case that some funders didn’t want to dig that deep.. </span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-47427535314247577572017-09-27T23:12:00.002-07:002017-09-28T08:26:24.137-07:00<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">PBS
Vietnam War Documentary – Commentary on Episode Eight<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Episode Eight, “The History
of the World,” covers the period May 1969-December 1970. This period is marked by President Nixon’s
decision to make a series of withdrawals of US troops under the policy rubric of
Vietnamization, sputtering secret talks and negotiations, increased popular
frustration and anger over the ongoing war, the largest anti-war demonstrations
in U.S. history, the.invasion of Cambodia, and a more public, politicized focus on American
Prisoners of War.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The June 27 1969 issue of
Life Magazine carried the names and individual photos of 242 American soldiers
killed in Vietnam in one week David
Halberstam commented that those photos “probably had more impact on anti-war
feeling than any other piece of print journalism.” A year later, as a result of
U.S. troop withdrawals and the policy of Vietnamization, while fewer Americans
were dying in Vietnam, an estimated 300 Vietnamese were being killed every day.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In a month long project, the
Daily Death Toll, cosponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Clergy
and Laity Concerned, 300 persons came to Washington, DC each day from a
different city or town. After visiting their Congressional offices advocating
for cutting off funding for the war, they gathered in front of the White House
and lay down in the driveway where they were arrested. There was consistently good
newspaper and T.V. coverage in the city or town from which the 300 had come
that day. One would think that this action and hundreds of other creative anti-war protests would have gotten more attention in this film about the Vietnam war and what was happening at home</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Not all protests were as
creative or communicated in a such a clear way. Some were combined with the
broader generational rebellion of the 1960s against authority, for new sexual
freedom, use of mind-altering drugs, and celebrated in great folk and
rock-n-roll music. While most of all that was not harmful to most participants,
the mixture often didn’t help offer a clear message to millions of Americans
still making up their minds about the war. Photos from Woodstock in the documentary
remind us of why people may have been confused by some of the protests and protesters.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">While organized by miniscule
numbers relative to millions of Americans who were against the war by 1969,
some protests, including the “Days of Rage”.in Chicago and attacks on some
banks and labs associated with weapons of war were violent. These actions were
decidedly delusional and counterproductive. By the summer of 1969, there also were
violent protests by men in the military, in the form of “fraggings” of gung-ho
officers who seemed intent on getting more of their men killed, even as Nixon
ordered more American troops to come home. Both among civilians and soldiers
there was growing frustration, anger and desperation to end the war that more
and more people believed was continuing based on lies and lack of political
courage.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">1969-1970 were years that
saw the largest anti-war protests in the history of the country. The Vietnam
Moratorium was a call for people to interrupt ordinary work or school on the 15<sup>th</sup>
of every month to organize some form of protest against the war. On October 15,
more than a million people participated in a wide variety of events across the
country, including marches, rallies, teach-ins and strikes.. A month later on
November 15 500,000 people gathered at the Washington Monument in D.C and
another 250,000 in San Francisco, calling for an end to the war and immediate
U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">For two days preceding the
mass march in Washington 38,000 people walked in a continuous single file from Arlington
Cemetery to the Capitol carrying the names of men from their home state who had
been killed in Vietnam and calling out the names as they passed by the White
House. The protest was called the March Against Death and was memorialized in a
poster by Pablo Picasso<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">On May 1 1970 the United
States invaded Cambodia. Response on campuses across the country was swift and
intense. New Mobilizaion leaders who organized the November 15 1969 March
called for people to come to Washington on Saturday May 9. 100,000 people, most
of them students came. 250 handed over their Draft Cards to be taken to Saigon,
where a Vietnamese student leader, Buddhist monk and Catholic Priest would
participate in burning them. On May 4 at Ken State in Ohio four students protesting the war were killed by National
Guard. Ten days later two student war protesters were killed at Jackson State in
Mississippi.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">There are plenty of people
in their sixties, seventies, eighties and probably several in their nineties
who helped plan, lead and participated in the anti-war protest movement during
the decade of the war. The PBS documentary would have been better, more complete,
more complicated and, yes, maybe a bit more controversial if Burns and
Novick had selected a dozen of them, instead of just one, Bill Zimmerman,
to offer comments on developments in Vietnam and at home during those years as they did with many veterans.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> .<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> In addition to Vietnamization and the invasion
of Cambodia, another important and controversial initiative by President Nixon
revealed in this episode of the film was his decision to make the issue of
American Prisoners of War in Vietnam much more public and political. At times, It
even seemed that Nixon was claiming we were still fighting the war to bring
home our POWs, when it was obvious that the way to get our POWs back home was to end
the war.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This issue is an example of
another opportunity missed by Burns and Novick to help explain what was
happening at home. The U.S refused to
recognize the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). As a result, the
International Red Cross was not able to perform its traditional role of serving
as a liaison between prisoners and their families back home. Cora Weiss and
other leaders of the anti-war movement formed a Committee of Liaison which
regularly carried mail between the America POWs and their families. COL
delegations, including one in which I participated in December 1970 were able to
visit with several of the prisoners and, in a few cases, bring an American soldier or two home.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">One of the prisoners we met
with told us that he had never been in
Vietnam or met a Vietnamese until his fighter bomber was shot down over the Noerh. He flew off
a carrier in the South China sea. When he landed in a field by parachute, he broke his ankle. Vietnamese peasants
surrounded him and, after a brief argument about what to do, they bandaged his
ankle and carried him a few hundred yards and down into an underground bunker.
Within minutes a wave of B-52s began their bombing run over the area. This
young American said he’d never experienced a B-52 bombing raid from the ground before and he wouldn’t want anyone else to experience that ever again. It would have been
good to see this former Prisoner of War interviewed in the film.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The story of the Committee
of Liaison was certainly an important one to be told in relation to who cared
and who did anything to help our POWs during the war. Cora and the Committee’s
work get very brief mention in Episode Nine on a feature page, the dramatic
focus of which is a photo of Jane Fonda sitting and expressing solidarity with
a North Vietnamese artillery battery. Burns and Novick knew exactly what they
were doing in portraying that connection. That page may understandably anger
some veterans but it also insults the intelligence and moral courage of many
veterans who fought the war and many veterans of the anti-war movement.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-25308134128903765302017-09-26T14:35:00.000-07:002017-09-26T19:30:37.485-07:00<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">.
