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| Photo by Nick Ut |
Vietnamese children fleeing an American-ordered
napalm attack on the village of Trang Bang, 1972.
This famous photograph has embarrassed a lot of American patriots. Not because they care the slightest bit about what Americans did to the Vietnamese people, but because it revealed our war crimes to the world. Back in 1972 the U.S. Corporate Mafia Government didn’t have the almost total control of the press that it enjoys today.
Behind the children in the above photo, in that mass of gray smoke in the background, lie the burning, napalmed bodies of their parents, their brothers and sisters and friends. Americans inflicted horrific suffering on innocent children and civilian people all over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos for 13 years. Trang Bang was just one of countless napalm attacks, very few of which were ever publicized in Pulitzer Prize winning photographs. There were thousands of My Lai massacres all over Vietnam, and the U.S. Army routinely photographed its own war crimes.
And yet, incredibly, there are still many Neanderthal apologists for the Vietnam War who seem to think we can evade accepting responsibility for all this evil. One of their tactics is to blame the South Vietnamese air force and army for attacks like the one at Trang Bang. Never mind that American pilots routinely butchered and burned alive Vietnamese women and children in countless villages all over Vietnam. Never mind that the United States dropped over three times as many tons of explosives on the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian people as it dropped in all theaters of World War II combined, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Sweep all that under the rug. If one of the rarely-publicized atrocities like Trang Bang can be blamed on our South Vietnamese puppets, then many grossly immoral American patriots can feel a whole lot better about all of it.
Well, suppose this particular mass-murder was carried out by one of our South Vietnamese servants. The fact remains that South Vietnamese pilots were trained by Americans, the jets they flew were built by Americans, the napalm they dropped was made by Americans, and the South Vietnamese military obeyed the orders of their American masters.
Honest people will have no trouble admitting that the napalm attacks on the civilian men, women and children of all villages like Trang Bang were fundamentally American attacks. Whether or not any particular atrocity was carried out directly by American pilots or soldiers, they were always ordered by American military commanders. Every bloody, nightmarish atrocity was just one of countless others, each a part of the whole, evil, racist American terror campaign against those courageous Vietnamese people who dared to fight for their freedom and independence from America.
But pro-government American patriots are pathologically dishonest people. They’ll go to their moldy graves convinced that we had some sort of God-given right to commit our racist war crimes against Vietnamese women and children.
“Until we go through it ourselves, until our people cower in the shelters of New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere while the buildings collapse overhead and burst into flames, and dead bodies hurtle about and, when it is over for the day or the night, emerge in the rubble to find some of their dear ones mangled, their homes gone, their hospitals, churches, schools demolished — only after that gruesome experience will we realize what we are inflicting on the people of Indochina...”
— William Shirer
author
1973
Kim Phuc, the little girl in the center of the photo above, was one of the survivors of the napalm attack on her village. Many years later she described her experience:
“I remember I was nine years old, just a child. That night we heard the Viet Cong were coming and that they wanted to use the village. And then in the daytime, the soldiers came in and there was fighting.
“We were so scared. I remember my family decided to seek refuge in the temple, the pagoda, because we thought it was a holy place. We could seek refuge there and we could be safe. I did not hear the explosion but I saw the fire around me.
“And suddenly my clothes were burnt off by fire. I saw the fire over my body and especially my arm. I remember at that moment I thought I would be ugly, and not normal like other children.
“I was so scared because I did not see anyone around me. Just fire and smoke. I was crying and I was running out of the fire and the miracle was my feet were not burned. I kept running and running and running.
“My parents could not get past the fire, so they turned back to the temple and they sheltered there.
“My aunt and two cousins died. One was three years old and one just nine months — two babies.
“After that I passed out.”
The American napalm caused Kim to suffer 3rd degree burns over more than half her body. The photographer, Nick Ut, rushed her to a hospital and she subsequently endured fourteen months of painful rehabilitation. To this day the scars cause her physical pain, but she has found a way to be free of the emotional pain through forgiveness and religion.
