Let us never negotiate out of fear
but let us never fear to negotiate
East Germans escape by the tens of thousands
until the communists threw up their wall of hate
The assault has begun on the dictatorship of Fidel Castro
This generation of americans has already had enough, more than enough
of war, and hate, and oppression.
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men
I have told them that molotov cocktails and rifles
would not solve their problems.
But they asked -and rightly so- what about Vietnam?
If America's soul becomes totally poisoned
part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.
A nation that continues year after year
to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift
is approaching spiritual death.
This need to maintain social stability for our investments
accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala.
It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia
and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active
against rebels in Peru
They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to
solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted.
Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again
raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos
without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence
in the world today:
my own government.
Two days into office, on the sunday, the day before John Kennedy
was buried, Lyndon Johnson met with his military advisors
and said he was not going to lose Vietnam.
He never agreed with Kennedy's memorandum
to withdraw and 2 days later he issued a new memo
signaling the US would be taking a more hands-on approach.
His foreign policy thinking was profound in a primitive way:
There are 3 billion people in the world, and we only
have 200 million of them. We're outnumbered 15 to 1.
If might did make right
they'd sweep over the United States and take what we have.
We have what they want.
Who is they? His analogies may have been coarse
but, stated in other words, the struggle was not really about communism
but was between the 1st world and the 3rd world.
Abandoning Kennedy's attempts at reform,
Johnson made it clear in the new
Mann doctrine that all Latin american
countries would be judged on how they
protected the $9 billion in US investments,
not on the interests of their own people.
The US would no longer discriminate against right-wing dictatorships
and regarded military aid as a wiser investment than
Kennedy's economic aid.
The 5th largest country in the world,
resource-rich Brazil, would be the first to suffer.
in 1964 new democratically elected president Joao Goulart
implemented land reform and
sought controls on foreign capital.
Recognizing Cuba was the last nail in his coffin.
Castro's example could not be emulated.
Johnson sharply reduced US aid.
Inflation sky-rocketed.
The CIA financed large anti-government rallies and the US administration prodded
right-wing officers to overthrow the government.
Within a month, the new regime arrested 50,000 people.
Torture was instituent.
In the next 6 years, $2 billion in US aid flowed into Brazil
and an even more repressive military regime
ruled for the next 20 years, worsening
an already large gap between rich and poor.
The dominoes, in this case the democracies, began falling
once again across south america.
in 1965, Johnson sent 23,000 troops into the Dominican Republic to
crush a popular uprising, seeking to restore
constitutional order after a military coup.
Johnson told his lawyer:
There ain't no doubt about this being Castro now
him moving other places in the hemisphere
might be part of a whole communistic pattern tied in with Vietnam
in Greece, the birthplace of democracy where the cold war
had taken its baby steps and the US had supported a right-wing government
for many years, a new yearning for democracy appeared certain to
bring the veteran liberal George Papandreu
back as prime minister.
Johnson called in the Greek ambassador and actually said:
Listen to me mr. ambassador, fuck your parliament and your constitution
America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea.
If those two fleas continue itching the elephant
they may just get whacked by the elephant's trunk.
Whacked good.
We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, mr. ambassador
If your Prime Minister gives me talk about democracy,
he, his parliament and his constitution may not last very long.
In fact, it didn't.
The military junta seized power in 1967, banning
mini skirts, long hair and foreign newspapers
making church attendence compulsory while engaging in
numerous incidents of sexually oriented torture and cruelty.
Its new prime minister, who had been a captain
in a Nazi security battalion tracking down
Greek resistance fighters, became the first CIA agent
to become the premier of a European country.
But it was Asia that posed the greatest resistance to US goals
Aside from Japan which was becoming a prosperous client state
red China exploded its first atomic bomb in Oct. of '64
catching Washington totally off-guard.
in Indonesia, sitting astride southeast Asia's principal sea lanes, where
more than 3 million members made its communist party the 3rd largest
in the world behind the Soviets and Chinese, Sukarno having
survived repeated US attempts to remove him further irritated the US
by declaring he would test an atomic bomb
but, he was denied help from China
and when he recognized north Vietnam and then expropriated
US rubber plantations and threatened to nationalize US oil companies
Lyndon Johnson struck hard.
Almost half the officer corps had received some US training
and in Oct '65 with CIA support
general Suharto led the army in
crushing Sukarno's supporters.
