When Unelected Technocrats Rule the World

I Can’t Get you Out of My Head

Part 4 What If People Are Stupid?

Directed by Adam Curtis (2021)

Film Review

Part 4 begins by introducing Bernard Kouchner, a French politician and doctor who cofounded Doctors Without Borders in 1971. Kouchner first came to public attention in 1979, when he hired a ship to rescue boat people who fled Communist Vietnam  following the fall of Saigon. Kouchner was one of the first elites to declare concepts of Left and Right meaningless because “we are all one world linked as individuals.”

In 1999, the UN appointed him interim president of Kosovo, an Albanian enclave inside Serbia created via a CIA destabilization campaign* and illegal NATO bombing campaign ordered by Clinton in 1999.** At present, only 98 UN member states recognize Kosovo independence.

Curtis moves on to advent of Deng Xiaoping to the Chinese presidency in 1977 and the murder trial of Mao’s widow Jiang Xing for the deaths she instigated during the Cultural Revolution. Deng would a brief experiment with a Democracy Wall, where citizens were allowed to anonymously notices critical of government corruption, greed and nepotism. The wall was removed when someone anonymously called for Deng’s removal as president.

The film briefly traces the rise of the Chinese pro-democracy movement, which the film links to a spree of rape cases the government refused to prosecute. With the death of Hu Yaobang, the sole pro-democracy advocate withing the party leadership, the movement shifted into Tienanmen Square.***

Meanwhile in Russia, Boris Yeltsin shut down democracy in 1993 (with Clinton’s support) when he dissolved Parliament and allowed the growing oligarchy take total control of government.

According to Curtis, Clinton was the first politician to recognize the collapse of mass movements in the US (ie people had stopped joining political parties and unions) and to consciously hand over power to bankers, financial managers and corporate executives.

This supposedly represented a growing consensus among the ruling elite that the power of politicians. This was due to their unfortunate tendency to make short term decisions under pressure from their political base. What followed would be a major expansion of “non-majoritarian institutions” that were accountable to voters (eg the EU, the WTO, the IMF, World Bank, World Economic Forum)

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*See https://www.bulgaria-italia.com/fry/docs/uck3.htm*

**See https://stuartbramhall.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/kosovo-an-evil-little-war-almost-all-us-candidates-liked/

***Over the past decade, there is growing evidence the Tienanmen Square uprising was a failed CIA color revolution: https://stuartbramhall.wordpress.com/2019/09/25/tiananmen-square-the-failure-of-an-american-instigated-1989-color-revolution/

Vietnam War Series Ends with Load of Sentimental Claptrap

The Weight of Memory, Episode 10

The Vietnam War

Directed by Ken Burn and Lyn Novick

Film Review

I found the final episode of the Vietnam War series, shown on Maori TV earlier this week, extremely disappointing. The first half contained some good historical detail and valuable commentary by North Vietnam and Vietcong fighters. The last half was a load of sentimental claptrap about the Vietnam War memorial and other efforts to “heal” the Vietnam experience. It was totally devoid of any political analysis, eg the role of banks, oil companies and defense contractors in strong arming three administrations into pursuing an unwinnable war at great cost to the American people. Even more disgusting was the failure to identify obvious parallels with the illegal US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have lasted even longer than Vietnam.

The filmmakers also totally gloss over the reality that for the Vietnamese, the war was purely a war of independence against foreign invaders.

Episode 10 covers March 29, 1973, when the last US troops left Vietnam, through April 30, 1975 when Saigon collapsed. The US evacuation had scarcely ended in 1973 when the Watergate scandal superseded all other national news. It was all over for Nixon once Congress learned that he had tape recorded all his Oval Office conversations. The tapes would provide undeniable proof of his participation in the Watergate burglary and cover up.

On August 9, after the House Judiciary Committee recommended impeachment, Nixon resigned. On the same day, Congress halved military aid to the (puppet) South Vietnamese government. The result was the virtual economic collapse of South Vietnam. Massive pay cuts would lead South Vietnamese troops to desert at the rate of 20,000 a month.

This episode includes very moving coverage of South Vietnamese who collaborated with the US occupation desperately trying to flee Saigon in front of North Vietnamese troops. Only a few were airlifted via helicopters that evacuated US embassy and security personnel. Many launched themselves into any vessel they could find in the hope of being picked up by US freighters.

Once North Vietnam took control of the south, the blood bath that had been predicted never eventuated. Roughly 1,000 South Vietnamese collaborators were killed in revenge killing and roughly 1.5 million were forced to participate in compulsory re-education.

The Vietnamese economy was a virtual shambles for a good ten years after the war ended. The filmmakers blame this on the privatization of Vietnamese industry and forced collectivization. A better explanation, in my view, is that the US war of aggression totally destroyed the country’s infrastructure and poisoned its farmland with Agent Orange.

Dire economic conditions would lead 1.5 million Vietnamese to flee Vietnam in small and medium-sized boats between 1978 and the early 1990’s. A good number drowned, but most ended up in refugee camps in other Southeast Asian countries. About 400,000 eventually made it to the US.