Related pages
American Genocide of the Vietnamese people
Book review:
The Phoenix Program
The Phoenix Program, My Lai and the “Tiger Cages”
American Genocide of the Laotian people
American Genocide of the Cambodian People
Neighborhood Bully: American Militarism
interview with Ramsey Clark
Maps:
Southeast Asia during the Vietnam Genocide
South Vietnam during the American Occupation and Genocide
Related sites
Vietnamese-American.org
http://vietnamese-american.org/
“Mission Statement: To preserve the Vietnamese culture and empower the Vietnamese people.”
This site has a wealth of valuable, truthful information about the Vietnam Genocide and its devastating effect on the people and land of Vietnam. An example: in the “Vietnam War” section there are excerpts from Then the Americans Came, by Martha Hess, which contains personal testimonies from surviving Vietnamese victims of massive bombing and torture at the hands of Americans.
Writings by Peace Activist S. Brian Willson
http://www.brianwillson.com/
Brian Willson is a courageous Vietnam vet who was wounded in combat — but not during the Vietnam Genocide. He was fighting a war of conscience. In 1987 a military train at a U.S. Navy munitions base intentionally ran over him and severed his legs as he and two other veterans sat on the tracks to block it. The train was carrying weapons to be used in America’s ongoing holocaust of innocent civilian people in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.
His autobiography is heartfelt, utterly unself-pitying and very instructive, particularly his experiences from Vietnam onward. Brian Willson’s writing is extremely valuable, being from a deeply intelligent and genuinely moral man who has witnessed firsthand the horrors of American state terrorism around the world.
From the site:
“THIS SITE CONTAINS essays describing the incredible historic pattern of U.S. arrogance, ethnocentrism, violence and lawlessness in domestic and global affairs, and the severe danger this pattern poses for the future health of Homo sapiens and Mother Earth. Other essays discuss revolutionary, nonviolent alternative approaches based on the principle of radical relational mutuality. This is a term increasingly used by physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists to describe the nature of the omnicentric*, ever-unfolding universe. Every being, every aspect of life energy in the cosmos, is intrinsically interconnected with and affects every other being and aspect of life energy at every moment.”
*everything is at the center of the cosmos at every moment
Vietnam Veterans Against the War Anti-Imperialist — VVAW-AI
http://www.oz.net/~vvawai/
“Vietnam Veterans Against the War Anti-Imperialist is part of a network of anti-imperialist veterans who are proud of our resistance to U.S. aggression around the world. In the 1970s, to be a Vietnam veteran was to be against the war. That proud legacy must be carried forward through the 1990s and into the next millennium. As veterans, we have been to the edge and seen the viciousness of Amerikkka unmasked. We have no doubt that the bastards who sent us to war will use their nuclear arsenal, along with unspeakably cruel conventional weapons, to maintain their empire — and after the Gulf War, do you?”
Vietnam Veterans Against the War — VVAW
http://www.vvaw.org/
VVAW was founded in 1967 by vets who realized that what we were doing in Vietnam was a monstrous evil. Through courageous political activism and grassroots organizing the VVAW helped to awaken the heavily brainwashed American people to the horrible reality of America’s greatest campaign of racist genocide in the 20th century.
Veterans For Peace
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/
“We, having dutifully served our nation, do hereby affirm our greater responsibility to serve the cause of world peace.
“To this end we will work, with others:
- Toward increasing public awareness of the costs of war;
To restrain our government from intervening, overtly and covertly, in the internal affairs of other nations;
To end the arms race and to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons; and
- To abolish war as an instrument of international policy.
“We urge all veterans who share this vision to join us.”
WAR is HELL
http://www.warishell.com/warishell/index.htm
This is the website for book Bloody Hell: The Price Soldiers Pay, which provides “a platform for veterans to speak for themselves. Page after page of searing testimony to the brutal, bloody, unmerciful, dehumanising, haunting, destructive, grim black void of war. The pain. The lies. The reality. The aftermath.”
