US Rewriting History of Vietnam War, a Genocide of 3.8 Million
US Rewriting History
of Vietnam War, a Genocide of 3.8 Million
Commemorations of the 50th
anniversary of the start of the Vietnam War take place Tuesday as US officials
whitewash one of the greatest human rights tragedies in modern history.
On Tuesday, Loud & Clear's
Brian Becker sat down with historian Peter Kuznick to discuss the Vietnam War
and the political motives of the politicians busy rewriting the history of the
conflict, including a commemoration for the start of the war, set for Tuesday.
Why are we commemorating the
start of the Vietnam War today?
"Last year was the 40th
anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. That was something that was worth
commemorating and celebrating, but the start of the Vietnam War is completely
ambiguous," said Peter Kuznick. "There are so many points at which
you can date the beginning of the war."
Kuznick suggested that the first
seeds of the Vietnam War can be traced to 1945, with Harry Truman succeeding to
the presidency, following Franklin Roosevelt's death. "Truman did not
share Roosevelt's anti-colonial leanings and was willing to get the US involved,
to begin supporting the French effort such that, by 1950, we had committed to
the restoration of French colonialism in Vietnam."
He said another appropriate start
date for the conflict could be 1954, with the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu
and a Geneva agreement repeatedly violated by the US.
The true beginning, in Kuznick's
view, however, was Eisenhower's decision to block the election of Ho Chi Minh
in 1956. "When Eisenhower was asked why the United States blocked the
election that was supposed to take place in 1956 to unify all of Vietnam, he
said if the election were to go on, Ho Chi Minh and the communists would win
80% of the vote, so it wasn't in the US interest so we pushed Jiam to block the
election," said Kuznick.
The death of Kennedy and the
steady escalation toward atrocity
A significant turning point in
the war was the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Kuznick
noted that "Kennedy had committed to a lot of people to begin to pull US
troops out, 1000 troops by 1963 and the remainder out by 1964." According
to Kuznick, "when Robert Kennedy and Robert McNamara were asked would it
mean to America if they were losing the war, they said we were going to pull
the troops out anyways."
"Johnson didn't share
Kennedy's commitment to withdrawing troops, and he immediately reaffirms the US
commitment, tells the generals that the United States was not going to lose
Vietnam, he was not going to be the President to lose a war to the
communists," Kuznick said.
While Kuznick does not view
Johnson as a hawkish tyrant, he does, however, consider the 36th president to
be a leader who slowly crept into the quicksand of arrogance and unending war.
"He didn't go in there thinking we were going to massively increase the
troop presence to over 500,000, or that we were going to begin this vicious
bombing campaign. He gradually moved to that position."
The genocide that killed at least
3.8 million innocents
The public perception of the
Vietnam War fails to reflect the reality of the gruesome ordeal. Americans
often think about the impact on veterans' communities, with many soldiers
suffering PTSD, and returning to the US to face insults and disgrace, including
accusations of being a "baby killer." A disproportionate number
Vietnam veterans found themselves ravaged by illness, drug addiction, and
homelessness after the US failed to address the needs of returnees.
But the War was also notable for
the widespread use of indiscriminate
carpet bombing, resulting in the near elimination of entire populations.
While Americans can note some 60,000 US soldiers who died, they are often not
aware that the civilian death toll in Vietnam and surrounding regions was
estimated by US officials to be about 3.8 million people.
Kuznick looks to set that record
straight. "Do you know how many people died in Vietnam?" he asked.
"My students don't know. When I do surveys with them they estimate maybe a
half million Vietnamese died in the war. [Former US Secretary of Defense]
McNamara came into my class and said that he believes that 3.8 million Vietnamese
died in the war; 3.8 million. Why don't the students know that?"
The move to recreate the history
of Vietnam as a noble fight for freedom
"President Obama has now
come out and talked about the nobility of American motives in Vietnam. What is
he talking about? This was a war of atrocities. It was one of the worst war
crimes of the 20th century, of all of history," explained Kuznick.
The professor detailed how the US
military industrial complex and the neocons, starting in the 1970s and
accelerating in the 1980s, pushed US officials "to sanitize, to cleanse
the memory of Vietnam. Reagan said that he was tired of Americans apologizing
about Vietnam, we should be proud of Vietnam, and Clinton and Obama do some of
the same, today."
"The commemoration of the
start of this war is bizarre," says Kuznick, "And now Obama says that
the Americans were fighting for freedom, but what is he talking about? We
weren't there for freedom, we were actually trying to overthrow the popular and
more democratic forces so that we could impose our own dictators and henchmen
over there."