EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN GOV’T SLAVES
“Never Forget, 50
Years Ago the US Slaughtered 500 Unarmed Men, Women, & Children”
Well, yes, but, first, it is important to realize that it was
only one of a number of massacres, some small, some large. The others weren't
witnessed and photographed.
There were also many Individual atrocities. I once met an
American deserter in Toronto who had raped and then blasted with his rifle a
Vietnamese girl. My understanding then was that kind of savagery was not
unusual among young conscripts far from home and unhappy about being there,
ignorant young men from far away, holding absolute power over the people they
likely blamed for making them be in such a “hellhole.”
More importantly, the fact is that the entire war was an
atrocity.
America killed about 3 million Vietnamese and did so in
their own land, a place America had no business even being. It used all kinds
of pretenses and lies to put itself there.
America left the place a horror of bomb craters and death,
with vast deposits of Agent Orange and other poisons left to kill and maim for
decades to come. So, too, countless land mines left to blow off peasants’ legs
when they tried reclaiming their farms.
And the secret bombing and incursions into Cambodia - all
totally illegal - destabilized a neutral government, allowing monsters to come
to power, monsters who killed another million people while the United States
watched and picked its collective nose.
So-called "heroes" of the war, men like John
McCain, represented nothing so much as America's desperate wish for something worthy
or heroic to be discovered out of the dark horrors for which they were
responsible.
America’s government, too, encouraged the thought of there
being something positive or worthy. After all, it had been utterly humiliated
in being defeated by a nation of peasants, after using every form of
destruction they could think of, short of nuclear weapons, which indeed had
been seriously considered.
McCain was a war criminal, shot down while bombing civilians
in Hanoi. The rich creep never even properly thanked the humble Vietnamese man
who saved his life. He had landed in water and would have drowned.
His fellow prisoners also said he received special
treatment, and some say he cooperated with his captors. The Vietnamese knew
perfectly well who this life-long spoiled brat was, the son and grandson of
American Admirals.
His entire life story is one of a fairly shabby man with an
ugly temper, never very able in anything he tried, who bullied everyone to make
his way up under the influence and reputations of his father and grandfather.
Later, of course, his status as “hero” catapulted him into politics, a field in
which he frequently disgraced himself.
America's Vietnam War was a true modern holocaust, killing
about 4 million people in total including what happened in Cambodia. Many died horribly with new American weapons
and ghastly practices such as large-scale use of napalm and carpet bombing.
There were also horrors like the CIA's Operation Phoenix
which murdered somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 peasants in an effort to
destroy social cohesiveness in the country. Night-crawling special forces went
out to villages in the dark, under CIA guidance, and literally used large knives
to cut the throats of residents such as mayors or other officials.
My Lai was terrible, but it was only the tiniest part of
this deliberately-created hell.
None of it served any good purpose. It just reflected
immense America arrogance and the brutality born of immense power. Its only
purpose was to hold America's artificially-created foothold in Asia, South
Vietnam, a place itself run by ugly dictators.
American presidents lied countless times about what they were
doing, and what they were doing was indistinguishable from some of the work of
the Nazis themselves.
You see, there is nothing in slogans about democracy or
freedom that saves a people from sinking into the most depraved behavior, and
that is the real lesson of the Vietnam War, but it is ignored to this day.
