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| Photo by Ronald L. Haeberle |
Women and children murdered at My Lai
by soldiers of the United States Army.
The war criminals of the United States Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force murdered three million people in Vietnam, in countless places like My Lai. Most of the victims were women and children.
The CIA even had an official program of state terrorism in Vietnam, known as “Operation Phoenix” or the “Phoenix Program”. Through the Phoenix Program, hundreds of thousands of people were tortured to death in provincial “interrogation centers” all over Vietnam. These torture centers were built specifically for that purpose by the United States. Women were always raped as part of the torture before being murdered. The large-scale terrorism, rape and mass-murder throughout the countryside was the collective policy of the CIA, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Navy. The My Lai massacre itself was an operation of the Phoenix Program.
Origins of the American genocide in Vietnam
The American genocide of the Vietnamese people had it’s origins immediately following World War II. America supported France in its attempt to regain its bloody colonial rulership over all Southeast Asia. But it was none other than the British, under the auspices of their American masters, who actually initiated the Vietnam War in 1945.
During the Yalta Conference, Britain was assigned the task of “disarming and repatriating the Japanese and restoring order” in Southern Indochina, since Britain had already been heavily involved in Burma. Britain chose to help its imperialist ally, France, reestablish its oppressive, racist, colonial regime over the Vietnamese people. It didn’t matter to the British government that the French colonial rulers had been part of the Vichy regime, which had collaborated with the Nazis. Or even that the Vichy French colonial rulers had therefore also collaborated with the Japanese occupation forces.
Why didn’t this matter to the British government? Because the British government, like their American masters, does not actually stand for principles like “democracy”, “humanitarianism” and “morality.” In reality it stands for nothing but the money and power of the British ruling classes. In addition, the British and French governments and plutocracies are inherently racist and Eurocentric, so the wishes and needs of the Vietnamese people did not matter in the least to them.
When British troops entered Vietnam in 1945 they discovered that the Vietnamese people had already disarmed the Japanese, and that Vietnam was unified under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh forces. The Vietminh had been allies of the United States during the war, valiantly fighting the Japanese occupation forces.
So what did the British do? They rearmed the Japanese and used them to reinforce their own troops as they forcefully took control of Saigon, expelling the Vietminh. How’s that for loyalty and gratitude?
The British then forcefully maintained their occupation until large numbers of French troops began arriving three months later, whereupon they handed Saigon over to the French and withdrew. At that point the brutal French Indochina War began.
The French, having been devastated and humiliated by their own evil cowardice in WWII, proved to be equally incompetent in their war of oppression against the Vietnamese people. They required more and more assistance from their new masters, the Americans. But the will of the Vietnamese people to be free was greater than the will of the French to oppress them, and no amount of American assistance was sufficient. The French were finally defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. At that point America’s direct control of the “Vietnam War” began.
It didn’t matter to the Americans that the Viet Minh had actually rescued downed American pilots of the U.S. 14th Air Force, saving them from sure torture and murder at hands of the bestial Japanese.
No, that counted for absolutely nothing with the plutocratic rulers of the United States Corporate Mafia Government. The U.S. government doesn’t honestly care about it’s own soldiers and airmen, much less people of another country. So this classic American backstabbing of a former ally set the tone for the appalling nightmare in Southeast Asia that would overwhelm the next 25+ years.
Ho Chi Minh was backstabbed by the U.S. Corporate Mafia Government because they simplistically labeled him a “Communist.”
However the truth was that initially, Ho Chi Minh actually admired all things “American”! During the war against the Japanese he had misjudged the true nature of America’s ruling plutocracy. Like millions of misinformed people around the world, he naively assumed that America was “the champion of democracy.” Perhaps he had no way of knowing any better at that time, but he believed America’s propaganda — that it stood for human values higher than ruthless self-interest.
With astonishing political naiveté Ho Chi Minh actually wrote many letters to President Truman and the State Department — asking for America’s help in liberating Vietnam from the French!
He even drafted a “Vietnamese declaration of independence,” modeling it on the American version, and beginning it with the words: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with...”
One can imagine the evil laughter that must have echoed through the halls of the U.S. State Department.
Ho Chi Minh, and all the Vietnamese people, discovered America’s truly satanic nature the hard way:
“I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. ...
“They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”
— John Kerry
Navy lieutenant, leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War
in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
April 23, 1971
U.S. Army atrocities
and Green Beret torture techniques
During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations the number of murderous U.S. military personnel invading Vietnam jumped from 23,000 in 1963 to 184,000 in 1966. They reached their peak during Dickhead Nixon’s presidency in 1969, with 542,000 American soldiers fighting the Viet Cong.
But that’s not all they were doing.
Too many of “our boys” committed sadistic crimes against humanity. American soldiers tortured prisoners. American soldiers sodomized, raped and murdered women and girls. American soldiers slaughtered entire villages of civilian men, women, children — even infants — in many, many places like My Lai and Thanh Phong.
From
Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
by William Blum:
The Green Berets taught its members who were slated for duty in Vietnam in the 1960s how to use torture as part of an interrogation.
The notorious Operation Phoenix, set up by the CIA to wipe out the Vietcong infrastructure, subjected suspects to torture such as:
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electric shock to the genitals of both men and women
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insertion into the ear of a six-inch dowel, which was tapped through the brain until the victim died
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suspects were also thrown out of airborne helicopters to persuade the more important suspects to talk, although this should probably be categorized as murder of the ones thrown out, and a form of torture for those not.
In violation of the Geneva Convention, the US turned prisoners over to their South Vietnamese allies in full knowledge that they would be tortured, American military personnel often being present during the torture.
The slaughter begins in earnest
 United States Air Force B-52 bomber crew butchering Asian women and children |
Meaning genocidal business, the United States Air Force launched the “Rolling Thunder” air assault on the people of Vietnam in 1964. This assault alone dropped more bombs on the little country than were used in all of World War II.
During the next five years, unknown hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilian men, women and children were butchered and burned alive by United States Air Force bomber crews. Vietnam was pounded with the equivalent of 22 tons of explosives for every square mile of territory.
That’s 300 pounds of high explosive for every man, woman and child.
A prime example: the United States Air Force mass-murdered tens of thousands of civilan men, women and children in Ben Tre city in 1968. Ben Tre was a city of 300,000 people in the Mekong Delta. The United States Air Force carpet-bombed it out of existence.
The officer in charge told reporters: “It was necessary to destroy the city in order to save it.”
“You always write it’s bombing, bombing, bombing. It’s not bombing, it’s air support.”
— Colonel David Opfer
United States Air Force
air attaché in Cambodia
complaining to news reporters
about their coverage of the genocide
During 13 years of America’s insane genocide of the people of Vietnam, eight million TONS of bombs (like Napalm and cluster bombs) and defoliants (Agent Orange) were dropped in total — and at least 3 MILLION Vietnamese people were slaughtered.
Most Americans cannot even imagine what that means.
“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
THREE — MILLION — PEOPLE!
Along with the American Indian Genocide, the Vietnam Genocide ranks America right down there in the pits of hell — in such fine company as the German Nazis, the Israeli Zionists, the Croatian Ustashi, the Japanese military, the Italian Fascists, the Turkish military, the Spanish Conquistadors, the Romans, the Mongols and all such genocidal monsters.
The vast majority of Americans have absolutely nothing in their experience to compare it to. Yet it was happening in our lifetimes, for anybody born before 1975. The only decent human beings in America were those who spoke out against this monstrous evil. And those people who were courageous enough to march in the streets were rewarded with beatings by the dirty pigs and cold-blooded murder by the FBI and the National Guard.
Meanwhile, patriotic racist Americans continued to live their so-called “normal” lives, thoroughly indifferent to the bloody slaughter being carried out in their names, slobbering over their steaks and watching TV, playing golf and going to parties while Vietnamese children were BURNED ALIVE in their villages by OUR goddamned pilots, countless Vietnamese civilian women were brutally raped and murdered and whole families machine-gunned to death by OUR goddamned soldiers.
It wasn’t just the demonic Nazis who committed genocide. Our own evil American government and military have committed genocide too. By the MILLIONS.
And the overwhelming majority of the victims were helpless, innocent civilian people.
Civilian men. Women. Children.
See the story of My Lai for an example of our heroic American soldiers on the job — murdering Vietnamese babies and raping Vietnamese girls to make the world safe for corporations like Coca Cola and Standard Oil.
After the slaughter...
disease and more death
Thanks to racist American arrogance, self-righteousness and indifference, the Vietnamese people have continued to suffer. In 1985 it was estimated that fully one-third of the Vietnam was a toxic wasteland, thanks to the U.S. Air Force use of chemical defoliants like Agent Orange. All of this left Vietnam impoverished, the land severely polluted and covered with deadly cluster bombs — and the people psychologically traumatized. Thirty years of genocidal war were then followed by almost 20 years of a U.S.-led embargo.
In the years since the murdering, raping U.S. soldiers, Navy SEALS and airmen were finally defeated and kicked ignominiously out of Vietnam, America’s evil legacy has continued. Agent Orange has caused large-scale birth defects in succeeding generations of Vietnamese people and hundreds of thousands of cancer deaths among those the who were living in the areas sprayed with the defoliant.
Even the most conventional, reactionary elements of the U.S. media occasionally admit to American war crimes. In 1997 a Wall Street Journal report estimated that 500,000 children in Vietnam suffer from serious birth defects because of the American use of chemical weapons. No doubt the real figure is much higher.
The unexploded cluster bombs have created uncharted minefields, terrorizing everybody and preventing farmers from working in many arable fields and rice paddies. These American bombs continue to murder, dismember and cripple for life, thousands of Vietnamese children and young adults.
“I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar soaked fingers out of the business of these [Third World] nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the ‘haves’ refuse to share with the ‘have-nots’ by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don’t want, and above all don’t want crammed down their throats by Americans.”
— General David Sharp
former U.S. Marine Commandant
1966
“We’re going to become guilty, in my judgement, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world. It’s an ugly reality, and we Americans don’t like to face up to it. I hate to think of the chapter of American history that’s going to be written in the future in connection with our outlawry in Southeast Asia.”