In the following months, Suharto's militias and civilian mobs went from
house to house killing a half million to a million suspected
communists and their families.
US, british and australian intell. provided thousands of names of
suspected communists to the army.
Sukarno was forced out finally in 1967 and replaced by
gen. Suharto who enriched himself, his family, cronies,
the Indonesian military and US corp.s for decades until he was overthrown
by the people led by student activists in 1998.
In 1968, the CIA acknowledged the Indonesian massacre ranked
as one of worst mass murders in the 20th century.
President Kennedy's national security advisor McGeorge Bundy
in later crticizing our Vietnam war policy wrote that
Indonesia was the true breaking point in Asia,
far more important to our goals than Vietnam which was, he said, unnecessary.
Yet now in history, even Indonesia's blood bath pales in comparison to
what the US inflicted on Vietnam.
Johnson and his advisors understood very little about Vietnam's history
and its strong resistance to Chinese and French invasions over the centuries.
They totally underestimated the nationalist aspect of Ho Chi Minh's
movement and assumed that if they wreaked enough havoc and
killed enough people the Vietnamese would submit.
Within 2 months of JFK's death in Jan. of '64 Johnson and McNamara
escalated covert military activities against north Vietnam.
Dropping intelligence and commando teams
to destroy bridges, railways and costal installations
kidnapping north Vietnamese and bombing border villages.
Johnson was pathological in his ability to lie.
As with the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003,
it would take years for the american people to discover the false origins of the Vietnam war.
In august '64 Johnson and McNamara used a fabricated incident in
north Vietnam's Gulf of Tonkin as an excuse to further escalate the war.
Johnson rushed the congress to authorize direct US military action.
The media echoed the line that a US ship had been attacked
and the House after 40 min.s of debate passed a war resolution
in the Senate, it was 88-2
A few days later Johnson told his undersecretary of State
Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!
... and people remember what this resolution really is,
it's a resolution which seeks to give
the president in US the power to make war
without a declaration of war.
In the election of 1964, Johnson
crushed Arizona senator Barry Goldwater
who threatened to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam.
These are the stakes.
We must either love each other, or we must die.
The stakes are too high for you to stay home.
It was built as a landslide for peace.
But following the election Johnson began a steady process of escalation
sharply expanding the free firezones in which
anything that moved was considered
a legitimate target.
The US arsenal of accepted weapons grew to include napalm, cluster bombs and
white phosphorus which burned from the skins right through to the bone
causing horrific deaths.
Do you smell that? What?
Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that.
I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
Johnson's lies about his plans snowballed
and by july of '65 he'd sent in 75,000 combat troops to Vietnam
more than half a million by the end of '67
The monthly draft reached 35,000 men as the US set out to find Vietnam's breaking point.
Yet, when his Joint Chiefs of Staff at a meeting asked for more fire power or
an all-out war, a witness recalled Johnson started screaming obscenities:
Image that you're me, that you're the president of the US
and five incompetents come into your office and try to talk you into starting WW3.
The risk is just too high.
How can you fucking assholes ignore what China might do?
You just contaminated my office, you filthy shitheads!
Get the hell out of here right now!
The generals got out.
And after a pause, Johnson steadily increased the bombing of north Vietnam
In his inimitable way he explained his strategy:
I'm going up her leg an inch at a time.
I'll get to the snatch before they know what's happening.
The US dropped 3 times as many bombs on tiny Vietnam as it did in all of WW2.
On the ground in a policy sanctioned by Kennedy millions of peasants, some say 5
some 7, were forced out of villages and resettled in barbwired camps.
Tens of thousands of supposed communists were assasinated as
part of a Phoenix program, but it did little to slow the resistance movement.
The murder of civilians became commonplace as the US military leadership exaggerated
body counts to tell the public that the communists were on their last legs
while still asking for more and more troops.
Five south Vietnamese governments came and went, the last
clinging to power through massive corruption.
Anti-war demonstrators protest US involvement in the Vietnam war
in mass marches, rallies and demonstrations.
America's college campuses began to buzz with activists.
In oct. '67 one of the first violent confrontations took place at the
university of Wisconsin in Madison.
Johnson, convinced the communists were behind the anti-war movement,
ordered the CIA to uncover proof with massive surveillence and
other information gathering efforts.
Codenamed Chaos, the CIA's illegal domestic operations lasted almost 7 years
compiling a computer index of 300,000 citizens and organizations
and extensive files on more than 7,000 individuals,
but failed to prove communist involvement.
