Rare rare rare, that a local rag, weekly, would run my piece. Three years of the current iteration of genocide. Of course, those of us who have been railing against the death machines — war profiteers, economic hitmen, ag-chemical-mining-oil thugs, the Kosher Nostra, the endless pipeline of infantilized and McDonaldized crap imbuing everything about Western Culture — knew this Orwellian day was on the horizon.
Here, the piece, unadulturated:
*****
Deaf ears. Media malpractice. A public hoodwinked by the machinations of the Jewish State of Israel’s lobby that make runaway slave catchers’ attack dogs seem like poodles.
It goes without saying that the genocide and continuing bulldozing and imploding of a people in Palestine will not be an anniversary noted by many of this newspaper’s readers. The incredible amount of targeted murders and false imprisonments by “our” ally, Israel, is just another day in the life of most Americans prepping for Halloween, Turkey Day and Yuletide celebrations.
You have to read Robin Andersen’s latest book, The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza (OR Books, 2026), or tap into an interview on YouTube as she discusses her forensic but, more importantly, unflinching examination of how establishment media abandoned journalistic integrity to manufacture consent for the genocide in Gaza.
We are talking about daily hundreds of unprecedented escalations and war crimes becoming a terrifying new normal. And now, three years after this latest Jewish State of Israel’s mass murder campaign, the eyes of the world turn to “war with China” machinations, “the Strait of Hormuz,” and gridiron gladiator sports. Or Dolly Parton.
Get this: Since October 7, 2023, the story of what was to become the genocide in Gaza was immediately shaped by the “mobilization of a very particular narrative: one of unprovoked terror, of Israel’s right to defend itself, of a war between equals.”
Lies, PR spin, and a long-in-the-tooth propaganda system (campaigns, hasbara): Israel and its American and Western lapdogs have perpetrated and covered up the crimes of ethnic cleansing.
Andersen and others have documented, in meticulous detail, the extent to which those attacks would be used by Western elites, the global military-industrial complex, and US legacy media to condone a full-scale genocide, including horrors that continue as Andersen speaks to audiences as part of her book tour.
There is no ceasefire.
Since Israel’s creation in 1948, Israeli political and military leaders have demonstrated a pattern of repeatedly violating ceasefires with their enemies in order to gain military advantage, for territorial aggrandizement, or to provoke their opponents into carrying out acts of violence (resistance) that Israel can then exploit politically and/or use to justify military operations already planned.
- Gaza’s Government Media Office said Israel committed 4,091 ceasefire violations over 300 days, killing 1,254 Palestinians.
- The office said only 35% of agreed humanitarian aid trucks and 39% of scheduled Rafah travelers were allowed through.
- Israeli forces continued attacks across Gaza, including shelling and gunfire in Khan Yunis and Al-Bureij.
The Complicit Lens is published by OR Books in collaboration with the Institute for Palestine Studies, and features an introduction by the Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi, who writes: “This book does not make for easy reading. Andersen walks us through the mainstream media’s misleading coverage, its bland and unquestioning repetition of lies and distortions by spokespersons for the Israeli and US governments, and its racist defamation of the Palestinians, when it is not ignoring their voices entirely. In analyzing this dereliction of the most basic duties of journalists, she offers detailed alternative and independent media accounts of Israel’s massacres, its intentional destruction of the infrastructure necessary for normal life, and its starvation of over two million people, obscured by this almost universal mainstream media malpractice.”
Andersen is professor emerita of media studies at Fordham University and an award-winning author of a dozen single- and co-authored books. Her work examines film, television, and media coverage of war, the environment, politics, and elections. She serves as a Project Censored Judge and contributes to the annual State of the Free Press. Andersen is on the Board of Directors of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
“Dire straits for the world” should be the daily refrain for Americans as other journalists and scholars continue to illustrate how the genocide and the expansion of Israel’s crimes into Lebanon, Syria and Iran are part of a proving grounds methodology and continuing criminal enterprise which serves as a stress test for the rest of the world.
