What Did We Learn From The Vietnam War?

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Lessons from the Vietnam State of war

John Marciano is professor emeritus of education at the State University of New York, Cortland, and a longtime activist, teacher, and merchandise unionist.

This commodity is adjusted from The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? (Monthly Review Press, 2016).

The Vietnam State of war was an case of majestic aggression. According to historian Michael Parenti: "Imperialism is what empires are all almost. Imperialism is what empires practice," as "one land brings to deport…economical and military power upon some other state in order to expropriate [its] land, labor, natural resource, capital and markets." Imperialism ultimately enriches the home country's dominant form. The procedure 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 brand the world safe" for multinational corporations. When discussing imperialism, "the prime unit of analysis should be the economical grade rather than the nation-land."i

U.S. imperial actions in Vietnam and elsewhere are often described every bit reflecting "national interests," "national security," or "national defense force." Endless U.Southward. wars and regime changes, however, actually stand for the class interests of the powerful who ain and govern the state. Noam Chomsky argues that if one wishes to empathize imperial wars, therefore, "information technology is a skillful idea to begin by investigating the domestic social structure. Who sets foreign policy? What involvement exercise these people represent? What is the domestic source of their power?"two

The The states Committed War Crimes, Including Torture

The state of war was waged "against the entire Vietnamese population," designed to terrorize them into submission. The Us "fabricated South Vietnam a bounding main of fire every bit a affair of policy, turning an entire nation into a target. This is not accidental merely intentional and intrinsic to the U.S.'southward strategic and political premises." In such an attack "confronting an entire people…barbarism can be the just event of [U.S.] tactics," conceived and organized by "the truthful architects of terror," the "respected men of manners and conventional views who calculate and human action 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 past the Geneva Convention, which the United States signed. U.S. officials and media pundits continue to assert that torture is a violation of "our values." This is non truthful. Torture is as American as apple pie, widely practiced in wars and prisons.

Washington Lied

The war depended on government lies. Daniel Ellsberg exposed 1 such prevarication that had a profound touch on the eventual course of the conflict: the official story of the Tonkin Gulf crisis of August 1964. President Johnson and Defense force Secretarial assistant Robert McNamara told the public that the North Vietnamese, for the second time in two days, had attacked U.Due south. warships on "routine patrol in international waters"; that this was clearly a "deliberate" pattern of "naked aggression"; that the evidence for the 2nd assail, like the commencement, was "unequivocal"; that the attack had been "unprovoked"; and that the U.s.a., by responding in order to deter any repetition, intended no wider war. All of these assurances were untrue.4

The War Was a Criminal offence, Not Merely a Fault

Since the end of the state of war in 1975, there has been a concerted attempt by U.S. officials, the corporate media, and influential intellectuals to portray U.S. deportment as a "noble cause" that went off-target. American military scholar and historian Christian Appy profoundly disagrees, arguing that the findings of the Pentagon Papers and other documents provide "ample prove to contradict this interpretation…. The United States did non inadvertently slip into the morass of state of war; it produced the war quite deliberately."5

Dr. Martin Luther Male monarch Jr. Condemned the State of war—and Was Vilified For It

In a celebrated spoken communication at Riverside Church building in Manhattan in Apr 1967, Dr. Male monarch courageously confronted bitter and uncomfortable truths well-nigh the war and U.S. lodge: "I knew that I could never again enhance my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having beginning spoken conspicuously to the greatest purveyor of violence in the globe today—my own government."6

Rex's magnificent speech, relatively unknown in the U.s. today, provoked an immediate backlash from the political and corporate media establishment and from ceremonious rights leaders. Life magazine denounced information technology as "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." A Harris poll taken in May 1967 revealed that 73 per centum of Americans opposed his antiwar position, including 50 percentage of African Americans.7 The New York Times strongly condemned King, calling his effort to link ceremonious rights and opposition to the war a "disservice to both. The moral issues in Vietnam are less articulate-cutting than he suggests." The Washington Post claimed that some of his assertions were "sheer inventions of unsupported fantasy," and that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his state and to his people."8

The Media Did Not Oppose the War, Only How It Was Fought

The assertion that the mainstream media opposed and undermined the war try is one of the smashing myths of the Vietnam disharmonize. They endorsed U.South. support of French colonialism and only emerged equally tactical critics of the war after the Tet Offensive in early 1968. The corporate media never challenged the cardinal premises of this imperial war.