Among the FBI's principal targets was the Nobel peace prize winner
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Welcome in Mr. King
I'm here to find out why you've been
tapping my telephones
About a year ago you were told some of your advisors
had communist connection,
but you wouldn't break with them.
Would that ... your planting microphones in hotel rooms I occupied during my travels?
the same procedure on 14 others the panthers, the muslims, the clan
the damage is done mr. Hoover but I might be worthwhile for
the people to know how America's number 1 blackmailer operates
don't give me all the credit.
Black America was in a state of near rebellion.
The summer of '67 surpassed all previous ones with 75 major riots
many lasting 2 days or more. National guard troops were called in
and, with police, killed 26 blacks in Newark and 43 in Detroit.
A Ramparts magazine march 1967 exposé revealed that the CIA had been funding
the National Student Association.
Other liberal groups were exposed as agency fronts with CIA money going
to anti-communist professors, journalists, aid workers, missionaries, labor leaders
and civil rights activists who did the agency's dirty work.
Among the discredited were the Ford foundation, RadioFreeEurope, RadioLiberty
and Congress for Cultural Freedom.
even McNamara with his characteristic rationality was having doubts.
In oct. of '67 100,000 people rallied in Washingtion.
Half marched to the Pentagon.
Armed infantry prevented them from reaching it.
McNamara watched alone from a command post on the roof
listening to chants of "Hey, hey, LBJ how many kids did you kill today?"
Now isolated within the establishment McNamara despaired.
Rumors of a possible mental collapse reached Johnson:
We can't afford to have another forestall
When McNamara argued that more bombing would not work
Johnson was livid, he demanded loyalty, saying of another aide:
I don’t want loyalty. I want loyalty! I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window
in high noon and tell me it smells like roses.
I want his pecker in my pocket.
Johnson arranged for McNamara's ouster to become president of the
World Bank.
In his last cabinet meeting an aide reported that McNamara finally broke down:
the goddamn bombing campaign, it's done nothing. They've dropped
more bombs in all of Europe in all of WW2 and it hasn't done
a fucking thing.
1968 was an extraordinary year of change.
In jan. on the same day north vietnamese
and vietkong forces unleashed a shock attack
on most of Vietnam's major cities and provincial capitals.
The attacks were ultimately repelled with great losses to the Vietnamese
but the mood in Washington was despair.
A bipartisan group of elder statesmen reassessed the situation:
It was time to get out.
Lyndon Johnson, his enormous ego deeply wounded by the doubts of
his leadership, besieged by enemies internal and external, his popularity
plummeting, announced shockingly in march '68 that he would not run
for a second term.
I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for
another term as your president.
The country was stunned. The leader of their war effort was
giving up. To those against the war this was a great victory. But to
many americans as well as neutral countries and allies alike the US now
appeared as a rudderless, immoral country, an emperor without clause
the Chinese said "a paper tiger".
Wrecked by inner demons, Johnson allowed his heart-felt dream of being a great social
reformer to be buried in the killing flelds of Vietnam.
He lamented later in the decade to a historian:
Losing the great society was a terrible thought, but not so terrible
as the thought of being responsible for America's losing a war to the communists.
Nothing could possibly be worse than that.
He was a man, a potential giant, who in denying his compassion suffered from
a truly American obsession: the fear of weakness.
Hoover's FBI was doing everything it could to disrupt the anti-war movement
as it had done for years to the civil rights movement.
Hundreds of agents infiltrated new left organizations.
FBI and CIA news flaks went to great lengths to marginilize the war's critics
and impune their patriotism.
Hoover was especially worried the antiwar protest would merge with
the black liberation struggle,
as a disproportionate number of black soldiers died on front lines.
Forever convinced that communists were behind the civil rights movement
Hoover pursued Martin Luther King with a vengeance
doing nothing to protect him,
even encouraging him to commit suicide
in one notorious anonymous hatefilled letter
until the moment King himself was shot and killed by another
supposedly lone nut assasin in April of '68.
Rage riots once more erupted across America.
The Berrigan brothers who were priests
went to jail for burning draft files.
