Somebody is going to accuse me of being FOR the Vietnam War for this, but here goes.
The media always shows hordes of refugees in Vietnam and blames them on Americans. But I have never heard of any refugees who moved AWAY from United States troops since the Civil War.
I have never heard of refugees going AWAY from Americans. In Vietnam those hordes of refugees were always moving BEHIND American lines. In Korea the same was true.
The biggest picture of this media blindness was when the Iraq War began. A huge number of reporters sat on the northern border of Iraq while Americans troops moved into the south.
The media had always heard there were huge numbers of refugees when a war started, and that Americans were devils. It had never occurred to them that refugees don’t move away from Americans.
It’s never occurred to anybody but me.
So all those reporters sat there on the northern border of Iraq, waiting for the refugees, for critical days at the beginning of the war. No refugees came.
The media has forgotten this little incident. I talked about it at the time on WOL, but nobody noticed. It cost the media one hell of a lot of money.
And they didn’t learn a damn thing from it.
#1 by Mike on 11/11/2004 - 11:31 pm
” But I have never heard of any refugees who moved AWAY from United States troops since the Civil War.”
You ought to question your sources a bit more. Seems to me that the US gov’t-media-plex doesn’t call ANYONE a regugee unless they’re surrendering to US troops.
#2 by Bob Whitaker on 11/12/2004 - 4:22 am
I asked for one example. Even the Soviet press never gave one.
#3 by Don on 11/12/2004 - 8:31 am
As with everything else, I think Race is relevant here. If American troops were 90% nonwhite, I would run away from them myself.
#4 by Mike on 11/12/2004 - 9:15 pm
One more time -> The reason you never hear of refugees running away from US troops is because the only people who’re called refugees are people who surrender to US troops. A refugee is a person who seeks refuge. A surrenderer is a person who has either given up or has no choice.
Aside from fighting and death, surrender is all that’s left for most people when the US decides to occupy a nation. Americans don’t seem to know the difference between refugees and surrenderers.
You don’t think that people seek refuge FROM US troops? In Iraq? In Serbia? And yes, even in WWII. Just because Europeans in the 1940s had a choice of who to surrender to, and chose, when possible, the less savage Americans over the Red Army, doesn’t mean that plenty of them didn’t RUN from US troops.