By Ann Kreilkamp | September 24, 2017

Let’s face it, folks. Life in the U.S.A. = PTSD. For everyone. Automatically. “Shock and Awe,” over and over and over again — faster and faster and faster. At this point in time, there is basically, no time to process anything before the next shock hits. Which makes cultivating awareness of the present moment an absolute necessity.

This new, fear-mongering “Korean War” meme just puts me right back there.

I remember exactly what I was doing when I heard over the radio that the Korean War started. That was in June, 1950, and I was 7 years old.

I remember being called out of the classroom at Catholic University to amass in the cathedral when JFK was killed.

I remember nursing my new baby boy — when I heard on the radio Johnson announce the Gulf on Tonkin “incident;” feeling that familiar dread, I knew internally that this was the start of another war.

While sitting glued to TV news: Robert Kennedy. Martin Luther King. The “first Gulf War” in Iraq. 9/11. 9/11. 9/11. Afghanistan. Iraq again.

That last was in early 2003. From then on the assasinations and (false) starts of wars grow hazy, confusing. And there are no stops. Only endless, wrathful murder and destruction of what is not ours.

None of the assasinations occurred, and none of the wars started, the way we were told they did.

So it’s very very difficult for me to even get past the whitewash (the red, white and bluewash) of the Vietnam War as a “fateful misunderstanding.” WHAT? Though that is how MacNamara later tried to rationalize the situation, the truth appears to be otherwise.

Robert S. MacNamara and the real Tonkin Gulf deception

Is the American public so brainwashed that we would actually sit through this series, when its assumptions are grounded in falsehood?

Here’s John Pilger, who watched the first episode.

The Killing of History

Excerpt:

I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings”.

The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of “false flags” that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971.

There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me – as it must be for many Americans – it is difficult to watch the film’s jumble of “red peril” maps, unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences.

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And here are two more opinion pieces, just in case you think Pilger is overstating the Burns bullshit.