How much can we take?
Our own borders have been sealed by Israeli surveillance systems, ICE thugs and police have been trained in Tel Aviv, and Cap’n Crunch Hegseth’s military is now embedded with Israeli tactics, surveillance, and operational control.
The term “Gazafiction” has always been applied to the West Bank and parts of Palestine. This is the application of Israeli military doctrine in the Gaza Strip to other places, most typically, combining airstrikes, mass evacuations, and extensive destruction of homes and civilian infrastructure (domicide).
However, the term has been coupled with another concept: “Zionization” of our media, our congresspeople, our own digital world. Israel-firsters: Larry Ellison owns Oracle, and he wants all 8.5 billion humans’ data under his wing. His son has destroyed independent media. David Ellison acquired Warner Bros. The Ellisons already control CNN and CBS, two of the largest news networks in the United States.
These are the Zionists’ proving grounds, and so Andersen’s work is vital, especially now when history and real news are being erased and penetrated with propaganda on steroids.
Three years of bombing schools, hospitals, bakeries, aid trucks, ambulances, waterworks, sewage treatment plants, mosques, churches, museums, press tents, children flying kites.
Andersen: “In so many ways, big media failed to provide accurate information about Israel’s bombing attacks and their consequences on the people in Gaza. They improvised a language of confusion, denial, and justification. In this book, we find a combination of media tropes and frames, together with verbal inventions for downplaying Israel’s increasingly brutal genocidal violence, along with the hollow echoes that explained away every military act of violence, as the media served as ‘stenographers to power.’ These strategies facilitated the continuation of a genocide. The failure to accurately cover the destruction of Gaza was inimical to the basic professional canons of journalism.”
You want more proof of global complicity? “Gaza Before October 7” shows Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) running medical humanitarian activities in the Gaza Strip, Occupied Palestinian Territories, for decades.
*****
And so, Vietnam? I cut my teeth on that giant killing field, those lies, and I was close to the war since my old man was in the US Army in intelligence and cryptography and was shot there. What was that all about, then? It was a genocide, a multipronged genocide that for the French and Americans, served as a testament to mass rape, mass starvation, mass ecocide, mass murder.
September 1945 to July 1954 — the First Indochina War
- Viet Minh military deaths: Historians estimate 175,000 to 300,000 Viet Minh fighters died, while Vietnamese government figures report 191,605 dead or missing.
- Civilian deaths: An estimated 125,000 to 400,000 Vietnamese civilians were killed during the conflict.
- Vietnamese fighting for France: Roughly 58,877 troops from the Vietnamese National Army (fighting alongside the French) also died or went missing.
- 1858: France launches its first attack on Đà Nẵng, marking the start of military campaigns in Vietnam.
- 1862–1867: Southern Vietnam is ceded to France and named the colony of Cochinchina.
- 1883–1884: Central (Annam) and Northern (Tonkin) Vietnam become French protectorates, completing the military conquest.
- 1887: French Indochina is officially established, uniting Vietnam, Cambodia, and later Laos.
- 1940–1945: Japan occupies French Indochina during World War II, temporarily displacing direct French colonial administration.
- 1946–1954: The First Indochina War is fought between the French and the Việt Minh, ending with the fall of Điện Biên Phủ and the 1954 Geneva Accords.
[The heads of Duong Be, Tu Binh and Doi Nhan decapitated by the French on 8 July 1908 in the Hanoi Poison Plot]
The Vietnamese famine of 1944–45 (Vietnamese: Nạn đói Ất Dậu – famine of the Ất Dậu Year or Nạn đói năm 45 – the ’45, due to most of the deaths occurring in 1945) was a famine that occurred in northern Vietnam in French Indochina during World War II from October 1944 to late 1945, which at the time was under occupation by Japan and administration by Vichy France, a collaborator of Nazi Germany in Western Europe. Between 400,000 and 2 million people are estimated to have starved to death during this time.
