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vietnam war
In Trump’s America, Free Speech Really Isn’t Free
By squeezing the college cash flow, the administration can force private college administrations to do its dirty work—banning protests, expelling protesters—legally.
Mar 23, 2025
Freedom of speech is kind of like eggs nowadays—too expensive! For Columbia University, the cost imposed on it by the Trump administration was suddenly $400 million in rescinded federal funding, at least if the speech was pro-Palestinian and critical of Israel.
What choice did the school have, except, as Jennifer Scarlott writes, “to appease the Trump administration by expelling, suspending, and revoking the degrees of a growing number of students accused of peaceful protest and exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly...?”
“The shameless capitulation of Columbia to government pressure,” she goes on, “is reflective of the corporate, neoliberal selling-out of academia. Academia, exemplified by Columbia University, has surrendered its proclaimed mission of intellectual independence and endeavor, and the academic pursuit of knowledge and social advancement.”
Five-plus decades ago, free speech did eventually bring the Vietnam War to an end.
Can you believe it? An academic clampdown on peace protests! Reading about this, I couldn’t help but feel my own college days come back hard and strong, and I started reading the current news in a larger context.
Education isn’t just a matter of absorbing a bunch of dead facts and certainties. As we gain—as we claim—our education, we bring our expanding awareness into the world we’re entering. An essential part of the world during my own college years, back in the late 60s, was of course the Vietnam War. This war wasn’t simply an abstraction; it was anxious to claim us as obedient participants. Many of us chose not to be obedient. We saw the hell and pointless horror of the war and decided that the only way we could participate in it was by standing against it, by ending it... and, ultimately, by working to create a world where war was no longer the unquestioned norm: a world, you might say, not defined by the lurking, soulless enemy (who must be killed), but by our connection to everyone and everything.
Yeah, this work is still in progress. War remains humanity’s cancer—with no funding rescinded for its endless waging, at least not by the U.S. government. But five-plus decades ago, free speech did eventually bring the Vietnam War to an end and, indeed, precipitated an era of “Vietnam syndrome,” where the public basically opposed war in general. No small problem for the nation’s warmongers! It took almost two decades, but the U.S. eventually found itself an enemy equal in evil to the commies: the terrorists. Specifically, Muslim terrorists.
In 1991, President George H.W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm, aka, Gulf War I, a quick, brutal assault on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. The Bush administration employed some highly effective public relations to push the war, including the false assertion that the evil Iraqis had ripped Kuwaiti babies from their hospital incubators and left them to die on the floor. The war lasted a little over a month, ending in the bombing and slaughterer of retreating Iraqi troops, as well as civilians, along what became known as the Highway of Death.
Afterward. Bush extolled the real victory his assault on Iraq had achieved, declaring: “It’s a proud day for America. And, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”
The public was OK with war again. God bless America!
And it’s been at war, in various ways, ever since. This is also part of the context in which I ponder today’s news about the Gaza genocide protests. Federal control over public relations is crucial, and if the protest movement is allowed to continue—and spread—sheerly because of the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians, the funding of which is our declared national policy, this could be... uh, problematic.
In the 60s, college campuses were at the hub of the nation’s antiwar protests, with faculty members seriously involved as well, and the various college administrations across the country mostly remained aligned with and committed to the principle of free speech. That meant the military-industrial complex had a serious domestic enemy: those loud-mouth college critics and their ability to punch holes in the official government PR about its military initiatives.
So what’s it going to do? Go total fascist and simply shut those students up by banning free speech? As appellate attorney Joseph Pace writes:
There’s a malign genius to the administration’s approach. Trump and his enablers know they can’t directly muzzle students or faculty without facing First Amendment lawsuits. To be clear, that doesn’t mean the administration won’t try. ICE has already begun arresting foreign student activists, and DOJ has signaled plans to charge protestors under federal counterterrorism laws. But the administration surely understands that most of those actions will be thwarted in the courts.
So start squeezing the college cash flow! That way, as Pace notes, it can force private college administrations to do the dirty work—banning protests, expelling protesters—legally. Pace quotes Trump strategist and former Heritage Foundation board member Christopher Rufo, who explained in a New York Times interview that the plan was to put the schools in a state of “existential terror” unless they went after the protesters.
