The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?
John Marciano is professor emeritus of education at the State University of New York, Cortland, and a longtime activist, teacher, and trade unionist.
This article is adapted from The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? (Monthly Review Press, 2016).
The Vietnam War was an example of imperial aggression. According to historian Michael Parenti: “Imperialism is what empires are all about. Imperialism is what empires do,” as “one country brings to bear…economic and military power upon another country in order to expropriate [its] land, labor, natural resources, capital and markets.” Imperialism ultimately enriches the home country’s dominant class. The process involves “unspeakable repression and state terror,” and must rely repeatedly “upon armed coercion and repression.” The ultimate aim of modern U.S. imperialism is “to make the world safe” for multinational corporations. When discussing imperialism, “the prime unit of analysis should be the economic class rather than the nation-state.”1
U.S. imperial actions in Vietnam and elsewhere are often described as reflecting “national interests,” “national security,” or “national defense.” Endless U.S. wars and regime changes, however, actually represent the class interests of the powerful who own and govern the country. Noam Chomsky argues that if one wishes to understand imperial wars, therefore, “it is a good idea to begin by investigating the domestic social structure. Who sets foreign policy? What interest do these people represent? What is the domestic source of their power?”2
The United States Committed War Crimes, Including
The war was waged “against the entire Vietnamese population,” designed to terrorize them into submission. The United States “made South Vietnam a sea of fire as a matter of policy, turning an entire nation into a target. This is not accidental but intentional and intrinsic to the U.S.’s strategic and political premises.” In such an attack “against an entire people…barbarism can be the only consequence of [U.S.] tactics,” conceived and organized by “the true architects of terror,” the “respected men of manners and conventional views who calculate and act behind desks and computers rather than in villages in the field.”3 The U.S. abuse of Vietnamese civilians and prisoners of war was strictly prohibited by the Geneva Convention, which the United States signed. U.S. officials and media pundits continue to assert that tor ture is a violation of “our values.” This is not true. Tor ture is as American as apple pie, widely practiced in wars and prisons.
Washington Lied
The war depended on government lies. Daniel Ellsberg exposed one such lie that had a profound impact on the eventual course of the conflict: the official story of the Tonkin Gulf crisis of August 1964. President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told the public that the North Vietnamese, for the second time in two days, had attacked U.S. warships on “routine patrol in international waters”; that this was clearly a “deliberate” pattern of “naked aggression”; that the evidence for the second attack, like the first, was “unequivocal”; that the attack had been “unprovoked”; and that the United States, by responding in order to deter any repetition, intended no wider war. All of these assurances were untrue.4
Explanation:
