Re: [Marxism] Marla Ruzicka/Tom Dooley

["acpollack2@xxxxxxxx" <acpollack2@xxxxxxxx>]

If you're around my age (49) you may have been assigned in school Tom Dooley's 
autobiographical work "The Night They Burned the Mountain," touting his heroic 
work as a doctor in Southeast Asia in the face of godless communism.  The work 
was a guaranteed tear-jerker for junior high kids, combining his 
Schweitzer-like doctoring, the horrific commie atrocities, and his tragic early 
death from cancer.

Later of course we found out Dooley was a lying self-promoter, who ratted out 
the villagers he was tending to the CIA, and who abetted the CIA's campaign to 
create a refugee flood out of the North in 1954. And needless to say the 
alleged Viet Cong atrocities were all lies.

Ruzicka was no Dooley; there's a big gap between a passive accomplice used as a 
dupe for prowar propaganda, and an eager, active participant in creating a 
humanitarian face for war crimes. But NGOs have been warning for years now how 
their work in Afghanistan and Iraq is tainted by any association with the 
military, the most extreme (and correct) position being that any such contact 
is right out.

Dooley's life should serve as a lesson about how "humanitarian aid" is used, 
and would-be Ruzickas have the obligation to expose the real source of 
humanitarian catastrophes: imperialism itself.

(By the way in the bios on the web there's an interesting analysis by some 
about divergence between conservative US Catholics' approach to the war in that 
period and what they call the "New Leader" crowd, ex-leftie anticommies who 
wanted to build a "secular, pluralist democracy.")

_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism