VISIONOFTHEWORLD

Today is a huge holiday in one country, that most Americans (unsurprisingly) don’t know about. Forty years since the end of the war in Vietnam, the Vietnamese national holiday known as “Liberation Day”, when the US-supported South Vietnam regime surrendered to People’s Army on April 30, 1975. For Vietnamese this is the end of 30 years of war that 3 million lives claimed, the devastation of nearly the entire country and still covered with unexploded landmines, and nearly half the rural population in the south into refugees. For Americans it’s a day of shame, for the country that believes in “no apologies” isn’t surprising this is being ignored by the news and not talked about in schools. The reasons for this are both sinister, and sad. 

“My name is Jack Regald… My testimony is about the indiscriminate murder of innocent civilian women and children, torture of prisoners for fun and other reasons…”

“My name is Joe Bangerd… My testimony will cover the slaughter of civilians, the skinning of a Vietnamese woman…”

“My name is Scott Camille… My testimony involves the burning of villages with people in them, the cutting off of ears, calling in artillery on villages for games, napalm dropped on villages, women being raped, women and children being massacred, CS gas used on people, animals being slaughtered, bodies shoved out of helicopters….”

This is the disgusting truth about America’s “Vietnam War”. This is what our glorious troops did to the Vietnamese people during the “Tour of Duty” in the 1960s and early 1970s. The same book I transcribed this testimonials from elaborates on the atrocities:

“In the diary she kept.. Clare Cullhane (a nurse at NGO hospital) wrote of- endless cases of women and children being run down by tanks, of GIs picking off children as they swam out to pick up food cartons from and overturned truck, of pilots inviting passengers for human ‘turkey shoots’”

Helicopter crews had a particularly bad reputation. As early as 1963 veteran war correspondent Richard Tregaskis described members of the 362^nd Helicopter Squadron as “wild men… one chopper would go first… and when the people would go running, the second plane would spray ‘em”… James Duffy, a helicopter gunner with the 1^st Air Cavalry, recalled “our company policy was to just keep on firing… I had fired at all the military targets I could spot and I looked out across the field and I spotted a Vietnamese woman peasant running away from the ship. I fired a burst of about six or second rounds into her back before we hit the ground. A couple of weeks later he and his company commander had “a good laugh about it.”

The worst of it took place at a village called My Lai-4 in 1968. The soldiers who moved into the area justified their slaughter of 500 people- all of them unarmed- all of them women, children and old people- on the grounds that they faced an invisible enemy; that children had frequently acted as scouts for the Viet-Cong, and suffered dozens of casualties from a minefield days before…

As the Americans approached…villagers began to flee across the open fields and were immediately shot down. The 2D Platoon…swept through the northern half of My Lai hurling grenades and setting fire to family shelters, calling occupants out of their homes and gunning them down, raping and then murdering village girls… they gang raped several more girls before rounding up ten to twenty women and children and killing them on the spot. Some civilians were killed when they emerged from their homes. Others were rounded up and moved toward a drainage ditch on the southeastern border of the hamlet where 75 to 150 villagers were shot to death at Lt Calley’s command.

At one point, the men of the 3D Platoon herded together a group of women and children and sprayed them with M16 fire. A half dozen other wounded villagers were killed ‘to put them out of their misery’.

“They just kept shooting at her,” said photographer Ron Haeberle, “You could see the bones flying in the air chip by chip.” A woman staggering out of a hut weeping, her dead baby in her arms… she took only a few steps before one of them en with Capt. Medina shot her down them “opened up” the dead baby with his M16.

“Some of the guys seemed to be having a lot of fun” said PFC Herbert Carter, “They were wisecracking and yelling ‘Chalk that one up for me!’

“I remember this one group, a little distance away. Maybe there were ten people, most of them women and little kids, huddled all together and you could see they were really scared, they just couldn’t seem to move. Anyway, he turns around toward them and lets fly with a grenade. It landed right in the middle of them. You could hear the screams and then the sound and then see the pieces of bodies scatter out, and the whole area just suddenly turned red like somebody had turned on a faucet.”

This is not just a massacre by a few bad soldiers. As shown by the testimony at the start- this was a widespread, systematic destruction of the lives of innocent Vietnamese peasants throughout the war. This is what America did, to keep Vietnam divided, to prevent the unification of the country under a socialist government. We went into villages, and if suspecting one of the residents was a “VC” (a communist supporter), the entire village would be torched, the people herded into trucks, and dumped in another field somewhere and told to get moving. We turned HALF the population of rural South Vietnam into refugees. And after we bombed North Vietnam back to the 18^th century, and flew hundreds of B-52 runs over Hanoi to bomb civilian neighborhoods to terrorize the North Vietnamese into signing a “peace treaty” in Paris- the result of the Christmas Bombing of Hanoi in 1972 in which a dozen B-52s were shot down and thousands of people killed- Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. If it sounds sickening, that’s because it is. We uprooted millions of people, burned their homes, used chemical weapons to destroy entire forests and farmland, used napalm against human beings, and dropped enough bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to be five times as many explosives as used in all of World War Two.

One of the many excuses used to justify the mass murder is that our "enemy" was also committing atrocities. This ignores the fact that we were invading THEIR COUNTRY and taking a side in their civil war. In the below documentary, the Viet Cong are said to have killed "37,000 people" during the war years. However, the American anti-insurgent programs killed many times this- even the CIA man William Colby admits in a Congressional hearing in 1971 on the so-called 'Phoenix' program- a sinister program of search and assassination in Vietnam- some 27,000 people are killed, at least 75% of them Colby admits were probably not even communists; and this is just this one program alone.

The travesty of the Vietnam War is something this whole country owns. It is not the evil deeds of a few soldiers, it is a shameful chapter in the history of our intervention in the affairs of other nations- the violation of basic human rights, the consistent opposition to the right to free-determination and liberty of the peoples of the Third World. I wish more people to know about this so that we can see that the American ‘big stick’ is not and will never be a welcome presence in foreign nations.

I’m not surprised nobody knows about, talks about, or thinks about this war. It was an atrocity, something Americans want to forget and mostly have.

_{Source: Doyle, Weiss, Editors. The Vietnam Experience “A Collision of Cultures”  P 148-149; 158-160 Boston Publishing Company ©1984}

_{Source: Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War. (Peter Arnett) TDW Corporation ©1980}

I found this leminhkhai.files.wordpress.com… today on a blog I was reading by a man who I think is a professor of history in Vietnam. It’s not a particularly new phenomenon- creating history books with cartoon characters to interest the young goes back quite a ways. I just thought the colorful picture was really funny and, given the trends in anime fandom I wouldn’t be surprised if this book found its way into the hands of many people from all around the world just for the pictures- the context of Vietnamese historical heroes is about the newest (and most outrageous) context that manga could be used in. Apparently the publisher was then fined twenty million dong by the government for not ‘registering’ it with them first!

leminhkhai.wordpress.com/2015/…

I found this totally hilarious, but it got me thinking about the inspiration (or lack thereof) that people put into their art. A lot of people are drawing manga style characters- so I wonder why history which is very diverse- hasn’t been an inspiration for a lot of the art around here. On second thought maybe I shouldn’t encourage anyone to unleash their anime on anything else in the world besides generic fluff... but it’s not like it has to be that style anyway. Producing art about history inevitably leads to the study of history- since you would need to find out as much as possible about the people and places before being able to illustrate them. The end result is knowing a lot more about that event, which is not a bad deal. If it would make bored students more interested, then it’s not exactly a waste of time.

2015: That number seems so unusually weird to be a year, it’s so high, I remember when you said the year as “Nineteen…” something, and felt like it would be that way forever. I fellow deviants have a lot planned this year, so even though I don’t have many watchers I give an update and know I won’t write another journal entry for months anyway. So here is what’s planned for ‘Twenty Fifteen’:

I finally have a proper printer. Not just some desk top bubble jet that prints cheap computer paper either- but a proper large format printer! It’s HUGE and it sits in my livingroom taking up quite a lot of space. I can now print my 11x17 works on art paper and frame them for hanging, which is something I’ve wanted to do for ages. Since it will sit mostly idle once I get done, I can offer it for prints if anyone wants them. More on that later.

Job searching and work hours- I am really tired of the company I work for, and sick of the 50+mile daily commute, it sucks up huge amounts of my own time and that’s why I’ve had trouble keeping up with drawing. I need to draw in daylight, and since November that hasn’t been happening because I don’t get home until after dark. I gave up my volunteer thing in summer, and since then slowly caught up on some old projects, so that now I can start new ones and work on them for the next several months. Actually I start new drawings all the time and hardly ever finish them. What I have now is lots of character drawings that need color- so you’ll see many more pictures of Janet being pretty as usual; the princess in blue shawl and the lovely Frances (who is black) and she pops up now in various architectural works I have. Some of my older characters will also make a reappearance. The next thing planned is some new ideas on perspective- something people have asked me about before, which is bird’s eye and worm’s eye views- which I’ve only rarely done. I also have some broken plane or curved plane ideas- such as a person on a swingset or on an airplane- that I want to do this year. I might make a lot more progress getting things done and uploaded once I land a new job- which I’m aiming for first quarter.

Prints and Artwork Commissions Open

All prices are TBD based on projects- all work on commissioned drawings printed free of charge up to a quantity. I have opened commissions for deviantart and also in-person, flickr, and yahoo; if you have a request please send me a note. My specialty is graphite and color pencil architectural renderings- you may be better served elsewhere if your request isn’t in that category.

I recommend using a bing or google search to find out what going rates tend to be for the types of drawing, in the category above. My drawings can be professional quality- so use the highest margin there. This gets rid of any confusion- I am not trying to make a killing so be assured I won’t charge unfairly above a typical rate. The best way to find an artist to do what you want is to look at their gallery- most recent works. You can clearly see what they’re good at and what not. For instance, you wouldn’t come to me to ask for Legend of Zelda fanart, would you? Probably a person who does Legend of Zelda fanart would not be able to give you a perspective drawing of a large housing complex. I don’t expect to find much business here- but the door is open so if you are curious, just ask!

