To:

Zcom_simple
Home » Z Blogs » Brian Dominick's Blog » Bringing the 'Vietnam Syndrome' Back Home

Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

5243

Brian Dominick's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/briandominick
Bio: . Brian has taught a variety of courses at ZMI in the years since. (More)

All Dominick Blogs

Recent Dominick Content

Znetarticle_icon ZNet Articles
Zcommentary_icon ZCommentaries
Zvideo_icon ZVideos
Zblogpost_icon Blog Posts

Bringing the 'Vietnam Syndrome' Back Home

By Brian Dominick at Aug 21, 2004

PDF Version

Printer Friendly Version
Change Text Size a- | A+
Back in 1990, during the lead-up to the First Gulf War, George H.W. Bush talked about the need for his impending war not to suffer from what pundits called "the Vietnam syndrome." As the fable went, the media and antiwar movement, in cahoots against the our nation's noble efforts to exterminate most of the Vietnamese population (tainted as it was by Communism), forced the Pentagon to fight that war "with one hand tied behind its back." Hence the royal ass-whooping we were dealt. Well, it looks like the syndrome has returned... For the past year we've been inundated with lefitst and liberal critics of the war drawing comparisons -- sometimes insightful, often spurious -- between the current onslaught against Iraq and the Vietnam war of the 1960s and '70s. There are major, crucial differences between the two, but some of the mythological aspects of the Vietnam invasion are creeping back up in Iraq. Where I see a real parallel is somewhere pretty much no one has noted in anything I've seen. in this notion of the military fighting the war with one hand behind its back -- and what is more curious is who is in control of he knot. During the initial invasion, there was no pretense of inhibition. The slaughter was open and it was bragged about regularly on CNN, where Fox News-style reporting fawned orgasmically over embedded regurgitations of unilateral successes and prideful commentary from has-been mass murderers with stars on their shoulders. And given the sheer brutality of the current occupation, it is difficult to consider the US Army and Marines to be particularly inhibited. But let's face it, the Marines could resoundingly defeat the Mehdi fighters in Najaf if given a blank check to do so. It wouldn't be pretty, and probably a few dozen Marines would die, but they would win pretty quickly, killing thousands in the process, and probably destroying the Imam Ali Shrine. Same for Fallujah in April, though that might have been a good clip harder. Hell, if they rooted the Vietcong out of Hue city, Vietnam in 1968, they certainly could do the same to the current Iraqi resistance today. However, the even more brutal hand of the two fisted crushing machine is indeed tied up. During Vietnam, most of the worst atrocities of the war had to be hidden from the view of the US public. Actions like the bombing and invasion of Cambodia, some of the worst civilian slaughters by US infantry, interrogation tactics employed against Vietnamese captives, and many other examples, were hidden from -- and in all too many cases hidden by -- the US media, lest the news fuel popular movements in the homeland. Today, regarding Iraq, that doesn't seem to be the chief concern. More important, I would wager, in the eyes of the current White House, State Department and Pentagon, are Iraqi public opinion and international sentiment about the war. With the American antiwar movement in such pathetic disarray (and I don't use those terms lightly), and lacking an antiwar opposition party in the government, the primary pressure being applied to temper the onslaught by US troops is applied by the international community and by the Iraqi resistance itself. Those are the biggest threats to the US war effort in Iraq. If you want to oppose the war, then, we can either aid those strains in some way (I'm not sure the mujahideen have an above-ground support fund), or we could add a third pillar to the opposition here at home, where virtually nothing of note to the war-drivers is taking place. So that's my thesis -- I'm leaving it there for now, since this is just a blog post -- but if it arouses any interest, I might turn it into an essay...

Comment On This Blog Post  See All Comments (1)

Person

By S3344945, Mick at Oct 19, 2004 07:18 AM
I agree with you that in America in particular but also in other countries there should be a concerted attempt to build an anti-war movement on a much bigger scale and I see it as the foremost tsk of the left at the moment. As Arundhati Roy said we must become the movement. I was wondering if anyone had any opinions on what i think is the Imperial overeach of America. I think we can see by the desperation of the Bush administration to hold on to the coalition of the willing a definite need to share the occupation costs, economically militarily and politically. It would seem to me that the American empire has not looked so vulnerable for a fair while and a concerted worlwide anti-war movement could have massive beneficial ramifications

Reply this comment

Loading_border