John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY WILLIAM J
ASTORE IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
Americans Are All Prisoners of War
There were really no American POWs in Vietnam.
No legal state of war was ever declared.
South Vietnam was not even a legitimate country but an artificial enclave, hived off the empire of the departing French, run exclusively by dictators, and intended to serve as an American pied-a-terre in Southeast Asia.
Even its own captive people did not support it. That’s who the Viet Cong were, residents of South Vietnam fighting the dictators of South Vietnam. America’s war was a shabby effort from beginning to end.
John Kennedy’s refusal to support the charade any further likely contributed to his assassination, although his attitudes towards Cuba and Russia were the major contributing factors.
That is the nature of the “freedom” and “democracy” LBJ’s war was all about. When asked once by a reporter in the White House why America was in Vietnam, Johnson, an extremely crude man, unzipped his pants and pulled out his ample penis. “That’s why,” he said.
The men captured by North Vietnam could justifiably be classed as war criminals, but the North chose not to do so and to keep them as bargaining chips. They knew, for example, that John McCain’s father was one of America’s most senior Admirals.
Good old John McCain, when he was shot down, was bombing a civilian facility in Hanoi. Some war hero.
I think America made a great deal of the "POWs" because the war was so shameful, so degrading, and so unsuccessful, they desperately wanted something to feel good about.
Project Phoenix cutting the throats of forty thousand village leaders in the nights. Marines burning down villagers’ homes. Napalm. Early cluster bombs. Agent Orange. Countless land mines. B-52 carpet-bombing. Massacres of civilians. Throwing prisoners who refused to talk out of helicopters. Countless rapes. Three million killed in Vietnam and another million in Cambodia.
If Americans had learned the true, terrible lessons that Vietnam offered, the history of the last half century might have been very different, but they did not.
America’s establishment was able to carry right on with its brutal imperial ways with just a few adjustments, like getting rid of the draft and creating a well-paid mercenary army. And the chances of adverse stories getting out in future were smothered by “embedding” the press with the military.
A further new element would be added in the 21st century wars by using in many cases recruited mercenaries, both corporate American ones and rabble recruited and armed from many places who passed as jihadi types but somehow always attacked what America wanted attacked and not what true jihadis would go after.
The horrors of America’s bloody march through the Middle East in the Neocon Wars of the last two decades were nearly as great as those of Vietnam, but almost no opposition at home arose. Americans were happy to go on with football and social networking while several million died, millions more were wounded, and tens of millions were reduced to desperate refugees.
Remnants of the Neocon Wars rage on still. American troops remain in parts of Syria and Iraq where they are not wanted. America’s ugly, complex proxy war in Syria continues to scar a beautiful land and prevent its healing. America and its partner, the monstrous Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, continue slaughtering civilians in Yemen. Libya, once an admirably-run and peaceful country, remains a smoldering ruin, overrun with armed gangs. America’s vicious, relentless efforts against Iran resemble a special kind of brutal, undeclared war. And America just flaunts international law by taking property from Syria and giving away the property of others in Palestine.
