Bill Jackson Jr

@jacobinmag Why would a millionaire be expected to fundamentally alter a system that facilitated him becoming a millionaire?

@Davidvargz66 @AliAbunimah You DON’T see what’s going on. We don’t get to determine the means by which an occupied population resists its oppressor. The doomed population of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 were not held to this standard and neither should Hamas.

@War_Is_A_Racket @AliAbunimah I see whats going on...Ur ideological brainwashing makes up a morally loaded word called "resistance" & thento cover very different things, from sabotage of military targets to massacres of civilians & hostage taking...

This is always what “Israel” does when it is losing militarily. Satanic cowardice and depravity.

@Davidvargz66 @AliAbunimah Iran is responding to an illegal war of aggression launched against it by the US and Israel, aka the Epstein Coalition. The Gulf tyrannies don’t get to ride two horses moving in opposite directions at the same time: host forces hostile to Iran AND be bystanders.

@War_Is_A_Racket @AliAbunimah Under your logic, if we would be talking about what Iran is doing in this war, I would say, Well history of Israel v Iran conflict didnt begin this year! Yeah no shit. Would be a dumb low IQ deflection.

@Davidvargz66 @AliAbunimah What they should not have done on October 8th was genocide. This isn’t complicated. Israeli leaders on the other hand had other ideas…

@War_Is_A_Racket @AliAbunimah We can talk about history after.... But my Q was specifically about decision making Q after Oct 7, and u are switching it into a Q about ultimate historical blame. So History didn’t begin on October 7’ is not an answer to the Q of what Israel should have done on Oct 8.

@Davidvargz66 @AliAbunimah Hamas took prisoners of war, soldiers primarily. Hamas raped zero prisoners, zero. You’re confusing them with the Israelis who literally RIOTED when IDF soldiers were filmed doing just that to a prisoner and charged (before the charges were dropped of course).

@War_Is_A_Racket @AliAbunimah Murdering civilians, rape, hostage taking, or indiscriminate attacks? That is not the same as demanding “nice” resistance U think there is only resist nicely & uselessly OR resist brutally?Umm a middle ground: resistance can be forceful, unlawful...without targeting civilians.

Americans love to say "not in my name." As if empire needs their permission. As if they have not been signing the contract with every election, every shrug, every "I am not political." The bombs are absolutely in their name. The sanctions are in their name. The starving children are in their name. If you live off the spoils of an empire and do nothing, you do not get to claim clean hands.

There is a mythology the U.S. built around the American War in Vietnam. It goes like this: Young idealistic soldiers were sent into an unwinnable situation by confused politicians. They came home broken and unappreciated. It was a tragedy. A mistake. A lesson learned. Notice what that story does. It centers Americans. Their trauma. Their confusion. Their homecoming. Their feelings. In this story, the Vietnamese people are a backdrop. A jungle. An obstacle. An abstraction. Three million dead Vietnamese people are the scenery for a story about American self-discovery. They made hundreds of movies about Vietnam. The Deer Hunter. Apocalypse Now. Platoon. Full Metal Jacket. Born on the Fourth of July. Hamburger Hill. Count how many of them center a Vietnamese character with a full human life, a family, a name you remember after the credits roll. They turned our genocide into their coming-of-age story. They lost the war and still managed to make themselves the main character. And then, with extraordinary arrogance, they put their soldiers' names on a wall in Washington and call it a memorial, as if the dead to be mourned were the people who flew 10,000 miles to do the killing. Where is the wall for our three million? There isn't one. Because in their telling, we were never quite real enough to mourn.

They never forgave Vietnam for winning. They never forgave Cuba for surviving. They never forgave Iran for revolting. They never forgave anyone who looked them in the eye and said: No. That "No" is the most dangerous word on Earth. Use it.

In 1972, Nixon bombed Hanoi at Christmas. Operation Linebacker II. Twelve days. Hundreds of B-52 sorties. Targets included hospitals, residential areas, and Bach Mai Hospital, a civilian medical facility struck multiple times, killing doctors and patients. The world protested. The images were everywhere. Even American allies expressed horror. Nixon called it "peace with honor." The Vietnamese called it what it was: the desperate escalation of a power that knew it had lost, trying to bomb its way to a negotiating position that would allow it to leave without complete humiliation. It didn't work. The Paris Peace Accords were signed six weeks later, on essentially the same terms that had been available before the Christmas bombing. Fifty years later, the grandchildren of the people who survived that bombing are signing contracts to build the infrastructure that will power Vietnam's future. The grandchildren of the pilots are writing think pieces about concerning partnerships. History's verdict on who made the right decisions is already written. It was written on April 30, 1975. It is being written again today, in the language of kilowatts and construction contracts and sovereign infrastructure decisions made without asking Washington's permission. The arc of this story does not bend toward American preferences. It bends toward Vietnamese determination. It always has.