Benjamin Spock, the world's most prominent pediatrician
W. Sloane Coffin, a Yale university chaplin
Jane Fonda, a young movie star
and heavy weight boxing idol Muhammed Ali
were all speaking up:
I ain't going no 10,000 miles to help murder and kill other poor people
if I'm gonna die I'll die right now right here fighting you
you my enemy, not no chinese no vietkong no japanese,
you my opposer when I want freedom you my opposer when I want justice
you my opposer when I want equality you want me to go somewhere and
fight for you, you won't even stand up for me right here in America
I'm announcing today my candidancy for the presidency of the US
Throughout America in 1968 a newly charismatic Robert Kennedy
captured the imagination of young and old tired of the war.
Finishing his brother's legacy, he was calling for a new America,
white, black, brown, it didn't matter his eyes had ...
once more the fire of change and reform was afoot:
The country wants to move in a different direction.
We want to deal with our own problems within our own country
and we want peace in Vietnam.
Johnson, secretly hoping to be a last minute choice for president if called,
feared him as much as any man.
But the fates were cruel beyond imagining to the Kennedy brothers, as on this
hot june night of his victory in the california primary he was brutally
gunned down in another strange hard to believe set of circumstances
by a supposedly deranged young Palestinian.
This was a serious and devastating blow to the heart of the reform movement.
Post-war baby boomers had begun flooding college campuses in 1964
imbued with idealism, dismissive of cold war ideology, upset with
their parents' conformist values and fears, their protests spread worldwide.
Students and workers convulsed industrial nations.
Confrontations shook Prague, Tokyo, west Berlin, Rome and Mexico City where
soldiers massacred hundreds of protesting students.
In the summer of '68 at the democratic convention
10,000 protesters were manhandled along with the media by Chicago police.
TV was now presenting a reality the public had never seen before.
American authority figures acting as aggressors both at home and abroad.
It seemed that the country was coming apart.
People spoke of the gulf between the antiwar left and prowar right as a
civil war like the one that had ripped the country apart over 100 years earlier.
It was in the midst of this terrifying turmoil that the anticommunist
hardliner Richard Nixon, so bitterly denied the presidency by John Kennedy
in 1960, found his life's destiny. But he almost lost, stunningly in this climate.
The right-wing segregationist Alabama governor
George Wallace running with the retired general
Curtis Lemay was pulling 21% and threatening Nixon's chances for victory
barely a month before the election:
As far as this problem of law-and-order is
concerned, I'm the only one of the candidates
who has laid out a precise program for
stopping the rise in crime and for reestablishing freedom from fear.
Riding the resentment of what he later called the 'silent majority', Nixon's
law-and-order message resonated with white voters scared of ghetto rebellions
campus disruptions and rising crime
and it eked out the narrowest of victories.
America's in trouble today not because our people have failed
but because our leaders have failed, and what America need's
our leaders to match the greatness of our people.
Nixon was also claiming a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam
refusing to divulge its details.
What Richard Nixon actually delivered to the country was not peace, law or order
but war, chaos and disorder
as the only president to resign his office in disgrace.
Nixon and his national security advisor and later secretary of state Henry Kissinger
actually expanded the war which lasted 7 more years.
Half the total of US casualties from the war occurred under Nixon.
Kissinger later said:
I refuse to believe that a little 4th rate power like north Vietnam
does not have a breaking point.
And he and Nixon set out to find it.
Nixon's secret plan to end the war turned out to be withdrawing US forces
starting April '69 and replacing them with US trained and equipped Vietnamese
while systematically and ruthlessly bombing north and south Vietnam into submission.
Drawing parallels with Eisenhower's nuclear threats in Korea
which, he said, ended that war, Nixon boasted to an aide:
I call it the Mad Man theory. We'll slip the word to them that
Nixon is obsessed about the communists we can't restrain him when he's angry
he has his hand on the nuclear button
Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days, begging for peace.
Two months into office Nixon began a secret bombing campaign inside
neighboring Cambodia to destroy north Vietnamese military sanctuaries.
He took extraordinary measures to hide it from Congress.
Even the crew members involved believed
they were hitting targets in south Vietnam.
Though most americans remained in the dark about the country they were invading
the truth occasionally seeped out, as
when freelance journalist S. Hersh in nov. 1969
broke the news that a year and a half earlier US forces had massacred up to
500 civilians in the village of My Lai
nicknamed Pinkville for its strong enemy sympathies.
Babies, pregnant women and old people had been scalped and mutilated
as command of the situation broke down.
Not a single shot had been clearly fired at US forces.
Indicative of the growing dehumanization of this time, and
resembling US attitudes towards the Japanese in WW2
65% of Americans told pollsters they were not bothered by the news of massacre
The only officer found guilty was given a partial pardon by Nixon
public opinion strongly in favor.