Vietnam War Documentary – Commentary on Episode Seven<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Episode Seven of the PBS
Documentary, entitled, “The Veneer of Civilization,” covers the period June
1968-April 1969. By April 1968 there were 543,432 American soldiers in Vietnam;
40,794 American dead; and the United States had spent 70 billion on the war. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The previous episode covered
the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in January 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther
King on April 4, mass riots that followed, and the assassination of Senator
Robert Kennedy on June 9, the night he ostensibly won the Democratic Party’s
nomination for President. Episode Seven covers confrontations In Chicago at the
1968 Democratic Convention and the election of Richard Nixon as President. Despite
the ways these events related to the war and their enormous effects in shaping
what was happening at home, disappointingly, the film footage in both episodes
continued to concentrate on military battles and the voices of men who fought,
ignoring the stories and voices of growing numbers of Americans who opposed the
war.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">As riveting and emotional as
some of the battles and feelings of the fighters are, the lack of a wider lens
gets boring. I’ve heard from several friends who have stopped watching the series. Here’s a<a href="https://www.ncronline.org/news/media/ncr-podcast-ken-burns-vietnam-war"> link to a podcast</a> with Tom Fox, who
after the war for many years was Editor and Publisher of the National Catholic
Reporter. During the war Tom served with International Voluntary Services
working with Vietnamese (estimated at 3 million) who had been forced from their
villages in the countryside by massive US bombing and Agent Orange raids. So far in the series, the film ignores Tom’s
story and the stories of hundreds of other courageous, dedicated young
Americans who spoke Vietnamese and worked with IVS or with the Quaker
Prosthetics and Rehabilitation Center in Quang Ngai, a province very heavily bombed and sprayed with Agent Orange, where 40% of the population had been displaced into refugee camps.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The numbers of men resisting
the draft, resisting the war within the military, and fleeing and deserting to
Canada or Sweden grew significantly in 1967 and 1968. In a two page Ad in The
New York Times 100 student body presidents declared, “We believe the war in
Vietnam is unjust and immoral, and we should not be forced to fight in
it.” 100,000 draft age youth across the
country signed pledge cards making this same declaration. Dr. Benjamn Spock, the famous baby doctor, and
Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Chaplain at Yale, and three others faced
federal trial for supporting draft resistance. Nine Catholic activists,
including Fathers Daniel and Phillip Berrigan stole and burned draft files in
Catonsville, Maryland. Mixed-age community groups gathered at local Draft
Boards across the country and read the names of all the Americans who had been
killed so far in Vietnam. Muhammed Ali spoke for a growing number of African
Americans when he refused military service and declared, “No Vietnamese ever
call me nigger.” None of this, none of these American stories have been given
significant attention or time in the film. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Another important dimension
of what was happening at home related to the war were debates about strategy for
the ant-war movement. The film does a relatively good job portraying debates about
war fighting strategies among military and political leaders on both sides, and
revealing the skepticism and sometimes spoken or unspoken dissent over particular
strategies by the men and women actually doing the fighting. The film needed to
take the same approach to debates about strategy for the anti-war movement.
What was the goal and strategy of the October 1967 “Confront the Warmakers” demonstration
at the Pentagon, the Student Strike at Columbia University in April 1968, and
the mass demonstration at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August 1968 –
and what actually was accomplished by these actions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">To achieve understanding of these
events would have required Burns and Novick to include diverse perspectives and
voices, just as they did in relation to war fighting strategies. Clearly, they
decided not to do this and, as a consequence, the film’s contribution to
understanding what was happening at home is much weaker than it might have
been.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The stories of resistance to
the war, like some of the stories of awful things American soldiers admitted
doing in the war, and debates about strategies will surely be controversial. It
is precisely this fuller, whole story, however, which needed to be found in the
film if the multiple truths in the war or about the anti-war movement, and the
preponderant truth, if there is one about this particular war or anti-war
movement, are going to be perceived by the film’s audience, and lessons
learned. So far, sadly, I don’t think it’s happening.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-28584963797814870312017-09-25T13:54:00.002-07:002017-09-26T08:17:30.839-07:00<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">PBS Vietnam War Documentary – Commentary on
Episode Six<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> Episode Six of the PBS Documentary takes a line from William
Butler Yeats’ famous poem as its title, “Things fall apart,” and covers the
period January-June 1968. Those six months were marked by three events that
dramatically affected American involvement in Vietnam and the course of
American history more broadly: the Tet Offensive by North Vietnam and the
southern National Liberation Front at the end of January; the assassination of
Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, one year to the day from King’s sermon
denouncing the war; and on the night he ostensibly won the Democratic Party’s
nomination for President, the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In January 1968, in response to my act of
draft resistance, I received a federal indictment in the mail that read: “THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA VS. RONALD JAMES YOUNG.” While I suppose I could have
anticipated this wording, nevertheless, it came as quite a shock for a guy who
only ten years earlier had earned the Boy Scouts’ Eagle Scout and God and
Country awards, had been president of my church Youth Fellowship, and had
seriously considered applying to attend the Military Academy at West Point.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Invited
to speak at the annual national gathering of Clergy and Laity Concerned About
Vietnam in February I wrote a poem titled, “We Are America,” that said in part,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“The Vietnam War started like civil
rights,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">As a question in my mind.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">But cut quickly and deeply into me,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The government of my country<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Is destroying the Vietnamese people,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In the name of national security,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">And in the name of saving Vietnam,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">A salvation from which<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Vietnamese are trying to save
themselves.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The government needs more soldiers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">And continues to send them to the
slaughter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">But we do not go willingly as
before.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Because of the Atomic Bomb,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">And civil rights,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">And wars in the cities that have
begun,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">And the Beattles and Alice’s
Restaurant,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">And P-O-T and L-S-D.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">And because the government<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Doesn’t always tell the truth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">And because we are learning the
Truth<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">That people are more important<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Than any idea or system.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">And that people are power.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: 116.25pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The government needs more soldiers<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">But we have something to say now,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">'We won’t go.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">We want to build not burn.'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">And we’re telling our friends.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">And we earnestly believe we are
right.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">And no matter how the indictments
may read,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">We believe we are America,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">And
We Shall Overcome!”</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> There were thousands of young Americans
with backgrounds and experiences like mine, including many like myself who
worked earlier in the Civil Rights Movement. But once again Burns and Novick
ignore their stories and voices, focusing Episode Six almost entirely on
military battles and the stories and voices of men who fought the war. Many of
the battlefield stories are riveting and the voices of those who fought are
emotional and compelling, including some who express growing doubts about the
war’s purpose and progress proclaimed by both sides’ military and political
leaders. Yet, failing to include more personal stories and voices of Americans
who opposed the war not only reflects a serious imbalance and bias, but
contributes to the failure to achieve the film’s goal of more fully understanding
what was happening at home.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Episode Six is convincing on how the
Tet Offensive, despite the enormous loses suffered – perhaps half of the 84,000 Vietnamese who participated in the attacks – broke the back of American opinion in support
the war. That was dramatically revealed in President Johnson’s reaction to Walter
Cronkite returning from Vietnam and declaring on his TV</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> special, “It seems
now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a
stalemate.” Johnson responded that evening but not publicly, “That’s it," he said, "If
we’ve lost Cronkite, we’ve lost middle America.” Johnson’s address to the
nation on March 31 announcing that he would not seek a second term epitomized the tragic Shakespearian drama of his Presidency, memorialized in
two plays by Robert Schenkkan, <i>All the Way
</i>and <i>The Great Society,</i> performed
as a pair in Seattle<i>.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">What Burns and Novick
don’t address about Tet, and they could have by doing interviews in the South and North
with people who were civilians in 1968, is how the Tet Offensive affected
Vietnamese opinion. Particularly in the south, how did Vietnamese civilians in
the cities and in the countryside view the offensive? What effects did it have
on their view of the Saigon government, the American military presence, and the
growing “Third Force” peace movement,
etc? The film’s primary focus on the military and interviews with those who
fought results in a failure to understand more deeply what was happening
politically both in America and in Vietnam.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> Martin Luther King’s
sermon against the war on April 4, 1967, King;s assassination, and the eruption of riots in many cities across the country deserved more
coverage in the film. These events, followed three months later by
Bobby Kennedy’s assassination had significant effects on prospects for ending
the war and on relations between blacks and whites. Except for the incident
where Marine Corporal Roger Harris, returned from Vietnam, refuses orders to join
military action against black rioters in D.C, the fllm seems to duck dealing
with race relations and with the obvious racist dimension of the war itself. The accompanying book by
Geofffrey War does more on this, causing
one to wonder if taking on the racial dimension of the war, as well as interviewing men who risked imprisonment for resisting the draft and men who resisted within the military were topics too hot to handle in the film for a few of
the major funders.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-12545724102221567512017-09-22T15:18:00.000-07:002017-09-22T21:15:27.177-07:00<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">PBS
Vietnam War Documentary - Response to Episode Five<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Episode
Five of the Documentary, <b>“This is What
We Do” (July-December 1967) </b>is the most telling so far about what is
missing from the Burns/Novick film. It also is the most exhausting episode.
