What is Namnesia Antidote?

What is Namnesia Antidote?

Namnesia: forgetting the lessons of Vietnam.

Vietnambien Syndrome: sleepwalking through war with delusions of inevitable victory reminiscent of Vietnam (also called Vietnambulism, a type of somnambulism peculiar to neo-conservatives).

When a fellow poster, anniefey, made a post at the TV News Lies Board about these two syndromes I was struck by the pervasiveness of this type of thinking when it comes to the occupation of Iraq. The warmongers in the administration and Congress not only suffer from Namnesia but have gone out of their way to spread the infection. When George "War Criminal" Bush talks about not repeating the mistakes of Vietnam, he is stating our error was withdrawing prematurely and leaving only 58,168 known dead Americans. He is determined to "stay the course" indefinitely in Iraq, no matter the cost in human lives and resources. When anniefey made her post it was with two unhappy coincidences; the five-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion and the occasion of the 4,000th American causality. We had once again failed to learn from history and were doomed to repeating the same errors.

Posts on this blog begin on March 23rd. In 2008, this was both Easter and the date of the aforementioned 4,000th causality. The names posted on this blog are from the Vietnam War Memorial Wall as extracted from a now defunct website. They are a matter of public record. Any errors in the extraction are mine and I apologize in advance for them. While a laudable goal would be to have a posting for everyone whose name appears on The Wall, it is just not feasible for a one-man operation. What I posted for each day of the year are two lists of these names; the first commemorating the date of death and the second celebrating the birth of those who gave their lives. I encourage anyone to post comments on these individuals, when such a comment is posted, I hope to in the future, create an individual post with more detailed information for that person. This will give family, friends and supporters the chance to collectively honor and remember these fallen service men.

The information on this blog will also appear in my This Day in History blog daily posts at some future timeframe. I hope this double posting will give some additional exposure to these men and women while aiding in combating Namnesia.