Why the US Lost the Vietnam War

A Skeptics View of American History

Episode 19 The Real Blunders of the Vietnam War

Mark Stoler PhD

Film Review

In one of his better lectures, Stoler debunks a number of myths about the Vietnam War.

He traces the history of the war to the reversal of Franklin Roosevelt’s policy opposing continued French colonization of Indochina. With Truman’s initiation of the Cold War, the US sought to strengthen France’s suppression of colonial independence movements as a defense against communist expansion into Eastern Europe. Truman also saw Western control of Indochina as essential to guaranteeing US-occupied Japan’s access Indonesia’s and Malaysia’s rubber, oil and mineral resources in Indonesia and Malaysia.

In 1954, a major defeat at Dien Bien Phu led the French military to withdraw from Vietnam. Under the 1954 Geneva Accord (which the US refused to sign), Laos and Cambodia were awarded independence, while Vietnam was temporarily split at 17th parallel (pending reunification elections in 1956). The southern Republic of Vietnam was ruled by a French puppet government under King Bao Dai, and the northern Democratic Republic of Vietnam by Ho Chi Minh.

According to Stoler, the US government made their first major blunder in 1918, when President Woodrow Wilson refused to meet with Ho Chi Minh (seeking US support for Vietnam’s independence struggle) during the Versailles treaty negotiations. So he met with the Soviets. However the biggest biggest blunder was misperceiving the independence struggle (supported by the majority of both North and South Vietnames) ar in Vietnam as a Cold War proxy war sponsored by the Soviet Union and China. Stoler blames this mistake on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee and their successful purge of all major Asian experts from the US State Department.

Refusing to hold elections in 1956 (because they knew Ho Chi Minh would win), the Eisenhower administration replaced the king with a Vietnamese exile living in the US named Ngo Dinh Diem. They also massively ramped up military and economic aid to South Vietnam, emboldening Diem to begin a ruthless purge of Vietnam’s freedom fighters. Most went underground to join the Viet Minh (national independence cadres) Ho Chi Minh started in 1941. Calling themselves the National Liberation Front, they were known in the West as the Viet Cong.

Under Kennedy, the US responded to continuing Vietnamese unrest by sending in special forces (Green Berets) and allowing the CIA to assassinate Diem. The number of US “advisors” (to the South Vietnamese arm) in South Vietnam increased from 900 in 1961 to 17,000 in 1963.

By 1964, North Vietnam was on the verge of defeating the US puppet government in the South. Facing conservative hawk Barry Goldwater in the November election, President Lyndon Johnson (determined not to be blamed for losing Vietnam) increased troop numbers to 500,000.

This film can be viewed free on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/real-blunders-vietnam-war

Black Lives Matter vs The Ku Klux Klan: Racial Tensions Spark Pain and Anger in the US

Black Lives: Deadlock. Black Lives Matter vs the Ku Klux Klan: Racial Tensions Spark Pain and Anger in the US

RT (2019)

Film Review

The eighth episode of Black Lives concerns the Ku Klux Klan and the deleterious effect of the white supremacy on Black Americans. It includes a very strange interview with Chris Barker, the KKK Imperial Wizard and his family, as well as a cross burning ceremony with the ritual language that accompanies it. According to Barker, the KKK is praying for a race war, in the hope African Americans will be annihilated or forced to go back to “their country.”

Barker boasts that presidents Warren Harding and Harry Truman were both KKK members.

The filmmakers also interview a Black Lives Matter leader from New York. He questions why the FBI still allows the KKK, which they designate as the most terrorist organization in the US, to operate – after 150 years. He contrasts their treatment of the Black Panther Party, which the FBI had infiltrated and decimated within 15 years.

 

The Psychobabble Theory of Assassination

Age of Assassins: The Loners, Idealists and Fanatics Who Conspired to Change the World

Faber and Faber (2013)

Book Review

In essence this book is an encyclopedia of modern day assassinations. In addition to providing comprehensive details of more than a dozen political murders, Newton proposes a general theory of what motivates assassins. In my view, this aspect of the book is a total failure. Mainly because it largely omits compelling evidence of US intelligence/military complicity in the assassinations of Malcolm X, JFK, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and John Lennon and the attempted assassinations of Reagan, Ford, George Wallace and John Paul II.

I also have a problem with Newton’s assertion that the era of assassinations began with the Lincoln assassination. Assassination via poisoning dates back to Roman times at least.

According to Newton, the Lincoln assassination inspired the Russian Nihilist movement and their numerous assassination attempts (which were ultimately successful) against czar Alexander II.

