This is from one of the best documentaries that I have ever seen, named "Hearts and Minds". The imagery I've collected here is from this part of the documentary.

Even though the documentary itself displays the imagery in a completely different light, I felt I had to save the imagery and the dialogue together as pictures, as the stills say so much.

This film is from 1974, just as the USA was in the Vietnam war. The documentary displays both gung-ho pro-USA sentiments and contrasts them with what the southern Vietnamese populace experienced in the shape of what the military industrial complex of the USA hit them with, combined with how very young American males were thrown into the unknown, fired on by jingoism and orders from old, white males.

I've never seen a moving image sequence that better shows the effects of the patriarchy, jingoism, propaganda and war: those killed live far away, but at home, we really don't see that.

The USA is not the only place where this happens. Where I live, in Sweden, we produce so many weapons that our country is actually the biggest arms-supplier in the world, considering the amount and breadth of arms we created, in contrast with the number of people that live here.

The end of the documentary is enormously breathtaking to me: as Uncle Sam walks around saying "it's not all bad", it naturally begs the questions "what does he mean by that?" and "why doesn't he instead say "almost everything is good"?

As for General William Westmoreland, his words speak for themselves; as Donald Trump is ready to take the White House and the USA on as his next tragicomical building project, the distance between 1974 and 2016 has seldom been smaller.

Westmoreland's words were almost universally condemned when this documentary was released, 42 years ago. Today, Donald Trump has a voter base that consists of tens of millions, who side-step his patriarchal, racistic, jingoistic, stupid and further his politics, if you can call them that.

Randy Floyd, a Vietnam veteran who throughout the documentary sits on a porch in Norman, Oklahoma, and talks about his time in the military, how he dropped bombs on the south Vietnamese citizens (both military and civilians), and how that contrasted with what he was actually learned before being shipped off to war, also speaks volumes.

I guess I'm trying to say: take the power back. Remember the resistance of the 1970s, of rebels in France, of the underground resistence in some countries against the nazis during the 1930s and 1940s, critizise everything you hear from both our politicians and fellow peers and remember that just one person can do something about almost anything, once their mind is in place - as Noam Chomsky once said, "Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."