Then the Yankees came marching in:
“What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war.”
- Longest American War: At nearly 20 years, Vietnam was the longest military conflict in American history until the War in Afghanistan surpassed it in 2021.
- 2.7 Million Served: About 2.7 million American military personnel served in Vietnam.
- 58,220 American Dead: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. lists 58,220 names of American service members killed in the war.
- 3 Million Vietnamese: An estimated 3 million Vietnamese (North and South, military and civilian) died during the conflict.
- Average Age 19: The average age of American combat soldiers in Vietnam was 19, compared to 26 in World War II.
- Agent Orange: The U.S. sprayed approximately 20 million gallons of herbicides over Vietnam, affecting millions of Vietnamese and American veterans.
- Draft Dodgers: An estimated 60,000-100,000 Americans fled to Canada to avoid the draft; tens of thousands more protested or resisted.
- Soviet Aid: The Soviet Union provided North Vietnam with approximately $8 billion in military and economic assistance during the war.
- Ho Chi Minh Trail: An extensive network of supply routes through Laos and Cambodia allowed North Vietnam to sustain the war despite heavy bombing.
- Tunnel Systems: The Viet Cong operated from extensive underground tunnel complexes, including the famous Cu Chi tunnels near Saigon.
- First Televised War: Vietnam was the first war extensively covered by television, bringing graphic images into American living rooms and shaping public opinion.
- Post-War Reconciliation: Despite the war’s devastation, the U.S. and Vietnam normalized relations in 1995 and are now trading partners.
“In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.”— José Narosky
War and Peace In Vietnam
Flying into Vietnam 10 years ago brought back the phone call my family received that my father had been shot by the Viet Cong. That was 1969, and I was a 13-year-old fighting schoolmates because I didn’t support the war in Indochina.
Even before the cold announcement that my father had been severely wounded carrying cryptographic equipment in a Huey, I knew the United States was wrong to be in Vietnam. Something about the mythology of war, invisible dominoes, never repeating history.
The stiff green uniforms and yellow star on red background of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam suited the hard-faced immigration soldiers at Hanoi’s airport. There was panic in the air from mostly Vietnamese workers and businessmen deplaning from Moscow. Our group was scatterbrained from the long flights from London to Moscow to Pakistan to Hanoi. We were researchers being treated like tourists, our gear dragged by young blokes looking for hotel commissions.
Most of the Vietnamese on the streets hustling us for cyclo rides (three-wheeled pedaled push carts) and hawking imitation Swiss army knives, Rolex watches, Zippo lighters and U.S. dog tags were young men. This was a testament to one of the world’s highest population growth rates (2.5 percent) and to burgeoning under- and unemployment rates (40 and 20 percent).
As soon as we boarded the bus, cutting through rice paddies tended by women in conical hats, surrounded by teary-eyed water buffaloes and frenetic ducks, I knew I was in another world.
It felt like Vietnam instantly. I could almost taste the explosives in the air.
Scientific expeditions into Third World locales evolve into a weird mix of wanting to be open to a culture and attacking it with these disassociations. With Vietnam, there was emotional baggage and the statistics of war:
– 2 million civilians killed in the north, 2 million in the south;
– 1.1 million military casualties; 600,000 wounded;
– 58,183 Americans (eight of them women) killed;
– 3,869 fixed-wing aircraft and 4,857 helicopters lost;
– 15 million tons of ammunition expended;
– 2,000 Americans and 300,000 Vietnamese missing in action.
So many millions of acres of rain forest and mangroves were destroyed. More than 6 million lives were lost from 1954 to 1975. America introduced the concept of “ecocide” — warfare on the ecology — that still affects each new generation with carcinogenic and mutagenic dioxin from herbicides in human breast milk.
But I hadn’t come to Vietnam to unload a war catharsis.
“The war against America has little relevance in the minds of the people today, as opposed to how people in the U.S. feel about it,” Gene Reddic, a copy editor in Hanoi with the Vietnam Investment Review, told me.