There were few limits to Nixon's thinking
he and Kissinger planned for a savage attack
possibly using nuclear weapons in the fall of 1969
but were thwarted when millions parti- cipated nationwide in an Oct. moratorium
and 3/4 million protesters flocked to Washington in november
Still, Nixon recklessly put the military on secret alert
flying 18 nuclear armed B-52s over the polar ice cap towards the Soviet union
trying to force them, once again unsuccessfully, to pressure the
north Vietnamese to peace terms.
Le Duan took over the leadership when Ho Chi Minh died in 1969
later told a visiting journalist that the US had threatened to use nuclear weapons
on 13 different occasions.
But that had not changed their policies.
Although they would pay a terrible price for their independence
the Vietnamese understood a basic truth the american leaders never grasped
the Vietnamese foreign minister later said
we knew that they could not stay in Vietnam forever,
but Vietnam must stay in Vietnam forever.
The Vietnam war was about independence and time
not territory or body counts.
America's 6th president J. Quincy Adams
a century before had warned that
a nation should not go abroad,
It was here in Vietnam that the US ran into
its ultimate monster, an enemy that could not be defeated because
they were fighting to protect their homeland against foreign invaders.
The US would win every major battle, but it never won the war.
According to his lawyer John Dean and other insiders, Nixon was
actually obsessed with war protesters and often adjusted his ...
to diminish their outrage
but now stilling himself by drinking heavily and watching the movie Patton
over and over again.
Americans love a winner
and will not tolerate a loser.
Americans play to win all the time
I wouldn't give a hoot and hell for
a man who lost and laughed.
That's why americans have never lost and will never lose a war.
Because the very thought of losing is hateful to americans.
Nixon in april 1970 announced a joint US-south Vietnamese ground invasion
of Cambodia to destroy bases along the border.
6 students were shot and killed by the national guards at Jackson State
in Missisippi and Kent State in Ohio
More than 400 campuses went on strike or shut down
4 million students, 300,000 faculty members, 30 ROHC buildings burned or bombed
more than 700 colleges experiencing some kind of protest activity
Kissinger described Washington as a
the airwar intensified. Nixon said in 1970:
I want everything that can fly to go in there and crack the hell out
sounding more like a gangster than a statesman, Kissinger conveyed the
order to bomb
words that could have been spoken by a defendant in the ... at Nuremberg
When Nixon, after he resigned, was confronted with his law breaking he replied:
when the president does it, that means it's not illegal.
By this time, Cambodia had been subjected for 5 years to a
brutal air bombardment and an escalating civil war that left
100s of thousands of Cambodians, many of them civilians, dead.
The communist rebels the Khmer Rouge used his atrocities to recruit angry peasants from
the country side and grew exponentially during the bombing.
They finally seized power in 1975 from a corrupt US backed military dictatorship
and then unleashed new horrors on their own people.
On top of the half million Cambodians killed in the US phase of the war
1.5 million more perished during Pol Pot's monstrous regime.
Perhaps 25% of Cambodia's population died during this period.
Meanwhile in Vietnam
many troops were making individual choices, whether to go into combat or not
Recent surveys estimate that well over 50% of soldiers in Vietnam
use marijuana.
In a remarkable admission in 1971 the armed forces journal revealed that
the conditions of the troops in Vietnam were only exceeded by the
French army mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Russian army in 1917.
Still, Nixon persisted.
By bombing Cambodia and continuing the secret and crippling bombing of tiny Laos
which was started in 1964, Nixon bombed north Vietnamese cities for the first time
since '68. Civilian casualties soared.
And after a landslide re-election over antiwar candidate George McGovern
in 1972, Nixon unleashed a 12-day christmas bombing on the north
the heaviest yet of the war.
The outcry in the world was deafening.
A peace agreement was concluded the next month in Paris
it was essentially the same deal that had been offered to Johnson in '68
and which Nixon had secretly undermined in order to win election.
The US promised to pay the north 3.25 billion dollars in reparations
but later reneged.
Elections were promised, promptly, but south Vietnam dithered and delayed
for the next year and a half.
We today have concluded an agreement
to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam and in southeast Asia.
Nixon brought home the last american combat troops in march '73.
As it would decades later in Iraq and Afghanistan,
the US invested huge amounts of money into training and equipping a corrupt
south Vietnamese ally to fight for themselves.
It did not work.
