The American War in Vietnam. John Marciano

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СКАЧАТЬ amid the height of protest during the American war, far too many educators, public officials, and media pundits passed on an uncritical patriotism and militarism, leaving citizens and youth without the critical skills needed for informed dissent and empowered citizenship in a democracy. At the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the journalist Andrew Kopkind laid out this dissenting challenge: “America has been in a state of war—cold, hot and lukewarm—for as long as most citizens now living can remember.” This militaristic state “is so ingrained in American institutions … in short, so totalitarian—that the government is practically unthinkable without it.” This war mentality influences every social institution and emphasizes “secrecy not candor, propaganda not information.”⁷ Kopkind shatters the story of American benevolence put forth by Obama and the Vietnam Commemoration.

       Lessons that Should Be Learned

      Before discussing some of the major lessons of the American war that should be learned, it is important to pause and think about the staggering human and environmental toll left behind in Vietnam:

      Total war dead: The estimates include a figure of 882 thousand reported in a demographic study published in Population and Development Review, 1995, and a 3.6 million estimate by General Nguyen Dinh Uoc, of the Vietnamese Institute of Military History, 1995. In Kill Anything that Moves, historian Nick Turse states: “The most sophisticated analysis … of wartime mortality in Vietnam, a 2008 study by researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, suggested that a reasonable estimate might be 3.8 million violent war deaths, combat and civilian. The findings lend credence to an official 1995 Vietnamese government estimate of more than three million deaths in total … for the years when the Americans were involved in combat.” The Indochina Newsletter estimates a total of 14.3 million refugees overall. In South Vietnam there were three hundred thousand orphans and eight hundred thousand children who lost one or both parents; 15.5 million tons of bombs, ground and naval munitions landed on Vietnam, more than double that used by the United States in all of the Second World War; and twenty million gallons of poisonous herbicides were spread over South Vietnam.⁸

      Historian Marilyn Young states that at the end of the war, some 9,000 hamlets out of a total of 15,000 were destroyed, as well as 25 million acres of farmland and 12 million acres of forest. In addition, there were about 200,000 prostitutes, 181,000 people disabled, and 1 million widows.⁹ The 3.8 million dead Vietnamese were approximately 8 percent of the total population of that country in 1975. The equivalent death toll in the United States would be about 17.5 million people.

       Recent History

      A brief review of U.S. military actions after 1975 is necessary to counter the notion that the death and destruction the United States rained upon Vietnam was merely something from the past that has no bearing on recent decades and the present. As documented by Vietnam veteran and historian Andrew Bacevich, historian and writer Tom Engelhardt, late historian and former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson, and historians Alfred McCoy and Nick Turse, the last forty years have witnessed an endless string of wars and attempted regime changes in Panama, Nicaragua, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria; the massive growth of a worldwide system of military bases; secret Special Operations missions in 2014 in more than a hundred nations; drone attacks in countless countries; massive spying on Americans and citizens of other nations by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), as revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden; and a “War on Terror” since September 11, 2001, that has, in the name of combating terror, created conditions and “blowback” that have fueled the rise of militant Islamist armed forces now active in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.¹⁰

       The Corporate Media

      The Vietnam Commemoration and Obama’s speech are merely the latest attempts since 1975 to deny the horrors listed above and portray U.S. violence as a Noble Cause that went astray—the dominant theme put forth by the corporate media, including the influential New York Times. Despite criticisms of American decisions and tactics in the war, the corporate mass media supported the premises underlying Washington’s foreign policy and the ends of the conflict. Journalist and media historian Philip Knightly challenges the widely held belief that American reporters opposed the war: “There is only one flaw in this: the correspondents were not questioning American intervention itself, but only its effectiveness.” They were “as interested in seeing the United States win the war as was the Pentagon. What [they] questioned was not American policy, but the tactics used to implement that policy.…”¹¹

      Daniel Hallin, a professor of communications, also disputes the myth that press and television reports confronted civilian and military authorities, and undermined the war effort, essentially the “liberal myth of the adversary press in Vietnam.” Despite this myth, those who have “systematically investigated the media’s role in the war [reveal that] there is an impressive consensus rejecting the notions that the media were adversaries to America’s policy in Vietnam or a decisive factor in the outcome of the war.” As of the time of Hallin’s study in 1989, the three major studies of network television coverage of the war had arrived at the same conclusion: “All reject the idea that the living-room war meant graphic portrayals of violence on a daily basis, or that the television was consistently negative toward U.S. policy or led public opinion in turning against the war.”¹²

       The Antiwar Movement at Home and in the Military

      The domestic antiwar movement challenged Washington’s policies; however, the key forces bringing the conflict to an end were the Vietnamese resistance and antiwar protest within the U.S. military. The protest against the war did not begin with college students in 1965, as many Americans believe, but twenty years earlier—in October 1945 when troopships bringing GIs home after the Second World War were diverted to transport French troops to Vietnam to continue its colonial rule there, sparking the first antiwar protest against American involvement. Tens of thousands of veterans of the American war became involved in the antiwar movement, as extraordinary dissent and rebellion emerged from within the U.S. military.

       Commemoration Myths

      Air Force veteran and scholar H. Bruce Franklin disputes one of the great myths of the American war, resurrected in a different form by Obama and the Commemoration: a deeply held belief held by most citizens decades after the fighting ended that “American prisoners of war [were] still being held as captives in Indochina.” Obama’s reference to this controversy in his speech lends credence to the myth. According to Franklin, the anguish over POWs and MIAs remained “the most important concern of many Vietnam veterans,” exceeding that around other pressing issues, such as Agent Orange and medical care. This myth was linked with that of returning vets abused by antiwar activists, a myth discredited by Vietnam veteran Jerry Lembcke’s Spitting Image, but a testimony to the strength of the dominant and inaccurate beliefs on the war that keep people uninformed and manipulated.¹³ In their concern for alleged American prisoners and missing in action, citizens here ignored the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese missing at the end of the war, as well as the thousands of homeless Vietnam veterans walking U.S. streets.

      The MIA/POW issue helped postwar presidents engage in economic and political warfare against Vietnam for at least two decades, until diplomatic relations were established during the Clinton presidency. After the war ended in 1975, the United States was the only major nation to withhold diplomatic recognition to Vietnam. In 1977 former president Carter was asked whether the United States had “a moral obligation to help rebuild” the country. He stated that we owed Vietnam no debt and had no responsibility because “the destruction was mutual.” Since “we went to Vietnam without any desire … to impose American will on other people” but to “defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese,” there was no reason “to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability.” СКАЧАТЬ