The First Antiwar Protests Came from the Merchant Marine Services

Opposition to U.S. intervention in Vietnam did non begin with educatee protests in the mid-1960s, simply with American merchant mariners in the autumn of 1945. They had been diverted from bringing U.S. troops home from Europe to ship French troops to Vietnam to reclaim that colony. Some of these merchant mariners vigorously condemned the transport "to further the imperialist policies of strange governments," and a group from among the crews of iv ships condemned the U.S. authorities for helping to "subjugate the native population of Vietnam."9

Some two decades later, the virtually important opposition to the American War would come within the military itself—including criticism past Generals Matthew Ridgeway, David Shoup, James Gavin, and Hugh Hester. The latter called the state of war "immoral and unjust," an human action of U.Due south. aggression. In 1966, Shoup stated that if the United states of america "had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations then full of depressed exploited people, they will go far at a solution of their own." The generals all signed a New York Times antiwar advertisement in 1967, and Shoup and Hester supported and spoke at rallies sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW). Because of their efforts, the FBI investigated them under Presidents Johnson and Nixon.ten

Marine combat veteran, poet, and activist W. D. Ehrhart spoke for thousands of vets who fought in the war and came dwelling to challenge it:

I'd learned that the eighty-eight years of French colonial rule had been harsh and savage; that the Americans had supported Ho Chi Minh and his Vietminh guerillas with artillery and equipment and training during Earth War Two, and in render, Ho's forces had provided the Americans with intelligence and had helped to rescue downed American pilots; that Ho had spent years trying to gain American support for Vietnamese independence; that at the cease of World War Two, the United States had supported the French claim to Indochina; that North and South Vietnam were nothing more than an bogus construction of the Western powers, created at Geneva in 1954. I'd had to larn it all on my own, most of it years later on I'd left Vietnam.xi

The War Provoked Strong Working-Grade Opposition

Labor studies scholar Penny Lewis counters a number of misconceptions about the anti-war move in her Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, particularly the false view that working-class Americans were "largely supportive of the state of war and largely hostile to the numerous movements for social change taking place at the time." In fact, "Working-class opposition to the war was significantly more widespread than is remembered and parts of the move found roots in working-class communities and politics. By and large, the greatest support for the state of war came from the privileged elite, despite the visible dissention of a minority of its leaders and youth."12

As the war deepened, so did an antiwar movement within the working class. It included the rank-and-file marriage members, working-class veterans who joined and helped "to lead the move when they returned stateside; [and] working-course GIs who refused to fight; and the deserters who walked abroad." Especially after the Tet Offensive in early on 1968, the antiwar movement "formed deeper roots amongst people of color, religious communities," and students who attended non-elite campuses.13

The domestic antiwar movement was the largest in U.S. history, and the Oct 1969 Moratorium Against the War alone was the greatest single antiwar protest ever recorded in this country. The movement was deepened and strengthened by the Student Nonviolent Analogous Committee (SNCC), that in Jan 1966 issued a public statement against the war—a mettlesome dissent that nearly bankrupted information technology financially. SNCC called U.S. involvement "racist and imperialist." The murder of SNCC activist and Navy veteran Sammy Younge showed that the organization's function was not to fight in Vietnam, only to struggle within the United States for freedoms denied to African Americans. SNCC appropriately affirmed its support for typhoon resisters. Reflecting the national view at the time, almost African Americans strongly disagreed with SNCC'due south stand on the war and draft resistance.14

Though miniscule when compared to the astronomical level of violence in Vietnam, antiwar violence by higher youth received more attending from the media and the public. In fact, however, it was an extremely modest function of an activist antiwar movement that "numbered more than 9,400 protest incidents recorded during the Vietnam era, besides as thousands of demonstrations, vigils, letter writing [campaigns], teach-ins, mass media presentations, articles and books [and petitioning] congressional representatives."fifteen Added to these activities was an explosion of antiwar news sources across the state, beyond college campuses. In that location were countless antiwar papers published by agile-duty soldiers and veterans who opposed the war, such as Vietnam GI, the VVAW newspaper.

Appeals to Back up the Troops Should Be Critically Examined

President Obama and the 2015 official commemoration have urged citizens to back up and honor those who served in Vietnam—an appeal that certainly does non extend to the antiwar activists of the VVAW. This charge to support the military in Vietnam—and all wars since—implicitly asks citizens to back up uncritically whatever U.Due south. conflict. As the war continued, the VVAW rejected such a view, in the face up of condemnation from prominent public officials, the American Legion, and Veterans of Foreign Wars.