— Senator Wayne Morse
(D-OR)
1967
“The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.”
— Ramsey Clark
former U.S. Attorney General
under President Lyndon Johnson
“The only lesson that the U.S. government seems to have learned from Vietnam is the need for absolute control of the press.”
— David McGowan
author of Derailing Democracy
Related pages
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
American Patriots and the Napalm Attack on the People of Trang Bang
Neighborhood Bully: American Militarism
interview with Ramsey Clark
Maps:
Southeast Asia during the Vietnam Genocide
South Vietnam during the American Occupation and Genocide
Related articles
Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial
by
Douglas Valentine
http://www.counterpunch.com/valentine.html
“By now everybody knows that former Senator Bob Kerrey led a seven-member team of Navy SEALS into Thanh Phong village in February 1969, and murdered in cold blood more than a dozen women and children.
“What hardly anyone knows, and what no one in the press is talking about (although many of them know), is that Kerrey was on a CIA mission, and its specific purpose was to kill those women and children. It was illegal, premeditated mass murder and it was a war crime.
“And it’s time to hold the CIA responsible. It’s time for a war crimes tribunal to examine the CIA’s illegal activities during and since the Vietnam War.”
Bob Kerry:
the Life and Times of a Throat-Slitter
by Richard Gibson
http://www.counterpunch.org/gibson.html
“Further outside the imperial gaze, even today, is the heroism of the Vietnamese, not only those who Kerrey and many other US officers caught up in the genocidal invasion sought to exterminate, but those who defeated the empire, politically, militarily, and morally, causing imperial troops to run away in their helicopters, pushing their allies off the struts as they ran.”
Robert Kerrey and the bloody legacy of Vietnam
by Patrick Martin and David North
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/may2001/kerr-m04.shtml
“Former US Senator Robert Kerrey, newly inaugurated as the president of the New School University, one of the most prestigious positions in American academia, has admitted participating in a death squad attack on a Vietnamese village [Thanh Phong] 32 years ago, in which he and six soldiers under his command killed 21 women, children and elderly men.
“In the course of the nighttime assault, the American raiders [U.S. Navy SEALS] killed every Vietnamese they encountered — men, women, children. They used every weapon in their arsenal, from knives to rifles and grenades to light anti-tank weapons, expending more than 1,200 rounds of ammunition on a village where only a few dozen people lived.
“...the SEALS slit the throats of an elderly man, his wife and three grandchildren in the first hut they encountered when they entered the village. The graves of these five victims, marked with a common date of death, can be seen in the village today.”
See also:
What is at stake in the fight to remove Robert Kerrey?
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/jun2001/kerr-j01.shtml
The Spook Who Went to Washington:
New U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons’ cold-blooded past
by Doug Valentine
http://www.newmassmedia.com/nac.phtml?code=new&db=nac_fea&ref=14651
“As a CIA officer, Rob Simmons traveled 12,000 miles to terrorize Vietnamese men and women in their own backyards. He did so unflinchingly, without the remorse one might expect from a self-professed devout Episcopalian.
“Behind the pious façade, however, lurks a cold-blooded political warrior who was sworn in last month to represent eastern Connecticut in Congress.
“‘I’m just a poor farm girl,’ Simmons said to me in a 1988 interview. He spoke shrilly, mocking a woman he had in a CIA-sponsored interrogation center where, by many accounts, torture [and rape] was part of the routine. Frustrated because he couldn’t prove she was a member of the Viet Cong’s underground political infrastructure, he released her ‘and watched her for three months, then put her name in the paper. That suppressed her. It suppressed the organization, too.’
“What Simmons is describing is psychological warfare: the application of terror to subdue people politically.”
An account of American terrorism in Vietnam
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/jun2000/viet-j06.shtml
“At a time when acts of military aggression perpetrated or planned by the US government are typically justified in the name of fighting ‘international terrorism,’ a book has appeared which documents America’s role as the organizer of the biggest campaign of terrorism and sabotage since World War II.”
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.”
People of the Lie:
The Hope for Healing Human Evil
by M. Scott Peck, M.D.
published by Simon & Schuster; 1983, 1985
In particular, see Chapter 6, “MyLai: An Examination of Group Evil”.
Bloody Hell:
The Price Soldiers Pay
by Daniel Hallock
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
The Beast Reawakens
by Martin A. Lee
Blackshirts and Reds:
Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
by Michael Parenti
What Uncle Sam Really Wants
by Noam Chomsky
Against Empire
by Michael Parenti
The Sword and the Dollar:
Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race
by Michael Parenti
Apocalypse 1945:
The Destruction of Dresden
by David Irving
A People’s History of the United States:
1492 — Present
by Howard Zinn
The Real Terror Network:
Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda
by Edward S. Herman
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 Fire This Time:
U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf
by Ramsey Clark
Desert Slaughter:
The Imperialist War Against Iraq
by the Workers League
The Culture of Terrorism
by Noam Chomsky
Deadly Deceits:
My 25 years in the CIA
by Ralph W. McGehee
Inventing Reality:
The Politics of News Media
by Michael Parenti
Manufacturing Consent:
The Political Economy of the Mass Media
by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
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.
