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Title: Vietnam Author: George Bradford Date: 1994 Language: en Topics: Vietnam, Vietnam War, War, anti-war, anti-capitalism, state capitalism, Fifth Estate Source: Retrieved on October 16 2021 from https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/344-summer-1994/vietnam/ Notes: Originally featured on Fifth Estate # 344, Summer, 1994
U.S. “normalization” of relations with Vietnam ignores the slaughter of
the war and continues the myth of the MIA/POW.
Why did President Clinton (whose opportunistic-draft dodging was the
only worthy thing he’s ever done) lift the almost twenty-year ban on
trade with Vietnam in February, beginning a process of “normalization”
between the two countries?
Was he tired of the ongoing violence—since 1975, more economic than
military—against a small nation with the gumption to defy U.S.
geopolitical hegemony? Was he planning to pay reparations for the
immense damage done to Vietnam (and the rest of Indochina) by the U.S.
war machine, or to pay the $3.25 billion in reconstruction aid promised
by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger when the peace treaty, with North
Vietnam was signed?
Hardly. The February 4, 1994 New York Times headline made it clear:
“Move Opens Potentially Lucrative Market for American Products.” Though
die-hard right-wing veterans groups like the American Legion opposed the
policy change, powerful business interests had long pressured for
“normalization” in order to enter a market that, according to the Times,
could be worth up to $6 billion in trade for U.S. corporations. And
Clinton is the businessman’s business president if he is anything.
The resumption of trade was endorsed by former U.S. military commanders,
war criminals-at-large like retired General William Westmoreland
(commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, who once explained the courage and
determination of his peasant enemies as an “oriental” indifference to
death), and retired Admiral Elmo Zumwalt (who was head of naval
operations in the war, and more recently famous for shrugging his
shoulders at his own son’s Agent Orange-caused death). Speaking at the
White House ceremony, Zumwalt declared it time to “put away bitterness
and revenge…and begin the process of the peaceful penetration of
Vietnam.”
Not only was the admiral’s language an impeccable example of masculinist
military mentality (the same attitude that called sex with prostitutes
“boom-boom” during the war, linking its mechanized violence to the
exploitation of women’s bodies), his remark revealed the direct
connection between military conquest and economic “penetration.” To
paraphrase Clausewitz, business is simply war by other means.
In fact, Mobil Oil and American Express had already signed agreements
with Hanoi bureaucrats. The day after the ban was lifted, Pepsi—which
was actually already distributing its product in the country through
other companies—was handing out free samples in Ho Chi Minh City. This
is what two to four million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians died
for? The independence to drink Pepsi rather than Coke? Can Bazooka
Bubblegum be far behind, distributed perhaps by U.S. soldiers and
sailors (on leave, say, from the Second Korean War) looking for
“boom-boom”? Who knows, maybe they’ll even open a new naval base at the
former U.S. facility at Cam Ranh Bay.
Clinton, worried about backlash over the phony issue of missing U.S.
soldiers in Vietnam, marshaled military men and Vietnam vets from
Congress for his ceremony, telling reporters that his “one factor only”
for reopening trade was to gain “the fullest possible accounting” of
U.S. soldiers missing in action. Thus he continued a vicious myth—that
Vietnam is still holding Americans prisoner—that grew out of Nixon and
Kissinger’s cynical tactic to avoid serious negotiations with the North
Vietnamese in the early 1970s. Later, under the auspices of right-wing
ideologues including Ross Perot and the fascist mercenaries he
sponsored, the lie took on a life of its own.
Every war is a meat-grinder for the working classes, and consequently
produces MIA’s—those poor devils blown and burned to unrecognizable and
unrecoverable shreds by the unholy merchandise of the arms
manufacturers. But the percentage of U.S. MIAs among total casualties in
the Vietnam War was far lower, dramatically lower, than in any previous
war, including Korea and the Second World War. H. Bruce Franklin, author
of MIA: Mythmaking in America, told the FE that MIAs constituted 20% of
the World War II dead, but less than 4% of those in Vietnam. (Franklin’s
book is alone in exposing the cynical fraud perpetrated by the
politicians, opportunists and media hounds, and has recently been issued
in an expanded paperback by Rutgers University Press.)
