Europe's Crowned Bloodsuckers: January 2013

Asia Times Online :: Southeast Asia news and business from Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam
How did the Gates of Hell open in Vietnam?

By Jonathan Schell

{Opening the gates of hell.} In Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse has for the first time put together a comprehensive picture, written with mastery and dignity, of what American forces actually were doing in Vietnam. The findings disclose an almost unspeakable truth.

A rural society was being torn to pieces before my eyes.

waging systematic war against the people of the region.

A case in point is the war in the Mekong Delta, home to some 5 to 6 million people in an area of less than 15,000 square miles (39,000 square kilometers) laced with rivers and canals. In February 1968, General Julian Ewell, soon to be known by Vietnamese and Americans alike as "the Butcher of the Delta",

indiscriminate warfare, unrestrained by calculation or humanity, on the population of South Vietnam

one example supplied by Turse, in 1965, General William Westmoreland, who was made commander of US forces in Vietnam in 1964, implicitly declared war on the peasantry of South Vietnam. He said:

Until now the war has been characterized by a substantial majority of the population remaining neutral. In the past year we have seen an escalation to a higher intensity in the war. This will bring about a moment of decision for the peasant farmer. He will have to choose if he stays alive

terrorizing the peasantry into submission

***(HORSE SHIT FROM AN ELITE)*** McGeorge Bundy, Lyndon Johnson's national security advisor, would describe his understanding of the president's frame of mind at the time this way:

LBJ isn't deeply concerned about who governs Laos, or who governs South Vietnam - he's deeply concerned with what the average American voter is going to think about how he did in the ball game of the Cold War. The great Cold War championship gets played in the largest stadium in the United States and he, Lyndon Johnson, is the quarterback, and if he loses, how does he do in the next election? So don't lose. Now that's too simple, but it's where he is. He's living with his own political survival every time he looks at these questions

the top floor of the skyscraper of lies that was the Vietnam War. Domestic politics was the largest and most fact-proof of the atrocity-producing situations. Do we imagine that this has changed?

The real top floor of truth is this,domestic politics is a long term carefully cultivated strategum that perpetuates the continued rule of the elite status quo urbanites who prey upon the rural peasantries. This has beeen an ongoing tale for centuries. Rich urbanites vs. poor rural peasantry.