The American War in Vietnam. John Marciano
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country were defending themselves and the “free world.”
Among the prominent citizens supporting and advocating genocide against Native Americans in the nineteenth century was L. Frank Baum, author of the much-beloved The Wizard of Oz and editor of the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer newspaper in South Dakota at the time of the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890. Before the massacre, he stated: “The nobility of the redskin is extinguished and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The whites, by law of conquest, by civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.” Shortly after the massacre, Baum wrote: “We had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up … and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”15
Alongside the imperial destruction of Native American nations, came economic, political, and military aggression against Latin America that began very early in U.S. history and has continued to the present with more than fifty years of economic embargo and terrorism against Cuba—condemned by virtually every state in the United Nations. Journalist-scholar Juan Gonzalez, former State Department official William Blum, and historian Greg Grandin document this violent imperial history. Gonzalez points out that U.S. presidents such as Jefferson, Jackson, and Theodore Roosevelt, all firm believers in white supremacy, “regarded [U.S.] domination of the region as ordained by nature. The main proponents and beneficiaries of this empire building, however, were speculators, plantation owners, banks and merchants who bankrolled armed rebellions in those Spanish-speaking lands by white settlers.”16
One of those famous citizens supporting U.S. government aggression against “those Spanish-speaking lands” was the great American poet Walt Whitman, who enthusiastically supported the invasion of Mexico in 1846 and “proposed … stationing … sixty thousands US troops [there] in order to establish a regime change.” His imperialist views on Mexican regime change were built upon white supremacy: “The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history.… What has miserable, inefficient Mexico … to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?”17
A century after the Mexican invasion, Blum documents the staggering number of U.S. interventions that have taken place in Latin America since the Second World War: Haiti, Guatemala, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Chile, Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama—and Cuba. Historian Greg Grandin points out that by the mid-twentieth century alone, the United States had sent its warships into Latin America more than six thousand times, invaded numerous countries, engaged in long guerrilla wars in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Haiti, annexed Puerto Rico, and stole part of Colombia “to create both the Panamanian nation and the Panama Canal.” Added to these, “American corporations and financial houses came to dominate the economies of Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America, as well as large parts of South America,” commencing “their overseas expansion before they headed elsewhere, to Asia, Africa, and Europe.”18
In his analyses of U.S. history, Andrew Bacevich has exposed a central premise of the Noble Cause principle: “The restless search for a buck and the ruthless elimination of anyone—or any-thing—standing in the way … have been central to the American character.” This “American character” applies to European settlers and their descendants, though not Native Americans, since this “restless search” has not been central to their culture. “If the young United States had a mission,” writes Bacevich, “it was not to liberate but to expand.” From the beginning, the United States compulsively expanded and “the historical record leaves no room for debate” on how this was done, which was “by any means necessary” including “full-scale invasions [and] ethnic cleansing.” This record totally contradicts the mythical Noble Cause view we have been taught about post-Independence expansion.19
Moving ahead into the mid-twentieth century and the present, it is clear that the beliefs about the Noble Cause principle after the Second World War do not match the facts. Blum has compiled an extensive and factual list of U.S. imperial violence during this period. It includes an extraordinary number of unprovoked invasions and covert actions against sovereign nations—what is now called “regime change.” Excluding his list of Latin American countries cited above, these nations include Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Congo, Greece, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Libya, the Soviet Union, Syria, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia. As he states: “It would, moreover, be difficult to name a single brutal dictatorship of the second half of the 20th Century that was not supported by the United States; not only supported, but often put into power and kept in power against the wishes of the population.”20
There is overwhelming evidence to support the scholars’ assertions made above. However, historian and political activist Michael Parenti argues that the dominant class and its allies in the corporate media, political system, and universities refuse to admit that U.S. leaders “have been the greatest purveyors of terrorism throughout the world.” The facts are quite clear: the United States and its “surrogate mercenaries have unleashed terror bombing campaigns against unarmed civilian populations … in scores of countries, causing death and destruction to millions of innocents.”21
Since the Second World War, the greatest U.S. violence has been in Asia—concluding with Vietnam. This included crushing the Huk (Hukbalahap) rebellion in the Philippines, a peasant-led guerrilla movement that led resistance against the Japanese in the Second World War, and continued their struggle against a government elite that had collaborated with the Japanese during that conflict. Using Cold War propaganda that the Huk were Communists, the U.S. military aided the campaign to destroy them by 1954. This period also witnessed the occupation of South Korea and support for the repressive anti-Communist Syngman Rhee, whose policies were similar to the U.S.-installed Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and helped trigger the devastating Korean War that included bombing North Korea “back to the Stone Age” in one of the greatest aerial attacks in history.22
In 1965, the very same year the United States escalated the war in Vietnam, the CIA aided in the massacre of perhaps 500,000 Communists, alleged Communists, and other progressive activists during a military coup in Indonesia, one of the greatest mass murders in history. The late historian Gabriel Kolko writes that it was “certainly one of the most barbaric acts of inhumanity in a century that has seen a great deal of it; it surely ranks as a war crime of the same type as those the Nazis perpetrated.” No single act by the United States after 1945 “was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate the massacre, and … to see that the physical liquidation of the PKI [Communist Party of Indonesia] was carried through to its culmination. Not a single one of its officials in Washington … questioned the policy on ethical or political grounds.”23
Similarities between Korea and Vietnam include the racist attitudes and actions against people there that helped fuel massacres by U.S. forces in both wars; for example, at No Gun Ri in Korea and My Lai in Vietnam. The death and devastation from the wars in Korea and Vietnam that left more than seven million people dead, and millions more injured and refugees, are the worst suffered by any nations after the Second World War. Too few U.S. citizens know this documented record, having been disabled intellectually and politically—first in their schools, then by the corporate mass media and leading political officials.24
During the Cold War, for example, U.S. violence across the world, always masked as a Noble Cause, strengthened the “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower warned about in his January 1961 Farewell Address. Five years earlier, however, the prominent sociologist C. Wright Mills analyzed this complex in his groundbreaking and powerful book, The Power Elite, a scathing critique of the institutions that later concerned the former president. The influence of this complex, which Mills identified as an “economic-military” link, comprises the all-embracing connection between the Pentagon, industry, Congress, and the academy. It has increased dramatically since Eisenhower’s address, devouring trillions of public funds to support the ever-increasing power of the National Security State (NSS). Decades before Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, Medal of Honor recipient and former Marine major general Smedley Butler addressed the nature of the U.S. imperial violence and the military-industrial