Of course, it is rarely if ever asked in the imperial heartland how many
Vietnamese MIAs there were. (Few in this country have any sense of what
Vietnamese casualties were, and when surveys are done, people usually
guess in the hundreds of thousands, which, as Noam Chomsky once pointed
out, would be the equivalent of contemporary Germans “guessing” the
number of Jewish deaths in the Second World War as perhaps 300,000.) The
fire power disparity between the U.S. and its Vietnamese adversaries was
at least fifty to one, and as high as 500 to one. And given such U.S.
policies as mass burials of Vietnamese civilian and military dead in
ditches with giant bulldozers, the dumping of bodies at sea, and
interrogation techniques like flinging prisoners to their deaths out of
helicopters, the percentage (and total) of Vietnamese MIAs is obviously
vastly greater than the number of Americans.
If the Vietnamese people had their wall in Washington, it would probably
stretch down to Sarasota. And nothing that occurred in the “Hanoi
Hilton” (the name U.S. prisoners gave the camp where they were held),
even in the fevered imaginations of the sorcerers who concoct mass
culture, comes close to the kinds of torture and mayhem perpetrated by
the U.S. and its puppet allies at the front and in the prisons of the
South Vietnamese regime. Yet the postwar malaise of self-pity and
victim-blaming remains in effect, exemplified by the Timesreporting the
recent policy change would bring about the closest ties between the two
countries “since the long and painful war that left 58,000 Americans
dead….” No mention of Vietnamese casualties at all—why would the
imperial “newspaper of record” bother to report that unpleasant data?
Imagining the executioners as the victims, and turning the real victims
into the executioners, is a common form of psychological denial
occurring in the wake of colonial defeats in this century. This current
post-war Big Lie is not the idiosyncratic delusion of a marginalized
milieu (extreme right and misguided relatives). The delusion that
Vietnam holds prisoners of war continues to be taken seriously in the
ruling discourse despite the fact that no reputable independent
investigation has ever found any credible evidence of the existence of
surviving POWs.
Rather, there has been a clear pattern of fabrication by the reactionary
organizations and public relations hustlers who keep the myth alive,
including even the use of doctored photographs of alleged POW’s that
turned out to be of gulag inmates in the 1930s (which didn’t stop some
hysterical relatives of missing pilots from “recognizing” their loved
ones). As the White House’s apparent need to manage the fiction
demonstrates, the figure of the POW/MIA has become an ideological fetish
in late imperial American society—a fetish to which any ruling
politician must genuflect to show proper respect for the war heroes and
their widows and orphans. Indeed, the only flag ever flown over the U.S.
Capitol other than the U.S. (with one exception)[1] was the POW/MIA
banner.
One important source of this mass psychology has been an entire genre of
Hollywood movies produced in the 1980s that served to aggravate racist
projection fantasies generated by the post-traumatic stress of
imperialist military failure. The POW/ MIA fiction helped to create a
post-war mystique strikingly similar to the protofascist
“stab-in-the-back” psychosis among Germans after World War I. The
cinema’s function in the manipulation of mass (un)consciousness is
notable, with the demonization of the real victims (in the Rambo and
Chuck Norris films) having parallels in other periods, particularly, the
motif of the evil Jewish outsider in pre-nazi German film. (See
Kracauer’s fascinating study, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychoanalytic
History of the German Cinema.) During more than a decade, this and other
similar themes were exploited by German filmmakers, thus psychologically
predisposing many Germans to accept Hitler and fascist rule.
The POW/MIA mystique is closely linked to another post-war ideology with
proto-fascist aspects: the cult of the (betrayed) veteran. This
significant strand in national socialist ideology, prevalent in the
German population in the years leading up to the fascist triumph, played
into an authoritarian rejection of politics that delegitimized bourgeois
business-as-usual in favor of a patriotic party-police state, an
attitude that should be familiar to any observer of American politics
today. (See Daniel Guerin’s Fascism and Big Business.)
Nowadays, the Vietnam veteran has become an icon of sentimental
patriotism, even among the liberal counter culture. (This while the
actual life conditions of many Vietnam veterans, genuinely suffering
from what happened to them in the war—or perhaps also from the suffering
they caused others—is wretched. The number of veterans who have
committed suicide now surpasses the number of U.S. soldiers killed in
the war, and Vietnam veterans account for an enormous percentage of the
urban homeless and mentally ill.).
In many circles today, expressing relative indifference to the fate of
the invaders of Vietnam, missing or otherwise (given the enormous
contrast in suffering between the two peoples), is tantamount to
sacrilege. One is allowed to criticize the war (as a stab-in-the-back by
elites or traitors, or as an example of failed idealism, or as a
halfhearted crusade, never as the imperialist holocaust it was), but one
is expected unconditionally to “love the warrior.”