"Hollywood brings soft power." Yes. That's the problem. Soft power is not innocent. Soft power is not neutral. Soft power is not simply culture flowing naturally across borders because people find it interesting. Soft power is the ability to make your version of events the default version. To make your perspective feel like the objective one. To make your heroes feel like humanity's heroes and your victims feel like nobody in particular. Hollywood didn't just make movies about Vietnam. Hollywood made movies about Vietnam that were distributed in every country on earth, subtitled into every language, taught in film schools globally, celebrated with Academy Awards, and absorbed by billions of people who had no other frame of reference for what happened there. And in every single one of those movies, the Vietnamese are either villains, victims with no interiority, or simply bodies. This is what soft power does. It doesn't need to lie. It just needs to choose who gets to be human and who doesn't. It just needs to decide whose grief is cinematically interesting and whose death is background noise. And then it scales that choice across the entire world for fifty years. You called it fascinating. I call it the second war. The one they actually won. Not in the jungles of Vietnam. In the cinemas of London, Paris, São Paulo, and Tokyo. They lost the military war. They won the narrative one. And you, sitting wherever you are, having watched those films, absorbing that framing, calling the question of our three million dead "complex," you are the evidence that the second war worked.

Do you know what was happening in Vietnam in 1968, the year Full Metal Jacket depicts? The Tet Offensive. 77,000 PAVN/VC fighters launching coordinated attacks on more than a hundred cities and outposts simultaneously. A military operation of extraordinary coordination and courage that shocked the American military establishment, devastated American public support for the war, and effectively broke the political will that was sustaining the U.S. intervention. Seventy-seven thousand fighters. Coordinated across a hundred cities. Against the most powerful military on earth. Planned and executed by Vietnamese people with names and minds and histories and families and a strategy that ultimately worked. Stanley Kubrick's film, set in that same year, depicts Vietnamese people as: a teenage sniper and a sex worker. And when I make this observation, your contribution to the conversation is to quote the sex worker's line. The gap between what Vietnamese people were doing in 1968 and what American cinema allowed them to be, that gap is the argument. That gap is the erasure. That gap is what three million dead look like when they've been processed through a cultural machine that needed them to be less than they were. You quoted the gap. You thought you were making a point.

Thank you Hezbollah Thank you Ansarallah Thank you Hamas Thank you Iran Thank you for punishing Israel Thank you for doing what others are not willing to do

The word "terror" has a legal and moral definition. It means the deliberate use of violence against civilian populations to achieve political ends. The point of the violence is not primarily military. It is psychological. It is to break will, to induce fear, to make the cost of resistance feel unbearable. That is what the word means. Apply that definition without prejudice. From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. military dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Laos, which is more than the U.S. dropped on Germany and Japan combined during World War II. Laos was not at war with the United States. It was a neutral country. The bombing was secret. Congress didn't authorize it. The American public did not know about it. Today, 50 years later, unexploded cluster munitions still kill and maim dozens of people in Laos every year, many of them children. That is what "collateral damage" looks like across a generation: A child loses a hand in a field because a weapon dropped before their parents were born is still active in the soil. The United States developed and deployed the "double tap" drone strike protocol. A practice in which a target is struck, and then when rescuers, family members, and bystanders arrive to help the wounded and recover the dead, the site is struck again. From Pakistan to Yemen, and most recently in Iran, the pattern is familiar. Think about what that means tactically. The purpose of striking rescuers is not military. Rescuers are not combatants. The purpose is to make rescue itself dangerous, to ensure that the social fabric that holds communities together, the impulse to help the wounded, becomes a vector for death. That is terror. That is the word. Applied accurately. The United States used white phosphorus in Fallujah. White phosphorus burns at 815 degrees Celsius. It burns through clothing, through skin, through muscle, to bone. It reignites on contact with oxygen. Water does not extinguish it. It was used in a city of 300,000 civilians. The Pentagon initially denied it, then acknowledged it, then classified it as a legitimate weapon. Doctors at Fallujah General Hospital reported a pattern of birth defects and cancers in subsequent years that researchers found statistically extraordinary. Babies born without eyes. Without limbs. With multiple heads. The contamination of a gene pool. That is what white phosphorus does to a civilian population. The line between terrorism and counter-terrorism, in practice, in the historical record, has always come down to one thing: air power. The side with the air force calls the other side terrorists. The side without the air force has no word for what is being done to them that will be heard in the international press.

There is something deeply grotesque about a society that calls itself "the land of the free" while operating the largest prison system on Earth. That calls itself "defender of democracy" while sabotaging elections abroad. That cries about "terror" while dropping bombs on schools and weddings. You try to point this out, and somehow you become the extremist.

You want to know the most successful American export. It is not technology. It is not culture. It is not democracy. It is denial. Denial so thick you can show them a war crime in real time and they will explain to you why it is necessary.

To all the sunni arab morons who fell for the anti assad propoganda, congrats.

Americans love to ask, "Why do they hate us." As if the answer is not obvious. You bomb their countries. You steal their resources. You call their dead "collateral." You starve their children with sanctions, then film commercials about charity. The real question is not why others hate you. The real question is how you still love yourselves.

Every time the U.S. threatens sanctions on a small country, remember Vietnam. Every time they fund a coup, remember Vietnam. Every time they call a sovereign choice "communism" or "authoritarianism," remember Vietnam. They tried ALL of it on us first. It didn’t work then. The playbook is old. And it’s broken.

There is a particular type of American who, when confronted with Vietnam, says: "We could have won if the politicians hadn't tied our hands." Let us examine this claim with the respect it deserves. Which is none. At peak deployment, the United States had 543,000 troops in Vietnam. It flew more than 5.2 million combat sorties. It used weapons so advanced that Vietnamese forces had never seen anything like them. It had total air superiority for most of the war. It had naval dominance of the entire coastline. It had satellite intelligence, chemical defoliation, electronic surveillance. It had the full industrial capacity of the wealthiest nation in the history of the world pointed at a country where most people farmed rice by hand. And it lost. Not barely lost. Not lost-on-a-technicality. Lost so completely that the last image of American presence in Vietnam is a helicopter on a rooftop in Saigon and desperate people climbing the walls trying to get on it as the American empire evacuated its failure in real time. Broadcast live. On television. Watched by the entire world. "They tied our hands." With what? What hand was left untied? What weapon was withheld? What tactic was forbidden? The truth is too simple and too brutal for that excuse to cover: You cannot win a war against people willing to fight forever for their own land. You were never going to win. The politicians didn't lose Vietnam. The logic of empire lost Vietnam. Because empire always eventually loses when it meets people who refuse to accept that they are supposed to lose.

Capitalism in its final form does not produce order. It produces anti-order. A hyperactive concentration of evil so total that it no longer even needs ideology in the old sense. It does not need citizens. It needs users. It does not need loyalty. It needs dependency. It does not need belief. It needs stimulation. That is why Trump feels so inevitable. He is the perfect sovereign for a civilization that has converted politics into addiction and apocalypse into entertainment. He does not govern contradictions. He monetizes them. Race, war, collapse, humiliation, tariffs, betrayal, revenge, scandal, panic. All of it becomes fuel. He is not the restoration of American greatness. He is the influencer of imperial decomposition.

They called Hồ Chí Minh a tyrant. A man who spent decades in exile, in prison, living in poverty, organizing resistance to colonial occupation. Who wrote poetry. Who quoted the American Declaration of Independence in Vietnam’s own declaration of independence, word for word, because he believed those words meant something. He believed America, of all countries, would understand what it meant to fight a colonial power for the right to self-governance. America sent bombers. Think about the layers of that humiliation. A Vietnamese revolutionary quoted Jefferson and Madison to appeal to American values. And the American response was napalm. Because it was never about freedom. It was never about democracy. It was about control. It was about which countries get to be self-determining and which countries exist to serve someone else's interests. It was about making sure that when Washington said "jump," the government in Hanoi would ask "how high." Hồ Chí Minh was not willing to ask that question. So they tried to destroy him. They destroyed nothing. He died in 1969, before the war ended. And the country he gave his life for won anyway. His face is still on the currency. Theirs is not.