Viet Nam Human Rights
Vietnam War: A lesson for America
3/5/16
It’s
the 41st anniversary of the Victory day of April 30, 1975, the
day the Vietnamese people, led by the Communist Party of Vietnam, were finally
victorious in the long just struggle for national independence and unification against
the United States and its
puppet regime in Saigon.
The
issue were hit by the Guardian in huge type on the front page: “VICTORY IN
VIETNAM!” The lead article began: “Vietnam is completely liberated. After 35
years of continuous heroic struggle against Japanese, French and American
imperialism, the Vietnamese people from north to south are free and
independent.”
The day after the U.S. debacle the name of
Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital where the American command was situated
until being unceremoniously, was changed to Ho Chi Minh City in honor of the
great leader of the Indochinese people who died in 1969. Hanoi, to the north,
remained the capital of reunified Vietnam. Vietnam
never receive war reparations payments from the U.S. for the massive loss of life
and destruction.
Vietnam
at the time had a population of about 52 million situated on both sides of the
17th parallel, temporarily dividing North and South Vietnam. Over four million
were killed in Washington’s aggressive war upon a very poor largely peasant
society beginning in the mid-1950s when the U.S. took over from the defeated
French colonialist armies. France had occupied and oppressed Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia (Indochina) for over 100 years, then it became America’s turn. U.S.
bombings killed at least a million more people in Laos and Cambodia.
For an American society fearfully fixated on
a few domestic terrorist incidents such as the Boston Marathon killings or the
so-called “underwear” bomber, the immensity of the deaths caused by their own
government in Iraq, Vietnam and so many other countries, is evidently
incomprehensible and thus unimportant.
Most
Americans, except for families of the dead, veterans and war opponents, never
think about the Vietnam War — one of history’s most unequal and vicious. Young
Americans in general have received only a bowdlerized trace of information at
school. At the same time, the lives of many Americans who protested this
shameful war — civilians plus antiwar GIs and draft resisters — were largely
radicalized and changed forever. Now in their sixties through eighties and
older, they continue to this day to protest war and injustice. For some,
details of this war remain indelibly etched in memory.
Droves
of Americans, including a substantial number of former soldiers, now visit Vietnam every year. Many tour the
war museums, the old battlefields and tunnels used by peasants and fighters to
escape from or to attack American forces. The Vietnamese treat such visitors
courteously, without a sign of enmity, which is quite remarkable considering
the horrors perpetrated upon a country that survived more explosive tonnage
than the U.S. deployed during World War II in Europe and Asia-Pacific —
15,500,000 tons of air and ground munitions during the Vietnam War; 6,000,000
tons in WW II.
U.S.
combat deaths from 1955-1975 were 47,424, nearly all in the latter part of the
war. Officially, Afghanistan is Washington’s longest war at 14 years, but
unofficially Vietnam is six years longer. In time, Afghanistan may live up to its
dubious designation since the U.S. government continues to delay full
withdrawal of combat forces.
It
may be of interest to learn that the total number of American combat deaths in
76 wars from 1775 to 2015 (including all the dead on both sides during the
Civil War) amounts to 846,163. That’s less than the UN-verified total of a
million Iraqis, half of whom were young children, who died from 1991 to 2003
due to killer sanctions. This was followed by another million dead Iraqis from
the 2003-2011 war.
Compare
the U.S. total of combat deaths in World War II (291,557) to the number of
Russian combat and civilian deaths (27 million). There were no civilian deaths
in the U.S, which has not suffered war damage from foreign invasions since the
British War of 1812-15. Most of Russia was flattened east of the Ural Mountains
in WWII. In Washington’s 1950-1953 war against North Korea, every city and most
towns were destroyed by U.S. carpet bombings. Several millions were killed. The
U.S. suffered 33,686 combat deaths.
Militarism,
a principal element in U.S. society, thrives on unequal wars where the weapons,
technology and communications of the “enemy” are far inferior and where it is
impossible for an inch of U.S. territory to experience the footprint of a
foreign soldier. Since the Civil War the American people, landscape and
infrastructure has been untouched by war.
This
is not as good as some think. America is the world’s principal mass killer
since the end of WWII but its people are so accustomed to wars that cause them
no pain and suffering that they easily support, or are indifferent to, unjust
aggression in the name of protecting America. Ironically, there’s hardly any
need to protect America, enclosed between two oceans in an impenetrable
fortress. But government fear mongering about the nation’s vulnerability is a
most useful lie intended to perpetuate Washington’s insistence upon functioning
as global overlord and military superpower.
America
experienced an earthshaking lesson in Vietnam — “Stop your unjust wars of
aggression!” —but Washington learned nothing from its humiliating defeat except
to shift its battlefields of choice from Southeast Asia to Southwest Asia
(i.e., the Middle East).
The
U.S. went on to fight in Iraq three times and impose long sanctions in 25
continuous years; in Afghanistan the Pentagon has been fighting for 14 years
and has achieved nothing; in Libya the U.S. bombed for less than a year but
managed to spark a civil war and open the door to the Islamic State in the
process. Many smaller incursions have taken place since losing the Vietnam war.
For instance, the Obama Administration for years took actions to overthrow
Syrian President Assad, and all the White House has to has to show for it is a
jihad war led by the Islamic State and the al-Nusra Front (the Syrian branch of
al-Qaeda).
The U.S. government may not ever learn the
lessons of the Vietnam War, compelled as it is by a socio-economic political
system to create a better world first and foremost for the 1%, and empty
rhetoric and wars for the rest of us. But we hope the lessons learned from the
1960-1975 era of uprisings for social change are not entirely forgotten but
revived, improved and in time put into practice at a much higher and decisive
level./.
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All comments [ 10 ]
Vietnam never received war reparations payments from the U.S. for the massive loss of life and destruction. So injustice!
If Vietnam had bombed the United States for fifteen years bringing death to some three million Americans in cities, towns and countryside across America during a brutal occupation by a half-million heavily armed Vietnamese soldiers, there is no way that the US would not have brought Vietnam before the International Court of Justice.
Lesson learned!
America is the world’s principal mass killer since the end of WWII but its people are so accustomed to wars that cause them no pain and suffering.
Deck Hero14: The ICC would have surely ruled in favor of the US plaintiff and against Vietnam.
The U.S. learned nothing from its humiliating defeat except to shift its battlefields of choice from Southeast Asia to the Middle East.
For the vast majority of Westerners, that is to say both US Americans and their relatives (imagined or real) in Europe, the war against Vietnam was a brutal military conflict waged by the United States.
Briefly described, the Vietnam Syndrome is a creation of the hormonally dysfunctional among the US ruling class, its acolytes and functionaries.
Yes, there is always a Vietnam Syndrome in the U.S.
Obama administration may not have learned that lesson carefully, and nơ they have made a lot of mistakes around the world.
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