Tag Archives: Vietnam

Political Rants

Memory’s minefield.

It’s always interesting when American Presidents in particular visit nations we have destroyed in past wars. This past week President Obama traveled to Hiroshima to deliver the resounding message that we are not sorry …  repeat, not sorry …  for using the most destructive weapons in the history of mankind on this unfortunate community. He also delivered some claptrap about reducing the number of nuclear weapons, even as his administration moves forward with an ambitious plan to engineer a highly destabilizing new generation of nuclear weapons.

U.S. to mankind: still not sorry.Empire means more than never having to say you’re sorry. It mostly means never even contemplating the concept of “sorry” – an imperial value not lost on the likes of NPR, whose Morning Edition host Renee Montagne reliably informed us that “in America – the view of the bombing – though everyone recognizes this as horrific – the view of the bombing is it was done because it had to be done.” So that’s what “the view” is, eh? Thanks, Renee. Up to your usual journalistic standards.

Obama’s previous stop was in Vietnam. No apologies there, either. Though the central thrust of his mission was to announce the lifting of an arms embargo on Vietnam that has been in place since the American war began, tightened under Reagan. Obama referred to this as a vestige of the Cold War, though the Cold War was not so cold in Vietnam, it bears reminding. Interestingly, the President’s aims in Vietnam are not dissimilar from the aims of the American war itself. One of the core objectives of U.S. policy in its Indochina wars was that of keeping the region from accommodating to China so that they would instead provide materials, markets, and cheap labor to Japan – an American version of the “co-prosperity sphere” imperial Japan aggressively sought to establish in the 1930s and ’40s.

Today, the goal is … well … to have Vietnam integrated into the American-led global economic order, via the TPP and other instruments, thereby containing what our government perceives as China’s expansionism. It is, in some respects, an effort to reclaim the maximal objective of the Vietnam war, which proved beyond our reach. (I tend to agree with Chomsky, however, that the U.S. did, in fact, essentially prevail in the Vietnam war by destroying three countries and ensuring that Indochina’s crippled post-war independence would serve as a model for no one.)

The coverage of this trip has been pretty abysmal. No surprise there. Once the mainstream media has worked out what “the view” is on a given topic, there’s no point in wasting any energy on actual reporting.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Bodies count.

Though you probably didn’t hear about it on the evening news or NPR, the group International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (of which Physicians for Social Responsibility is a member) released a report on casualties of the so-called “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The toll is conservatively estimated at 1.3 million in total, with 1 million in Iraq killed as a result of our 2003 invasion. Anyone familiar with the figures breezily tossed around by the last two administrations might be surprised by this total. (I recall W. Bush casually offering 30,000, as if guessing the number of marbles in a jar.) Actually, the number is roughly in line with what the Iraq Study Group estimated in 2005-06.

This is what hegemony looks likeNo matter – this wasn’t worthy of comment, except on Democracy Now! That’s not surprising. We can’t acknowledge the magnitude of our own crimes, only those of our official enemies. Assad is an execrable mass murderer, right? Sure he is. But has he killed as many as we have over the past fifteen years? Not nearly. How about ISIS? Killer crackheads, to be sure. But pikers next to us. Absolute freaking amateurs. We have a long tradition of outdoing those we criticize. No one denounced the Russians for their invasion of Afghanistan more than we did; and yet here we are, 14 years into our own Afghan war, no end in sight. Noble mission vs. international crime. Curiously, the former has a higher body count.

This is nothing new. We’ve just passed the fiftieth anniversary of our invasion of South Vietnam – the arrival of the first contingent of combat units in the country. If they think about it at all, most Americans generally think the number of dead in the Vietnam war as being in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps – maybe 300,000. Given that millions were killed, millions more gravely wounded, this is akin to holocaust denial. Kind of sickening. It’s estimated that about 40,000 Vietnamese have died since the war due to unexploded ordinance alone – see this recent article in the Nation.

Unless we come to terms with this as a people, we will be condemned to repeat it. We already have, and we will again. But we don’t have to. It’s up to us.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Austerity rules.

Just a few things I want to comment on this week, not at any great length. Bear with me, please.

Human Rights. In what appeared to be an effort to elicit Vietnam’s cooperation in the looming Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) “free trade agreement” – really an investors’ rights agreement – Secretary of State John Kerry recently paid a visit to Hanoi to discuss new maritime security cooperation measures, against the backdrop of China’s recent declaration of a kind of demilitarized zone in the South China Sea. None of this is surprising, but what kind of made my jaw hang open was the reporting around the visit. The main hook was that Kerry had been part of America’s expeditionary force in South Vietnam during the war, and he toured some of his old haunts in the south. NPR (not to single them out – everyone else did this, too), practically in a single breath, made reference to this trip down memory lane, then referred to problems with Vietnam’s human rights record, which Washington complains about.

Kerry greets a survivor.Really? Just a little bit of context might be nice. What was Kerry doing there in the 1960s again? Vacationing? No. Oh, that’s right – he was part of a massive invasion force that was grinding Vietnam – particularly southern Vietnam – to a bloody pulp, leaving probably 2 million dead and three countries destroyed; a massive crime that we have never been held accountable for. I think it’s a little premature to lecture Hanoi on human rights, frankly.

Work release. The Fed will be dialing back their “quantitative easing” policy in the coming year. I have mixed feelings about this, frankly. The central bank has been the only organ of American power – public or private – seemingly willing to invest in this economy. Much of that investment has been in vain, as the banks the Fed lends to have been extremely reluctant to lend that money out. Corporations are sitting on their money, not hiring at any great clip. And of course, at every level of government, it’s cut, cut, cut; thousands of public sector jobs eliminated. Austerity rules, once again.

I have this nagging feeling that American capital is unwilling to invest in American workers – that they feel it’s a bad risk, and so they seek richer pastures elsewhere, where workers rights are even less protected the meager safeguards we enjoy here. What we need is some public investment entity to pick up the slack. We need to commit ourselves to full employment – if someone is willing and able to work, and the private sector has nothing to offer them, let the government provide them with work. They, in turn, will spend that money in their local economy, supporting private sector jobs and growth. At the same time we need to stop incentivizing corporate off-shoring of jobs (see the TPP, above).

Austerity isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice, a bad one, and we have to reject it if we want a better life.

luv u,

jp