[Locals] Good youth organized antiwar protest in Boston

[Aimee Smith]

http://boston.indymedia.org
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=57282

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Speech delivered at Youth organized Rally Against the War
Boston Common
December 4, 2004
by Suzanne Nguyen - (MIT Graduate Student)

As a Vietnamese, I see many similarities in the
disinformation and propaganda campaign that was used
during the Vietnam era with the campaign being used
right now in Iraq.

Back then, the Vietnamese resistance was portrayed as
"foreign fighters" from the North who were infiltrating
South Vietnam. That wasn't even accurate because what we
Americans call the "Viet Cong" were *Southerners* who
fought against the US occupation.

We see a similar story with Iraq now. The story is that Iraq
is being infiltrated with foreign fighters from outside, and
Americans are there to defend the Iraqis from this infiltration.
But this story doesn't mesh with the US Defense Department's
own numbers. I'll cite you their numbers from a July article:
       "of 6,000 captured fighters, only 90 are non-Iraqi."

We do know though that there ARE now about 150,000 foreign
fighters in Iraq. And those are just counting the foreign
fighters from the United States.

There's a lot of similarity in the terminology that's being
used. We were trying to win "hearts in minds" in Vietnam and
that's what we're doing now in Iraq. We talk about how we kill
"military age males:" that's a way of erasing the fact that
these are innocent people.  The word "communists," is replaced
with "terrorists," as a way of excusing massacring and torturing
Iraqis.

During the war on Vietnam, General Westmoreland said:
"The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as the
Westerner."

In a recent article on Guantanamo Bay, General Myers said:
"Let's not forget the kind of people we have down there, these
are the people that don't know any moral values."

Dehumanizing the occupied is one commonly used tool of an
occupation. Another is discrediting the resistance against the
occupation. I'd like to give you one historical example of that
commonly used script.

In 1952, there were a series of car bombings in Saigon. The
New York Times article on the bombings blamed the Communists
for this "terrorist act."

As it turns out, the CIA co-wrote that article, and it wasn't the
Communists who did it, but a different group which CIA supported
and funded.

Let's keep this in mind when we talk about what's going on in
Iraq right now, and the Iraqi resistance.

I'd like to end on one positive note: sometimes as an anti-war
leftie, it's discouraging because it feels like they control the
media, they control our schools,  the police, and etc., but we're
the ones control our minds, and we can use our minds to see past
this disinformation and propaganda.

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