Nor did Nixon's mad man thesis.
In april '73 trying to buy time for the south Vietnamese army, he ordered the
most intense bombing of the entire war of both north and south, but
overwhelmed by Watergate revelations, he was forced to rescind the order.
The war dragged on 2 more years until the south Vietnamese army
simply collapsed and fled.
The north Vietnamese forces overran Saigon in april '75.
Disturbing images of fleeing civilians, deserting south Vietnamese soldiers,
their officers a step ahead of them, and US embassy marines beating down
deperate US connected Vietnamese trying to escape on the last helicopters off the embasy roof
would remain indelibly imprinted in the american psyche.
They also added fuel to the already angry hardliners who, like Nixon,
contended that the media had sold out Vietnam.
Nixon, meanwhile, caught at a web of crimes known as the Watergate Scandal
paranoid over his domestic enemies and further revelations that would expose
his illegalities on several fronts, grew increasingly erratic.
His defense secretary instructed military leaders not to respond to Nixon's orders.
The system was truly beginning to crack.
I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
Vice-president Ford will be sworn in as president at that hour in this office.
Nixon, thus, avoided impeachment.
But over 40 of his people were convicted of crimes, several of them going to jail.
Nixon was pardoned by his newly appointed vice-president Gerald Ford.
As the war, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon faded from american
TV screens, trust between the presidency and the american people was betrayed.
Kissinger, now promoted to secretary of state, came through unscathed.
He and north Vietnam's Le Duc Tho were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace prize.
Knowing that the peace had not yet been achieved,
Le Duc Tho had the grace to turn the prize down.
The US licked its wounds, but few in power reflected on the deeper
meaning of what had occurred.
The Eisenhower dominoe theory proved to be a myth,
the feared virus had not spread.
Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia Taiwan, the Philippines, and
most importantly Japan, all prospered and remained firmly in the western camp.
Worried about US loss of prestige in Asia and clearly not having learned
the lessons of supporting dictatorships, Nixon and Kissinger turned with fresh eyes
to Latin America to reassert US power.
Chile had survived as a model democracy since 1932.
It would not survive Nixon and Kissinger.
When socialist Salvador Allende won the election
of 1970 promising to nationalize US companies
like IT&T that essentially controlled the Chilean economy,
Nixon told his CIA chief: make the economy scream.
The IMF and the World Bank, with Robert McNamara at its helm,
denied loans to the regime.
The CIA funded opposition parties, pushed propaganda and disinformation,
offered bribes, organized demonstrations and strikes against the government.
And finally condoned the murderer of
the most powerful Chilean general
who'd vowed to defend democracy.
When Salvador Allende took his case against the US to a pack general assembly
at the UN in december '72, he was cheered wildly, but
may well have signed his death warrant:
We find ourselves opposed by forces that operate in the shadows without a flag
with powerful weapons from positions of great influence.
We're potentially rich countries, yet we live in poverty.
We go here and there begging for credits and aid, yet we're great exporters of capital.
It's a classic paradox of the capitalist economic system.
The CIA urged its Chilean agents to act.
Military leaders directed by gen. Augusto Pinochet
executed their coup d'etat on sep 11, 1973
As the military closed in, Allende made a final radio address from the presidential palace:
Allende took his own life with the rifle given him by Fidel Castro.
Pinoched seized power. His junta killed or disappeared over 3200 opponents
and jailed and tortured tens of thousands more in a rain of terror known as the
Caravan of Death.
For the Chilean people, 9/11 has a far more tragic meaning than our 9/11
that marked the end of their government at the hands of the US.
Argentina would follow with a terrifying dirty war against leftists
that would last from 1976 to '83 and kill or disappear an estimated 9-30 thousand people.
The new Pinochet regime in Chile was quickly recognized and given aid, and
lasted in power until 1988.
Chile's intelligence service was master-minded
by col. Manuel Contreras who became a
paid CIA agent.
He organized death squads that hunted down political opponents
in Latin America, Europe and the US.
His secret police even sent agents to Washington DC to blow up a
former Chilean diplomat critical of the regime.
Called operation Condore, the assasination ring included the right-wing governments
of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil.
Assasination squads tracked down and killed more than 13,000 dissidents
outside their home countries.
Hundreds of thousands more were thrown into concentration camps.
At a minimum, the US facilitated comm.s among these intelligence chiefs.
