over the years, is that the United States quite consistently tries to create enemies if a country does escape from the American grip. What we want to do is drive the country into being a base for the Russians because that justifies us in carrying out the violent attacks which we must carry out, given the geopolitical conception under which we organize and control much of the world. So that’s what we do, and then we “defend” ourselves. We engage in self-defense against the Great Satan or the Evil Empire or the “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy.” More generally, the Soviet Union plays the same kind of game within its own narrower domains, and that explains a good bit of the structure of the Cold War, in fact. Well, what has all of this meant for Indochina and Central America? Let’s begin with Indochina. Now remember I’m talking about the real world, not the one in the PBS television series and so on. In the real world, by 1948, the American State Department recognized, explicitly, that Ho Chi Minh was the sole significant leader of Vietnamese nationalism, but that if Vietnamese nationalism was successful, it could be a threat to the Grand Area, and therefore something had to be done about it. The threat was not so much in Vietnam itself, which is not terribly important for American purposes (the Freedom to Rob in Vietnam is not all that significant); the fear was that “the rot would spread,” namely the rot of successful social and economic development. In a very poor country which had suffered enormously under European colonialism, successful social and economic development could have a demonstration effect. Such development could be a model for people elsewhere and could lead them to try to duplicate it and gradually the Grand Area would unravel. So, for example, when the Bishop regime in Grenada began to take any constructive moves, it was immediately the target of enormous American hostility, not because that little speck in the Caribbean is any potential military threat or any of that sort of business. It is a threat in some other respects; if a tiny, nothingcountry with no natural resources like this can begin to extricate itself from the system of misery and oppression that we’ve helped to impose, then others who have even more resources might be tempted to do likewise. Well, we recognized that we had to prevent the rot from spreading so we had to support France in its effort to reconquer its former colony, and we did so. By the time the French had given up, we were providing about 80 percent of the costs of the war and in fact we came close to using nuclear weapons towards the end, by 1954, in Indochina. There was a political settlement, the Geneva Accords, in 1954, which the United States bitterly opposed. We immediately proceeded to undermine them, installing in South Vietnam a violent, terrorist regime, which, of course, rejected (with our support) the elections which were projected. Then, the regime turned to a terrorist attack against the population, particularly against the antiFrench Resistance, which we called the Viet Cong, in South Vietnam. The regime had killed about 80,000 people (that means we had killed, through our plans and mercenaries) by the time John F. Kennedy took over in 1961. This assault against the population, after several years, did arouse resistance—such acts have a way of doing that—and, by 1959, the anti-French Resistance received authorization from the Communist leadership, to use violence in self-defense. Then, the government, which we had established, immediately began to collapse because it had no popular support, as the United States conceded. Then Kennedy had a problem. It’s important to realize how he handled this. This is one of the d/s-similarities between Vietnam and Central America to which I’ll return. In 1961 and 1962 Kennedy simply launched a war against South Vietnam. That is, in 1961 and 1962, the American Air Force began extensive bombing and defoliation in South Vietnam, aimed primarily against the rural areas where 85 percent of the population lived. This was part of a program designed to drive several million people into concentration camps, which we called “strategic hamlets,” where they would be surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire, “protected,” as we put it, from the One thing you 'll notice is that the United States quite consistently tries to create enemies if a country does escape from the American grip. What we want to do is drive the country into being a base for the Russians. guerrillas who, we conceded, they were willingly supporting. That’s what we call “aggression” or “armed attack” when some other country does it. We call it “defense” when we do it. This was when the “defense” of South Vietnam escalated, with this attack in 1961 and 1962. But that again failed. The resistance increased, and by 1965, the United States was compelled to move to an outright land invasion of South Vietnam, escalating the attack again. We also at that time initiated the bombing of North Vietnam, which, as anticipated, brought North Vietnamese troops to the South several months later. Throughout, however, the major American attack was against South Vietnam. When we began bombing North Vietnam in February 1965, we extended the bombing of South Vietnam which had already been going on for several years. We extended the bombing of South Vietnam to triple the scale of the bombing of North Vietnam, and throughout, it was South Vietnam that bore the main brunt of the American war in Indochina. We later extended the war'to Cambodia and Laos. As far as the major aims were concerned, the American war was a smashing success. For one thing, there was a huge massacre. The first phase of the war, the French war, probably left about half a million dead. From 1954 to 1965 we succeeded in killing maybe another 160,000 to 170,000 South Vietnamese, mostly peasants. The war, from 1965 to 1975, left a death toll of maybe in the neighborhood of 3 million. There were also perhaps a million dead in Cambodia and Laos. So all together about 5 million people were killed, which is a respectable achievement when you’re trying to prevent any successful social and economic development. Furthermore, there were millions and millions of refugees created by the American bombardment, which was quite extraordinarily savage, not to mention the murderous ground operations. The land was devastated. People can’t farm because of the destruction and unexploded ordnance. And this is all a success. Vietnam is not going to be a model of social and economic development for anyone