The Nihilists, in turn, inspired the Irish nationalists and the “propaganda of the deed” (see Why Social Studies Never Made Sense in School: The History of Anarchism ) tendency of the anarchist movement. The result would be a wave of attempted and completed assassinations across Europe and in the US.

The book contains a long section on the life of US anarchist Emma Goldman and the attempted assassination oshe plotted with her lover Alexander Berkman on Henry Clay Frick (hired by Carnegie to break the steel workers union) s. Although she would later renounce violence, her huge public following (according to Newton) would inspire Leon Czolgosz to assassinate president William McKinley.

The book devotes a long chapter to the rise of Serbian nationalism, the Black Hand and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the purported cause of World War I. It devotes numerous pages to the Armenian genocide by Ottoman rulers and several assassination attempts against Roosevelt and Truman.

I found the later chapters, beginning with the assassination of John Kennedy, a big disappointment. In my view, this section of the book is pure pop psychology and psychobabble.

Newton identifies three primary motives for assassination:

1) A desire to end the suffering engendered by capitalist greed.

2) The drive for violent retribution in reaction to other killings.

3) A desire to smash the state and other authoritarian structures.

This leaves out all the lone nut assassinations – in which misfits try to murder prominent political figures for no apparent reason at all. Except for the JFK assassination (Newton acknowledges Oswald had accomplices* ). Newton seems to be a strong supporter of the lone nut theory of assassination. He blames the rise of lone nut assassins on deep seated decay and alienation in US society, which he believes is aggravated by the motion picture industry.

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*Based on an acoustical recording obtained from a Dallas police microphone, the 1978 House Committee on assassinations ascertain that Oswald had to have at least one accomplice. See  https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKassassinationsC.htm

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The Global Rush to Claim and Exploit Our Oceans

Oceans Monopoly

Al Jazeera (2016)

Film Review

This documentary explains the legal process by which coastal countries claim access to valuable seabed resources outside the three-mile statutory limit set by international law.

In 1945 President Truman issued the Proclamation on the Continental Shelf, claiming all seabed resources on the US continental shelf* for the purpose deep sea oil drilling.

In 1982, the United Nations formalized the granting of seabed claims by creating the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). By definition, the EEZ extends 200 miles beyond a nations coastline. This UN mandate was subsequently modified to allow coastal countries with continental shelves extending more than 200 miles to claim the entire area as national territory.

In 1997, the UN General Assembly created the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. The latter is a body of 21 geologists who assess geologic data countries submit to document their continental shelf boundaries.

Often the continental shelf of neighboring countries overlaps. For example Canada, Norway and Russia all claim the Arctic Ocean – believed to hold 10% of the world’s remaining oil reserves.

In the South China Sea, eight countries are fighting over $100 billion worth of resources.

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*The continental shelf is an underwater landmass which extends from a continent, resulting in an area of relatively shallow water known as a shelf sea.

 

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1947-1948: Brits Look On as Jewish Terrorists Ransack 274 Palestinian Villages

Al-Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe Part 3

Al Jazeera (2013)

Film Review

Once the UK announced its intention (in February 1947 – see 1947: British Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine ) to end its occupation, the UN Security Council voted to partition Palestine –  granting 56% of country to Jewish settlers (who represented 5.5% of the population) and 44% to the indigenous Arabs (who comprised 94.5% of the population). There is documentary evidence that the Truman administration used a combination of bribery and “pressure” (unfavorable aid or trade consequences) to swing the UN vote in favor of partition.

By 1947 the combined forces of the Jewish paramilitary (terrorist) groups had reached 40,000 and begun a campaign of systematic ethnic cleansing (which paramilitary leader and future prime minister David Ben-Gurion documents in his diary). By May 14, 1948, the day British troops withdrew from Palestine, half of the country’s 548 villages had already been evacuated and taken over by Jewish terrorists.

Jewish paramilitary forces typically employed a strategy of shelling Palestinian cities and villages from three sides, while leaving an single open corridor for civilians to flee. Any Palestinians who stayed to defend their homes were slaughtered or transferred to detention camps. British troops and police looked on without intervening.

In several instances Jewish terrorist forces imitated their Nazi persecutors in Europe by forcing Palestinians to dig their own mass graves before shooting them.

The remaining Palestinian resistance desperately sought assistance from Arab League nations in defending their homeland. Surrounding Arab countries amassed roughly 24,000 troops to defend Palestine. In addition to being poorly equipped and trained,* they had no unified command. Jordan, the only country with a strong, well-equipped military, made a secret deal with the Jewish forces not to support the Palestinians.