In an internal CIA history that was de-classified in 2007
it was revealed that under the leadership of counter-intelligence chief
who was obsessed with the idea of Soviet union
infiltrating his organization and
taking over ultimately most of the world, the CIA had been
actively involved in creating and using foreign police forces and
counter-terrorism units,
and training close to 800,000 military and police officers in 25 countries
including secret police and death squad leaders.
After a dismal decade marked by Vietnam, Watergate and
initial congressional investigations into the
activities of the CIA, America felt confused.
What kind of country were we?
The answer was a perturbing one.
Despite the deep drift between left and right, and young and old
Americans were enjoying rising standards of living,
and a loosening of strict sexual gender and moral codes
it was even halting progress in race relations.
No war taxes were levied, and the draft was finally muff ball
Those who could afford a college education,
by-and-large, did not go to Vietnam.
The working class did.
Most Americans happily enjoyed the fruits of the 1960s economic boom,
a boom driven in part by the military- industrial complex with its huge arm sales.
By example, more than 5,000 helicopters out of close to 12,000 were lost in Vietnam.
Between 1951 and '65, the state of California alone received $67 billion
in defense contracts, which helped revitalize the empty American west,
employing huge numbers in new cities and towns.
This, in turn, redistributed the power in Congress with many representatives
throughout the gun belt, becoming dependent on the arms industry for
their positions in government.
And, as it would later in Iraq and Afghanistan, the government would pay for the war
by printing more dollars, straining its ability to convert dollars into gold,
inflating the currency and helping to create a deficit that grew from
$3 billion in the early '60s to a
staggering $25 billion by 1968.
Speculation, ...
productive reinvestment lagged
corruption also abounded in Vietnam where
US shipped huge warehouses of goods to the warzone.
Enormous base camps with giant merchandising centers called PX's
flowered in a primitive landscape like mini Las Vegas's
fueling dreams of consumption.
Black markets thrived as cars, refrigerators, TV sets, food and drink
distorted a 3rd world economy.
Deadly weapons disappeared stolen by racketeering insiders, both US soldiers and
civilians, who greedily sold to both south and north Vietnamese.
Financial scandals, as in most wars, disappeared in the debris and chaos.
Ominous signs began to emerge.
Factories fled either to developing countries or the non-union south
as older northern industrial cities began to decay from unemployment,
poor housing and schools, and drugs.
Real wages not only stagnated, they were actually declined for the next 30 years
as the middle and working class' standard of living steadily eroded.
In 1971, Nixon removed the US from the $35/ounce gold standard and
abrogated the Bretton Woods treaty that
had governed the post-war economic alliance.
OPEC, an organization of oil producing countries,
mostly in the mideast, now felt powerful enough
to punish the US for supporting Israel
in the 1973 war. Oil prices quadrupled in the next year.
The US which, prior to the 1950s, produced all the oil it needed
was now importing 1/3 of its supply.
The country would suffer deep cycles of inflation and recession
with Wall st. profiting from the increasing volatility and insecurity
of a speculative bubble economy, that reached its nadir in the
great recession of 2008.
The Vietnam war would indeed spell the end of the last significant period
of social and political reform the US had seen.
Was the country now a paper tiger living on borrowed money and time?
This question would haunt the national imagination through 1970s
and even the 1980s into the '90s
when, with the fall of the Soviet union, the sense of American domination re-emerged
The accepted mythology of the time was the US lost the war in Vietnam.
But as linguist, historian and philosopher
Noam Chomsky has pointed out
it's called a loss, a defeat, because they didn't achieve the maximal aims
the maximal aims being turning it into something like the Philippines.
They didn't do that. They did achieve the major aims:
It was possible to destroy Vietnam and leave.
Elsewhere he wrote, south Vietnam had been virtually destroyed, and
the chances that Vietnam would ever be a model for anything had essentially disappeared.
When an aging and wiser Robert McNamara returned to Vietnam in 1995
he conceded, somewhat in shock, that despite official US estimates of
2 million Vietnamese dead, that 3.4 to 3.8 million Vietnamese had perished.
In comparison 58,000 americans died in the fighting and 200,000 were wounded.
The US had destroyed 9,000 of south Vietnam's 15,000 hamlets,
in the north all 6 industrial cities, 28 of 30 provincial towns
and 96 of 116 district towns.
Unexploded ordnance still blankets the country side.
19 million gallons of herbicide had poisoned the environment.
Almost all of Vietnam's ancient triple canopy forrests are gone.