I would call this flipping the reality, a crucial aspect of war-related public relations. Here, for instance, is a small sliver of a United Nations report from Tom Fletcher, under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, noting that Israel’s latest cease-fire violation on March 17 resulted in hundreds of deaths. Furthermore:
Since 2 March, Israeli authorities have halted the entry of all lifesaving supplies, including food, medicine, fuel, and cooking gas, for 2.1 million people. Repeated requests to collect aid sitting at the Karem Shalom border crossing have also been systematically rejected, no further hostages have been released, and Israel has cut power to southern Gaza’s desalination plant, limiting access to clean water for 600,000 people.
But criticizing this is what the smugly powerful call antisemitic. The irony here, as Pace noted, is in the nature of the Trump administration itself, which he described as a “den of antisemites.” This is no doubt most flagrantly represented by Elon Musk, who infamously gave two Nazi salutes at a recent rally and, among much else, spoke at a right-wing convention in Germany where he lamented that “Germany’s real problem was ‘too much focus on past guilt.’”
We’re on a dark and dangerous road to nowhere. The protests are keeping human sanity alive.
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'Life-Threatening Catastrophe': Trump Gutting of USAID Halts Agent Orange Cleanup Work
"The damage this administration has already done throughout the world is pretty staggering."
Mar 17, 2025
The Trump administration's unlawful dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development has ground to a halt critical Agent Orange cleanup efforts in Vietnam, which American forces sprayed extensively with the toxic, cancer-linked chemical between 1961 and 1971—impacting an estimated 3 million people.
ProPublicareported Monday that "workers were in the middle of cleaning up the site of an enormous chemical spill, the Bien Hoa air base, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly halted all foreign aid funding" last month.
"The shutdown left exposed open pits of soil contaminated with dioxin, the deadly byproduct of Agent Orange," the investigative outlet noted. "After Rubio's orders to stop work, the cleanup crews were forced to abandon the site, and, for weeks, all that was covering the contaminated dirt were tarps, which at one point blew off in the wind."
"And even more pressing, the officials warned in a February 14 letter obtained by ProPublica, Vietnam is on the verge of its rainy season, when torrential downpours are common. With enough rain, they said, soil contaminated with dioxin could flood into nearby communities, poisoning their food supplies," the outlet continued, observing that hundreds of thousands of people live around the air base.
Officials who sounded the alarm didn't receive a response from the Trump administration, according to ProPublica. The officials in Vietnam warned their colleagues in Washington that "we are quickly heading toward an environmental and life-threatening catastrophe."
The Vietnamese Red Cross estimates that more than 150,000 children in the country have been born with ailments attributable to Agent Orange.
Last month, as U.S. President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk took aim at USAID, The New York Timesspotlighted the story of Nguyen Thi Ngoc Diem, who the newspaper noted was "born with a malformed spine and misshapen limbs—most likely because her father was exposed to Agent Orange."
"It makes no sense," Diem told the Times in response to the Trump administration's assault on USAID. "Agent Orange came from the U.S.—it was used here, and that makes us victims. A little support for people like us means a lot, but at the same time, it's the U.S.'s responsibility."
In the wake of Trump's illegal funding freeze at USAID, the Times noted that "bulldozers that were cleaning up contamination at a former American air base in southern Vietnam—which both countries might eventually want to use—have gone silent."
"Around 1,000 mine-removal workers in central Vietnam have been sent home," according to the Times. "Even if funding returns, in a year meant to mark recovery from the darkness of a cruel war, fundamental damage has already been done in ways that feel—for partners and victims in both countries—like a knife shoved into old wounds."
ProPublica stressed Monday that the Trump administration has not just ordered cleanup work to stop. It has also "frozen more than $1 million in payments for work already completed by the contractors the U.S. hired."
Jan Haemers, the CEO of Haemers Technologies—a company that has worked on Agent Orange cleanup in Vietnam—told ProPublica that "halting a project like that in the middle of the work" amounts to "an environmental crime."
"If you stop in the middle," Haemers said, "it's worse than if you never started."
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Could the US Military’s Recruitment Problem Be a Good Thing?
Is it possible that collective humanity is actually turning against war—seeing it more as the primary problem than the solution to our global ills?
Feb 09, 2025
Some experts worry that, if the country went to war, many reserve units might be unable to deploy. A U.S. official who works on these issues put it simply: ‘We can’t get enough people.’”
“Vietnam Syndrome” hasn’t gone away! It resulted in the elimination of the draft and ultimately morphed into “Iraq Syndrome”—so it seems—and even though those lost, horrific wars are now nothing but history, the next American war is ever-looming (against Canada?... against Greenland?). And yet, good God, the military is having a hard time recruiting a sufficient amount of patriotic cannon fodder.
