Wooly Bully - Long Version - Vietnam Background

As promised

Hearts of Darkness - Francis Ford Coppola's Documentary of Apocalypse Now

For a long time one of my all-time favourite movies was Apocalypse Now. It still is but, y'know, things move on and change.

It was no surprise to discover that at some point I'd randomly downloaded a documentary of the making of the film.

What I didn't anticipate was the documentary coming to life without my assistance while working on a computer, and discovering it was so compelling that I had to stop my tasks, watch it properly and then watch it again.

There's a few books that are just overrated flim-flam and have a suspicious smell of agenda more than talent. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is one, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is another, and so is Moby Dick by Herman Melville, although that particular book didn't take off till after his death.

Don't mistake me. All three books have magnificent flourishes of writing but just don't stand up all the way through, and dozy academics can't even call it out, as I noticed on an 'In Our Time's recent episode'.

In a way Coppola is grappling with this weak story ending, and tries to fill the gap with a very bloated, uncooperative and superficial Marlon Brando.

What is exceptional is watching the making of the movie unfold and learning for the first time that Francis Ford Coppola (It's always a triple whammy when it comes to triplet names if we're paying attention) funded the movie himself before Vietnam movies became a thing in the eighties and early nineties, and it was acceptable to portray a soon to be 'defeated' Pentagon.

We now know much of that was scripted by Bell Helicopter and Daniel Ellesberg who is portrayed as a hero, but actually worked as a throat slitter for the CIA in much the same manner that Snowden isn't NSA, but a CIA contractor.

It's all about optics you see. That's why Snowjob gets a movie made about him, and Julian Assange languishes in the worst prison in the UK, Belmarsh.

Coppola starts off this documentary with a fine set of man boobs and a pasta-gut that wouldn't look out of place on a man 20 years older. However, when the shit hits the fan he starts losing kilos at a time, and by the end is a slender motherfucker at the screening. 

He did go through hell, but also had the balls for it.

I really fell in love with Francis in this documentary, as I have with his daughter's work in recent years. He has that Italian American body language that my political mentor had back in the day, and I wish I could have observed this before he passed on, his wife too only weeks ago.

Oh well, Joe and Kathy are reunited again and they're still in my thoughts. You were both great with me and it was a privilege to know you both.

One thing I never talked about with Joe was that his wife's first lover died in Vietnam. I never shared it with her husband but it was a vista of life I'd only ever known previously, on film.... such as Apocalypse Now.

Southampton Warriors

Act One:

It's that time of year when we honour and remember the bravery, courage and sacrifice that our boys (and girls) gave to defend the British people's right to determine their own destiny, free from the rule of external ideological threats to our way of life, and that we celebrate this coming Armistice day to remind us of the horrors of WWI trench warfare and mechanized killing through tanks.

The carnage and bloodshed of the Great War were perfectly choreographed to end at precisely 11:11 on the 11th day of the 11th month. This is a wink by the scriptwriters who celebrated their victory by locking the Allies into the next world war, through the Treaty of Versailles.

Act Two:

The second act can usually be darkest and so after a phoney start, Allied forces (minus the Yanks) found themselves staring into the abyss of defeat, with the Axis Powers surrounding us at Dunkirk. A retreat was the only option. The show was nearly over, but the super weirdo Adolf Hitler, sensing a premature ending, allowed us to slip through his fingers and instructed his Panzer divisions to pause for some German sausage and beer instead. Fortunately, Churchill and FDR had a cunning plan. The people of the U.S. had no desire to get involved and so a New Pearl Harbour was guaranteed to secure the consent of the Americans. Oh wait a minute, a New Pearl Harbour was how the Neocons kicked off the 9/11 drama 57 years later. What I meant to say was the old Pearl Harbour happened as Japan had no oil and just like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria the best way to start a war is to choke a country economically, then kick their ass, and when they surrender, drop a nuke for a curtain call.

Act Three:

After the war, at our world-famous Southampton University, Dr Anthony Sutton earned his D.Sc (Doctorate of Science) in recognition of his research and a proven record of internationally recognised scholarship. By 1957 he had been snapped up by The Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a public policy think tank promoting the principles of individual, economic, and political freedom.

