John Pilger on Ken Burn's 'Vietnam War': The killing of history

John Pilger on Ken Burn's 'Vietnam War': The killing of history.

What is known in the US as "the left" has effectively allied with the darkest recesses of institutional power, notably the Pentagon and the CIA, to see off a peace deal between Trump and Vladimir Putin and to reinstate Russia as an enemy, on the basis of no evidence of its alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The true scandal is the insidious assumption of power by sinister war-making vested interests for which no American voted. The rapid ascendancy of the Pentagon and the surveillance agencies under Obama represented an historic shift of power in Washington. Daniel Ellsberg rightly called it a coup. The three generals running Trump are its witness.

All of this fails to penetrate those "liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics", as Luciana Bohne noted memorably. Commodified and market-tested, "diversity" is the new liberal brand, not the class people serve regardless of their gender and skin colour: not the responsibility of all to stop a barbaric war to end all wars.

Emphasis Mine

In the matter of the Deep State, we would find ourselves allied with Donald Trump.

I would have to agree with the Right that the Left is now an impediment to social discourse. The Left has been co-opted by the elites.

When the Left forgot its class roots in the Proletariat, the Left became much easier to co-opt. There is seductiveness in achieving change through reform rather than revolution. The Liberal is the enemy of the Proletariat.