Sir! No Sir! (movie review)

This excellent little documentary traces the emergence of an organized resistance to the Vietnam War within the USA's own military during the Johnson and Nixon administrations.

The rank and file GIs distributed numerous underground publications at the risk of court martial. Many refused orders and went to jail. Others came home to inform the public of the war crimes going on in Indochina, where success was measured in body counts as a result of indiscriminate killing. My Lai was no isolated incident.

The resistance extended to officers and the intelligence community and became yet more concerted when soldiers were tasked with policing duties against US civilians in Chicago and elsewhere. Nixon-Kissinger were forced into an air war against Cambodia and North Vietnam because ground troops were in wholesale rebellion.

The film also examines the folk tale, popularized by Rambo and other media, that returning soldiers were spat upon by anti-war activists and called baby-killers, especially by female hippies. This story was apparently spread to occlude the more troubling truth that the US armed forces were increasingly turning against the war.

Mom reports already seeing this in Whittier (California). Indeed, this is not a new movie, though I'm sure it's not shared in high schools, where corporate sani-speak rules.

If you're in the Fuller camp (school), you'll have FINCAP, LAWCAP and GRUNCH as tools for analysis. That's considered esoteric political philosophy though, all wired up with an esoteric geometry wherein we speak about "tetravolumes" and such -- not something you'll know about if depending on the "gulag professoriate" for your analytical toolset.

No Mites, Sytes or Kites, no global grid, no American Transcendentalism.

Why is public discussion about ratcheting up in Afghanistan instead of ratcheting down in Iraq? Because most pundits have the intelligence quotient of a jelly fish perhaps (or pick any spineless species)?