“They don’t live it everyday … the Vietnam war does not conjure up B-52’s bombing Hanoi, and they don’t see Americans as evil people,” he added.
I felt alone for much of the time I worked in Vietnam, and not only because I was the only American in a group of 23 British, Canadian and Vietnamese scientists.
It wasn’t separation from familiar surroundings that stirred the feeling, or the fact that we were bivouacking for three months in primary rain forest — a cloud island, really, and hundreds of miles from Hanoi, just a few clicks from Laos. The raw primal rain forest we had come to study as a part of an international biodiversity project wouldn’t account for the strange separateness I would be feeling. My isolation came from being an American in a sea of Vietnamese — more than 83 million of them in an S-shaped country the size of Italy but with a per capita annual income of just $270.
It has one of the world’s highest population densities for any agricultural country. And then there is the “onslaught.” The 1986 economic reform program, known as Doi Moi, or “open door,” has brought an incredible Westernization — not only of Hanoi’s storefronts, but in the mindset of the people who find themselves actually desiring Western capitalism.
There is almost a lust for the new life, with disregard for tradition, spirituality and the environment.
I felt like an intruder — big, burly, full of extra calories, my dollars gold. I was an American returning with my father’s ghost haunting me.
Many of us have the “secondary Vietnam aftershock”: episodes with friends who had been to Vietnam now self-medicating with drugs, booze, violence. I have taught Vietnam draftees at community colleges — students with faraway gazes who couldn’t cope with festering emotions. All the land mines at home.
“I have buddies who did the tunnel-rat thing, the deep jungle sapping,” said Brian O’Connor, a 42-year-old Ohioan who was swapping stories at the Apocalypse Now bar in Hanoi. “But you have to remember, most of the servicemen were not in combat zones. I had two tours, and I fell in love with Saigon — no bullets. Just the occasional knifing or bottle bomb.”
Almost 3.2 million Americans, including more than 7,000 service women, served in Vietnam during America’s one and a half decades here. Around 80 percent were rear echelon or support; less than 20 percent ever saw combat.
“It’s still something talked about in our schools in Germany,” said Petra Buchbinder, a 24-year-old German traveler and backpacker who has been working as an English teacher in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and Hanoi. “Almost nothing about Hitler and the Third Reich, but much on the fire bombing and My Lai massacre. When I see Americans over here, I wonder if that one or this one fought here … and what they must have seen, or what dark horrors they carry with them.”
I had to press hard to get older folk — 40 or older — to talk about the war. In Hanoi, Hue and Vinh, people didn’t want to broach topics of combat duty or flights from carpet-bombing.
However, south of the Ben Hai River, the zone area along the 17th parallel that demarcated the war (DMZ), many spoke of killing Viet Cong. Others lamented how they had lost and been shuttled to reeducation camps set up by the communists after “the victory.”
Quang Tri, Cam Lo, Rockpile, Lang Vay and Hamburger Hill are just a few of the places these South Vietnamese fought at, places that saw bloody battles and ended up on television in America’s living rooms.
They had done hard labor in camps, and now they’re working the streets for big tourists to pay 50 cents for long rides on their cyclos. Others are street sweepers or sledging boulders.
I saw older women working on road gangs, hauling boulders and hot tar and baskets of sand. “The pro-Americans, the elite, or sympathizers were stripped of jobs, impoverished, received no education,” Reddic said. “Those that held land were basically evicted and singled out for reeducation.”
Because the north didn’t suffer as much from the Americans, compared to the south, a lot of tension exists between the north and south.
“The north fears the south breaking away. The south was more enterprising,” Reddic said. Of course, during the war, the U.S. government pumped in billions that built up infrastructure and provided capital for private and public works projects.
The war with America may have pitted the south against the north, but Vietnam has been at war with invaders for more than a thousand years. “The Vietnamese have a history of always protecting themselves, always throwing out the big guy. Like China, Japan, the U.S.,” said Tim Carr, a New York journalist who worked in Hanoi for two years.