For example, although President Ronald Reagan chosen on Americans to honor the troops, he showed his truthful colors when it came to programs to assist those scarred by the Vietnam conflict. His "outset human activity in office was to freeze hiring in the [Veterans] Readjustment Counseling Program. He presently moved to eliminate all Vietnam veteran outreach programs, including an employment-training program for disabled veterans."16

The My Lai massacre offers a concrete case to test the official accuse that citizens should back up the armed services in times of war. Kenneth Hodge, 1 of the U.S. soldiers who participated in the massacre, insisted years later that "in that location was no crime committed":

Every bit a professional person soldier I had been taught and instructed to comport out the orders that were issued by the superiors. At no fourth dimension did information technology ever cross my listen to disobey or to refuse to deport out an order that was issued past my superiors. I felt that they (Charlie Company) were able to deport out the assigned task, the orders, that meant killing pocket-size kids, killing women…. I feel we carried out the orders in a moral fashion, the orders of destroying the village, …killing people in the village, and I feel nosotros did not violate any moral standards.17

There is no bridge that can span the chasm betwixt Hodge and those soldiers who refused orders to impale people at My Lai; and between Hodge and pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., who landed his helicopter in the midst of the massacre and saved Vietnamese who certainly would have been killed. Hodge's defense should also be compared with journalist Jonathan Schell's comment about My Lai: "With the report of the…massacre, we confront a new situation. It is no longer possible for united states to say that nosotros did not know…. For if we learn to take this, in that location is nothing we volition not accept."18

Real back up for the troops should non consist of cheap flyovers at sporting events; corporate campaigns to raise funds for veterans that are pennies on the dollar alongside vast profits from military contracts; performing empty flag-waving gestures while supporting political efforts in Washington to cut funds for wounded and disabled veterans and other needed programs; or assuring veterans that the war was a noble cause when it was not.

My Lai Was a Massacre, Not an "Incident"

The most publicized U.S. barbarism of the war, the slaughter of unarmed residents of the village of My Lai in the hamlet of Son My on March 16, 1968, was a massacre—not an "incident," as information technology is called in the official Vietnam War Celebration sponsored by the Department of Defense. It lists the death toll "at 'more than 200,'" and singles out but Lieutenant Calley, "equally if the deaths of all those Vietnamese civilians, carried out by dozens of men at the behest of college command, could be the mistake of just one junior officer."nineteen

For historian Gabriel Kolko, My Lai "is only the foot soldier's straight expression of the…fire and terror that his superiors in Washington devise and command from behind desks…. The existent war criminals in history never fire guns [and] never suffer discomfort. What is illegitimate and immoral, is the entire war and its intrinsic character." Regarding the dwelling front reception to the My Lai massacre, he reminds usa that the "rather triumphant welcome diverse political and veterans organizations gave Lieutenant Calley reveals that terror and atrocity have their followers and admirers at home likewise as in Vietnam."twenty

Regarding My Lai, the war, and the United States, historian Kendrick Oliver concludes: "This is not a social club which really wanted to know well-nigh the violence of the war that its military were waging in Vietnam." Many Americans "perceived they had more in common with…Calley than with any of his victims…. Information technology was the lieutenant…who became the object of public sympathy, not the inhabitants of My Lai whom he had hastened to death, and the orphans and widows he made of many of the rest."21

Ecocide Is an Essential Legacy of the State of war

The horrific and illegal chemical warfare confronting the Vietnamese was divers powerfully and precisely past biologist Arthur Galston: "Information technology seems to me that the willful and permanent destruction of surround…ought…to be considered as a law-breaking against humanity, to be designated by the term ecocide."22 The devastating environmental health furnishings of the war continue for Vietnamese and U.S. veterans. Arthur Westing, the leading U.South. authority on ecological harm during the war, addressed these furnishings at an Agent Orange symposium in 2002. The "2d Indochina War of 1961–1975 (the 'Vietnam Conflict'; the 'American War') stands out today every bit the [model] of war-related environmental abuse."23

The U.Due south. Regime Does Non "Hate War"—It Loves It

President Obama'southward claim in his Vietnam commemoration speech—that Americans "hate war" and "only fight to protect ourselves because information technology'south necessary"—is the latest in a long line of fantastical pronouncements past U.South. officials. Even an elementary cognition of U.S. wars since the founding of the nation would dispel this delusion. These include the genocidal Indian Wars that lasted more a century until 1890; wars of aggression against Cuban, Philippine, and Puerto Rican independence struggles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and the overthrow of twoscore-one governments in Latin America between 1898 and 1994.24 There is also Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq (twice, in 1991 and 2003, in addition to genocidal economic sanctions in between), and Afghanistan, with the latter ii both all the same underway, and many more than documented in the Congressional Research Service'south of import study, released in September 2014, that tallied hundreds of U.South. military machine interventions. Every bit Veterans for Peace notation on their website: "America has been at state of war 222 out of 239 years since 1776. Let that sink in for a moment." Since the end of the shooting state of war in Vietnam in Apr 1975, virtually every calendar year has seen the presence of U.S. war machine forces abroad, in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Cardinal Asia, and Eastern Europe. A number of these nations accept seen multiple U.S. military interventions under diverse presidents over the past forty years since the end of the Vietnam War.25 The historical record, therefore, reveals a nation that is wedded to war.

Vietnamese Resistance to U.S. Aggression was Justified

Nguyen Thi Binh, caput of the Vietnamese delegation to the 1968 Paris Peace Conference, declared that the war of resistance against America was "the fiercest struggle in the history of Vietnam," forced upon a people who did non provoke or threaten the The states. During the Second World War, Vietnam "was on the side of the Allies and embedded the spirit of democracy and freedom of the Declaration of Independence of America in the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence and constitution." Despite this fact, the United States "attempted to supersede France and impose its rule over Vietnam." The Vietnamese understood their country "was 1," and their "sacred aspiration was independence, freedom, and unification." They always believed that they "have the right to choose the political government for their country without foreign intervention."26

The History of the War Is a Struggle for Memory

A practical lesson of the war is offered past Vietnam veteran and sociologist Jerry Lembcke, author of the important volume Spitting Epitome: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, who writes that the "vast majority of Vietnam State of war veterans would know more than virtually the war today if they had spent their months of deployment stateside in a classroom with Howard Zinn." And what should be the lesson for young people who wish to empathise the American war? "That the veteran…might today exist a meliorate source…had he stayed domicile from Vietnam and read some history books; [and] the student, whose education might exist better served by reading a proficient history book about the war than interviewing the veteran."27

Afterward every war that the U.s.a. has fought, a new affiliate is added to history textbooks, ane that interprets the conflict for succeeding generations. The new narratives stress the necessity of its involvement and America's role and conduct during the state of war. Some describe the excesses and even the criminal beliefs of the U.S. military, only never ascertain these as such or acknowledge their central place in the conduct of the state of war. U.Southward. history textbooks substantially portray U.Southward. assailment against Vietnam as a failed defense of republic and freedom; it was a "mistake" and a "tragedy," with noble goals. The thesis that the conflict was an illegal deed of state aggression is considered unworthy of disquisitional examination. The parameters established by these texts do not allow students to consider the possibility that the Vietnamese resistance was a justifiable liberation struggle against foreign aggression and a brutally authoritarian government.

Noam Chomsky'southward conclusion on the nature of the war and its relationship to the educational organization captures the essence of the past and present textbook studies. Simply replace Southeast Asia with Afghanistan or Iraq, and his thoughts in 1966 on schools and club remain accurate and relevant:

At this moment of national disgrace, equally American technology is running amuck in Southeast Asia, a discussion of American schools can inappreciably avoid noting the fact that these schools are the first training ground for the troops that will enforce the muted, unending terror of the condition quo of a projected American century; for the technicians who will be developing the means for extension of American power; for the intellectuals who can be counted on, in meaning measure, to provide the intellectual justification for this particular form of barbarism and to decry the irresponsibility and lack of sophistication of those who will find all of this intolerable and revolting.1

Forty years subsequently the American war in Vietnam concluded in 1975, the central and near critical issue is the "struggle for memory," an ideological war over the most authentic and truthful story of the conflict. Whose ideas well-nigh the war will prevail? This struggle will help determine how we, the people, volition respond to present and time to come U.Due south. international conflicts. If citizens are to empathize the role of U.S. governmental and corporate elites in initiating the current endless wars, they must develop an accurate and comprehensive agreement of the history of the state of war in Vietnam. Such an analysis will provide the critical tools with which to counter the hyper-patriotism of the official Vietnam commemoration, whose lessons are based on the dominant and false story of U.S. beneficence: a nation forever faithful in its quest for justice that always follows a righteous path in its wartime conduct. Another story must be told: that of a decades-long reign of terror confronting the people of Vietnam, a shameful state of war that no authorities-sanctioned lesson or eloquent rhetoric tin can hide.

