We have a nationalized military to fight wars and we have a nationalized
veterans administration to care for the wounded of those wars. But yet still
some folks think we don't need a nationalized health care system. Phooey on
them.
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From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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Subject: [blind-democracy] In Just Months, the Coronavirus Is Killing More
Americans Than 20 Years of War in Vietnam
In Just Months, the Coronavirus Is Killing More Americans Than 20 Years of War
in Vietnam By Nick Turse, The Intercept
27 April 20
Born in controversy, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is now the most poignant
monument on Washington, D.C.’s National Mall. Designed in 1981 by a Yale
undergraduate named Maya Lin, the memorial consists of polished black granite
panels that form a 125-degree angle and are inscribed with the names of the
U.S. military personnel dead from that conflict. The two walls, low at the ends
and high where they meet in the middle, list the deceased chronologically — an
individual accounting, day by day, of each American life lost.
It took 20 years, from 1955 to 1975, for the United States to lose 58,220 men
and women — 47,434 in combat — to the nation’s most divisive conflict since the
Civil War. In less than four months, just as many Americans will have died from
the Covid-19 pandemic — the toll, on Sunday, stood at 55,383, a few thousand
shy of the total number killed in Southeast Asia. In short order, America will
pass that appalling milestone. If this is indeed a war, as President Donald
Trump has described it — in his words, “We’re waging a war against the
invisible enemy” — a question can be asked: Where and how will the dead of this
conflict be memorialized?
Will a president who staked his legacy on a “big, beautiful wall” along the
Mexican border actually be remembered for a very different wall: one that bears
the names of scores of thousands of Americans who died on his watch? This wall
could be inscribed with the names of all those who perished on the front lines
of this pandemic, like Vitalina Williams, a 59-year-old immigrant from
Guatemala and grocery store worker in Massachusetts; Ferdi German, 41, an Army
veteran who worked as a subway car inspector in New York City; Craig Franken, a
61-year-old – married for nearly 20 years – who worked at the Smithfield Foods
meatpacking plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and four members of the
Franklin family from New Orleans, 86-year-old Antoinette and her sons Herman,
71, Timothy, 61, and Anthony, 58, who survived a previous cataclysm — Hurricane
Katrina, associated with (and exacerbated by) a prior U.S. president — only to
succumb to another disaster, 15 years later.
Then there are the health care workers, the doctors, nurses, EMTs, and other
medical professionals who — like so many of the Army medics and Navy corpsmen
whose names appear on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial — ran toward danger and
sacrificed their lives in an effort to save their fellow Americans. These
courageous people include Celia Yap-Banago, 69, an immigrant from the
Philippines who spent nearly 40 years as a nurse at the Research Medical Center
in Kansas City, Missouri and fell ill after caring for a patient believed to
have had Covid-19 and Madhvi Aya, a 61-year-old Indian immigrant who worked as
a physician’s assistant at Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, and treated
Covid-19 patients wearing only a surgical mask.
About 300 feet from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial stands a sculpture made by
Glenna Goodacre, who died, at age 80, on April 13. Modeled after Michelangelo’s
“Pietà,” it depicts three women in uniform surrounding — and one of them gently
cradling — a wounded male GI. “The emphasis of this tribute is centered on
their emotions — their compassion, their anxiety, their fatigue, and above all,
their dedication,” said Goodacre when the statue was unveiled. Could there be a
better template for a sculpture honoring the efforts of health care workers
like Yap-Banago and Aya to accompany a wall memorializing the fallen of this
pandemic?
For years, American presidents touted progress during the disastrous war in
Vietnam. “We can rightly judge … that the progress of the past three years
would have been far less likely, if not completely impossible, if America’s
sons and others had not made their stand in Vietnam,” said President Lyndon
Johnson in March 1968. In August 1972, his successor, Richard Nixon, said: “I
pledged to seek an honorable end to the war in Vietnam. We have made great
progress toward that end.” Trump has repeatedly revived the Vietnam War-tainted
phrase “light at the end of the tunnel” during this pandemic and similarly
claimed headway despite the increasing deaths. “As we continue our battle
against the virus, the data and facts on the ground suggest that we’re making
great progress,” he said recently during his own version of the 5 o’clock
follies.