With his planet-sized brain, Tony (as he preferred to be called) devoured his way through many of the nearly one million volumes and more than six thousand archival collections from 171 countries dedicated to documenting war, revolution, and peace in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Just one problem.

He found out through his exhaustive research who those 11:11 jokers are *winky*, and he didn't think it was funny. He discovered that the US was transferring its manufacturing technology to the USSR at the height of the Cold War and that US Infantry, Cavalry and Marines fighting the Viet Cong and dying in the tropical rice paddies of Vietnam, were facing the same Ford trucks they knew inside out from back home.

The Hoover Institution called a meeting and Tony's bosses said "now look Anthony, you've become a naturalised American, you have a top job at one of the most prestigious think tanks in the world and we need you to pull back on your research focus. Why don't you head a new department, dedicated to anything you like but not technology transfer to our enemies?

Maybe it's a Southampton thing but he told them to go fuck themselves, and he set up shop on his own. His later work is even more gobsmacking, but don't take my word for it. 

Make your own mind up if you've got an attention span longer than a poppy pin.

His interviews are quicker than reading his books. How can you "Never Forget" if you don't remember in the first place?

Tell me. Do you really support the troops?

McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War

I've recently been working with people who have complex needs so I have a grasp of what it potentially means to send a five year old into a war situation. 

This is an angle of the Vietnam war that I hadn't come across before and it's very moving.

Robert Strange McNamara ordered 100,000 below intelligence recruits to Vietnam every year to make up the shortfall from draft dodgers who were excused from military service because their wealthy parents had excuses like they just had teeth braces fitted.

Douglas Valentine

Sadly Douglas Valentine is too old to connect the dots between the CIA's use of child abuse networks and he doesn't even know the White Helmets are a British Military intelligence creation by James Le Mesurier. He vacantly states in a subsequent interview with a New York radio host who is clueless on the international stage, that it's impossible to verify. 

It's not, and he's too old and lazy to open up the playing field of information. Dust Boy was complete fiction. 

Operation Phoenix | CIA Torture & Murder of 80 000 Vietnamese

The CIA were heavily involved in heroin trafficking during the Vietnam war but while one arm was shipping the drugs back to the US another was systematically torturing and murdering vast numbers of Vietnamese in Operation Phoenix.

Is it not odd given the latest CIA torture report that the corporate media are not discussing this? There's much evidence to suggest that this operation was buried (once again by the CIA's control of the media, with the Pentagon Papers story.

The Fog of War - Robert Strange McNamara

It's easy to criticize so I'll keep it to a minimum. McNamara wags his finger at the viewer and at Castro if you're paying attention. The only people he doesn't wag his finger at are the power elites whose boots he shined but didn't lick. Nobody makes documentaries about the quiet heroes like say Robin Cook who resigned from the Blair Cabinet rather than have blood on his hands. At least McNamara faces the camera and says his piece unlike say Kissinger who is always in hiding. However by the time somebody comes to make a war documentary of you it's pretty much all over in terms of morality. You don't even get invited to Govcorp unless you're willing to sends millions to their deaths. Kali Yuga living baby.

In The Year Of The Pig

Heavy. 

In the Year of the Pig is a 1968 American documentary film about the origins of theVietnam War, directed by Emile de Antonio. It was nominated for an Academy award for best documentary.

The film, which is in black and white, contains much historical footage and many interviews. Those interviewed include Harry S. Ashmore, Daniel Berrigan, Philippe Devillers, David Halberstam, Roger Hilsman, Jean Lacouture, Kenneth P. Landon,Thruston B. Morton, Paul Mus, Charlton Osburn, Harrison Salisbury, Ilya Todd, John Toller, David K. Tuck, David Werfel, and John White.

Produced during the Vietnam War, the film was greeted with hostility by many audiences, with bomb threats and vandalism directed at theaters that showed it.^[3]

De Antonio cites the film as his personal favorite. It features the ironic use of patriotic music, portrays Ho Chi Minh as a patriot to the Vietnamese people, and asserts that Vietnam was always a single country rather than two.

Its poster was famously used as an album cover for The Smiths' second album Meat is Murder. The insignia on the soldier's helmet was changed to "meat is murder".