Several friends have told me they have stopped watching the series, not because
they were not interested or didn’t learn anything from watching, but because so
much of the film footage is about battles.It’s almost as if the filmmakers
became intoxicated with battle scenes and stories, and forgot what they claimed
was the purpose of the film. (It will be very interesting to learn how the
numbers of viewers of the series changes over the course of the ten episodes.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> In
their Introduction to the book, <i>The
Vietnam War,</i> based on the film series, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick write, “It’s
been more than forty years now, and. . .we have been unable to put that war
behind us. The deep wounds it inflicted on our nation, our communities, our
families, and our politics have festered.” In presenting their goals for the film, they
write, “Most important, we wanted to understand what the war was like on the
battlefield and on the home front, and we wanted to find out why. . . Americans
have been unable to have a civil conversation about one of the most
consequential events in our history.” Reviewing the photographs and texts of
the book and the film so far, I believe Burns and Novick have succeeded in
helping us understand what it was like on the battlefield but fail to help us
much on understanding the home front and why conversations about Vietnam are
still so difficult. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">While
appreciating the positive accomplishments of the PBS Documentary, Tom Fox, who
served in Vietnam as a community worker in the nongovernmental International
Voluntary Service, suggests that a place to start in figuring what went wrong
is the very title of the series. Writing in National Catholic Reporter online,
Tom commented, “</span><span style="color: #414042; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">However large Burns
and Novick's scope, I fear their lens has been too narrowly focused on the
military aspect of the conflict and not wide enough to adequately digest all
its bitter lessons. Yes, the title is "The Vietnam War." I would have
preferred something like "Vietnam, America and the War."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="color: #414042; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">There is no magic in a
title, but Tom’s preferred title would have kept reminding the filmmakers that
their purpose was not simply to understand the war which can be viewed as
primarily a military matter, but also to learn somethings about Vietnam and,
very importantly as Americans, to view what was happening on the home front
during the war in ways that help us achieve a more complex, deeper, more
critical understanding of our own country’s history, culture and politics. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="color: #414042; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">A serious problem with
Episodes Four and Five's treatment of the home front is that, except for three nationally
prominent figures, Senator Fulbright, Martin Luther King, and Dr. Spock, who
voice anti-war views, and occasional snippets from a single anti-war activist Bill
Zimmerman, the anti-war movement continues to be portrayed two-dimensionally
and mostly with generalities. The film’s effect would have been very different if
Burns and Novick had selected ten or a dozen individual American students, teachers,
women, clergy, union and business leaders opposed to the war and had them tell
their personal stories, as the filmmakers did very effectively with several
veterans of the war. Then if the film had focused back and forth over time
between the experiences and changing perceptions of those fighting the war and
those fighting against the war, I believe Burns and Novick could have made a
major contribution to our understanding of what was happening on the home front
and to our learning lessons for the future. One has to wonder if major funding
from the Bank of America and David Koch may have posed a serious restraint on their developing the film in this direction.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="color: #414042; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I can’t end this response
to Episode Five without a brief comment on the October 21, 1967 demonstration
at the Pentagon, in part because I know there are plans developing for a
commemoration of that event a month from now. By the Fall of 1967 Americans paying
attention to the war in Vietnam had plenty to be angry about. The numbers of
American soldiers killed and wounded were growing. The numbers of Vietnamese
killed and wounded were several times the American numbers. U.S. bombing
campaigns and Agent Orange defoliant raids were resulting in enormous destruction
and suffering. And several government secrets
and lies about the war already had become public. 1967 was the year that a
majority of Americans had come to doubt the war. It was not surprising that by
Spring/Fall 1967 the feelings and attitudes of protesters and the tone of
anti-war demonstrations became more confrontational.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="color: #414042; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The challenge or
problem is that greater anger and frustration are not very good bases for smart
strategies. (That was true in the 1960s, and it's true today in the time of Trump.) In 1967, marching from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon to confront the
warmakers may have made sense. The loud, public calls to “Shut Down the Pentagon”
(Jerry Rubin) or “Levitate the Pentagon” (Abbie Hoffman), and the call by some
to physically rush the soldiers surrounding the building were not smart ideas.
These “strategies” would certainly fail; they risked harm for no worthwhile, credible goal; and they sent a confusing message to Americans who were still
making up their minds about the war that made the protesters appear to be against the soldiers
(a wrong message which also got communicated by anti-war demonstrations “greeting”
soldiers on their return home from Vietnam). What if after an overnight vigil
at the Pentagon, we had gone home and at least some of us returned on Monday as
“normal” visitors to the Pentagon determined to engage in conversations about the war with as
many employees in the building as we could, before very likely being ejected or
arrested.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="color: #414042; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Returning to the film,
obviously choices get made about what vets or what activists to interview. If
Burns and Novick had adopted the approach of involving more anti-war activists
in parallel with the many veterans they involved in the film, they would have
had to be as careful and sensitive in selecting representative activists who
would be good communicators as it seems they were in selecting vets to participate.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<b style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></i></b>
<b style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">During the Vietnam War, as
National Youth Secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Ron
resisted the draft, led an interfaith/interracial mission to Saigon focused on
repression, carried mail from their families to American POW’s in Hanoi, and
coordinated national peace marches on Washington, DC in November 1969 and May
1970. Ron lives in Everett WA and can be contacted at </span></i></b><a href="mailto:ronyoungwa@gmail.com" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><b><i><span style="color: #888888; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">ronyoungwa@gmail.com</span></i></b></a></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-17303557044299921502017-09-21T16:16:00.002-07:002017-09-21T19:08:23.815-07:00<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">PBS
Vietnam War Documentary – Response to Episode Four<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Episode Four, “Resolve,” (January 1966-June 1967)
confirmed both my appreciation for positive contributions of the film series
and my critique of it’s profound failings. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">There were more stunningly
awful scenes of military battles, with multiple images of wounded and dying
soldiers, and still photos of stacks of carelessly piled bodies of dead
Vietnamese. There were more riveting visuals and interviews with American and Vietnamese veterans of the war. Interviews
with several American vets revealed a growing disconnect during this period
between the deepening doubts soldiers were feeling about the purpose and
progress of the war, and their military and political leaders’ callous
certainty and lack of courage in facing reality. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">As it became clearer that
the U.S war in Vietnam might be unwinnable, the response by the military,
backed by most political leaders, was to increase the bombing of Vietnam and to
send even larger numbers of American soldiers to fight the war. There are brief
snippets, but a whole lot more could and should have been done in the film to explore how
this disconnect compounded the fears and frustrations of fighting men and the
anxieties of their families, and how it complicated and deepened the pain and
bitterness families felt when one of theirs was killed or wounded. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">There is no doubt that belief
in American idealism, exceptionalism and sense of invincibility that many Americans
carried with them into the war suffered a tremendous shock by the realities they
confronted in Vietnam. And also no doubt that this disconnect, this
contradiction is an important unresolved dimension in the continuing
contentiousness over the war. It deserved more direct, explicit and fuller treatment in
the film.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
film records how this period, January 1966-June 1967, saw major increases in
public anti-war sentiment and expansion of the anti-war movement. And yet,
relative to the amount of attention to military battles, to experiences of
soldiers and interviews with veterans, there are very few visuals or individual
interviews with Americans who actively opposed the war. Except for a few very
prominent persons, Burns and Novick continue in this episode to treat Americans
who were against the war more abstractly with generalities rather than through
presenting their photos and personal stories. That troubling imbalance impedes chances
that as viewers people will adequately understand what was going on in our country about the war and be sufficiently challenged in considering lessons
we need to learn from the war for going forward.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The film's abstract treatment of the huge anti-war demonstrations in New York and San Francisco on April 15, 1967 was a missed opportunity to introduce personal stories of some of the speakers and/or some of the 300,000 participants. I was one of the 150 or so draft-age young men who burned our Draft cards in Central Park that day. What motivated many of us to give up safe student deferments from the war or even Conscientious Objector status and risk Federal prosecution and going to prison. Were our actions rooted in the same American idealism that inspired other young men our age to sign-up for military service in Vietnam?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Two nationally prominent figures that the
film does focus on, Senator J. William Fulbright and Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr., played key roles during these years in growing opposition to the war. The
film’s treatment of Fulbright is good. Fulbright’s reversal from supporting to
opposing the war worried President Johnson who sought unsuccessfully to detract
attention from Fulbright’s Senate Hearings by taking off to Honolulu for a
conference with Saigon government heads, Generals Thieu and Ky. The highpoint
of the hearing was testimony against the war by George Kennan, who had been a
prime architect and advocate for containment policy against Communism. Kennan
testified, “If we were not already involved. . .I would know of no reason to
become involved.” He suggested U.S. preoccupation with Vietnam was like an elephant being frightened by a mouse. And Kenan agreed with Fulbright that “we can’t achieve it
(victory) even with the best of wills.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The film’s treatment of Martin Luther King’s speaking
out against the war on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church was irresponsibly
brief and inadequate. As James Cone has written, “More than any other person,
past or present, black or white, Martin Luther King proclaimed and lived the
American dream.” Most of the media and King’s closest allies criticized his
speaking out on the war, charging that he should stick with civil rights issues.
But King’s conscience made him see clearly and declare boldly that America’s war in Vietnam “made
a mockery of the ideals the United States professed to be defending.” And in a
statement which may have marked him for death a year from the date of this
speech, King declared that he could never again speak “against the violence in the
ghettoes,” without first speaking clearly “to the greatest purveyor of violence
in the world: my government.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> Burns’
and Novick’s failure to deal adequately with Martin Luther King speaking out was
compounded by their not portraying or interviewing any of the Protestant,
Catholic and Jewish leaders of Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam
(CALCAV) that sponsored the event at Riverside Church and followed-up by
helping to organize Vietnam Summer in 1967 that involved 10,000 people, many of
them young people, ringing millions of doorbells, and laid the basis for the
1968 Presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy. The "who's who" of CALCAV offered a great opportunity to personalize opposition to the war. Burns and Novick didn't take it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-42751980978289789922017-09-20T19:28:00.000-07:002017-09-20T22:45:31.811-07:00<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">PBS
Vietnam War Documentary – Response to Episode Three<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Episode Three, entitled “The River Styx,” covers the period of January
1964-December 1965. The episode reflects some of the really positive
contributions of the film and some very troubling tendencies, particularly if
they persist in other episodes, that reflect the film’s profound failings. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> The most important positive contribution of the film, as
viewed in these initial three episodes, is that it candidly and courageously
portrays the utter awfulness of war. There are scenes that reveal the capacity,
willingness and even inclination of those fighting for whatever side or cause to
commit unspeakable violence and scenes with equal honesty show the horrendous
consequences and toll in human suffering. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">This truth about war is portrayed powerfully enough that some persons
watching the film may well conclude that no matter what the calling or cause we
won’t go to war ever again. While there’s no evidence that Burns and Novick
have come to this conclusion themselves or wish that others would there is
power and meaning in much of the film’s footage that presses us in that direction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> Another very positive and powerful effect of the film is
experienced in some of the visuals and interviews with American veterans and
with Vietnamese veterans, including Vietnamese who fought on opposite sides. It’s
clear that one of Burns’ and Novick’s major goals for the film is to honor
veterans of the war, even as the film presents a preponderance of evidence, if
sometimes in confusing ways, that the war should never have happened. One other
important positive take-away is that while the film’s documentary footage
realistically depicts what it was like for those fighting the war, the film is
very clear in holding high level political leaders responsible for the decision
to go to war and for decisions about how to fight it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> This leads me to what so far is a serious failing of the
film. From the start of this project and in the enormous publicity campaign
about the film, Burns and Novick have emphasized that this film is not just
about the war, but about how the war deeply divided America, and that these
divisions continue to haunt us today. Obviously, the divisions over the war
were between real flesh and blood persons, even sometimes different persons within
the same family, all with real personal stories. In the first three episodes,
while there have been a number of stirring photos and warm personal portrayals of
men who fought in the war, some movingly presented along with their families, there’s
been only one of a man, Bill Zimmerman, who fought against the war. So far, Americans
who opposed the war are portrayed anonymously as participants in protests, e.g.
Teach-Ins and the SDS March on Washington, etc. I fear this serious imbalance
will continue in future episodes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> The film acknowledges the secrecy and lies high
government and military officials regularly practiced to keep the American
people in the dark about what was happening and about major impending decisions
about how to pursue the war. Indeed, by 1965 Secretary of Defense McNamara apparently had concluded that the war was unwinnable, but still supported sending a
much larger number of Americans to fight because he lacked the courage to go
public and because, like President Johnson, he believed "losing was not a <i>politically</i> acceptable option."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The film details the complexity of the actual situation surrounding the
Gulf of Tonkin incident, though in a way that doesn’t make it explicitly clear that
the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which authorized the American war was based on a
lie. More Americans knowing that earlier might have helped prevent the US
invasion of Iraq, which also was based on a lie. Knowing it now can help us
prevent future wars.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> In focusing as much as it does on the military dimensions
and battles in the war, the film fails to help us adequately understand what was happening
politically in Vietnam. Episode Three reveals the increasingly repressive
nature of the Saigon regime of Ngo Dinh Diem and references the role of the
Buddhist opposition movement, including the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc,
in contributing to Diem’s eventual end. Hopefully, coming episodes will focus
more attention on the growth of this so-called “Third Force” peace movement and how Vietnamese involved in it related to Vietnamese who supported the Communist-led
National Liberation Front.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">By so far not including more photos and personal stories of Americans who
opposed the war, the film fails to help us understand what was happening
politically in America. In 1965, appalled
by what they knew the U.S. was doing in Vietnam and inspired by Thich Quang
Duc, three Americans, each with her or his own personal story, immolated
themselves as a protest against the war.