Bibliography
Then the Americans Came
by Martha Hess
published by: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996
The Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
“One of the best books ever written on the secret history of the Vietnam war. Valentine presents an unsparing account of the Phoenix Program, the CIA/US Army ‘pacification’ program in Vietnam that practiced plunder, torture and widespread assassination.”
Apocalypse 1945:
The Destruction of Dresden
by David Irving
Bloody Hell:
The Price Soldiers Pay
by Daniel Hallock
The Fire This Time:
U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf
by Ramsey Clark
Desert Slaughter:
The Imperialist War Against Iraq
by the Workers League
Killing Hope:
U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since WWII
by William Blum
Rogue State:
A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
by William Blum
What Uncle Sam Really Wants
by Noam Chomsky
The Beast Reawakens
by Martin A. Lee
Blackshirts and Reds:
Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
by Michael Parenti
Against Empire
by Michael Parenti
The Sword and the Dollar:
Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race
by Michael Parenti
Western State Terrorism
Alexander George, editor; essays by Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Gerry O’Sullivan and others
Terrorizing the Neighborhood:
American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era
by Noam Chomsky
Pressure Drop Press, 1991
Pirates and Emperors, Old and New:
International Terrorism in the Real World
by Noam Chomsky
The Culture of Terrorism
by Noam Chomsky
A People’s History of the United States:
1492 — Present
by Howard Zinn
Deadly Deceits:
My 25 years in the CIA
by Ralph W. McGehee
Inventing Reality:
The Politics of News Media
by Michael Parenti
War At Home:
Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It
by Brian Glick
War, Lies & Videotape:
How media monopoly stifles truth
edited by Lenora Foerstel; multiple authors
On Killing:
The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
by Dave Grossman
published by: Little, Brown
Examines the consequences of the U.S. Army’s conditioning of American soldiers to overcome the instinctive loathing of murdering fellow human beings. Shows how it has increased post-combat stress disorder and how contemporary society — especially the American media — replicates the U.S. Army’s conditioning techniques, resulting in increased violence in American society.
Viet Cong:
A Photographic Portrait
by Edward J. Emering
published by: Schiffer
Unique compilation of photographs taken by the Viet Cong themselves. Details Viet Cong guerrillas, main force Viet Cong, political gatherings, weapons, awards, artistic troupes, and jungle life. Fully illustrated, some in color.
Ho Chi Minh
by William J. Duiker
published by: Hyperion
Takes full advantage of recently declassified archives to create a riveting portrait of the immensely important and elusive figure. Impeccable research chronicles Ho’s life from his childhood as the son of a poor yet brilliant scholar, through his career as the first president of his country, during which he demonstrated phenomenal political abilities.
Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War
by William M. Hammond
published by: UPKs
Uses classified documents as well as extensive interviews to examine the bitter animosity that developed between the U.S. government and the news media during the genocidal Vietnam war. Tells how they first shared a common vision, but as the war dragged on, the truth fell victim to the U.S. government’s “management” of the press.
Nowadays, of course, the mainstream press wouldn’t dream of reporting the latest American military atrocities. The U.S. Corporate Mafia Government has gotten much better over the years at “managing” the press and all the mass-media.
The four books immediately above are available from:
Edward R. Hamilton, Bookseller
Falls Village, CT 06031-5000
Online book:
Vietnam: the Croatia of Asia
http://www.reformation.org/holoc23.html
This is Chapter 23 of the online book The Vatican’s Holocaust by Avro Manhattan. Details the little-known relationship between the Vatican, the U.S. and the fanatic Catholic regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.
The events surrounding this relationship led directly to America’s escalation of its war against the Vietnamese people.
Diem was another puppet-dictator installed by the U.S. government. But this particular puppet was also backed by the Vatican.
Serious problems began when his, and his wife’s, religious fanaticism got out of control. In the name of “God” he murdered and terrorized his own people — with the blessings of the Vatican and the U.S. government, of course. He was finally assassinated in 1963, but it was too late, the damage had been done. Diem’s bloody tyranny over his own, mostly Buddhist, country helped to radicalize large numbers of Vietnamese people. It opened the eyes of those with eyes to see, to the truly demonic nature of the United States Corporate Mafia Government and military.