Vietnam: The Quiet Mutiny (John Pilger)

There's still a few Vietnam vets running around Bangkok. They're usually shot to pieces emotionally and in need of a morning beer around Washington Square but I enjoy talking to them because of their visceral memories and proximity to massacre and carnage. There's something life affirming in talking to people who have seen senseless killing.

In all the time I've been talking to Vietnam vets online and offline local or somewhere around the world I've never heard anyone nail it more closely than John Pilger's documentary. It's extraordinary. Heart wrenching but extraordinary.

Update: Washington Square has been torn down. Here's a photo of it now.

The best thing about the documentary above, is Vietnam Vets shooting their commanding officers. This practice I completely approve of during imperial wars. It is probably the reason the US withdrew from the Vietnam War, not the protesters back home. 

The practise of shooting commanding officers is called Fragging and the real figures are kept top secret.

Remember that if you ever have to point a gun at someone for someone else's war.

Trigger Happy American Corporate Media Lying About Iran

Why is the corporate media talking up war? Could it be they make money out of the military industrial complex commercial ties to media and war profiteering? Even the United States of America head of Department of Defence Leon Panetta has said that Iran has no nukes. I would feel much happier if Iran had some nuclear capability to stabilise the region. I'm on Iran's side if the US create war again.

Did The Coca-Cola Recipe Just Go Open Source?

I love Coca-cola and have worked on their business in Asia. It's one of my favourite drinks and yet like McDonalds it's a brand I've tried to persuade of their potential for doing more good in the world than just sugared water/fast food. Their distribution in some cases is better than the United Nations world health organisation (WHO). It's a no brainer when selling the vitamins in sugared juice to suggest that instead of shouting about giving vitamins to healthy Hong Kong and Chinese kids who don't really need it, that instead Coca-cola could own the idea of distributing those vitamins to much more needy and remote places where Coca-cola merchandising makes it but essentials don't.

However I think the days of grasping great opportunities like that are over as we increasingly see that one after another the closely guarded secrets of 20th century material capitalism emerge into the daylight. Case in point is Coco-cola's secret recipe which may have just gone open source. A point not without irony when when noting the radio show it occurred on. This American life.

In case you're wondering about the above graphic, I have mentioned before that Coca-cola won where the U.S. marines failed in Vietnam. If that's still obscure for the younger ones out there here's the original seminal  Chief of Police Nguyen Ngoc Loan execution picture.  Another U.S. ideological warfare casualty.

Chalmers Johnson - Kinda Like Kissinger Without The War Crimes

Not so long back I came across a link to an obituary for the late Chalmer's Johnson. I read it and was a bit surprised that the spelling was as bad as mine in places, though I was most curious about the claim that Chalmers was the intellectual equal if not superior to Henry Kissinger. Unlike a lot of people who try to get into Kissinger debates I've had the good fortune to read 'Years of Upheaval' which is part two of his autobiographical trilogy.

It's an amazing read not because Kissinger writes well but because of it's comprehensive detail and let's face it, sheer chronological historical narrative. This is the guy who invented shuttle diplomacy. A German Jew flitting back and forth between Tel Aviv, Cairo, Riyadh, Damascus and Jordan. Then there's the Paris peace accord with Vietnam, Soviet détente, and secret trips to Peking in preparation for Nixon's visit, the oil crisis and so on and so forth. Truly remarkable times.

I disagreed with the obituary though I've had to change my mind. If there's one video worth watching from this weekends political bender this is the one. It's all there and most troubling for me, an emerging understanding of why the Euro is plummeting against the dollar as the empire makes it's last gasp efforts to hold on to the past. I urge you to watch this. Chalmers Johnson is in a different intellectual league to Kissinger. A man able to delineate between the expedient thing and the right thing. Something Kissinger isn't qualified to comment on. 

RIP Mr Johnson you were a great American patriot.

Forrest Gump - Southern Sentimentality & The Punctuated Assassinations Of The U.S.

It's been so long since I saw Forrest Gump I could barely recall any more than the eponymous character but I had a feeling I'd enjoy it and my intuition was richly rewarded. Like Into The Wild, it's a movie that made me think a fair bit, smile lots, laugh often and  occasionally well up with the odd tear of reality's harshness and regret for the frequent coup d'etats of the United States, punctuated by bullet's often misunderstood by the duped mainstream as threadbare 'lone gunman' stories pedalled by a complicit corporate media.

There's lots of ways to cut this movie as some sort of dual mirror-image-narrative of innocence, marginally succeeding against submerging under a parallel and reflected world of cynical reality. Even then that's only 'just succeeding' as his love is rejected by an unsophisticated world view and propensity for doing as told by those he trusts. A character trait assumed to be essential in close relationships.

In some ways it's also a celebration of a long gone American meritocracy where with hard work and a level playing field (insisted on by his mother) everyone get's a chance but that opens up deeper questions of free will, probability and chance I'm increasingly interested in since I've taken a close look at the NDE (Near Death Experience) data and it's unproven relationship to life journeys and incarnations that raise more questions than provide answers.

Even the one point of artistic insensitivity, a gratuitous product placement by NIKE (as Tom Hanks did in all his movies at one point) was immediately forgiven as the trainers are the only NIKE trainers I ever bought. Which meant I loved them. The NIKE Old School Classic Cortez. The rest for me are hip hop pimp rollers or Chav dealing white trash affairs. As a Goldman Sach's excecutives put it recently, Hermes is the Air Jordan's of wealthy white people.

Did you do any fornicating?

I really like Oliver Stone's work. I think he's consistently dealt with the most excruciating themes of the American 20th century in a candid way that most Americans aren't ready to deal with. I also like that he did two tours of duty in Vietnam despite being part of that privileged elite who could have avoided the draft, as did the Neocon chicken-hawks; Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol et al.

I just rewatched Stone's Nixon earlier because yesterday I finally got round to seeing Frost/Nixon, a clip of which I've used above. It's extraordinarily good and made me want to revisit Nixon the man because in the thick of all the Bush bashing (when it's evident he never really had the intellectual gravitas to manipulate the world but was instead a subject of manipulation) I took great delight in telling people Nixon was one of my favourite presidents. I can't say it now because I've dug a bit deeper after watching this, though I will say that despite the carnage that Nixon authorised, particularly the unconscionable bombing of Laos and Cambodia he still presided over the most geopolitically volatile period apart from all out world war. It's easier with hindsight but the question remains did he exploit that geopolitical volatility? Was it really necessary?

The answer's probably no because proxy ideological wars in far away places are at a primary assessment level abysmal failures though arguably have much more complex secondary geopolitcal angles like the suggestion I read today that Afghanistan and Iraq is about having an experienced army  at hand if middle Asia becomes the arena for conflict over resources (not just oil). Believe me the only peaceful ideological solution we have for that is a sharing one. Marx came close and I suggest we need to try again, because the profit motive is hitting a dead end and hey, even the Wright brothers didn't quit when their first plane nose dived. However my ideological chin sticking out affirms a simple principle. Don't bomb and maim small Buddhist countries to achieve larger geopolitical ends. Take some pain on the chin, and I most definitely am looking at the United Kingdom as well as the United States too.

It's time to open up an Easter Egg on this blog because when I wrote that last Nixon piece it had another story behind it. It was allegorical too, because my apartment was being broken into at the time. The protagonist(s) were also reading my blog (note the personal Wifi router the case is sitting on) so I thought I'd land a punch when it suited me and today it does. So I guess I got to write about it, share what I think about Richard Nixon and pluralistic thinking, as well as nail a date and a time to that period when things like my Porsche briefcase had it's combination lock popped while I wasn't at home.  I did walk away with my full deposit from that affair. That's unheard of in Asia when two warring sides choose to go their separate ways with a tenancy contract between them.

I don't mind confessing there were days when I thought I'd lose a lot more than the deposit as I'm stubborn. It's irrespective of what influence or power I'm up against though a shiny motorcycle police escort one early morning while nipping down to 7 Eleven prompted me to settle for the cash. A foreigner never actually win's in Asia so I did OK given who I was up against, and that post I wrote time stamps accusations without ambiguity. Not that I didn't appreciate it being nominated for post of the month too because the dual narratives were completely coherent and utterly sincere. You'll forgive me if I killed two birds with one stone. It's the mark of a really lazy person not an industrious one ironically.

Anyway that was  all wild and I learned that snakes really do writhe when you have them by the tail but the reason for this post is very simply to outline that Oliver Stone is for me, more of a patriot than any of the abysmal Tea Party crowd and (I contest) a brave creative American icon. Which is kind of my way of saying sorry, because I met him in a nightclub once, here in Bangkok. He'd been filming Alexander the Great and unfortunately I'm less amusing after a cocktail than I think I am so I confirmed if his name was Oliver and leaned into his ear sharing something along the lines of 'I hope you didn't omit from your film, that while Alexander was pinning down Asia, he was also pinning down his Generals'.

Oliver immediately backed away as if purgatory was imminent and his entourage protectively engulfed me from saying another word, sweeping me away back into a less interesting world. The moral of the story I guess is just be nice, say hi and 'how are you' when you meet someone you respect instead of being a smart ass, and also just make sure they haven't directed a turkey of a movie.

Both Nixon and Frost Nixon are brilliant films. The first historically and the second, well the second did something that a small screen has never done for me before. I've been moved by actors on the big screen theatre but the Nixon character in this second movie. I was spellbound by the end. I never believed that a small netbook screen could ever command  or impose such pathos and yet it was all there. You should watch it because even if you don't care about politics you should care about how the mightiest can fall and once again how little in life is black and white all set to a Greek tragedy of biblical proportion. I just discovered that Frank Langella was nominated for an Oscar in this movie and that's the most deserving nomination I can think of for some time. I also think it's great to see actors doing very fine jobs of David Frost and John Birt. Both of whom now I think have knighthoods. Watch Langella in this. Sometimes it's like a bear leaning over you baring perfectly ominous but preternaturally perfect teeth. Or is that Frost as well?

Nixon & Complexity

Prior to George W Bush the most reviled president by pretty much unanimous opinion in recent American history was Richard Nixon. However, after a few years of listening to my early American baby boomer friends or non octogenarian civil rights supporters trash the name of Richard S Nixon I took the time to read into this complex figure who in my eyes is pretty much inseparable from Kissinger as they both dominated the political stage that extended from a year before my birth in 1969 to 1974 when Nixon was ceremoniously (sic) squeezed out of the Whitehouse while walking across the Rose Garden lawn towards the helicopters with one final wave to the cameras before a life of relative obscurity.

There's something about seminal helicopter shots in U.S. history such as the last line of South Vietnamese people desperate to bail out of Vietnam before the Viet Cong triumphed with the fall of Saigon. Yeah, helicopters and history is something I'll always associate with the Americans in much the same way that the Chinese will forever be associated with Tanks and squares.

 

 Incidentally this famous photograph of the fall of Saigon was taken by Dutch photojournalist Hugh Van Es who died just under a month ago here in Hong Kong. It is all connected you know even if it's largely some illusory Black Swan post rationalised causality.

Traditionally the view of Nixon is one of mendacity, vulgarity and sneaky subterfuge, and yet, it is one I can reconcile with the other side that I want to talk about because let's face it, the problems don't lie with our politicians, they lie with the electorate and our complete inability to handle the truth or even discuss it in an adult manner. That doesn't mean I'm not surprised by the sheer scale of human fallibility over on the other side of the Atlantic with the MP's expense claims which are surely not that far morally from those who claim income support while having an income from work. Benefit cheats sounds so much more dramatic and I'm surprised the press haven't dreamed up a more sticky label for the "right dishonourable members of the Parliament". I digress.

 Clearly the thorniest role that confronted Nixon was Vietnam and there's no denying that in order to extricate the United States from that holy fuck up of ideological warfare in proxy countries that a lot of nasty, ugly and criminal decisions were taken such as the bombing and warfare that took place across the Ho Chi Minh trail which veered into Laos (the most bombed country in the history of the world) and Cambodia thus compromising the lives of millions of their own inhabitants. I'm on record as being hugely fond of the Laotians and the Khmer because of the inexplicable and retarded snobbery they face from other developing world candidates such as Thailand who exercise the rule of marginal superiority acted out from deeply evident insecurity in the manner of the arriviste nouveaux riche against old money while more than aware that side by side with the Benz and it's logocentric Star, is the sticky steamed rice, the stink bean and the ubiquitous calloused hands from pre-school tilling of the paddy fields of Isaan, more often than not controlled by the plutocratic Siamese Chinese families as indeed they do across South East Asia.

 But back to Vietnam because despite the claims of denial by Kissinger  (Nixon is now gone) there can be little ground for conceding that nobody knew what was going on in the Mekong Delta and it's a crime against humanity that only the land of the free are obliged to defend themselves against. However we all know that 95% Americans don't even know the difference between Taiwan and Thailand because as long as the milk and honey is flowing in the lands where territorial transgressions are the sticky issues there's little need to have an empathy for what is known as 'the other'. When it's always about two sides isn't it?

 Which brings me on to the nature of this post because I'm of the opinion that the duality of binary classification is no longer a simplistic luxury we can afford and it's time if you haven't started to look, for the complexity and infinite shades of grey that exist between the polar states of good and bad, black and white, north and south or up and down.

 Life isn't some post war halcyon consumer years of rosy cheeked goodness and evil empire badness, though of course that latter term was Reagan's contribution to political history, yet we now see Obama introducing the nuance of different types of Islam between Cairo and Jakarta and which it would be wise to pay attention to (if taking a look at Islamic country birth demographics for example).

To bring anything to the advertising planning table is the ability to embrace complexity and distance oneself from the relentlessly overly simplistic reductionist role of account planning which is one part science to two parts art and not the other way round.  Particularly now we know that homo economicus is forever dead. And so with that mental perspective in mind I want to reverse back, full speed and with screeching tires (distant sound of police siren in the background) into Nixon's career because it was his role with the Plumbers and the repeated and subsequently scandalous 'break ins' of the Democrat National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate office complex and now forever preserved in political history and it's meme like propensity to term any scandal with the suffix of 'gate' and which first came to light when on June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a security guard at the Watergate Complex, noticed tape covering the locks on several doors in the complex. He took the tape off, and thought nothing of it. An hour later, he discovered that someone had retaped the locks. The scandal revealed the existence of a White House dirty tricks squad but to my mind, the democrats could have played a smarter game with what they left out for the uninvited breaking and entering squad.

More to the point is that the labeling of Nixon as  monolithic-bad doesn't do justice to one of the more contradictory and paradoxically subtle minds of the post-war Whitehouse. Here we have a president as in the above video playing his own Piano Concerto.

Furthermore once we distance ourselves from the morally repugnant Indochina actions and the break ins that subsequently required extensive lying, we have a figure who was easily one of the most intellectually qualified of his era, and a character who was responsible for the detente that was fostered in partnership with the Soviet Union (unthinkable really given the postwar context) and most markedly became the first president to visit Chairman Mao and extend the hand of tentative friendship with the Communist China.

 One only has to think of the McCarthy era to understand the deeply Pavlovian response of the American peoples to anything of a socialist nature despite the recent global socialization of the banking system from the efforts of their last GOP president.

Nixon was also responsible for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) "clean air, clean water, open spaces" and so we have a complex figure with both the vulgarity of a Bronx bare-fist fighter and the intellectual subtle fingered sensitivity of  a concert pianist, the diplomacy skills of the long term thinker and player as well as the DNA of a progressive environmentalist. Arguably the only game in town as we observe the decline of the American empire.

So in summary embrace complexity and only settle on reductionist simplicity once the really hard work of weeding out the immortally terrible and the infinitely unworkable.


A lot more difficult than one might think.

(I'll come back and try get the formatting right but it's still a mess in draft blogger)

1969

1969 was an ace year. There was Woodstock, Apollo 11 and man first walking on the moon. The first Boing 747 and Concorde flight, test tube fertilisation of human eggs, The Beatles last gig on Apple Records rooftop, John & Yoko conducting their Bed-In, the Stonewall Riots, and the introduction of the ATM as well as the opening of the Beijing Subway, the mass anti Vietnam War demonstrations and don't forget the first message between two computers through Arpanet the forerunner of the internet.

Well anyway I'm biased and so it seems are Kappa. I couldn't resist this just in case the last few posts were a bit too serious, and even though Lauren doesn't like my Puff Charlie look. But the way I see it 1969 is so close to the 70's which is just a mere extension of and adjacent to the 80's. Doddsy knows all about all of them anyway. He was there man.