In contrast, Palestine’s Greek orthodox churches assisted by offering sanctuary to both Christian and Muslim Palestinians fleeing Jewish violence. The Jewish gangs, refusing to honor the age-old custom of sacred spaces and sanctuary, responded by seizing and killing teenager Palestinians until the adults agreed to surrender.

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*When British troops marched out of Palestine, they left nearly all their heavy military equipment behind for the use of of the Jewish paramilitaries.

Untold History of the US – The Cold War

Parts 4 and 5 of Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States explore the exaggerated claims of Soviet expansionism that characterized the Truman/Eisenhower administration.

Part 4 begins by contrasting the economic standing of the US and the USSR when the war ended in 1945. The US economy was booming. America controlled 50% of the world’s economic production and most of its gold. The Soviet economy, in contrast, had been shattered. Truman reneged on Roosevelt’s promise to provide the Soviets post war aid to assist in their recovery. During the US occupation of West Germany, he also discontinued German war reparations to the USSR.

The late forties was a period of excruciating poverty for Eastern Europe, with major famine in the Ukraine. With the Soviet economy in a shambles, the claims made by Truman about their intention to conquer the world were ludicrous.

After Henry Wallace, the last holdover from the Roosevelt administration, made a major speech (echoing statements by Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt) opposing nuclear weapons, Truman fired him.

This episode also explores the first implementation of the Truman Doctrine, justifying US intervention in the domestic affairs of other countries. Truman first used it in 1947 to put down a popular uprising against a fascist coup in Greece. In a clear precursor to US intervention in Vietnam, Truman sent in US advisors to train the Greek military in “counterinsurgency tactics,” ie death squads to crush unions and human rights organizations and concentration camps to extinguish civilian support for pro-independence activists.

Part 4: Cold War: 1945-50

Part 5 explores the election of Eisenhower to power in 1952, coinciding with Khrushchev’s rise to power in 1953 and the re-election of Churchill in 1951 (Churchill was replaced by Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee from 1945-51).

Eisenhower, who had opposed using the A-bomb against Japan at Pottsdam, became a fervent nuclear weapons supporter as president. Under pressure from anti-communist hawk John Foster Dulles, he resisted Khrushchev’s and Churchill’s to organize a peace summit to limit the nuclear arms race.

Eisenhower would go on to engage in war crimes in Korean, causing massive civilian deaths by bombing North Korean dams.

In addition to authorizing the CIA overthrow of democratically elected governments in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, he paid 80% of French military costs as they endeavored to defeat Vietnam’s pro-independence movement.

In this episode, Stone also explores the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1955 in Java. Members consisted of world leaders determined to remain independent of either US or Soviet influence. In attendance at the first meeting were Ho Chi Minh  (Vietnam), Tito (Yugoslavia), Nehru (India), Nasser (Egypt), Zhou Enlai (China) and Sukarno (Indonesia). The CIA eventually removed each of these men from power, in some cases via assassination.

Part 5: the ’50s: Eisenhower, The Bomb and the Third World

Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the US – Parts 1-3

Untold History of the United States – Parts 1-3

Directed by Oliver Stone (2012)

Last week, I sat down and binge watched Oliver Stone’s 10 part Showtime series Untold History of the United States. I was pleasantly surprised. Stone is strongly influenced by late historian Chalmers Johnson (see The Impermanence of Empire) and mentions him at several points in the series.

Untold History concerns the hidden history of the “American Century” that we’re never taught in school. Unlike Howard Zinn’s People’ History of the United States, it devotes little air time to the popular resistance movements that shaped the period 1932-2012. Instead it focuses mainly on the presidents who governed during this period.

Parts 1-3, which focus on World War II, unpack the lie that Truman dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan to spare hundreds of thousands of GIs who would have died invading the Japanese mainland.

Stone begins with a broad outline of the German military build-up that began in the early 1930s. I think this segment would have been clearer if Stone had discussed the Wall Street fascists who deliberately armed Hitler in the hope he would invade and destroy the Soviet Union. He delays this discussion until part 9, when he introduces Prescott Bush, the pro-Nazi granddaddy of George W Bush.

The first three parts of this series provide a fairly comprehensive history of the Spanish Civil War and of so-called British “appeasement” of Hitler in the early 1930s. I was extremely surprised to learn that Neville Chamberlain wasn’t motivated by cowardice, as we were taught in school, when he agreed to Hitler’s 1938 occupation of Czechoslovakia. He was merely carrying out the wishes of the US-Anglo elite – they were happy to cede Eastern Europe to Germany if it facilitated the destruction of the Soviet Union.

I was also totally unaware that the Soviets were responsible for destroying the bulk of Hitler’s vast military arsenal while the Allies piddled around in peripheral conflicts in North Africa and Italy (at the cost of 27 million lives in contrast to the 500,000 each lost by Britain and the US).

