Word: vietnam
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...former Yugoslavia, in Somalia and the Middle East, America has come in saying, "Make a fresh start!" And those caught in their ancestral rivalries reply, "How can we make a pact with the future until we have made a peace with the past?" During the war in Vietnam, an American culture of the individual, which thinks in terms of years, came up against an older Asian culture that sees identity in terms of a collective and thinks in terms of centuries. The result was as bewildering as when you ask a question in French and get an answer in Cantonese...
...seat on a Montgomery bus just as Gandhi had on the South African train, the unknown rebel blocking the line of tanks rumbling toward Tiananmen Square, Lech Walesa leading his fellow Polish workers out on strike, the British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst launching hunger strikes, American students protesting the Vietnam War by burning their draft cards, and gays and lesbians at Greenwich Village's Stonewall Inn resisting a police raid. In the end, they changed the century as much as the men who commanded armies...
...every oppressed people or group with a cause has practiced what Gandhi preached. Sixties kids like me were his disciples when we went South in the Freedom Summer to sit in for civil rights and when we paraded through the streets of America to stop the war in Vietnam. Our passionate commitment, nonviolent activism, willingness to accept punishment for civil disobedience were lessons he taught. Martin Luther King Jr. learned them; so did Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Aung San Suu Kyi, the unknown Chinese who defied the tanks in 1989 and the environmental marchers in Seattle a few weeks...
...fact, the only casualties that really worry Moscow are Russian. Media support is crucial to the generals, who believe, like their American counterparts in Vietnam, that they lost the last war because of bad press. This time they are taking no chances. In an operation that is half Soviet-style press censorship and half Desert Storm-style media management, the Russian command is totally controlling coverage. TV networks are not allowed to photograph Russian casualties and never show combat. When things go wrong, as they apparently did last week in Grozny, the official response to foreign reports is apoplectic. Accounts...
...gets worse. "Intelligence professionals reviewing this case would have to consider whether Ressam may have been a decoy designed to draw attention away from someone else," says Dowell. "In Vietnam, the Viet Cong would often do all the preparations for an attack, knowing U.S. intelligence would pick it up and protect against it, but then not actually attack. If you have a big organization, you want to send out a lot of false signals to stretch your enemy's resources and keep him guessing about when you're really planning to strike...