Most veterans, it is true, were themselves victims of the war
machine—poor and working class draftees, with a greatly disproportionate
number of blacks, Latinos and Indians among them, with no stake in the
war and no desire to be in it. And to their credit, soldiers and sailors
helped bring an end to the war as much as or more than the anti-war
movement back home, by staging mutinies and refusing to fight, once it
became clear they were not going to win. A significant number became
courageous, principled, public opponents of the war, and some became
conscious revolutionary enemies of the U.S. Empire. (See “The Collapse
of the Armed Forces: The Lessons of Vietnam,” in
, and “The Lessons of Vietnam: The Government Spit on Vietnam Vets, Not
the Anti-war Movement,” in
, available for $2 each from the FE Book Service.)
But before anyone forgets the differences between the war’s impact on
the two countries and their peoples, it never hurts to repeat a few
figures to remind ourselves who the real victims were. Some 58,000
Americans died in the war, in contrast with two to four million
Indochinese (two million were probably Vietnamese). Some 6,600,000 tons
of bombs were dumped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia by the U.S., more
than the First World War, the Second World War and the Korean War
combined. There were approximately 25,000,000 bomb craters left when the
Americans quit the country.
About 400,000 tons of napalm were dropped and nearly 20 million gallons
of deadly Agent Orange and other related herbicides were sprayed on the
Vietnamese countryside. It is commonly known that U.S. veterans and
their families suffer myriad health problems from exposure to the dioxin
in these herbicides; far less is acknowledged here about the epidemic of
cancers and other diseases they have caused in Vietnam. 25,000,000 acres
of farmland and 12,000,000 acres of forest were destroyed; of some
15,000 South Vietnamese hamlets, 9,000 were destroyed in the war.
In contrast with some 2,200 Missing Americans, the Vietnamese government
calculates some 300,000 MIAs of its own. In one of the very few
references ever made to these people in the U.S. press, Philip Shenon of
The New York Times writes that military death certificates (frequently
all that is left of the war dead), typically displayed in Vietnamese
households, are “as common…as wall calendars and family photographs.”
According to Shenon, in the single province of Lang Son in northern
Vietnam, there are nearly 2,400 soldiers listed as missing—more than the
U.S. total. Approximately 1,000 northern Vietnamese families apply each
month to go south to search for the remains of missing relatives. (See
“The Vietnamese Speak Softly of 300,000 Missing in the War,” 11/30/92.)
More than three million Indochinese were left wounded, and by 1975,
14,305,000 people had been turned into refugees. The U.S. stopped short
in its efforts only at an all-out invasion of a million or more troops,
which—even in the unlikely event that it was successful militarily—would
have brought about complete chaos at home among a populace disenchanted
with the war. The other unused option was the atom bomb, which world
public opinion prevented. Yet, in the obscene parlance of the war
criminals (like George Bush, who used the cliché while pulverizing
Iraq), this necessary strategic limit was fighting “with one arm tied
behind our backs.”
Those who identified with the invaded rather than the invaders might
find it difficult to get too upset about the fate of those Americans who
were taken prisoner. Sadly, human sympathy does have its limits. Yet
while there may be room in the sympathies for a young, confused draftee,
the pilots (who made up the bulk of the U.S. prisoners of war in
Vietnam) are another story. They were officers and professional
soldiers, highly educated elites with strong loyalties to the war
machine and few scruples about carrying out its orders.
It was they who sprayed the herbicides and jellied gasoline, incinerated
and carpet bombed villages, farms, hospitals, schools and even dams and
dikes at one point, causing massive flooding, destruction and the
disruption of agriculture. (This is a technique the Pentagon improved
during the war against Iraq in the 1990s: focusing much of the bombing
on infrastructure, they inflicted mass death indirectly through disease
and famine.)
The Vietnamese would have been justified in hanging captured pilots on
the spot. And if there were any justice in the world, some of the POWs
might have been forced to stay in Vietnam, for years, perhaps, to clean
up the mess they made. Even today, people die every year in Vietnam from
unexploded ordnance; the victims include Vietnamese directly engaged in
searching for the remains of Americans, in response to the demand of a
heartless, racist nation ghoulishly insistent on having every last
particle of its “heroes” returned home.