Another piece of American Modern Art is doomed to destruction at the hands of our credit-corrupted corporate developer culture.

newsok.com/downtown-oklahoma-c…

This building is one of the few pieces of modern architecture in America that can dazzle Europeans and feature in their architectural magazines and books. I have seen photos of it beside masterpieces by Le Corbusier. Incredibly it is not even the only building by the architect John Johansen to gain international prestige. It continues to attract art photographers from all over the world- and locally as well. Along with Frank Lloyd Wright's Price Tower, it is among Okahoma City's most famous modern buildings. So why the FUCK are they going to destroy it?!?

Why else. OKC is a very conservative city, and there has never been shortage of seething resentment against this idiosyncratic brutalist structure since the day it opened. The promise of a 20-floor skyscraper is simply a pretext to tear down the Stage Center- in all likelihood there will be no 20-floor condo tower for many years to come- if ever at all. Such a thing could be built almost anywhere in this flat wide open city! It seems to me the city just wanted to write off a public building from their expenses, to erase all that it represents being from the civic-minded swinging 60s, being a public space for the arts. What better thing to stomp on the arts with than what will certainly be an ugly, wonky shaped new-urbanist glass prism with cheap aluminum accents and built by this Rainey guy's development firm, by illegals. It will be a hideous monstrosity that rises high above everything around it as a reminder to the entire city that design ought to be as superficial, undignified and unavoidable as possible. The Stage Center can be called ugly and argumentative to, from those who don't like it- but at least it FITS ITS SURROUNDINGS being a playful colorful building located in a park, below the trees, of the appropriate size and evoking an abstract arty image for the group it was meant to serve. Nevertheless, despite what the locals may desire and no matter how much funding (backed by credit) a property developer can throw on the table, a building like Stage Center is not just the property of a city government when it has graced the covers of international publications and is known throughout the world by the art and design communities, photographers and enthusiasts the world over. It is a piece of American Modern Art, it belongs to our country's history and culture. It is my building just as much as it is Oklahoma's. And I am deeply offended, and enraged, that such a thing is being stolen from my country by pigs. Let's hope I can, like a number of people commenting on the article, rush over there to get a look at it and some pictures before it is buried by a throwaway society with no self-image.  Shame, Oklahoma City, shame.

The weather is not something I usually carry my complaints about to the internet. It's usually just something to make smalltalk about at work for whatever reason, mention how hot it is- usually this time of year I can't go for walks around my company's campus to the other building to get lunch- because the blazing hot 95+ heat and sun beating down on my causes me to sweat terribly (thank you very much- polyester shirts!) But this year is different, it's been different than any other year I've ever had since moving south in 2005

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To the point where it's starting to affect things in weird ways that I've never had problems with:

It was 78 today. That's it. In Charlotte, in JULY. I usually can count the number of times I've needed an umbrella- and usually for a freak shower on a morning when I remember to bring it. Today I needed it to go from the car to the office, from the office to lunch- back from lunch- and on the way home. That's 8am, 1pm, 130pm, and 530pm today. No big deal- just strange. My balcony, the one feature of my condo that sold it to me (besides loving the 1960 architecture) has been flooded so many times that the carpet is perpetually soggy, and has moss growing on it. I can't sit out there, and haven't been able to since June because of the damp furniture, the soaked carpet, and the bugs. It has rained every single day here for the past month. Every day- and not just sprinkles- today in point- 3 inches of rain in an on-off series of downpours that caused flooding throughout the state. This happened last week, and the week before. The sky has never been free of clouds since late May. It has been overcast, super dark bluegray or layered storm clouds of many textures and shapes and colors for two months. And the downpours on 4th of July week were so intense that most of the fireworks displays were cancelled- and one of them- the one that happens in Uptown- they thought the rain was over long enough to start the show, and then a downpour began halfway through. My balcony was flooded AGAIN that night, and they just resumed the show- I could hear the booming again- a few minutes after it was over because everyone is so used to it raining.

The interior of my apartment- with concrete floors and walls there is nowhere for the humidity to go- and it's so damn humid around here that it's inescapable. Even on a 78 degree day if you walk vigorously, you still sweat and feel awful. I have to run the AC even though the temps are comfortable- just to keep all the paper I have from getting moist.

Which means- that's right- I CAN'T DRAW. The fucking humidity is so bad I can't make lines on the paper without a super soft pencil, and nothing is turning out. I've never had it so humid that I couldn't manage a drawing. This has been going on over a month, with no end in sight. Apparently we've had our entire year's rainfall already with the year half over. Roads are actually collapsing into sinkholes all over town. Flooding has happened in suburbs that have never experienced floods- ever. Usually when records are being broken in summer it's about temperatures- average highs. Last year it was 90s for most of July and August. This year, 70s. And hardly any sun. I'm getting bored here people!