March 16 - Alice Herz an eighty year old grandmother in Detroit;
November 2 - Norman Morrison, a Baltimore Quaker and father, on the grass under
the Pentagon office window of Defense Secretary McNamara; and November 9 –
Roger LaPorte, a twenty-two year old
former Roman Catholic seminarian, in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-38119388949035583082017-09-19T16:29:00.001-07:002017-09-19T19:41:46.878-07:00<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">PBS
Vietnam War Documentary – Response to Episode Two<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Following
in France’s Footsteps - </span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Episode Two reveals that while France
was motivated by colonialism and the U.S. by anti-Communism, the patterns of
the two countries involvement in Vietnam, including an abysmal lack of understanding
of Vietnamese history and culture, whom we allied with, and the focus on
military action rather than politics were the same. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In his review of the PBS Documentary,
Thomas Bass quotes David Halberstam of the New York Times as having said, <span style="color: #222222;">“The problem was trying to cover something every day as
news when in fact the real key was that it was all derivative of the French Indo-China
war, which is history. . .So you really should have a third paragraph in each
story which should have said. . . ‘None of this means anything because we are
in the same footsteps as the French and we are prisoners of their experience.” </span>It
became clear early on to Halberstam, but to all too few political leaders that
the eventual outcome of our involvement would also be the same. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Dominoes
and a Chess Piece - </span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">On April 7, 1954 President Eisenhower gave
his famous “falling dominoes” speech, comparing
the prospect of France’s defeat in Vietnam by the Communist-led
nationalist forces to a falling domino, first in a line of dominoes, including
Burma, Thailand, Indonesia and even Japan that might also fall to
Communism. That fearful, if absurdly
mechanistic and misguided image and theory was a prime motivation for Kennedy and Johnson in their thinking about increasing military involvement
in Vietnam. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Cold War ideology and the politics of fear provided a
framework in which images and theory about Communism became more important than
reality. As Leslie Gelb, who directed
the Pentagon Papers project, tells Burns and Novick in Episode Two, </span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Vietnam was a piece on a chessboard,
not a country.” And as Gelb wrote in his summary of the Pentagon Papers, “We
must note that South Vietnam (unlike any of the other countries in Southeast
Asia) was essentially the creation of the United States.” This “creation of the
United States” is the “country” Burns bemoans disappearing at the end of the
war.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">A
contrast of two Parades - </span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In 1957, three years after the United
States installed him in power and two years after he refused country-wide elections
mandated by the 1954 Geneva Accords which almost everyone believed Ho Chi Min
would win, President Ngo Dinh Diem came from Saigon on a state visit to the
United States. Diem was greeted at the airport by President Eisenhower who hailed
him as great patriot and defender of freedom; he addressed an enthusiastic joint
session of Congress, was wined and dined by Cardinal Spellman, and treated to a
huge Ticker-Tape parade in New York City with 250,000 people lining the
streets. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In contrast, Diem sponsored a parade in Saigon to
celebrate an anniversary of his rule which was so autocratic, corrupt, nepotistic
and unpopular that, out of fear of protests or violence, the Diem regime and police allowed no one on the streets to
observe the parade.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Fabricated
News and Good Journalists – </span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The Cold War profoundly
affected news coverage from 1947 to 1990 and was a major reason why there wasn’t
more opposition earlier to U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Media coverage of Diem’s 1957 visit to the
United States was carefully and effectively managed by American Friends of
Vietnam, an anti-Communist elite lobbying organization created by Joseph
Buttinger. (Buttinger later became disillusioned with Diem and denounced him.) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">As Episode Two reveals, in Vietnam, the Saigon government,
U.S. Embassy and the U.S military all worked very hard to present news about
the war in the most positive light, often including what later were proven to
be outright lies. Most American journalists, and as a consequence most
Americans, got their news about the war from these sources. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">There were a handful
of journalists, including Neil Sheehan, Malcolm Browne and David Halberstam,
who dug deeper, sometimes at risk to themselves, for the truths about the war. Sheehan
received the <i>Pentagon Papers </i>from
Daniel Ellsberg and wrote what they revealed in <i>The New York Times. He also </i>wrote the book, <i>A Bright and Shining Lie, </i>later made into a film. Malcolm Browne, raised
a Quaker, famously photographed Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation in June 1963,
which contributed to the downfall of the Diem regime. David Halberstam wrote, <i>Vietnam: the Making of a Quagmire </i>in
1964<i>, </i>which prophetically predicted
why the U.S. war was unwinnable months ahead of the arrogant and tragic massive increases in the
numbers of young Americans being sent to fight the war.<i> </i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Whatever one’s take away from the Burns/Novick PBS Documentary,
the works of these three journalists are resources we should make sure to study
and urge that young people study in schools. The following words from the end
of David Halberstam’s book seem a good way to end this commentary on Episode Two:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: .2in; margin-right: .2in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">“In the early fifties the people of America were subjected
to constant statements. . . .about the
West’s battle to save Southeast Asia from the Communists. But the war was
taking place in Vietnam, what was at
stake were the lives of Vietnamese people, and to them the names seemed wrong;
it was not a matter to them of the West against the Communists, but of
themselves against the colonialists. It
was a classic example of seeing the world the way we wanted to, instead of the
way it was.”</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-27035510129783182392017-09-18T13:05:00.001-07:002017-09-18T13:05:21.872-07:00<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">The<b> PBS
Vietnam War documentary </b>ten week series by Ken Burns and Lynn
Novick will be aired nightly on most Public Television stations September 17-22
and 26-29. I encourage you to find ways that you and your family and
friends in other areas of the country can be involved in community responses to
the film. Ideas for how you can participate include writing an Op-Ed or Letter
to the Editor, helping to arrange a panel at a church, synagogue, mosque or
local Library, distributing the model flyer at your local station or other
public venue, and working with Veterans for Peace. While there's a lot in the
series that is </span></i><i><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">positive, including visuals and interviews with diverse
Americans and Vietnamese with very different </span></i><i><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">views
of the war, I fear that the imbalance of voices and the film's distorted
historical framing of the war will keep us from learning lessons to help
prevent future wars.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Following this brief Blog Post on Episode One is a
Commentary I wrote after my wife and I attended a Preview by Burns and Novick
in Seattle, and a flyer we distributed to 1000 attendees. You're welcome
to reproduce (or adapt) the Commentary and/or the Flyer for use in your area.
Replies to <b>"contact: </b></span></i><a href="mailto:vietnamlessons@gmail.com" target="_blank"><b><i><span style="background: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-decoration-line: none;">vietnamlessons@gmail.com</span></i></b></a><b><i><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"> </span></i></b><i><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">at
the bottom of the flyer come directly to me and I am happy to respond to any
replies. I’ve also included a link here to a <a href="https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/vietnam-war-weaves-narrative-human-calamity">Commentary by Tom Fox in the National
Catholic Reporter online.</a></span></i><b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><a href="https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/vietnam-war-weaves-narrative-human-calamity"><br /></a>
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--></span></b><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">PBS
Vietnam War Documentary – Response to Episode One<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Episode One covers the period 1858-1962, focused largely
on US involvement with France’s military campaign to reimpose French colonial
rule at the end of World War II. This happened after the Viet Minh national
independence movement, led by Communist Ho Chi Minh and aided by the US helped
to defeat the Japanese occupation. The US wound up paying 75% of French war
costs before France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The US imposed the authoritarian government of Ngo Dinh Diem in the southern zone. Diem, with US
support, refused country-wide elections in 1956 – elections mandated by the
international Geneva Accords and elections which almost everyone agrees Ho Chi
Minh would have won.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The film quotes Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy,
Johnson and Nixon offering the anti-Communist rationale for US deepening military
involvement, but fails to pay sufficient attention to President Roosevelt whose
opposition to French colonialism and support for Vietnam’s independence
suggested a wiser, more realistic policy path that could have avoided generating
disastrous divisions in Vietnam and the United States, and saved more than
58,000 American and more than 2.5 million Vietnamese lives.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In an exchange with Secretary of State Stennius in 1943, </span><span style="font-family: "Times Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">President Roosevelt, when asked in which direction US policy
should lean, replied it was "perfectly clear that Indo-China should not go
back to France, but that it should be administered by an international
trusteeship. France has had the country--thirty million inhabitants for nearly
one hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were in the
beginning.” When pushed on the idea of the US accepting some lesser goal than
full independence, Roosevelt said, “No--it must be independence. . . that is to
be the policy, you can quote me in the State Department."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">Beginning with President Truman, this was
not the policy the US pursued in Vietnam. Episode One’s lack of sufficient
attention to this possible alternative policy path results in an historically
distorted framing of the American War in Vietnam, described in the film’s
opening Episode as “begun in good faith, with good intentions.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">Another serious problem with Episode One is
that there is no attention paid to the fact that Vietnam was not the only
country during the 1950s, ‘60s and 70s in which exaggerated US fears of
