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Vietnam War

From Deep Politics Wiki

Proxy warProxy warVietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand

 Vietnam War link(War, Cold war, proxy war) ModernHistoryProject Spartacus
The My Lai massacre, an indiscriminate murder session carried out by US forces - distinguished from an unknown number of other such events by the fact that the story got out, together with images. The 26 soldiers charged with the hundreds of murders eventually served a total of only 3½ years under house arrest.
DateDecember 1956 - 30 April 1975
LocationVietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand
TypeProxy war
Deaths2,500,000
DescriptionThe Vietnam War was a proxy war lead by US that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from December 1956 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. Millions of people were killed, mostly Vietnamese. JFK was assassinated soon after declaring his intent to withdraw US troops. The war helped the CIA to refine its methods of illegal drug trafficking, torture and the like.
PerpetratorsUnited States
Witnessed byDan Rather

The Vietnam War was a Cold war era military confrontation in Vietnam, nominally due to the doctrine of 'containment' of Soviet influence. John F. Kennedy had plans to withdraw the majority of forces by the conclusion of 1965.[1]

Official Narrative

The main aim of the US government was the prevention of a communist takeover of South Vietnam, as part of the Cold War doctrine of "containment". This fear was of the "domino theory", expressed by Dwight D. Eisenhower during an April 7, 1954 news conference:

Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the "falling domino" principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.[2]

The bleak consequences for Vietnamese population could be inferred from a now infamous report by correspondent Peter Arnett in his writing about Bến Tre city on 7 February 1968: "'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it', a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong."[3]

Gulf Of Tonkin

Full article: Gulf Of Tonkin

As a prelude to the escalation of the conflict by the US, an "incident" was reported in the Gulf Of Tonkin, on the 2nd and then 4th of August, 1964. This was used as a justification for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which began the rapid escalation of the Vietnam war by authorising the use of "conventional" US military forces in South Ease Asia without the inconvenience of a formal declaration of war.

Long suspected of being a False Flag attack, light was shed on the Gulf Of Tonkin incident by the 2005 declassification of an internal National Security Agency historical study on the matter which concluded[4] that the Maddox had engaged the North Vietnamese Navy on August 2, but that there were no North Vietnamese Naval vessels present during the incident of August 4. The report stated regarding August 2:

At 1500G, Captain Herrick ordered Ogier's gun crews to open fire if the boats approached within ten thousand yards. At about 1505G, the Maddox fired three rounds to warn off the communist boats. This initial action was never reported by the Johnson administration, which insisted that the Vietnamese boats fired first.[4]

Regarding August 4, the NSA report concluded that:

It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night. [...] In truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on August 2.[5]

On November 30, 2005, the NSA released the first installment of previously classified information regarding the Gulf of Tonkin incident, including a moderately sanitized version of Mr. Hanyok's article.[4] The Hanyok article stated that intelligence information was presented to the Johnson administration "in such a manner as to preclude responsible decision makers in the Johnson administration from having the complete and objective narrative of events." Instead, "only information that supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers was given to Johnson administration officials."[6]

Drug dealing

The CIA was involved in Vietnam before the war started. The war allowed the CIA to greatly step up its drug trafficking, which was one purpose of the war.[7]

In 1993, Harry Miller, a Vietnam veteran, sued Larry Silverstein, together with Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Ross Perot and Colin Powell, alleging that they had perpetrated acts including serial murder for 25 years, since the war in Vietnam, as part of a conspiracy to distribute heroin. In January 1994, a New York court threw out the suit; an appeal by Miller was later rejected. The suit was not reported by the commercially-controlled media at the time.[8]

War crimes

My Lai Massacre

Full article: Vietnam War/My Lai Massacre

Body count system

Robert McNamara thought that the number of killed Vietnamese insurgents equals battlefield success and will lead to victory (now known as the "McNamara fallacy").[9] His "body count system" to measure a units success has led to a significant number of war crimes, of which the My Lai massacre was the one with most publicity.[10]

Consequences

Estimates of the casualties vary from about 1,000,000 to 4,000,000, mostly Vietnamese.[11]

After the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, over 100,000s were rounded up in re-education camps to "learn about the ways of the new government" although never tried, judged, or convicted of any crime[12]. After these camps were reported on by the western NGOs and media, the Hanoi government defended the reeducation camps by placing the enemy image "war criminal" on the prisoners. A 1981 memorandum of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to Amnesty International claimed that all those in the reeducation camps were guilty of acts of national treason as defined in Article 3 of the 30 October 1967 Law on Counter-revolutionary Crimes (enacted for the government of North Vietnam), which specifies punishments ranging from 20 years to life in prison or the death penalty. However, it was instead allowing the prisoners to experience "reeducation". A book from 1995 revealed the CIA actually intervened and attempted to steer public opinion by - among other tactics - revealing data gathered by a team of 650 CIA case officers operating in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to NGOs as Amnesty International.[13]

Exposure

Winter Soldier Hearings

The "Winter Soldier Hearings" was a media event sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) from January 31st to February 2nd, 1971. It was intended to publicize war crimes and atrocities by the United States Armed Forces and their allies and challenge the morality and conduct of the war by showing the direct relationship between military policies and war crimes in Vietnam.[14][15][16][17]

US POWs

Full article: Vietnam War/Prisoner

Hundreds of US soldiers and airmen were not returned home, possibly up 500-600,[18] since the US government did not want to pay billions in reparations.[19][20]


References

  1. ↑ https://covertactionmagazine.com/2026/05/15/jfks-last-stand-and-the-forensic-trail-left-in-the-vietnam-files/
  2. ↑ http://www.nps.gov/features/eise/jrranger/quotes2.htm
  3. ↑ "Major Describes Move". New York Times. 8 February 1968.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Robert J. Hanyok, "Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964", Cryptologic Quarterly, Winter 2000/Spring 2001 Edition, Vol. 19, No. 4 / Vol. 20, No. 1.
  5. ↑ Hanyok article (page 177)
  6. ↑ Hanyok article (page 177)
  7. ↑ http://www.maebrussell.com/Bibliography%20Sheets/408s1.html
  8. ↑ http://www.haaretz.com/up-in-smoke-1.75334
  9. ↑ https://www.geckoboard.com/uploads/mcnamara-fallacy.pdf
  10. ↑ https://datafield.dev/how-humans-get-stuck/part-01/chapter-04/case-study-01.html
  11. ↑ http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/couple-warriors-holding-hands-vietnam-1971/
  12. ↑ http://www.generalhieu.com/foot-lvhung.htm
  13. ↑ https://books.google.nl/books/about/Shadow_War.html?id=ys-KQgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y
  14. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Soldier_Investigation
  15. ↑ https://www.historiansagainstwar.org/wintersoldier/fitzgerald.html
  16. ↑ https://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_entry.html
  17. ↑ https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/gned/wintersoldier71hw.html
  18. ↑ September 29, 2008 – Sydney Schanberg – The Scott Horton Show – Episode 655 - Scott Horton YT channel (Dec 25, 2017)
  19. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20081004231748/http://www.nationinstitute.org/p/schanberg09182008pt1
  20. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20081006000437/http://www.nationinstitute.org/p/schanberg09182008pt2
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