[Marxism] "Historian" Tom Brokaw's Blind Spot on Vietnam

[Dbachmozart at aol.com]

clip --
 
Brokaw's book provides a mirror reflecting the many ways America continues to 
 live in a web of denial and deception. The key event of the 1960s was not 
"the  Vietnam war" as Brokaw describes it -- a conventional war between opposing 
 armies -- but U.S. leaders' approval of policies that led to the mass murder 
of  civilians. Such "collateral damage" was inherent in fighting against a 
native  population sheltering a guerrilla force seeking to expel a foreign 
invader. It  is a fact that Washington -- whatever its declared intent or 
rhetorical conceits  -- pursued a strategy and tactics that led to the killing of 
tremendous numbers  of Indochinese civilians, and wounded and made homeless more 
than 10 million  people, by dropping 6.7 million tons of bombs (and firing as 
much ground  ordnance from Army bases and giant Navy ships) on tiny Indochina, 
more than  triple the World War II bombing of all Europe and the Pacific 
theater. Former  U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, a principal architect of 
the Vietnam  War, has estimated that 3.4 million Vietnamese died in the war. 
A sizable number  of these were civilians, as were a very large number of 
Laotian and Cambodian  peasants who died from years of U.S. bombing of their towns 
and villages. 
It is also a fact that this bombing and shelling resulted in the "wanton  
destruction of towns and villages," "deportations" and "inhuman acts committed  
against any civilian population," acts which were included in the indictment of 
 Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, and clearly violated the laws of war meant to 
protect  civilians. It is difficult to see how U.S. leaders would not have been 
similarly  indicted had the _Nuremberg judgment_ 
(http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/nuremberg.htm)  been applied to their conduct of 
the  war. 
It is also true of course that the war in Indochina included sizable military 
 combat between armies. But one cannot seriously explore the '60s while 
ignoring  the single most important factor that produced its social convulsions; 
America's  murder of Indochinese civilians caused millions of idealistic young 
people to  protest, at first decorously, and then with mounting fury and 
deepening despair  as their protests were ignored and the killing increased -- day 
by day, month by  month, year by year, for more than a decade. "Hey hey LBJ, 
how many kids did you  kill today?" was not merely a slogan chanted by draft 
dodgers. It was a cry from  the heart from millions of decent people -- of whom 
those of draft age were but  a small minority -- who could not bear that their 
government was engaged in such  wholesale slaughter of innocents, and that it 
was doing so in their name. 
The undeclared and illegal war created massive resistance to the draft as  
those subject to it, horrified by the killing, objected to being forced to fight 
 a war in which they did not believe and for ends they did not approve. 
How Brokaw could write an entire book devoted to the '60s and ignore what was 
 most toxic about the country's aggression against Vietnam and the many ways 
our  involvement in Indochina more generally deformed and shaped our political 
 culture -- not to mention Vietnam's -- is bewildering, to say the  least.
full article -
_http://www.alternet.org/audits/82356/?page=entire_ 
(http://www.alternet.org/audits/82356/?page=entire) 




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