Notes

↩Michael Parenti'southward statement here is a synthesis of "What Do Empires Do?" 2010, http://michaelparenti.org, and Against Empire (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995), 23. Parenti documents this history in great detail in a number of other books, including The Face of Imperialism, Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies, and The Sword and the Dollar. In a annotation to the author, Noam Chomsky cautioned about reading the general argument almost imperialism too narrowly; it was sufficient as "a general statement on imperialism, merely…misleading about Vietnam. It will be read every bit though the Usa wanted to exploit Vietnam'southward resources…. The concern was the usual one (Republic of guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua, others) that successful independent development in Vietnam might inspire others to follow the same form."
↩Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Common cold State of war (New York: New Press, 2003), half-dozen, 93, 98. It is a testament to the forcefulness of the dominant view of American strange policy that Chomsky, an internationally renowned scholar and intellectual, was nearly unknown to nearly all of the more six thousand students I taught over the grade of 30-one years at the Country Academy of New York, Cortland. Some had heard of him, merely it was rare to find a student who had read any of his writings. In addition to Chomsky's many books, readers should examine William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 2000) and G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (New York: McGraw-Colina, 2013).
↩Gabriel Kolko, "War Crimes and The Nature of the Vietnam State of war," in Richard Falk, Gabriel Kolko, and Robert Jay Lifton, eds., Crimes of War (New York: Vintage, 1971), 412–13; Kolko, "On the Avoidance of Reality," Crimes of War, 15.
↩Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets (New York: Penguin, 2002), 12.
↩Christian Appy, Working Class State of war (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Printing, 1993), 253.
↩Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "Beyond Vietnam: A Fourth dimension to Interruption Silence," April four, 1967, Riverside Church building, New York Metropolis, available at http://commondreams.org.
↩Edward Morgan, What Really Happened to the 1960s (Lawrence, KS: Academy of Kansas Press, 2010), 76; Daniel S. Lucks, Selma to Saigon (Lexington, KY: Academy Printing of Kentucky Press, 2014), 203.
↩New York Times, April 7, 1967; Washington Post, April 6, 1967.
↩Michael Gillen, "Roots of Opposition: The Critical Response to U.South. Indochina Policy, 1945–1954," Ph.D. dissertation, New York Academy, 1991, 122.
↩Robert Buzzanco, "The American Military's Rationale against the Vietnam War," Political Science Quarterly 101, no. four (1986): 571.
↩Due west. D. Ehrhart, Passing Fourth dimension (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1989), 161–62.
↩Penny Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks (Ithaca, NY: ILR, 2013), 4, 7.
↩Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, 45.
↩Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, 92; Lucks, Selma to Saigon, 3.
↩Kirkpatrick Auction, SDS (New York: Random Business firm, 1973), 514, 48.
↩D. Michael Shafer, "The Vietnam Combat Experience: The Homo Legacy," in The Legacy: The Vietnam State of war in the American Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 1992), 97.
↩Quoted in Michael Bolton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai (New York: Viking, 1992), 371.
↩Jonathan Schell, "Comment," New Yorker, December twenty, 1969, 27.
↩Nick Turse, "Misremembering America's Wars, 2003–2054," TomDispatch, Feb eighteen, 2014, http://tomdispatch.com.
↩Kolko, "War Crimes," 414; "Avoidance," 12.
↩Kendrick Oliver, The My Lai Massacre in American History and Retentivity (Manchester, Britain: Manchester Academy Printing, 2006), eight–nine.
↩Quoted in Erwin Knoll and Judith Nies McFadden, State of war Crimes and the American Censor (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 71.
↩Arthur Westing, "Return to Vietnam: The Legacy of Agent Orange," lecture at Yale University, April 26, 2002; Westing, Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina State of war (Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Plant, 1974), 22.
↩Greg Grandin, "The War to Kickoff All Wars: The 25th Anniversary of the Forgotten Invasion of Panama," TomDispatch, December 23, 2014. Encounter also Grandin'southward fantabulous Empire's Workshop (New York: Metropolitan), 2006.
↩Barbara Salazar Torreon, Instances of Apply of United states War machine Abroad, 1798–2014 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Enquiry Office, 2014).
↩Nguyen Thi Binh, "The Vietnam War and Its Lessons," in Christopher Goscha and Maurice Vaisse, eds., The Vietnam War and Europe 1963–1973 (Brussels: Bruylant, 2003), 455–56.
↩Jerry Lembcke, "Why Students Should Terminate Interviewing Vietnam Veterans," History News Network, May 27, 2013, http://historynewsnetwork.org.
↩Noam Chomsky, "Thoughts on Intellectuals and the Schools," Harvard Educational Review 36, no. four (1966): 485.

2016, Volume 68, Issue 07 (Dec)