else. In fact, it will be lucky to survive. The rot will not spread. We also made sure of that by our actions in the surrounding areas, where we buttressed the American position. The post-war American policy has been designed to insure that it stays that way. We follow a policy of what some conservative business circles out of the United States call “bleeding Vietnam.” That is, a policy of imposing maximum suffering and harshness in Vietnam in the hope of perpetuating the suffering and insuring that only the most harsh and brutal elements will survive. Then you can use their brutality as a justification for having carried out the initial attack. This is done constantly and quite magnificently in our ideological system. We are now supporting the Pol Pot forces; we concede this incidentally. The State Department has stated that our reason for supporting the Democratic Kampuchea Coalition, which is largely based on Khmer Rouge forces, is because of its “continuity” with the Pol Pot regime; therefore we support it indirectly through China or through other means. This is part of the policy of “bleeding Vietnam.” Also, of course, we offer no aid, no reparations, though we certainly owe them. We block aid from international institutions and we’ve succeeded in blocking aid from other countries. India tried to send, in 1977, 100 buffalo, a very small amount, to Vietnam to try to replenish the buffalo herd that was destroyed in the war. We tried to block it by threatening to cancel Food for Peace aid to India if they sent the 100 buffalo. Mennonites in the United States tried to send pencils to Cambodia; again the State Department tried to block it. They also tried to send shovels to Laos to dig up the unexploded ordnance. Of course, we could do it easily with heavy equipment, but that we are plainly not going to do. Ije t’s turn to Central America, that is, “our little region over here that never has bothered anybody,” as Henry Stimson put it. Major U.S. military intervention in Central America began 131 years ago in 1854 when the United States Navy bombarded and destroyed a port town in Nicaragua, San Juan del Norte. This town was in fact captured for a few days by contras from Costa Rica about a year ago. The press made a big fuss about it, but they failed to note the historical antecedents. Our bombing and destruction of the town was not a capricious act. It was an act of revenge. A yacht owned by the American millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt had sailed into the port and an official had attempted to levy port charges on it. So, in revenge, the Navy burned the town down to the ground. Well, that was our first military intervention in Nicaragua and there have been many since. In the first third of this century, the U.S. sent military forces to Cuba, Panama, Mexico, and Honduras and occupied Haiti for twenty years. There, under Wilson, we reinstituted slavery, burned villages, destroyed, tortured, and left a legacy which still remains, in one of the most miserable corners of one of the most miserable regions in the world. Woodrow Wilson, the great apostle of self-determination, celebrated this doctrine by invading Mexico, Haiti and by launching a counter-insurgency war in the Domipican Republic, again, with ample destruction and torture. There, again, we established a long-lasting military dictatorship, under Trujillo, one of the worst dictators we managed to establish in this region. The United States invaded Nicaragua repeatedly, finally leaving behind a brutal, corrupt, and long-lasting military dictatorship, the regular consequence of U.S. intervention. In the post World War II period, there have been military interventions in Guatemala (probably the country which comes closest in the contemporary world to Nazi Germany), Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Grenada. A twenty-year war of terrorism was waged against Cuba. Cuba has been the target of more international terrorism, probably, than the rest of the world combined and, therefore, in the American ideological system, it is regarded as the source of international terrorism, exactly as Orwell would have predicted. And now there’s a war against Nicaragua. The impact of all of this has been absolutely horrendous. There’s vast starvation throughout the region while crop lands are devoted to exports to the United States. There’s slave labor, crushing poverty, torture, mass murder, every horror you can think of. In El Salvador alone, from October 1979 (a date to which I’ll return) until December 1981— approximately two years—about 30,000 people were murdered and about 600,000 refugees created. Those figures have about doubled since. Most of the murders were carried out by U.S.-backed military forces, including so-called “death squads." The efficiency of the massacre in El Salvador has recently increased with direct participation of American military forces. American planes based in Honduran and Panamanian sanctuaries, military aircraft, now coordinate bombing raids over El Salvador, which means that the Salvadoran Air Force can more effectively kill fleeing peasants and destroy villages, and, in fact, the kill rate has gone up corresponding to that. At the same time, the war against Nicaragua has left unknown thousands killed, these added to the 50,000 or so killed in the last stages of the Somoza dictatorship. Since we overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala in 1954, according to a Guatemalan human rights group in Mexico (none can function in Guatemala), about 150,000 people have been murdered, again, primarily by U.S.-backed forces and sometimes with direct U.S. military participation. These figures kind of lose their meaning when you just throw out numbers. You see what they mean when you look more closely at the refugees’ reports: for example, a report by a few people who succeeded in escaping from a village in Quiche province, where the government troops came in, rounded up the population, and put them in the town building. They then took all the men out and decapitated them. Then they raped and killed the women. Then they took the children and killed them by bashing their heads with rocks. This has been what our taxes have been paying for—sometimes by means of our proxies—since the 1954 successful overthrow of Guatemalan democracy, where we have effectively preserved order since. I might mention that the 1954 American-instigated coup was referred to by John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State, as “a new and 42 Clinton St. Quarterly
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