John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY GARETH PORTER IN CHECKPOINT ASIA
“How the US Navy Sold the Vietnam War
“False narratives paved the way for the Vietnam War. The very first one was a very popular book with phoney tales of Communist atrocities against Catholics”
https://www.checkpointasia.net/how-the-us-navy-sold-the-vietnam-war/
A fine article.
I recall Dooley well.
His sympathetic face and the kind of work he did lent great force to the propaganda of his words. An Irish-origin name definitely worked some magic in America, especially in those days.
It was a time of big St Patrick's Day Parades and celebrations. Irish city mayors. And just look back at how many dozens of Hollywood movies used a sympathetic Irish cop or priest character.
I never read his book, and I never knew anything about its being propaganda, but in general I am always a bit wary of anyone claiming communists or any other group are somehow uniquely terrible.
Yes, we all knew they did some terrible things, but later we learned America did many things just as terrible, although mainly abroad to other peoples.
Isn't it just amazing the lengths the American military went to for propaganda?
You know, CIA has behaved in this very way many, many times with books concerned with the Kennedy assassination.
They've generated dozens of phony efforts to defend the Warren Commission, and I believe also created some deliberately pathetic anti-Warren Commission efforts to discredit the "conspiracy theorists,” a term which itself was a CIA disinformation creation of the mid-1960s.