The real reason for Churchill and Roosevelt stalling for two years (Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941) before opening a second front (in Normandy) was their continuing belief that Hitler would defeat the Soviets. Once the Red Army pushed Nazi forces out of the USSR and began retaking Eastern Europe, the allies were forced to act to limit Soviet expansion.

It was actually this two year delay that caused nearly all of Eastern Europe to end up under Communist control – not ruthless Soviet expansionism as we are taught in school.

Stone agrees with historians who attribute the US nuclear attack on Japan to anti-communist hawks in the Truman administration who sought to use it to intimidate the Soviet Union. He maintains that Henry Wallace (Roosevelt’s vice-president until 19944) would never have given in to War Department hawks.

Wallace, according to Stone, was a true liberal populist in the Roosevelt mold. He was universally hated by Wall Street elites. He lost the 1944 vice presidential nomination to Truman (despite controlling over 65% of the delegates) after Democratic Party bosses rigged the 1944 Democratic Convention.

Part 1 – World War II

https://vimeo.com/136182100

Part 2 – Roosevelt, Truman & Wallace

https://vimeo.com/136182101

Part 3 – The Bomb

The Art and Science of State Terrorism

Part 4 of Counter-intelligence: Shining a Light on Black Operations

“Necrophilous” is Part 4 of a five part documentary by Scott Noble called Counter-Intelligence: Shining a Light on Black Operations.

In Part 4, filmmaker Scott Noble examines the sadistic fixation of the National Security State with death, pain and permanent injury of individuals and groups whose democratic yearnings conflict with the financial interests of US corporations. He likens this fixation to the psychopathology that motivates serial killers.

Necophilous is defined as having an abnormal fascination with death and the dead. Part 4 begins by examining the decision, in 1945, to drop two atomic bombs on Japan.

A nuclear bomb deliberately targets civilians, a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Truman’s claim that nuking Japan spared GIs the bloodshed of a land invasions turns out to be completely bogus.

He already knew the Japanese were on the verge of surrendering. In fact Secretary of War Henry Stimson was afraid the Japanese would surrender before the US got the chance to deploy atomic weapons – which were mainly intended to terrorize the Soviet Union.

The School of the Americas

Exhibit two is the School of the Americas (SOA), founded in 1946 at Fort Benning Georgia. More than 60,000 soldiers and police from US client states have trained in counter-insurgency techniques (aka state terrorism) at SOA. The use of deaths squads who disappear and assassinate pesky intellectuals, educators, labor leaders and human rights advocates figures prominently in the SOA curriculum.

The CIA-installed Guatemalan dictatorship first used it in the 1950s. After the CIA itself used it during Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, it would be replicated by US-backed regimes of terror throughout Latin America. The same “men in black” reappeared in Bush’s campaign to terrorize Afghans and Iraqis who resisted US occupation.

Aided by Kubark, the official CIA torture manual, the instructors at SOA are also the world’s leading experts in torture. The only purpose of torture is to induce fear and compliance in a hostile population. Despite its role in inducing false confessions, it never produces meaningful intelligence. This is confirmed by decades of research.

Total War and the War on Terror

A final form of American state terrorism is “Total War,” in which civilians are deliberately targeted for extermination.

US dedication to Total War predates the Geneva Convention that declared it a war crime. It dates back to the near total extermination of the Native Americans, followed by the mass slaughter of the Philippine population during US occupation (1898-1946), Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War, Clinton’s deliberate bombing of essential Iraqi infrastructure in 1991 and the use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium against civilians during the second invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In fact the War on Terror is really a War OF Terror, aimed at expanding the US empire to include seven Middle East and North African (MENA) countries: Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Lebanon and Iran.*

As Noble ably documents, plans for the American conquest of the above seven countries first crystallized in 1979 under Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. A fundamental aspect of this campaign has been covert US support for Islamic fundamentalism – the self-same “terrorists” we are fighting in the so-called War on Terror – in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Palestine, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere.

“Necrophilous” concludes by examining evidence that 9-11 was most likely an engineered false flag operation to justify the decades-long war that would be required to establish a permanent military presence in the Middle East and North Africa. The military build-up for the invasion of Afghanistan began months before the so-called “attack” on the Twin Towers.

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*Retired General Wesley Clark first revealed the existence of this campaign to conquer the Middle East and North Africa during a Democracy Now interview in 2007

photo credit: Kurt and Sybilla via photopin cc

Counter-intelligence: Shining a Light on Black Operations

Scott Noble
Metanoia Films (2013)

Also posted on Veterans Today