Blog by an American couple living in Vietnam and advocating for greater motorbike safety. The technical aspects are pretty straight-forward but the neat part about it was watching the client learn about blogging and online photo
sharing as we worked on the site: I introduced her to Flicrk, Picasa
and Gmail! She took to it like a fish to water and the site is full of great
photos taken by her husband David. Read more about their
work doing physical therapy in Vietnam and their posts about life in Da Nang.
. Technology: Movable Type, Flickr. Visit Site.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ Vietnam
Deep Throat Gargles Up
June 1, 2005
Deep Throat in an 1958 FBI publicity photo. “From Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Felt1958.jpg |
One of the greatest political mysteries of the Twentieth Century was revealed this week as “Vanity Fair revealed the identity of Deep Throat”:http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/050530roco02, the government informer who led Washington Post reporters onto the full scope of the Watergate Scandal. Here’s the “Post’s own article on the revealing”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/31/AR2005053100655.html.
Although I was far too young to follow the events at the time, the _Washington Post_ stories combined with the followup book and movie to create a popular images of the fearless investigative reporter, the showdowy government insider with unclear motives and the newspaper publishers taking a risk for the big story.
So it seems ironic that Deep Throat – no excuse me, W. Mark Felt, the number two man at the FBI in the early 1970s – was a close assistant of the notorious FBI head J. Edgar Hoover and was himself convicted in 1980 for authorizing government agents to break into homes of suspected anti-Vietnam war protesters (looking for suspects from the radical Weather Underground bombings).
QuaCarol: You Don’t Want to Be Ranters Anymore
March 11, 2005
By QuaCarol
Sometimes I have to lift up comments and make them their own posts. Here’s one of QuaCarol’s reply to “Uh-Oh: Beppe’s Doubts”:/martink/archives/000544.php: “I see this community of bloggers, reaching out to each other and connecting, when meetings (and here I venture to say “all”) are focused on keeping their pamphlet racks filled, rather than posting URLs on their bulletin boards or creating a newcomer’s URL handout.”
Four More Years (Let’s Roll Up Our Sleeves)
November 3, 2004
President George W. Bush has been re-elected for four more years. The man who led the United States to “two wars in four years”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/cat_iraq_antiwar.php and whose policies in Afghanistan and iraq continue to create chaos in both countries will get four more years to pursue his war of terrorism against the world. Americans will not sleep any safer but will dream ever more of conquering and killing enemies. We’ll continue to sow the seeds of wars for generations to come.
I was worried when Senator John Kerry unexpectedly picked up in the primaries to become the Democratic presidential candidate. In his patrician upbringing he was very much like President Bush, and they actually agreed on many of the big issues — war, gay marriage, stem cell research. But in his personality, style and temperament Kerry was too much like former Vice President Al Gore.
Yes, I know Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election and that his loss was declared by mysterious chads and a handful of senior citizen judges in Washington, D.C. But an election as close as that one should have been seen as a resounding loss, no matter what the Supreme Court verdict. As Vice President, Gore had helped lead the nation to one of its greatest economic recovers in our lifetimes. He was also clearly smarter in the President, more knowledgeable and farsighted, with more carefully articulated visions of the future. But he barely won the popular vote, making the electoral college vote close enough to be debated.
Kerry is intellectual and aloof in the same way that Gore was. And clearly there are a number of American voters who don’t want that. They want a candidate who can speak from the heart, who isn’t afraid to talk about faith. They also want a candidate who can talk in simple, morally unambiguous ways about war.
And what about war? Would a President Kerry have really pulled out troops sooner than President Bush will? Who knows: Democratic Presidents have pursued plenty of wars over the last century and when Kerry proclaimed he would hunt down and kill the enemy, he spoke as the only one of the four men on the major tickets who actually has hunted down and killed fellow humans in wartime.
We can make an educated guess that a Kerry-led America would leave iraq in better shape than a Bush-led America will. Kerry has the patience and the planning foresight to do the hard coalition-building work in iraq and in the world that is necessary if U.S. military power will translate to a real peace. But a Kerry plan for pacification and rebuilding of iraq could easily have followed the path that Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson’s did in Vietnam: an unending, constantly-escalating war.
Did Americans officially approve the country’s past two wars yesterday? It’s hard to conclude otherwise. Despite the lies of mass destruction and despite the “willful misleading of the American people”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000194.php that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks and “possessed weapons of mass destruction”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/cat_iraq_weapons_of_mass_destruction_scandal.php, something over 50% of Americans thought the Bush/Cheney Presidency was worth keeping for another four years.
But there’s nothing to say a popular vote grants wisdom. In the next four years, those of us wanting an alternative will probably have many “teachable moments” to talk with our neighbors and friends about the deteriorating situation in iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe those of us whose “pacifism is informed by religious understandings”:www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000462.php can cross the intellectual divide some more and talk about how our faith gives us a simple, morally unambiguous way to argue against war. The country needs “strong pacifist voices”:http://www.nonviolence.org/issues/philosophy-nonviolence.php now more than ever. Let’s get talking.
ps: …and donating. Nonviolence.org is a nine years old peace resource guide and blog. It’s time it gets regular funding from its million annual readers. “Please give generously and help us expand this work”:http://www.nonviolence.org/support/. We have a lot to do in the next four years!
Images of Patriotism and the Swift Boat Controversy
August 23, 2004
The U.S. election campaign has many ironies, none perhaps as strange as the fights over the candidates’ war records. The current President George W. Bush got out of active duty in Vietnam by using the influence of his politically powerful family. While soldiers killed and died on the Mekong Delta, he goofed off on an Alabama airfield. Most of the central figures of his Administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney also avoided fighting in Vietnam.