Alongside its article on the ending of the trade embargo, the Times
printed the now famous photograph of children running down a road after
being burned by napalm. Kim Phuc, the little girl shown in the photo
running naked with her arms out from her body in pain and distress, is
now a young woman. A couple of years ago she came to the U.S. to receive
further treatment for the burns she received that day in 1972. When
interviewed by the press, she said that she felt no rancor toward those
who had injured her and her country, and that she forgave the same
pilots who napalmed her village, and would tell them if she met them,
“the war is over. The past is the past.”
One can only honor such a generous spirit and respect her for getting on
with her life. It’s her life, after all.[2] But in a certain sense, no
one with a conscience in this country has a right to take the same
magnanimous attitude; we cannot yet forgive and forget because neither
the perpetrators nor the culture has properly faced U.S. crimes against
southeast Asia. (This country hasn’t even come to terms with its crimes
against Native Americans, Africans and many others.)
No, we can never forgive the crimes of the U.S. war machine. Too many
war criminals are still living out their lives in luxury as corporate
functionaries, consultants, pensioners and “elder statesmen.” Perhaps
after generations of reparations and atonement for the terrible crimes
committed, forgiveness might be appropriate. But the imperial overlords
aren’t returning with heads humbly bowed to acknowledge any
responsibility for the atrocities; rather, after damaging and killing
millions of people and causing horrendous destruction to the earth
itself, the plunderers are planning to carry out the only project they
understand, the penetration and exploitation of the land they once
attempted to subjugate by other means.
This denunciation of the monsters who administer global capitalism is
not meant to mythologize or glorify the Vietnamese. Certainly, the
Vietnamese stalinists never abolished the market economy in an attempt
to create a liberatory, communal society. And the country has been no
paradise since the U.S. was ousted; as one might expect, after
generations of foreign invasion, slaughter and brutalization, the
Vietnamese are governed by an impoverished, bureaucratic police state,
with a mostly state capitalist economy mixed with private
entrepreneurial enterprise. It’s one of those painful ironies of the
modern world that a small country suffers from being locked out of the
world market; of course, apart from a thin stratum of elites, once let
in, the country will simply find itself with a new set of problems and
new layers of oppressive social relations.
“Normalization” only serves human ends when the idea of what is “normal”
is seriously examined and redefined to create a humane, genuinely
egalitarian, ecological society. Otherwise, exploitation and alienation
will inevitably expand. With the growth of the capitalist economy, one
kind of poverty will replace another. This time, however, the exploiters
will not be the old classes of aristocratic landlords, foreign
investors, and Saigon warlords, but government functionaries, new
foreign investors and tourists (golf resorts for aging U.S. war
veterans, with Viet Cong veterans as the caddies?), and a new milieu of
aggressive, westernized Vietnamese entrepreneurs.
The new invaders will without a doubt have their revenge on the land and
on the people once the market gets cooking. The prostitution of the
spirit that rules wherever capital determines the content of life will
find full entry where once the most powerful war machine in history
could not have its way. Business, to return to the Clausewitz idea, is
war by other means. Tragically, the war against Vietnam, like all of
industrial capitalism’s war against life itself, is far from over. We’re
in no mood to forgive, to put this sordid past behind us, or to deceive
ourselves about what is to come. The present is the past is the future.
We will never forgive, and we will never forget.
FE Note: George Bradford authored “Looking Back on the Vietnam War:
History and Forgetting,” FE #320, June, 1985, and “
Vietnam’s Untold Victim: The Land
,” in the Summer 1985 FE (both out of print but available from FE Books
in photocopy on request with a self-addressed stamped envelope).
[1] In August 1814, British troops led by Admiral Sir George Cockburn (a
direct ancestor of radical political commentator Alexander Cockburn),
hoisted the Union Jack over the Capitol before setting the building on
fire.
[2] The generosity of the Vietnamese is remarkable. Said one Vietnamese
widow to Times reporter Philip Shenon, “I understand how the Americans
feel. When I read in the newspapers how the Americans come here to
search for the missing soldiers, I know exactly the pain of the
families. We share the same grief.” One would not likely encounter the
same sentiment among the POW/MIA families in the U.S.
And since movies have played a role in this discussion, it is worth
mentioning that one had to be struck by the same forgiving attitude
expressed by Le Ly Hayslip in the flawed but worthwhile treatment of her
life by Oliver Stone in his recent film, “Heaven and Earth,” which, in
telling this Vietnamese woman’s remarkable story of the war on several
levels, is, despite its problems, the only effort so far of an American
director to portray the war from an angle other than that of the
sufferings of the invaders.