Communism and over reliance on military power led our country to intervene against
nationalist movements that we suspected of being socially progressive,
including interfering in elections, orchestrating the overthrow of elected
leaders, and intervening militarily. The list includes: Italy (1948), Japan (1951), Iran and the
Philippines (1953), Lebanon (1957), Laos (1958), Congo (1960-61), Dominican
Republic (1963-65), Brazil (1964), and Chile (1964-73). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">Failing to acknowledge this pattern in US
Cold War policies leads to an almost apologetic view of the US war in Vietnam
portrayed as the result of ignorance, misunderstandings and mistakes, rather
than the reflection of a fundamentally flawed US foreign policy framework. This
approach also leads us away from learning essential lessons that could
contribute publicly to preventing or ending disastrous US invasions and
occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">Attending the gala Preview at the Kennedy
Center on September 12, John McCain and John Kerry, who together with President
Clinton in 1995 played important positive roles in our normalizing relations
with Vietnam, both had high praise for the Burns/Novick PBS Documentary. In 2003, both voted YES to authorize the US
invasion of Iraq<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Commentary on the PBS Vietnam War Documentary<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">By Ron Young<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the PBS Vietnam War documentary, filmmakers
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick present visuals and voices Americans and Vietnamese
reflecting complex, different views of the war. However, I fear the film’s
imbalance of voices and distorted historical framing of the war will keep us
from learning essential lessons to help prevent future wars. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the film, we hear the voices of Truman,
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon defending
the war but not the voice of Roosevelt urging US support for Vietnam’s
independence nor voices of Senators Morse and Gruening who voted against the1964
Tonkin Gulf Resolution. This deceitful resolution effectively authorized the
war, just as forty years later the government’s false claim about Iraq having
nuclear weapons provided the rationale for the disastrous U.S. invasion. The
film doesn’t give us the voice of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David
Halberstam who got it right in his 1964 book, <i>The Making of a Quaqmire,</i> on why the American war in Vietnam was
unwinnable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We hear agonized, brave voices of young
American soldiers who fought the war, more than 58,200 of whom never came home,
but not the voices of an estimated million or more who went AWOL or deserted
and very few personalized stories of soldiers and civilians who courageously resisted
the war and risked imprisonment. We hear nothing from young Americans like Don
Luce, Tom Fox and Lady Borton, who went to serve in Vietnam as civilians, who
learned the language, and worked side by side with Vietnamese, not fearing them
but learning from them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The worst distortion is Burns’ historically
inaccurate statement that at the war’s end, “a country (South Vietnam)
disappeared.” While Vietnamese had different political views then and do now,
Vietnam was and is one country. This was recognized in the 1954 Geneva Accords
that ended French colonial rule, temporarily divided the country into two
zones, and mandated Vietnam-wide elections in 1956, elections the U.S. backed Diem
regime refused. In truth, the war’s end in April 1975 marked Vietnam’s
independence. The country was finally free of foreign domination. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 14.4pt; margin-bottom: 9.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The American war in Vietnam didn’t need to happen. On
February 28, 1946 Ho Chi Minh wrote to President Truman informing him how the
French were making preparations for returning French troops to Hanoi to make
Vietnam a colony again. Ho wrote urgently, “<i>I
therefore earnestly appeal to you personally and to the American people. . .to
support our independence. . .in keeping with principles of the Atlantic
and San Francisco charters.” </i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 7.5pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 4.5pt; tab-stops: 135.45pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">President
Truman, blinded by Cold War ideology which pitted the U.S. against many
anti-colonial nationalist movements, never replied. Instead, the U.S. paid 80%
of France’s losing war costs. And then we spent $168 billion ($1 trillion in
2017 dollars) for the American War that robbed resources at home from the War
on Poverty and Great Society programs. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 7.5pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 4.5pt; tab-stops: 135.45pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Burns
and Novick view their film as helping to create reconciliation over a war that
generated deep divisions among Americans. As South Africans understood in
creating their post-Apartheid commission, you can’t have reconciliation without
truth-telling. While the film’s slogan, “there is no single truth <i>in </i>war,” is wise in general, it is
possible to determine the preponderant truth about a particular war. The basic
truth about the American War in Vietnam is that it was wrong and, like the U.S.
war in Iraq, it never should have happened.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: #F1F1F1; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-line-height-alt: 4.5pt;">
<b><i><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">During the Vietnam
War, as National Youth Secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Ron
resisted the draft, led an interfaith/interracial mission to Saigon focused on
repression, carried mail from their families to American POW’s in Hanoi, and
coordinated national peace marches on Washington, DC in November 1969 and May
1970. Ron lives in Everett WA and can be contacted at </span></i></b><a href="mailto:ronyoungwa@gmail.com"><b><i><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">ronyoungwa@gmail.com</span></i></b></a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><b><i><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: #F1F1F1; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-line-height-alt: 4.5pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 9.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 9.0pt; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A
Model Flyer<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 9.0pt; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="color: #548dd4; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 24.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">WHAT the WAR DOCUMENTARY WON’T SAY!</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 9.0pt;">
<b><span style="color: #c0504d; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 22.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The </span></b><b><span style="color: #c0504d; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 24.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">American</span></b><b><span style="color: #c0504d; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 22.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> War in Vietnam Didn’t Need to Happen </span></b><b><span style="color: #c0504d; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 20.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">58,220 Americans and 3 million Vietnamese
didn’t need to die</span></b><b><span style="color: #c0504d; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">. All could have been
spared suffering from UXOs, Agent Orange, PTSD and suicides.</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 9.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 19pt;">In 1944, President
Roosevelt sent US OSS agents, including Mac Shin from Seattle, to assist Ho Chi
Minh’s forces in defeating the Japanese occupation, after which France tried to
reimpose its colonial control.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 9.0pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">On February 28, 1946 Ho
Chi Minh wrote to President Truman.</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 18.0pt; margin-bottom: 7.5pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt;">On behalf of the Vietnam
government and people, Ho informed the President that the French were making
preparations for returning French troops to Hanoi to make Vietnam a colony again.
Ho wrote, “<b><i>I therefore earnestly appeal to you personally and to the
American people. . .to support our independence. . .in
keeping with the principles of the Atlantic and San Francisco charters.” </i></b></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 18.0pt; margin-bottom: 7.5pt;">
<b><span style="color: #c0504d; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 17.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">President Truman,
blinded by Cold War ideology which pitted the U.S. against many anti-colonial
nationalist movements, never replied. Instead, the U.S. paid 80% of France’s
losing war costs. And then we spent $168 billion ($1 trillion in 2017 dollars)
on the American War that robbed resources at home from the War on Poverty and
Great Society.</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 7.5pt; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 20.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">SAY IT! The American War in Vietnam Was Wrong!</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 7.5pt; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 20.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This war (and the war in Iraq) Never Should Have Happened!</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 7.5pt; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 8pt;">CONTACT: vietnamlessons@gmail.com</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-67601475842621619432017-08-23T10:46:00.000-07:002017-08-24T10:06:15.213-07:00On Protests, Violence and Voting Rights<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Violence
at recent demonstrations and counter demonstrations reveal the need for cities
and states, with support from Congress, to refuse protest permits to groups that
threaten violence. The simplest way to do that, while respecting the right of
freedom of speech, is to refuse permits for protest rallies or marches in which
participants plan to carry guns. It’s one thing to allow “open carry” of
firearms in public, it’s quite a dangerous different decision to allow persons
to carry firearms in a protest march when political confrontation and violence
are very real possibilities. To its credit, apparently, ACLU is considering not
defending this form of provocative protest. The NRA’s shameless support for
violence-prone, gun-toting protests should cause politicians to think twice
before taking money from the gun lobby. </span><b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> These are not new issues, but the Trump Presidency is
generating an even more dangerous context. In 1966, I marched with Martin
Luther King Jr. in Chicago, supporting the campaign for implementing fair
housing policies. The ACLU controversially defended the right of neo-Nazis to
march. When we black and white marched together, we needed the National Guard
to protect us from screaming white mobs lining both sides of the street. History teaches us that when politics are
deeply divisive, as they are today, fueled in part by the President, dangers to
democracy intensify.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Freedom
of speech is a right worth defending, even when the message of an individual or
group is morally repugnant. The danger in restricting the right is that
political contexts and what majorities might want to prohibit change over time.
