Vietnam War Is A Study In US Crimes

[Karmadillo]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/050300-102.htm

Published on Wednesday, May 3, 2000
Vietnam War Is A Study In US Crimes
by Robert Jensen

Twenty-five years ago on Sunday, the last helicopters took off from the roof of an apartment building near the U.S. embassy in Saigon -- a powerful image of Americans defeated, getting out just before the Vietnamese we fought against took over the city from the Vietnamese we supported.

But there�s one big problem with that symbol and that memory: We won the Vietnam War.

U.S. policymakers have secured a huge propaganda victory in shaping perceptions about that war and, paradoxically, one of the propaganda achievements has been convincing people that we lost. The reason for the seemingly strange strategy is simple: Putting forward the idea that we lost obscures both the real reason we fought the war and diverts attention from U.S. crimes during the war.

Despite the claims of U.S. leaders, we did not fight in Vietnam to establish democracy. Instead, we fought in Vietnam to derail democracy. After the Vietnamese defeat of French colonialism in 1954, the Geneva Conference called for free elections in 1956. But the United States and its client regime in South Vietnam blocked those elections. Why? In his memoirs, President Eisenhower explained honestly: In free elections, the socialist government of Ho Chi Minh would have won by an overwhelming margin. As is typical, the United States is all for elections in other countries, if they turn out the way we want.

The central goal of U.S. policymakers in Vietnam was to make sure that an independent socialist course of development did not succeed. U.S. leaders relied on Cold War rhetoric about the communist monolith but really feared that a �virus� of such independent development could infect the rest of Asia, perhaps even becoming a model for all the Third World. What might happen if all nations emerging from colonialism believed they had a right to decide their own futures, outside the U.S. orbit?

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[msongs]

1. there he goes again, spreading truth against fabricated history lol nt

[coalition_unwilling]

2. Few Americans are aware of the fact that when Ho Chi Minh

marched into Hanoi in 1945 after the surrender of the Japanese, he spoke to the assembled masses and quoted from . . . the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Even fewer Americans are aware that the OSS (the pre-cursor to the CIA) cooperated with the Viet Minh from 1942-45 in operations against the Japanese. First U.S. fatality in Vietnam was an OSS officer, IIRC, killed in 1945.

[jaysunb]

3. Does this make me a "criminal" for having fought there ?

[coalition_unwilling]

4. You were an instrument of the criminals, not a criminal yourself. (Unless

you were court-martialed.)

Do you feel you were a 'criminal' for having fought there?

[jaysunb]

7. rhetorical reply to the author of the piece.

I pretty much understood what I was doing when I got drafted. There's plenty of guilt and remorse, especially today when I remember those that didn't come home with me, but I do not believe my conscription renders me complicit in the crime.

[coalition_unwilling]

11. I have been tearing up all day off and on and one of the DU threads

caused me to crack my Stanley Karnow 'Vietnam' history and start re-reading Neil Sheehan's "A Bright, Shining Lie." Just so sad. Karnow calls it an 'unspeakable tragedy' and a war that "no one won." Sheehan's title speaks for itself.

I ran into Ron Kovic at Occupy Los Angeles back in November and he told me that the war caused as many or more internal, unseen wounds as it did outward visible ones. Along those lines, you were far more a victim of criminals than you were complicit in the crime, imo.

But there is a special place in hell reserved for McNamara and Kissinger.

[bhikkhu]

5. True enough, but a little skewed

The fear that led to criminal and anti-democratic action on the part of the US was not fear that nations emerging from colonialism would come to believe that they had a right to decide their own future; it was fear that they would be swallowed up as proxies in the much larger communist vs capitalist game. Or so went the grand narrative of the time. Whether the narrative was accurate or rational is debatable, but the reasoning of those involved is clear enough, and doesn't need to be rewritten as something that it was not.

[whathehell]

6. That was my understanding as well. n/t

[Karmadillo]

8. The Threat of a Good Example

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_Example.html

THE THREAT OF A GOOD EXAMPLE
NOAM CHOMSKY

<Edit>

As far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua could disappear and nobody would notice. The same is true of El Salvador. But both have been subjected to murderous assaults by the US, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars.

There's a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, "why not us?"

This was even true in Indochina, which is pretty big and has some significant resources. Although Eisenhower and his advisers ranted a lot about the rice and tin and rubber, the real fear was that if the people of Indochina achieved independence and justice, the people of Thailand would emulate it, and if that worked, they'd try it in Malaya, and pretty soon Indonesia would pursue an independent path, and by then a significant area of the Grand Area would have been lost.

If you want a global system that's subordinated to the needs of US investors, you can't let pieces of it wander off. It's striking how clearly this is stated in the documentary record-even in the public record at times. Take Chile under Allende.

Chile is a fairly big place, with a lot of natural resources, but again, the United States wasn't going to collapse if Chile became independent. Why were we so concerned about it? According to Kissinger, Chile was a "virus" that would "infect" the region with effects all the way to Italy.

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[jaysunb]

9. Agreed, but there were many other reasons and intrigue involved

The OSS/CIA and others had their own reasons for promoting this narrative. Many made millions with the heroin trade of the so called "Golden Triangle." Friendly governments would have been corrupt puppets of their benefactors, creating a "golden goose" unlike any other.

[cliffordu]

10. Well.....

Shit happens.

[Karmadillo]

12. Kick