An owner of three cafes — including the Memory Cafe, a hot spot for expatriates and foreign travelers looking for rental bicycles, motorcycles and tours around Hanoi — 37-year-old Tam Hang recalls B-52 bombing raids against Hanoi in the early part of 1970 and then three years later.
“I saw my aunt and uncle and friends laid out on the street when we were finally let out of the bomb shelter at school. There were thousands lined up and covered with sheets during just one attack. I still remember the sound of the bombs. I don’t forget the war, the smell of rotting flesh, but I am not against Americans,” Tam said.
Vietnam wants Americans back. This is true of the north, which saw some physical damage from American warplanes, as well as the south, which received the bulk of 13 million tons of bombs and tons of napalm and white phosphorus, as well as most of the 20 million gallons of Agent Orange sprayed on millions of acres of forest, cropland and mangroves.
When I was singled out of our group as an American, dozens of people, young and old, anywhere — in Hanoi’s old quarter at cobra and dog meat stalls, or at Buddha pagodas along the banks of the jade-tinged Perfume river in Hue, or in Con Cuong, an outback town full of loggers — would seek me out for handshakes and embraces.
They bowed and shoved to get a closer look. They measured my wrists and ankles. They stroked blond forearms hairs, bowed as if I held some prominence, and always laughed.
The younger ones wanted to know how much money I made; how much my diver’s wristwatch cost; why I was in Vietnam; what kind of car I owned. Others, older with war-weary eyes, tried in broken English or French to tell me their exploits. They secreted envelopes addressed to relatives living in the States and stuffed them into my pockets.
North Vietnam was victorious in the 15-year war with America, although “Uncle” Ho Chi Minh wasn’t alive to witness it.
Victory shows in crumbling buildings and ox-carts towing dung and human waste (night earth) for subsistence farms, and smoky Russian buses ferrying dozens of passengers crammed among blocks of tea leaves and live pigs and duck along Vietnam’s potholed roads built by the French and the United States.
Those first two weeks in and around Hanoi, we prepared to make the plunge into a bio-dome where rare Asiatic elephants, Javan rhinoceroses and a newly discovered species, a bovine called the pseudoryx, roam.
It was here where I was rushed with images of a rural country permanently sunk by “victory.” A country now overhauling itself daily, overloading itself with Japanese electronics and American clothing trends.
I was taken aside by expatriates who told me about yet-unexplored Buddhist temples. Surfers right out of the “summer of love” traced my maps showing me where the best waves where hitting China Beach. Vietnamese businessmen bought me syrupy, sweet coffee, pitching ventures for exporting jade or importing computers. Scientists making $50 a month asked me to send them Western books on entomology and taxonomy.
So many changes are taking place in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City weekly. The streets are a riot of bicycles, motorcycles and trucks. And time is running out to preserve the environment and study the few pockets of relatively untouched territory left.
And yet the concept of “biodiversity” is foreign, treated like a guided missile from the West. Even the word “conservation” barely made it into Vietnam’s lexicon a few years ago.
“You’d be in the same position if you exchanged shoes with us,” said Cao Vang Sung, deputy director of zoology and ecology for Vietnam’s Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources. “People need to cut wood for food and medicine. Biodiversity from your Western point of view forgets to look at the overall effects of a country’s living standard.”
I kept asking myself what I was doing here trying to collect data on this country’s mammals, plants, insects, ethnic minorities. It’s so poor, so backward, so unreceptive to outside help, so paranoid about foreigners.
A poet friend from Cleveland who had been a Vietnam vet put it best: “We spent so much time and money and lives to topple that country, and now Americans are going back 25 years later to help restore a country it helped destroy. It’s crazy, weird.” Schizophrenic.
“All these wars have put the Vietnamese into a short-term mentality … turning everything into a commodity — trees, animals, women and children,” says Reddic with a sigh.
Publication date: 04/28/05
**Photos by PK Haeder