Refusing the right of persons to spew white supremacist, neo-Nazi hatred today
may seem a good and necessary limitation, especially to people who have experienced hate-motivated physical
violence. In another time and
context, a majority, including some of the same people, might support limiting speech
of those who oppose their government’s war or who advocate against unfair
taxation or for a single-payer “socialist” solution for achieving universal
healthcare. The risks of freedom of
speech are real, the risks of denying this right are even greater. Refusing
protest permits for groups in which participants carry guns would protect
public safety while preserving freedom of speech. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Our
work together for a better America is about much more than denouncing hate
groups. We need to work together to build effective political support for
overturning two recent Supreme Court decisions that are disastrous for our
democracy. “Citizens United vs the FEC”
(2010) granted corporations the same right of free speech and right to
contribute money to political campaigns as individual citizens and “Shelby
County vs. Holder” (2013) gutted a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
We need to challenge all politicians and prospective candidates for office,
Democrats or Republicans, to support legislation that would overturn these decisions that deny protections for voting rights and greatly compound the problems of big money in politics. Realistically, overturning these court decisions is a
longer term goal. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Nationally,
in the meantime, we need to resist Republican voter suppression efforts,
including restrictive voter I.D. laws, new limits on voter registration,
reduced times and locations for voting, and provisions that make it harder to
restore voting rights for people with past criminal convictions – all of which
are designed and work in ways that fall heaviest on minorities, the elderly and
youth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Locally,
we should support citizenship education, encourage voter registration, and
expose hate groups, like anti-Muslim “Act for America” which claims 750,000
members nationwide and recently doubled the number of chapters in Washington. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">In Everett specifically, we should support the proposed change in how we vote
for City Council members to include voting by districts, as well as for
at-large members. District voting will attract candidates who have direct
personal connections with more multi-cultural, underrepresented and under-served
neighborhoods in our city.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Locally
and nationally, we’ve got to denounce and protest each new demonstration
promoting racist, proto-Fascist, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ
hatred. In most cases, I’m sure we can turn out much larger numbers than these
hate groups and, if we’re consistent and creative, we can win over a lot more
people to side with us against hate and stand-up for justice and peace.
Strategically, looking toward the 2018 elections, our goals need to be to
strengthen voting rights and increase the numbers of eligible voters who come
out to vote. “Si, se puede, yes we can.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-36615162466014455852017-08-01T14:33:00.000-07:002017-08-03T20:02:20.437-07:00PBS Vietnam War Documentary - Community Responses<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">.</span><span style="background-color: white;">The</span><b style="background-color: white;"> PBS Vietnam War documentary </b><span style="background-color: white;">ten week series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick will be released nationwide on September17. Here is a link to the list of</span><i style="background-color: white;"><b> <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzmDlU4zNqt8X3p6NlluY0M0dEE/view?usp%3Dsharing&source=gmail&ust=1501880544651000&usg=AFQjCNHIPLSMPbOOwtrEvqweWScRDpmLHA" href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzmDlU4zNqt8X3p6NlluY0M0dEE/view?usp=sharing" style="color: #888888; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">"What Stations Are Doing"</a></b></i><span style="background-color: white;"> in relation to the documentary. I encourage you to find ways that you.and your family and friends in other areas of the country can be involved in community responses. Ideas for how you can participate include writing an Op-Ed or Letter to the Editor, helping to arrange a panel at a church, synagogue, mosque or local Library, distributing the model flyer at your local station or other public venue, and working with Veterans for Peace. While there's a lot in the series that is positive, including visuals and interviews with diverse Americans and Vietnamese with very different views of the war, I fear that the imbalance of voices and the film's distorted historical framing of the war will keep us from learning lessons to help prevent future wars. Here is a Commentary I wrote after my wife and I attended a presentation by Burns and Novick in Seatlle, and a flyer we distributed to 1000 attendees. Many people who read the flyer expressed agreement or appreciation for the idea that "The American War in Vietnam Didn't Need to Happen," and no one expressed hostility. You're welcome to reproduce (or adapt) the Commentary and/or the Flyer for use in your area. Replies to </span><b style="background-color: white;">"contact: <a href="mailto:vietnamlessons@gmail.com" style="color: #1155cc; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">vietnamlessons@gmai<wbr></wbr>l.com</a> </b><span style="background-color: white;">at the bottom of the flyer come directly to me and I am happy to respond to any replies.</span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Commentary on Previewing the PBS Vietnam War
Documentary<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">By Ron Young<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">At a preview of the PBS Vietnam War documentary,
while filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick presented visuals and voices of diverse
Americans and Vietnamese reflecting complex, different views of the war, I fear
the film’s imbalance of voices and distorted historical framing of the war will
keep us from learning essential lessons to help prevent future wars. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the preview, we hear the voices of Nixon,
Agnew and Johnson defending the war but not the voices of Senators Morse and
Gruening who voted against the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution. This deceitful
resolution effectively authorized the war, just as forty years later the false claim
about Iraq having nuclear weapons provided the rationale for the disastrous U.S.
invasion. The preview, and my guess is the film itself, doesn’t give us the
voice of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Halberstam who got it right in
his 1964 book, <i>The Making of a Quaqmire,</i>
on why the American war in Vietnam was unwinnable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the documentary’s preview we hear agonized,
brave voices of young American soldiers who fought the war, more than 58,200 of
whom never came home, but not the voices of an estimated million or more who
went AWOL or deserted or voices of soldiers who courageously resisted and
risked imprisonment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The worst distortion is Burns’ historically
inaccurate statement that at the war’s end, “a country (South Vietnam)
disappeared.” While Vietnamese had different political views then and do today,
Vietnam was and is one country. This was recognized in the 1954 Geneva Accords
that ended French colonial rule, temporarily divided the country into two
zones, and mandated Vietnam-wide elections in 1956, elections which the U.S.
