American destruction of Vietnam and its racialist substratum

[enkidu_]

We have all heard of the "VietNam war", but despite some good movies (Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, notably), the problem is that we think that the "VietNam war" was only that, a "war" : like when "some" shield European colonialism by saying that "everyone has been imperialist" (that's literally like putting into the elusive "bad deeds" category your little cousin breaking a window while playing cricket and a serial killer with tens of mutilated victims), in the same way the "VietNam war" was not only a war ; it summoned a set of parameters which have been used to oppress non European all over the world, and which are still used to in the Middle East.

Here some selected excerpts (the whole book is worth it, perhaps the only one if you ever have to read on this subject) from American investigative journalist (he went into all the archives, etc) Nick Turse's Kill Anything That Moves - and as the title suggests, it was more than a "normal war" :

The dark humor in the opening stanzas of a song composed by soldiers from 1st Cavalry Division caught the anything-goes attitude perfectly.

We shoot the sick, the young, the lame,
We do our best to kill and maim,
Because the kills count all the same,
Napalm sticks to kids.
Ox cart rolling down the road,
Peasants with a heavy load,
they’re all VC when the bombs explode,
Napalm sticks to kids.

The piling up of Vietnamese bodies to be counted—and in a sense discounted—was facilitated by the contempt that Americans generally had for the country and its people. To President Johnson, Vietnam was “a piddling ****-ant little country.” To McNamara, a “backward nation.” President Nixon’s national security adviser Henry Kissinger called North Vietnam a “little fourth-rate power,” later downgrading it to “fifth-rate” status. Such feelings permeated the chain of command, and they found even more colorful voice among those in the field, who regarded Vietnam as “the outhouse of Asia,” “the garbage dump of civilization,” “the ******* of the world.” A popular joke among GIs went: “What you do is, you load all the friendlies [South Vietnamese] onto ships and take them out to the South China Sea. Then you bomb the country flat. Then you sink the ships.”Others swore that the best solution to the conflict was to pave the country over “like a parking lot.” An even simpler proposal was commonly offered: “Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.”

The deeply ingrained racism that helped turn the Vietnamese countryside into a charnel house was summed up in a single word: the ubiquitous “gook.” That epithet evidently entered the military vocabulary in an earlier conflict, the eerily similar campaign in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, where American troops began calling their indigenous enemies “goo-goos.” The pejorative term then seems to have transmuted into “gook” and was applied over the decades to racially dissimilar enemies in Haiti, Nicaragua, and Korea before returning to Southeast Asia. From the beginning of the war to the end, it was uttered ad infinitum. “The colonels called them gooks, the captain called them gooks, the staff all called them gooks. They were dinks, you know, subhuman,” recalled one veteran.

The notion that Vietnam’s inhabitants were something less than human was often spoken of as the “mere-gook rule,” or, in the acronym-mad military, the MGR. This held that all Vietnamese—northern and southern, adults and children, armed enemy and innocent civilian—were little more than animals, who could be killed or abused at will.

Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, chap. 2

The United States already had an endless supply of superweapons at its command. Indeed, to a barefoot peasant in rural Vietnam, a 40,000-pound bomb load dropped by a giant B-52 Stratofortress bomber—silent and invisible to those on the ground—must have had an element of Dr. Manhattan in it. The American forces came blazing in with fighter jets and helicopter gunships. They shook the earth with howitzers and mortars. In a country of pedestrians and bicycles, they rolled over the landscape in heavy tanks, light tanks, and flame-thrower tanks. They had armored personnel carriers for the roads and fields, swift boats for rivers, and battleships and aircraft carriers off shore. The Americans unleashed millions of gallons of chemical defoliants, millions of pounds of chemical gases, and endless canisters of napalm; cluster bombs, high-explosive shells, and daisy-cutter bombs that obliterated everything within a ten-football-field diameter; antipersonnel rockets, high-explosive rockets, incendiary rockets, grenades by the millions, and myriad different kinds of mines.
(...)
Notably, many of the weapons that Americans brought to Vietnam were designed specifically to maim and incapacitate people, on the theory that horribly wounded personnel sapped enemy resources even more than outright killing. An army munitions official later described the history of these efforts.
(...)
American war managers were all but certain that no Third World people, even with Soviet and Chinese support, could stand up to the mightiest nation on Earth as it unleashed firepower well beyond levels that had brought great powers like Germany and Japan to their knees. (The amount of ammunition fired per soldier was twenty-six times greater in Vietnam than during World War II.) Overkill was supposed to solve all American problems, and the answer to any setbacks was just more overkill.

At its peak, the U.S. effort in Vietnam was soaking up 37 percent of all American military spending and required the fighting strength of more than 50 percent of all Marine Corps divisions, 40 percent of all combat-ready army divisions, and 33 percent of the navy. Overall, estimates of the U.S. expenditure on the war range from $700 billion to more than $1 trillion in 2012 dollars.
(...)
During the conflict, some antiwar critics predicted that North Vietnam might end up as the most bombed country in the history of the world. They had good reason to fear this: on average, between 1965 and 1968, thirty-two tons of bombs per hour were dropped on the North. It turned out, however, that of the munitions unleashed by the United States in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War—which added up to the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs—the lion’s share was dropped not on the North but on South Vietnam, America’s own ally. There, around 19 million people would be subjected to the most lopsided air war ever fought.

Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, chap. 5

 

[Cpt. Rishwat]

My favourite Vietnam war movie of all time has to be Oliver Stone's Platoon. Whenever I hear the term "gook" I always remember that film above all. The orientals do seem to have taken a bit of a pounding between the 1940's and 1970's from the US when you consider Japan was nuked as well.

 

[Asim_khan]

My favourite Vietnam war movie of all time has to be Oliver Stone's Platoon. Whenever I hear the term "gook" I always remember that film above all. The orientals do seem to have taken a bit of a pounding between the 1940's and 1970's from the US when you consider Japan was nuked as well.

The one war that's forgotten in all this is the Korean war, and the atrocities which were comitted against refugees. The below story might help explain why the feelings of the North Korean government are so strongly anti american

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/coldwar/korea_usa_01.shtml#five

 

[Robert]

The one war that's forgotten in all this is the Korean war, and the atrocities which were comitted against refugees. The below story might help explain why the feelings of the North Korean government are so strongly anti american

The USAF levelled the nation with napalm strikes from B-29s on a level which dwarfed the Allied bombing offensive in Nazi Germany.

 

[Robert]

On the subject of View Nam, remember that the French were there for a decade before the USA turned up. Battle of Dien Bien Phu and all that.

Back in 1945, Ho Chi Minh was advised and armed by the Americans as he fought the Japanese and Vichy French.