The Cold War

Note on Human Consciousness: SLA Marshall's study.

25 June 1950—present Korean War

That's right. "To the present." "North Korea unilaterally withdrew from the armistice on May 27, 2009, thus returning to a de jure state of war." The war is still officially going on. The scumbags.

Documentary. Movies: Pork Chop Hill. The Bridges at Toko-Ri The Hunters.

And here we have the first proxy war of the Cold War instead of having a hot one. The brand new UN was the United State's proxy. Part of the reason Truman fired MacArthur was that MacArthur wanted the war to go total. "There is no substitute for victory." Well, if the other side has nukes too, there'd better be a substitute. So, both sides are learning how to do war through proxies.

November 1, 1955[1] – April 30, 1975. The Vietnam War.

And here was the United States second proxy, the Vietnamese. The South Koreans and Australians are two countries that I know of so far who also contributed troops to this war. I believe that the general assessment has been that the United States picked a bad proxy in this war. The Vietnamese it allied with where too associated with the old French colonial establishment to ever have pleased the Vietnamese people as a whole. But, as per Malcome Muggeridge's observation, America's first journalists there had already assigned the white and black hats, so the United States was stuck with what it got.

(The next proxy, the Afghan people, where much more committed and effective. Some would now say too much so!)

I'm not going to list documentaries from here on because we are still so close to these new wars that ideological filters can still blur our perceptions of what went on.

The same is true of movies, but I include some here for the period images they contain: Tunnel Rats,, 84C MoPic, Bat*21, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill..

To know what really went on, there are still the problems C.S. Lewis and Malcome Muggeridge noted and the problem of state secrets like Enigma. To repeat: on-scene news reports and immediate commentary on them contain the least amount of information, and I'll add now: probably the most wrong information.

I will mention one other thing, though. Vietnam was the first war in which the rising empathic consciousness of the modern era was specifically turned against its possessors as a military strategy.

Yes, there had always been propaganda in both news print and movies. And yes, truth has always been "the first casualty of war." But propaganda was always been mediated through its publication and distribution channels. The propaganda could always be discounted because of its source. In Vietnam, information was being transmitted live, or live with a delayed feed. It now had an immediacy that could not be easily discounted even if it was the result of one kind of manipulation or another.

This was the first war in which the sociopathic consciousness of war was broadcast directly into the living rooms of empathic consciousness by war reporters with modern communications equipment. And the United State's military, operating in a highly bureaucratic mode at this time, was almost completely oblivious to what was going on.

The other side specifically tailored their military strategy to make use of this. After the Tet offensive, the North Vietnamese were militarily beaten but not psychologically beaten, while the United States what not military beaten, but was psychologically beaten. The North Vietnamese general who commanded the Tet Offensive had calculated on exactly that. He had rolled the dice one last time, and won. (That commander, by the way, was NOT Gen. Giap, who was otherwise directing the overall strategy.)

Gen. Giap was a student of Sun Tzu. William Westmoreland was "a corporation executive in uniform" (Stanley Karnow.) The kill ratio is a metric of battle success. Effective war strategies often result in high kill ratios. But the reverse is not necessarily true. Having a high kill ratio does not mean that an effective war strategy is being pursued. When kill ratios are used bureaucratically, they are entirely deceptive.

The United State's military would later learn from all this and so back to school and re-learn all the classics of military science, including Sun Tzu. And it would later add media management (restriction of reporting and embedding of reporters) to its tools of state secrecy when fighting wars. Empathic consciousness is unarmored when compared to sociopathic consciousness. It needs to be protected when a war is fought. Controlling the information flow is how empathic consciousness is protected. The wars of the future will be information wars. Wars about the flow and interpretation of information. Psy-ops wars. If truth was always the first casualty of war, in the future it will become even more so.

January 31, 1968 to Sept. 30, 1968. The Tet Offensive. Here is one documentary.

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