Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky

This is an enlightening book about the American mass-media propaganda of the 1960s through 1980s. Even though it's old it still applies to contemporary issues, as Iraq has often been compared to Vietnam (although Vietnam had a much higher magnitude of significance). What's most similar is how the government used the media to make a strong case for occupying these territories and proceeding to terrorize their populations for the dogmas of "freedom, justice, equality, etc.", when all-the-while they were really just masquerading as puppets for corporations, who ordered the delivery boys to fetch the goods- namely resources, cheap labor, and more populations for globalization and consumerism. 

The book starts with the U.S. funding of terrorist regimes, such as the ones in Central America during the 1980s. It outlines how the media ignored the terror imposed by governments that were beneficial to U.S. investors (Guatemala, El Salvador), yet were critical of Nicaragua, a country that just wanted to govern without U.S. corporate interests. Then it briefly dances around eastern Europe before devoting a very large portion to the outright massacre of southeast Asia. Vietmam is covered first, then the heartbreaking destruction of Cambodia, an innocent country that had nothing to do with anything before the United States deliberately destroyed every single village with the excuse that refugees from Nam were hiding there. As I read this, I was reminded of a scene in Apocalypse Now where these Cambodian children were huddled around a traitorous American ex-captain who was hiding there to escape the horror of Vietnam (ultimately ending up in an even more horrifying place). The children seemed to be happy as they looked in on another dubious American captain that had been caught trying to assassinate this man. To him the traitorous captain read various excerpts from Time magazine that were being published about the war, and, needless to say, the excerpts about our rightful place in the area was stupendously bogus.