Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [246]
79. H. Bruce Franklin, “Antiwar and Proud of It,” The Nation, December 11, 2000.
80. Both Time and Newsweek, in their twenty-fifth-anniversary retrospectives on the war, featured the exit at war’s end and the “desperate South Vietnamese” seeking escape from “the invading North Vietnamese.” Douglas Brinkley, “Of Ladders and Letters,” Time, April 24, 2000; also, Evan Thomas, “The Last Days of Saigon,” Newsweek, May 1, 2000. A 1995 Washington Post editorial speaks of the Vietnam war as a “defeat to the Vietnamese. They bled, died and finally fled in great numbers from a Communist regime . . .” (April 30, 1995), characteristically not allowing the vast majority of people in South Vietnam to be “South Vietnamese.”
81. McNamara, In Retrospect, p. 319.
82. Full analyses of this history, and the lack of evidence, are provided in H. Bruce Franklin, M.I.A., or, Mythmaking in America (Brooklyn, N.Y: Lawrence Hill Books, 1992), and Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).
83. Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, p. 183.
84. For a discussion, which stresses the underreported dissident movement within the armed forces, see ibid., pp. 61–62.
85. Michael Lind, The Necessary War (New York: Free Press, 1999).
86. Gardner, “Going Back to Vietnam for a Usable Past.”
87. Barry Wain, “The Deadly Legacy of War in Laos,” Asian Wall Street Journal, January 24, 1997; Ronald Podlaski, Veng Saysana, and James Forsyth, Accidental Massacre: American Air-Dropped Bomblets Have Continued to Maim and Slaughter Thousands of Innocent Victims, Mainly Children, for the Last 23 Years in Indochina (Humanitarian Liaison Services, Warren, Vt. 1997). These three authors, who have worked in Laos, believe the official figure of 20,000 annual casualties is too low.
88. Daniel Pruzin, “U.S. Clears Laos of the Unexploded,” Christian Science Monitor, September 9, 1996.
89. Keith Graves, “U.S. Secrecy Puts Bomb Disposal Team in Danger,” Sunday Telegraph, January 4, 1998.
90. Quoted in Strobe Talbott, “Defanging the Beast,” Time, February 6, 1989.
91. See Ben Kiernan, “The Inclusion of the Khmer Rouge in the Cambodian Peace Process: Causes and Consequences,” in Kiernan, ed., Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia (New Haven: Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies, 1993), pp. 199–272.
92. A study sponsored by the Finnish government was titled Kampuchea: Decade of the Genocide (London: Zed, 1984). It included the years 1970–74, when the United States was heavily bombing the Cambodian countryside, as part of the decade of genocide. This study was ignored in the U.S. mainstream media.
93. Editorial, “Cambodia’s Dictator,” Washington Post, February 10, 1998.
94. See Edward Herman, Myth of the Liberal Media, chapter 16, “Suharto: The Fall of a Good Genocidist”; Edward Herman and David Peterson, “How the New York Times Protects Indonesian Terror in East Timor,” Z Magazine (July–August 1999). On the massive scale of the Suharto killings, see note 30 above.
95. For these and other citations, see Herman, Myth of the Liberal Media, chapter 16.
96. Seth Mydans, “Indonesia’s Rising Prosperity Feeds a Party for Democracy,” New York Times, June 21, 1996.
97. Herman and Peterson, “How the New York Times Protects Indonesian Terror.”
98. Ibid.
99. James Reston, “A Gleam of Light,” New York Times, June 19, 1966.
100. David Sanger, “Indonesia Faceoff: Drawing Blood Without Bombs,” New York Times, March 8, 1998.
101. Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 28–29.
102. For a major study, see Steven Kull, “Americans on Defense Spending: A Study of U.S. Public Attitudes,” Report of Findings, Center for Study of Public Attitudes, January 19, 1996. On public opposition to excessive defense spending even during