Not that I can blame them exactly. If you don’t believe in fighting, then why not use any influence and loophole you can? It’s more courageous to stand up publicly and stand in solidarity with those conscientious objectors who don’t share your political connections. But if you’re both antiwar and a coward, hey, loopholes are great. Bush was one less American teenager shooting up Vietnam villages and for that we commend him.
Ah, but of course George W. Bush doesn’t claim to be either antiwar or a coward. Two and a half decades later, he snookered American into a war on false pretences. Nowadays he uses every photo-op he can to look strong and patriotic. Like most scions of aristocratic dynasties throughout history, he displays the worst kind of policial cowardice: he is a leader who believes only in sending other people’s kids to war.
Contrast this with his Democratic Party rival John Kerry. He was also the son of a politically-connected family. He could have pulled some strings and ended up in Alabama. But he chose to fight in Vietnam. He was wounded in battle, received metals and came back a certified war hero. Have fought he saw both the eternal horrors of war and the particular horrors of the Vietnam War. It was only after he came back that he used his political connections. He used them to puncture the myths of the Vietnam War and in so doing became a prominent antiwar activist.
Not that his antiwar activities make him a pacifist, then or now. As President I’m sure he’d turn to military solutions that we here at Nonviolence.org would condemn. But we be assured that when he orders a war, he’d be thinking of the kids that America would be sending out to die and he’d be thinking of the foreign victims whose lives would inevitably be taken in conflict.
Despite the stark contrast of these Presidential biographies, the peculiar logic of American politics is painting the military dodger as a hero and the certified war hero as a coward. The latter campaign is being led by a shadowy group called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Today’s Guardian has an excellent article on the “Texas Republicans funding the Swift Boat controversy”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1288272,00.html. The New York Times also delves the “outright fabrications of the Swift Boat TV ads”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/20/politics/campaign/20swift.html?ex=1094018686&ei=1&en=691b4b0e81b8387f. A lot of Bush’s buddies and long-time Republican Party apparatchiks are behind this and its lies are transparent and easy to uncover. It’s a good primer on dirty politics 2004 style.
One of the big questions about this election is whether the American voters will believe more in image or substance. It goes beyond politics, really, to culture and to a consumerism that promises that with the right clothes and affected attitude, you can simply buy yourself a new identity. President Bush put on a flight jacket and landed a jet on an aircraft carrier a mile off the California beach. He was the very picture of a war hero and strong patriot. Is a photo all it takes anymore?
John Sayles Looks at “Men with Guns”
May 1, 1998
John Sayles is one of the most talented independent directors filming today. In movies such as “Brother from Another Planet,” “Matewan” and “Lone Star,” he’s told stories about everyday people as they live their lives, try to build better worlds and find themselves caught in their human frailty. His latest movie, “Men with Guns,” follows a wealthy but dying city doctor as he searches the interior of his country for the students he had trained to treat the indigenous poor. Like Dorothy following the yellow brick road, he collects a caravan of lost souls along the way and learns what his ignorance has wrought, both personally and for the life of his country.
The tale is set in an anonymous Latin American country and the ambiguity serves its purpose well. This is not the story of a particular set of abuses or a specific government or army. It is a tale of what happens when capitalism, military rule, rhetoric and human fallibility come together. It is a story of what happens when good people refuse to confront atrocities being committed in their name and instead opt for a willing naiveté.
In interviews, Sayles said he got the image of “men with guns” when he imagined the lot of Vietnam’s “rice people”, politically-simple peasants who went on harvesting rice for hundreds of years as a succession of “men with guns” came through in waves of terror. It didn’t so much matter if the armies were Chinese, French, American or from North Vietnam: all men with guns rule with what seems an arbitrary brutality. The most that the locals can do is stay out of the way.
At it’s heart, “Men with Guns” is a pacifist and anarchist movie, though assigning such labels diminishes the work and threatens to turn Sayles into another manifesto writer. He’s too interesting for that and uses story-telling to show us the world and how it works. Ultimately, the movie blames everyone for their role in the terror – the soldiers, the rebels, the priests and our good-hearted but naive doctor. But Sayles also absolves them and pulls them from their caricatures as he shows us the larger forces that drove them to their roles.
Last Friday, Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, a leading human rights activist in Guatemala, published a scathing report documenting abuses from Guatemala’s 36-year civil war; two days later he was murdered in his own home by unknown assassins. The real-world model for Sayles’ doctor was Guatemalan and it’s hard not to see Condera’s murder as another incident of brutality by men with guns, figuratively if not literally (his murderer reportedly used a cinder block). Seeing John Sayles’ latest movie would be a fitting tribute to Condera’s work and that of others struggling for justice in the world.
A Look Back at the Peace Movement’s Response to the Gulf War
November 20, 1997
It is safe to say that the peace movement’s largest campaign in the past decade took place around opposition to the military build-up and conflict in the Persian Gulf in 1990 – 1. New people became involved, old peaceniks became reactivated and every peace group in the country went into overdrive to organize and educate about the issues.
Recently I have heard several people bemoan the failure of the peace movement during that period, a failure because the war wasn’t stopped. But there were successes beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. The week the war started saw two massive protests in Washington. It took almost a decade of involvement in Vietnam before protests that large were ever seen. The peace movement mobilized incredibly quickly and (in retrospect) efficiently, and we surely defined the options available to U.S. President Bush.
The aftermath of the war brought a crisis to many organizations. Their fundraising efforts dried up and budget deficits led to cutbacks in staff and program outreach. It was as if a sort of public amnesia set in and no one wanted to think about peace. This is a natural human response perhaps, but it’s reverberations on the infrastructure of the peace movement continue to this day.
Let’s start a dialogue about the peace movements response to the Gulf War. What were it’s effects on your lives and the organizations you were a part of? Was the peace movement a success, a failure, or something in between?