Last week, Trump suggested that the death toll of the Covid-19 pandemic might
top out at 50,000 American lives lost. “We did the right thing, because if we
didn’t do it, you would have had a million people, a million and a half people,
maybe 2 million people dead,” he said. “Now, we’re going toward 50, I’m
hearing, or 60,000 people.” An April 20 prediction of an American death toll of
50,000 was as unrealistic as Trump’s baseless January claim that “we have
[Covid-19] totally under control,” and his February fictions that the virus
“will go away in April” and “within a couple of days [the number of Americans
with Covid-19] is going to be down to close to zero.”
Earlier this month, at one of his coronavirus press briefings, Trump also
touted the fruits of his efforts along the Mexican border. “We’re up to about
168 miles of wall,” he boasted. But having devoted far more time and energy
over the past three years to that project than to pandemic preparedness, the
body count of Americans killed by Covid-19 during his tenure has, in four
months, exceeded two decades of armed conflict in Southeast Asia. (The number
of Vietnamese civilians killed during those years is estimated at about 2
million, nearly the same as the worst-case scenario forecast of U.S. deaths
without efforts to slow the coronavirus through social distancing.)
It took two 200-foot walls made up of 70 separate panels to list the more than
58,000 dead on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Just how many names — of grocery
store employees, warehouse workers, delivery drivers, custodians, meatpacking
plant workers, doctors, nurses, and EMTs — will need to be etched into a
Covid-19 memorial won’t be known for years. Some projections put the total
number at more than 67,000 Covid-19 deaths by August. The White House
previously warned of the possibility of as many as 240,000 fatalities. Some
estimates put the number at 300,000 Americans lost to the disease over the next
several years.
For now, we need to keep counting the fallen and begin thinking about how to
memorialize all the heartache, all the deaths faced alone, all the bodies
consigned to mass graves, all the lives lost too soon. We already know that a
wall to honor America’s Covid-19 casualties would be big, far too big. And we
know, however poignant the design, however it stirs the soul, however iconic it
becomes, there’s never going to be anything beautiful about it.
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+33# Rodion Raskolnikov 2020-04-27 15:12
Of course this is a nice analogy, but I hate to forget all the Vietnamese,
Laotians, Thais, Cambodians, Indonesians, Filipinos, Burmese, and others who
were ruthlessly slaughtered in the "Vietnam War." It was really a war against
all of SE Asia. The domino theory held that following China's move to communism
all the other nations of SE Asia would also fall unless the US intervened
militarily.
No one has counted the deaths from the total war launched by the US in 1949 but
the total number of people directly killed is probably well over 20 million and
indirect deaths from the collateral damage of war including poisoning from
Agent Orange would add another 20 million people. Covid-19 has a hell of a long
way to go to catch up with the US Pentagon.
+3# Farafalla 2020-04-27 18:18
Just the other day you were saying that COVID is a hoax perpetrated by Bill
Gates. How many RRs are there?
-2# Rodion Raskolnikov 2020-04-28 05:57
FF -- Accuracy, please. I've never said it was a "hoax." I have said that Gates
and his associates like Fauci have had their own for-profit plans for a
pandemic for a long time.
You get the term "hoax" from the idiot media who are trying to create a class
of "Covid deniers" for anyone who does not accept their official narrative.
There are at least two RR on RSN: 1. the top RR or Rodion Raskolnikov and 2.
the fake RR or Robert Reich. There may be more. I'll keep an eye out for new
ones.
PS -- I think Nick Turse is a first rate journalist and my point was not to
demean the very good point he is making in this article. I just want to change
the official narrative of the War Against Vietnam to the War Against SE Asia.
