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Dissenting POWs: From Vietnam's Hoa Lo Prison to America Today

WATCH! MR Conversations: “Dissenting POWs,” with Wilber, Lembcke, Zeiger and Rothstein (PLUS: Excerpts)

The conversation begins with the story of Vivian Rothstein’s participation in a 1967 peace delegation to North Vietnam, and her encounter there with the Americans held at Hoa Lo Prison — the subject of ‘Dissenting POWs.’ One might think that that delegation’s visit to Hoa Lo Prison, and the dissent expressed by almost half of its POW inmates, would have been so controversial as to gain a fair amount of attention at the time…. | more…

Detail of a design by perri tomkiewicz and erin lux

Misogyny, memory, and the pathologization of dissent (Listen: Lembcke on “Warrior Nation;” Plus: “Dissenting POWs” reviewed in Counterpunch)

“Vietnam veterans were commonly portrayed in film and news reports as casualties of the war, their mission sold out on the home front and their homecoming marked by ingratitude and condemnation. Representations of POWs followed a similar path…It was trauma, not politics and conscience, that moved in-service resisters.” | more…

The lies peddled about Venezuela’s past (FAIR publishes ‘Extraordinary Threat’ excerpt)

It is worth summing up some of these key lies: 1) Venezuela was “once prosperous.” In fact, Venezuela was an unequal country in which most people were poor despite the country’s oil wealth; 2) Venezuela was a democracy before Chavismo. In fact, politicians alternated holding power according to an undemocratic agreement, and rammed austerity down the throats of Venezuela’s poor by committing massacres, such as the Caracazo…. | more…

“A Socialist Defector” (Grossman reviewed in Socialism and Democracy)

While deploring “shameful” aspects of Stalin’s rule and its “heavy hand” that limited economic experimentation, Grossman finds the Soviet presence to have been crucial in erasing fascism from public life, “breaking the chokehold of cartels, banks, chauvinist press lords and arrogant Junkers.” | more…

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