“We can’t get enough people”—you know, to kill the enemy and to risk coming home in a box. And maybe that’s a good thing! The public is kind of getting it: War is obsolete (to put it politely). War is insane; it threatens the future of life on the planet—even though a huge swatch of the American media seems unwilling to get it and continues to report on war and militarism as though they literally equaled “national defense.” After all, we spend a trillion dollars annually on it.
Indeed, war unites us... in hell.
The above quote is from a fascinating—and troubling—piece by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker, which has long been my favorite magazine. What troubled me was the unquestioned acceptance in the piece of the inevitability, indeed, the normalcy, of going off to war. In that context, war is simply an abstraction—a real-life game of Risk, you might say—and the proclaimed enemy is, ipso facto, less human than we are, and thus more easily reduced to collateral damage.
The article addresses a highly problematic (from a military point of view) diminishing of the military’s recruitment base. For instance: “Recruiters,” Filkins writes, “are contending with a population that’s not just unenthusiastic but incapable. According to a Pentagon study, more than three-quarters of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible, because they are overweight, unable to pass the aptitude test, afflicted by physical or mental-health issues, or disqualified by such factors as a criminal record. While the political argument festers, military leaders are left to contemplate a broader problem: Can a country defend itself if not enough people are willing or able to fight?”
While this is no doubt a legitimate question—militarism, after all, exists in a social context—what’s missing from this question, from my point of view, is the larger one that hovers above it, emerging from the future. Perhaps the larger question could be put this way: In a world that is hostage to multi-thousands of nuclear weapons across the planet, and on the edge of ecological collapse—with its Doomsday Clock currently set at 89 seconds to midnight—can a country defend itself from its greatest risks by going to war? Or will doing so simply intensify those risks?
Here’s a slightly simpler way to put it: For God’s sake, isn’t war obsolete by now? Isn’t militarism obsolete? I’m surprised The New Yorker piece didn’t reach a little further into the stratosphere to establish the story’s context. Come on! This is the media’s job.
Actually, there’s also a second question emerging as well. Let me put it this way: Is it possible that collective humanity is actually turning against war—seeing it more as the primary problem than the solution to our global ills? Could this be so despite the quasi-meaningless borders the world has divided itself into, which must be “protected” with ever more omnicidal violence?
The story notes: “After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a groundswell of patriotic feeling encouraged young people to volunteer for the military. The sentiment held as the U.S. attacked the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and then as it launched an invasion of Iraq, which quickly toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. But, as those wars dragged on, the public mood soured. The troops deployed there were unprepared and ill-equipped, sent to pursue objectives that could be bafflingly opaque.”
The public mood soured? Could this possibly be described in a more simplistic way—with less respect for the national collective awareness? What if something a bit more significant were actually happening, e.g., a public majority began seeing the invasion, the devastation of hundreds of thousands of lives, as... wrong?
And might, let us say, enormous human change be brewing? The same thing happened in Vietnam. It turned into hell, not just for the people of Vietnam—the war’s primary victims—but for the U.S. troops waging it. It became unendurable. “Fragging”—the killing of officers—started happening. So did moral injury: psychological woundedness that wouldn’t go away. Vet suicides started becoming common.
Back to Iraq. At one point the story mentions Bravo Company, a Marine battalion that had led the bloody assault on Fallujah in 2004. Two decades later, some of the surviving members held a reunion, which was permeated with anguish and guilt. For many, the trauma of Fallujah hadn’t gone away, and they remained emotionally troubled, often turning for relief to painkillers, alcohol, and methedrine.
All of which is deeply soul-cutting, but there’s a bit missing from the context: “Twenty years after the U.S. military offensive in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, locals are still suffering from the lasting impacts of the use of internationally banned weapons by U.S. forces,” according to Global Times. This includes such hellish instruments of war as white phosphorous and depleted uranium, the effects of which—on local air, soil, water, and vegetation—do not go away.
And of course the consequences for the locals have been ghastly, including enormous increases in cancer, birth defects, leukemia, still births, infant mortality and so, so much more, including “the emergence of diseases that were not known in the city before 2004.” And these effects will remain present in Fallujah, according to the article, for hundreds of years.
But the U.S. had to defend itself!
This is insane. War, as I have noted previously, is humanity’s cancer. It affects all of us, whether we belong to “us” or “them.” It affects us collectively. Indeed, war unites us... in hell. The mainstream media needs to stop pretending it doesn’t realize this.
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