The effects of chemical warfare alone lasted for generations,
and can be seen today in the hospitals in the south where agent orange was used
dead fetuses kept in jars, surviving children born with horrid birth defects
and deformities, and cancer rates much higher than in the north.
And yet, incredibly, the chief issue in the US was for many years
the hunt for 1300 soldiers missing in action,
a few hundred of them presumed taken as captives by the north Vietnamese.
High grossing action movies were made out of it.
No official apology from the US has ever been issued,
and absolutely no appreciation of the suffering of the Vietnamese
President Bill Clinton finally recognized Vietnam in 1995
20 years later.
Ever since the war, american conservatives have struggled to vanquish the
Vietnam Syndrome, which became a catch phrase for americans' unwillingness
to send troops abroad to fight.
For a war that so mesmerized and defined an entire generation,
surprisingly little is known about Vietnam today among american youth.
This is not accidental.
There's been a conscious and systematic effort to erase Vietnam from historical consciousness.
It's time that we recognized ours was in truth a noble cause.
We dishonored the memory of 50,000 young americans who died in that cause
when we gave way to feelings of guilt as if we were doing something shameful.
It was not only conservatives who white-washed history
Whatever we may think about the political decisions of the Vietnam era,
the brave americans who fought and died there had noble motives.
they fought for the freedom and the independence of Vietnamese people.
The outcome has been shrouded in sanitized lies.
The Vietnam veterans' memorial in Washington, dedicated in nov. of '82,
now contains the names of 58,272 dead or missing americans.
The message is clear;
the tragedy is the death of those americans.
But imagine if the names of 3.8 million Vietnamese and millions of Cambodians
and Laotians were also included.
The supposed shame of Vietnam would be finally avenged by Ronald Reagan,
the 2 Bush's
and even to an extent Barack Obama in the decades to come.
The irony is that the Vietnam war represented a sad climax of the
WW2 generation from which Johnson,
Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr.
and all the generals in high command came;
those proclaimed by the mainstream media in the late 1990s as the
greatest generation.
Yet, that same media ignored the arrogance of a generation that
over-confident from WW2, dismissed Vietnam as a 4th rate power
that could be easily defeated.
From, what the ancient Greeks call, hubris or arrogance comes the fall.
And from this initially obscure war came a great distortion of
economic, social and moral life in America.
A civil war that polarized the country to this day,
with much denied, little remembered, nothing regretted and, perhaps,
nothing learned.
History must be remembered, or it will be repeated until the
meanings are clear.
The second president of the US, John Adams,
once said: 'Power always thinks it has a great soul
and that it is doing God's service when it's violating all his laws.'
which makes the details of the oncoming history a sad, inevitable blood bath
that repeats itself again and again
as the USA much too often
stood on the side of the oppressors. Propping up allies with financial and
military aid, war-on-drugs programs, police and security training,
joint military exercises, overseas bases and occasional direct military interventions
the US empowered a network of tyrants who were friendly to foreign investors
who could exploit cheap labor and native resources on terms favorable to the empire.
Such was the British and French way and such will be the American way.
Not raping, looting Mongols; but rather
benign, briefcase toting, Ivy League educated bankers and corporate executives
who would loot local economies in the name of modernity, democracy and civilization
to the benefit of US and its allies.
During the cold war, politicians and the media side-stepped debate over the
basic morality of the US foreign policy by mouthing platitudes about
US benevolence and insisting that harsh, even dirty, tactics were needed
to fight fire with fire.
The Kissingers of the world called it Realpolitik
but even when the Soviet union collapsed in the early 1990s, our nation's policies
did not change, as the US time and again has taken the side of
the entrenched classes or the military, against those from below seeking change.
It was the American war against the poor of the earth,
the most easily killed, the collateral damage.
As was asked at the beginning, was it really about fighting communism
or was it a misunderstood or disguised motivation?
It was George Kennen, America's leading early cold war strategist, who went to
the heart of the matter in a memorandum written in 1948:
'with 50% percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population,
we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment.
Our real task is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to
maintain this position of disparity.
To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality, and daydreamings.
We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as
human rights, the raising of the living standards and democratization.
We are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.
The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.'
But George Kennen, who lived to be 101 years old in 2005,
was an intellectual who never sought political office.
Never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined the barbaric
proportions of the upcoming presidency of Ronald Reagan.
I’m proud to be an American,
where at least I know I’m free
cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land
God bless the USA.