The Real History of a Time

My father used to say that the history of a time can’t be written until all the bodies are buried. There’s definitely something to that, and the little bits that do peek out often reveal the shape of an underlying mass of buried secrets. It’s enough to turn you into a conspiracy theorist.

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The Gigantic Elephant and the Tiny Mouse

In The Year of The Pig one of the striking moments, which I focused on, [stderr] is when several of the people promoting the US’ involvement in Vietnam used the same construction for their arguments; it was clear that they were tapped into a common source – presumably what are now called “talking points memos” produced by government agencies in order to get out a consistent “message” to the public.

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