Reading Culture through memory: the symbol the Helicopter

http://www.commondreams.org/views/050300-102.htm

From the website 'Common Dreams.org which has the slogan ' join the movement for the greater good' which claim to be a non profit, progressive, non partisan citizen organisation made in 1997 by two political activists Craig Brown and Lina Newhouser. This particular article was written by a professor called Robert Jensen from the department of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin Published in 2000.

The article is titled Vietnam war is a study of US crime. The main focus of the article is that the image of the last helicopters taking off the US embassy in Saigon 25 years ago can be seen as such a powerful image of the American defeat, by getting out before the Vietnamese took over from who the americans were supporting, but claims this is wrong. The problem is that American actually won the war. Propaganda is said to be what has covered the winning of the american and been replaced with a loss. the use of propaganda is said to have been used to convince the american people of a lost to obscure the real reason. The reason that American fought fought and lost the war to divert attention to the real facts of the crimes the American soldiers committed. That they did not fight establish democracy but to derail it.

'Fought with one hand tied behind our backs' is said to have been how soldiers described how they fought in the war and that they could be described as being restrained gentleman. But in reality it is the opinion of this article that the soldiers were not as it is said that they use the following methods; saturation bombing of civilian areas, counter-terroism programs that indued political assassinations, routine killings of civilians, and 11.2 million gallons of Agent Orange to destroy crops and ground cover. All of them classified as breaking International laws and being war crimes.

The overall focus and point of the article is to try and get across that the telling of this story that the Americans lost the Vietnam war is the United States continuing to evade the truth about its foreign policy.