Posted by sakerfa on December 22, 2009 Video: Another Sorry Episode in American History – Agent Orange – Sibel EdmondsPosted by sakerfa on December 22, 2009 Cycles of atrocities, Cycles of Shame & Regret, and Cycles of more atrocities… This recent article by Time Magazine on Agent Orange in Vietnam opened up a floodgate of emotions I had thought I had gotten over with a year ago, after my own personal first-hand experiences there. The article was fairly well-written, that is, considering the publication. Here are some excerpts:
You can read the entire article here. I spent the better part of the year 2008 in Vietnam. I traveled around the country, and was involved in interviewing and recording various children related charities and organizations there. While in the Da Nang area I had an opportunity to visit and interview a family who were victims of Agent Orange – bed-ridden twin men of age 28 and their parents. The family lived in a village, in a shack, 3.5 miles from the nearest road. I had to walk the entire distance on a very hot and humid day, pass through many rice paddies, and after being chased by an angry water buffalo, I finally made it. The following 5-minute video includes one of the interview segments I conducted with the parents, and brief footage of the twin’s horrendous condition. Before you watch the video: The footage of the Agent Orange victims is very graphic and may be disturbing to some. I apologize for the quality of the video: I had to conduct the interview through my translator and overcome my own shock and emotional response, while recording the victims. Here is my video, recorded in March 2008, near Da Nang, Vietnam: I want to emphasize these facts from the Time Magazine article:
And,
And I want to add a few other comparison points: We spend billions per week on undeclared wars to injure, kill, and destroy. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on fraudulent and wasteful defense contracts. We spend billions on drones and bombs which kill 687 civilians per 14 enemy targets, amounting to a ratio of nearly 50 civilians killed for each undeclared enemy killed… And when it comes to cleaning up this huge mess we left behind in Vietnam, when it comes to a certain degree of reparation expected from a superpower nation with even a minute amount of moral decency, when it comes to…we go on denying responsibility, arguing irrational technicalities, and do nothing, absolute zilch. President Gerald Ford had the following to say on February 19, 1976, on the anniversary of the Japanese Internment:
Okay, for this post I am not going to dwell upon President Ford’s consciously chosen words to emphasize our responsibility to treasure liberty and justice only for individual Americans, and not for all humanity (Still- I’m grinding my teeth, and holding my tongue). Now, here is my question: What is it with all these past lessons of tragedies we later come to admit to and regret?! Because we keep doing the same thing over and over again. Because we seem to always turn around afterwards and start the next vicious cycle again. And it seems we have been making the vicious cycles longer and crueler each time: Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram, Extraordinary Renditions … Perhaps a president or two later, we’ll be hearing regrets along the same lines on all the atrocious acts we’ve been engaged in since 2001, in the name of a war on terror, in the name of national security. Perhaps, we’ll be taking a solemn oath or two to not repeat the same atrocious acts. Perhaps we’ll have a law or two written to emphasize and engrave our regrets and commitment to never do the same again… And then, perhaps, there will come another pretext, or something declared and used as pretext, and we’ll go about forgetting all past regrets, declare our previous oaths nullified, and have the previous laws replaced with the opposite of the original and name them ‘patriotic,’ and …there we’ll go repeating history, only making each cycle bigger and worse than the one before. Am I just being cynical here? I don’t think so. But, what do you think? |
ENDORSED BY VIETNAM VETERANS OF AMERICA, October 2013 and ASSOCIATES OF VIETNAM VETERANS OF AMERICA, June 2014.
Search This Blog
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Video: Another Sorry Episode in American History – Agent Orange – Sibel Edmonds
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment