Erased From History - Imperial Ambitions

[kookomula]

"In 1962 it was announced that US planes were bombing Vietnam - there was no protest. The United States used chemical warfare to destroy food crops and drive millions of people into "strategic hamlets", essentially concentration camps. All of this was public, but there was no protest; it was impossible to get anybody to talk about it. Even in a liberal city like Boston,you couldn't have public meetings against the war because they would be broken up by students, with support of the media. You would have to have hundreds of state police around to allow speakers like me to escape unscathed. The protests came only after years and years of war. By then, hundreds of thousands of people had been killed and much of Vietnam had been destroyed.

But all of that is erased from history, because it tells too much of the truth, which is that it took years and years of hard work by plenty of people, mostly young to build a protest movement".

Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions (Hamish Hamilton, 2005)