imposed Diem regime refused. In truth, the war’s end marked Vietnam’s
independence. The country was finally free from decades of foreign domination. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The American war in Vietnam didn’t need to happen. On
February 28, 1946 Ho Chi Minh wrote to President Truman informing him how the
French were making preparations for returning French troops to Hanoi to make
Vietnam a colony again. Ho wrote urgently, “<i>I
therefore earnestly appeal to you personally and to the American people. . .to
support our independence. . .in keeping with principles of the Atlantic
and San Francisco charters.” </i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">President
Truman, blinded by Cold War ideology which pitted the U.S. against many
anti-colonial nationalist movements, never replied. Instead, the U.S. paid 80%
of France’s losing war costs. And then we spent $168 billion ($1 trillion in
2017 dollars) for the American War that robbed resources at home from the War
on Poverty and Great Society programs. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Burns
and Novick view their film as helping to create reconciliation over a war that
generated deep divisions among Americans. As South Africans understood in
creating their post-Apartheid commission, you can’t have reconciliation without
truth-telling. The truth is the American War in Vietnam was wrong. It was a
war, like the war in Iraq, that never should have happened.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">During
the Vietnam War, as National Youth Secretary of the Fellowship of
Reconciliation (FOR), Ron resisted the draft, led an interfaith/interracial
mission to Saigon focused on repression, carried mail to American POW’s in
Hanoi, and coordinated national peace marches on Washington, DC in November
1969 and May 1970.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Ron
lives in Everett, WA and can be contacted at </span></b><b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><a href="mailto:ronyoungwa@gmail.com">ronyoungwa@gmail.com. See FLYER below.</a></span></b></div>
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</v:imagedata></v:shape><b><span style="color: #548dd4; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 24.0pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #548dd4; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 24.0pt;">WHAT the WAR DOCUMENTARY WON’T SAY!<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #c0504d; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 22.0pt;">The
</span></b><b><span style="color: #c0504d; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 24.0pt;">American</span></b><b><span style="color: #c0504d; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 22.0pt;">
War in Vietnam Didn’t Need to Happen </span></b><b><span style="color: #c0504d; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 20.0pt;">58,220
Americans and 3 million Vietnamese didn’t need to die</span></b><b><span style="color: #c0504d; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 16.0pt;">. All could be spared suffering from UXOs, Agent
Orange, PTSD and suicides.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-bottom: 9.0pt; mso-line-height-alt: 14.4pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 19pt;">In 1944, President
Roosevelt sent US OSS agents, including Mac Shin from Seattle, to assist Ho Chi
Minh’s forces in defeating the Japanese occupation, after which France tried to
reimpose its colonial control . <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-bottom: 9.0pt; mso-line-height-alt: 14.4pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">On February 28, 1946 Ho Chi Minh wrote to
President Truman.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">On behalf of the Vietnam government and people, Ho informed the
President that the French were making preparations for returning French troops
to Hanoi to make Vietnam a colony again. Ho wrote, “<b><i>I therefore earnestly appeal to
you personally and to the American people.
. .to support our independence. . .in
keeping with the principles of the Atlantic and San Francisco charters.” <o:p></o:p></i></b></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #c0504d; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 17.5pt;">President Truman, blinded by Cold War ideology which
pitted the U.S. against many anti-colonial nationalist movements, never
replied. Instead, the U.S. paid 80% of France’s losing war costs. And then we spent
$168 billion ($1 trillion in 2017 dollars) on the American War that robbed
resources at home from the War on Poverty and Great Society. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 20.0pt;">SAY IT! The American War
in Vietnam Was Wrong!<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 7.5pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 4.5pt; tab-stops: 135.45pt; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 20.0pt;">This war (and the war
in Iraq) Never Should Have Happened!</span></b><b><span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 8.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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</div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 8.0pt;">CONTACT: vietnamlessons@gmail.com<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257321229759287742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971285516139000862.post-10668080139534943012017-07-11T13:58:00.000-07:002017-07-11T14:17:56.596-07:00Need for A Real Reset in US-Russia Relations: President Trump and President Putin Could Do It<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> Media
hyper-focus on Russian meddling in our recent elections has blinded us to the
urgent need and possibility for US-Russia cooperation to resolve the conflict
in Ukraine, help end the disastrous war in Syria, and reduce the threat of
nuclear war. President Trump’s meeting with President Putin on the edge of the
G-20 meeting in Hamburg may have represented a step toward a real reset in
US-Russia relations. Henry Kissinger’s meeting with Putin in Moscow on June 29
may have helped clarify necessary elements for a reset.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";"> While rightly condemning Russian meddling in
our elections, thanks to public media station <a href="https://ww2.kqed.org/lowdown/2017/03/02/a-history-of-u-s-meddling-in-foreign-elections/">KQED</a>, we were reminded recently
how many times over decades the US meddled in other countries elections,
including Argentina (1946), Italy (1948), Japan (1951), Philippines (1953), Vietnam
(1955), Laos (1958), Dominican Republic (1963-65), Chile (1964-1973),
Yugoslavia (2000). Combined with the 1953 US-orchestrated coup against Iran’s
Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, 1961 involvement in the assassination of
Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, and 1973 US-supported coup against
Chile’s elected President Salvador Allende, our country’s record leaves little
room for national self-righteousness. Whatever may happen next about Russian
meddling in our elections, US-Russia cooperation is essential to address
current conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, and the threat of a new nuclear arms
race.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";"> A year ago, NATO’s largely symbolic military
maneuvers to counter Russian moves in Crimea and Ukraine were perceived by
Russia as more purposefully provocative than militarily credible. Leaders in
Germany, France and Italy worried at the time and still worry that escalating
confrontation is leading dangerously in the direction of a new Cold War. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Having
successfully shed his anti-Russian blinders more than most American
politicians, Henry Kissinger has been publically critical from the start about
how persistent Cold War patterns complicated the crisis in Ukraine. Russia imagined
a substantially larger than real U.S. role in the popular revolt against the
corrupt Ukrainian President Yanukovych, and the U.S. uncritically welcomed the
revolt and new President Poroshenko as providing opportunity to draw Ukraine
closer to the EEU and NATO. Russian military support for Russia-leaning rebels
in Eastern Ukraine and increasing U.S. military support for the Western-oriented
government in Kiev compounded the dangers of a U.S.-Russia confrontation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">The
necessary elements for a compromise political solution in Ukraine have been
relatively clear for some time. Kissinger argued that what’s needed is tougher
coordinated US-Russian diplomacy to support strict adherence by both sides to the
ceasefire and full implementation of all provisions of the peace agreement
which called for constitutional reform in Ukraine and return of the entire area
to Ukrainian sovereignty, but with independent local elections and more
autonomy for the Eastern region. In addition, given its geographic location and
history, Ukraine should be encouraged to establish economic relations with both
the European Economic Union and the Russian-backed Eurasian Union. And, Ukraine
should announce formally and publicly that it will not join NATO.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";"> In Syria, US-Russia relations worsened in the
last year. Recently, however, the US and Russia, with Jordan’s help, negotiated
a ceasefire in Southwest Syria that seems to be holding and could be the basis
for a wider cessation of violence. Closer US-Russia coordination and
cooperation are essential to avoid accidental military confrontation and to
restart political negotiations. The United States and Russia will need to agree
on a united, muscular diplomatic strategy to get commitments from the
Government of Syria and the main Syrian opposition forces, as well as from Iran,
Saudi Arabia and Turkey to participate in negotiations to end the war and form
an inclusive, representative government. Not a simple or easy undertaking, but
essential to saving lives and to serving longer term, best interests of all the
parties involved.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">While
efforts to resolve the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria are very important and
would help build trust between our countries, U.S.-Russia cooperation is also urgently
needed to reject a new nuclear arms race.
The United States is in the process of committing $1 trillion dollars
over thirty years to build a new generation of more accurate, faster and
smaller nuclear weapons, like the already flight-tested B61-12, which many
military experts believe may make using nuclear weapons more thinkable. Russia, China and Britain are in process of
making similar dangerous commitments. The
US and Russia need to negotiate new risk-reduction initiatives related to
nuclear weapons, including cancelling funding for upgrading our countries’
nuclear arsenals and agreeing to support the Treaty to Ban Nuclear Weapons
worldwide, already endorsed by two-thirds of the 192 member United Nations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">While
simplistic anti-Trump, anti-Putin views, and/or stubborn Cold War sentiment may
cause some to reject the idea of cooperation out of hand, it is essential that
the United States and Russia work together, as they did effectively in negotiating
the Iran Nuclear Deal. US-Russian cooperation to end the conflicts in Ukraine
and Syria, and reject a new nuclear arms race would represent good real news and
provide reassuring relief for our country and world anxiously on edge over
growing global inequalities and extremist threats. President Trump and
President Putin could get us moving in that right direction. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">July 2017 <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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