0# E.V.Debs 2020-04-30 23:39
Well, Commissar Internet Research Agency, you've pulled these numbers straight
out of your ass, as usual. Horrible as it was, very few Filipinos (all
contractors), and fewer Thais, no Burmese (???!) or Indonesians were victims of
our slaughter. Agent Orange, nasty as it was, likely killed very people
directly, though it might have led to malnutrition and starvation. If you were
not so Putinish Slavic, I'd think you were working or applying for a job with
Alex Jones. RSN's political correctness in putting up with you is the reason I
stopped contributing to RSN long ago. Rather than Raskolnikov, you're a
Mishkin, except that you're actually a Идиот. Here you have 33 people who
usually have more sense, endorsing your nonsense.
+12# Robbee 2020-04-27 18:07
breaking news - the orange bleach bum says we may look to china for failing to
contain c v and ruin the greatest economy the world has ever seem? - to get our
few trillions back?
der orange is responding after germany - which, naturally, with testing,
contact tracing and isolation contained c v at a cost of just under $200
billions - sent china their bill?
now? 4 months after china? south korea? and germany started testing? - in
another couple weeks! - der orange hopes to be testing 2 million a week? maybe
even contact tracing? someday we’ll get our plans out? and nobody says what?
because what? strikes at the heart? of our freedom to associate freely? - give
me liberty and give me death? - we may even isolate positives? who can say?
55,000 americans counted dead of c v - perhaps 70,000 actual c v dead?
the toll reminds vietnam
where 100 old, white men drafted OTHER MEN’S SONS to fight in rice paddies
against a people fighting for freedom from french colonists
knowing that black and brown men will die in larger numbers than whites - 4
white guv’s open their states without testing, contact tracing or, certainly,
isolating!
der orange has won his spurs!
In Just Months, the Coronavirus Is Killing More Americans Than 20 Years of War
in Vietnam By Nick Turse, The Intercept
27 April 20
0# E.V.Debs 2020-04-30 23:41
Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening didn't vote for that bullshit.
+5# lfeuille 2020-04-27 20:14
Some fool is going to use this to argue that war isn't so bad.
+1# Rodion Raskolnikov 2020-04-28 07:13
That's right. And this fool will also not notice the hundreds of thousands of
Vietnam war vets who spent lives homelessness, drug addicted, suffering with
PTSD, giving birth to babies with Agent Orange caused birth defects -- and all
the rest of the collateral damage of war.
The great flu pandemic of 1918-19 was a by-product or collateral damage of WW I.
0# windrider 2020-04-28 15:59
Haven't you heard the saber rattlers talking up war with China in the context
of the next election? They are saying Biden is a pawn of China and we have to
re-elect Trump so we can go to war.
0# janie1893 2020-04-28 00:41
We could, perhaps, pull down the wall between the US and Mexico at a memorial
ceremony to honour all the victims of the pandemic. We could require Mr.Trump
to manually pull down the first 100 yards.
0# Robbee 2020-04-28 16:55
Quoting janie1893:
We could, perhaps, pull down the wall between the US and Mexico at a memorial
ceremony to honour all the victims of the pandemic. We could require Mr.Trump
to manually pull down the first 100 yards.
- that's just silly!
dickhead has bone spurs! didn't you get my above memo?
+4# Razzoo2 2020-04-28 02:31
Maybe we could engrave the names of the dead on Trump's border wall so the wall
has some useful function.
+1# Rodion Raskolnikov 2020-04-28 14:22
Good idea.
0# Robbee 2020-04-28 16:57
Quoting Razzoo2:
Maybe we could engrave the names of the dead on Trump's border wall so the wall
has some useful function.
- O U T S T A N D I N G !
0# yolo 2020-04-28 17:20
"Where and how will the dead of this conflict be memorialized?"
Just like we have always done when someone dies, we bury them, honor their
lives, and remember them in our hearts. Just because Trump calls it a war
doesn't mean we have to define this crisis that way.
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