The US in Vietnam
By Larry Romanoff July 21,2023
The Creation of a Media Myth
Agent Orange
NAPALM
The CIA's Phoenix Program
The RAND Corporation
Abandoned POWs in Vietnam
The Creation of a Media Myth
In addition to the
false-flag operation and its attendant lies that propelled the US into a full
war with Vietnam was an enormous prior effort to manipulate public opinion and
alter perceptions about the truth of Vietnam itself, which truth has never seen
the light of day in America. Many Americans firmly believe to this day that
their country entered Vietnam to protect and save the democratic South from
invasion by the brutal communist North, and to contain Soviet “expansionism”
and the “spread” of communism over all of Asia. But nothing in the official
narrative was ever true, the US story a complete lie and entirely contrary to
the reality.
For background,
France had maintained Vietnam and parts of Southeast Asia as a forced colony
since the late 1800s, and restored their colonial rule after the defeat of the
Japanese in 1945, leading to increased resentment and military resistance,
their total defeat in the battle of Dien Ben Phu in 1954 finally forcing the
French to concede they had lost Vietnam. In an effort to restore peace to the
region, UN negotiations produced a set of documents known as the Geneva
Accords, which briefly created a temporary non-political boundary between North
and South and directed that national elections be held for a government of the
unified and soon to be free nation. And to specifically put aside any notion
that the boundary was a partition, the Geneva Agreements stated that the
military demarcation line was “provisional and should not in any way be
interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary”.
But the Americans,
who had been using the French as a proxy, directing the war and paying most of
its expenses,
were loath to abandon the prospect of a lucrative colony. Instead of permitting
peace to return, the Americans greatly increased military aid and activity in
the South, and forcibly created a new fake government, importing a genocidal
expatriate Vietnamese from New Jersey named Ngo Dinh Diem to be president, effectively colonising South Vietnam
as a proxy for its intended war against the North. The US even staged a
massive, and reprehensibly fake, election hailed in the Western media as ‘free
and fair’, with American officials fabricating ‘an 83 per cent
turnout despite Vietcong terror’. It was all a fiction. The Americans also
refused to allow the UN to administer the decreed national elections to take
place because virtually the entire population was already supporting Ho Chi Minh in North
Vietnam, which would have removed the US from any position of control. US President
Eisenhower stated openly there
was no question that “80 per cent of the population would have voted for Ho
Chi Minh as their leader“, a condition the Americans would not permit. From
that point, the US continued its military escalation, for ten years using the
South Vietnamese as fodder in a bitter civil war, until finally staging its
false-flag operation with the USS Maddox and declaring all-out war on Vietnam in
1964.
But the American
history books tell a very different version. They claim that under the 1954
Geneva Accords “Vietnam was partitioned into communist north and democratic
south” and, as John Pilger noted, “In one sentence, truth is dispatched”. The American
books created a fictitious moral world of good South and bad North with the
Soviet Union brutally expanding its evil influence and the Americans once again
defending the righteous. But of course, it was no such thing. The entire
population of Vietnam wanted only to be united and freed of foreign imperialism
and its former colonial masters, but in refusing to accept this outcome the US
had declared war on both the North and the South, and without support from
either side. The US media began a decade-long propaganda campaign to demonise
the North Vietnamese and totally fabricate a Russian communist threat to
justify the heavy American military presence. The CIA was tasked with this onslaught of
disinformation and ordered to maintain the illusion through the media.
Almost everything
in the American history books about Vietnam is an outright lie. As one author
said so well, “What this essentially tells us is that, for all the
democratic ideals that America claims to espouse, as soon as someone who does
not agree with their viewpoint is voted in, they will do anything in their
power to subvert and undermine them. This is rephrased and then becomes the
‘official’ history of events, finding its way into everything from textbooks to
documentaries”. And in all of the vicious commentary about the spread
of Russian communism, there is not a word about the “spread” of the much
more vicious and rapacious America, looking for domination at any cost. And
even today, American tourists to Vietnam are offended to see war memorials
depicting the truly horrendous human cost to the Vietnamese of this American ‘adventure‘
and the blame laid on the
US for the continuing misery from napalm and Agent Orange. The American
guidebooks advise their travelers to simply view these memorials as ignorant “anti-Americanism”
and not treat them seriously.
Agent Orange
Agent Orange is a
highly toxic herbicide, defoliant and carcinogen consisting of equal parts of
two herbicides, 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D, intermixed with another especially lethal
dioxin named TCDD. The chemical was the creation of joint efforts between
the British and the Americans to design a bio-weapon that would totally
exterminate an enemy’s food crops[1][2][3]. Some of the
chemical’s components proved useful as commercial herbicides and later entered
the mass markets, though eventually proving too destructive to the environment
for continued use. The US military was testing Agent Orange as a
bio-weapon in the early 1940s, especially for rice crops, and began full-scale
production for use against Japan before the end of the war. And yes,
they did use it against Japan. The US tested well over 1,000 similar compounds
and conducted field trials of “the more promising ones“, especially
in Tanganyika and Kenya to assess the
value of millions of liters of carcinogenic herbicides in the eradication of
(1) trees and bushes concealing terrorists and (2) socialist governments. Arthur Galston, TCDD’s developer,
cited it as “perhaps the most toxic molecule ever synthesized by man”
but, according to Photoshop and Mr. Sanitise, its insertion into Agent Orange
was a mistake, an unintended manufacturing side effect, and present in only “vanishingly
small quantities“.
The sanitised
version that finds its way into American history books is that the US military
used it as a ‘defoliant‘, a gentle process
of removing the leaves from a few trees where Vietnamese snipers might be
hiding, but that was never true. This extraordinarily lethal chemical was used in
an effort to destroy Vietnam’s entire rice crops, and the nation’s food supply,
and to contaminate the soil and groundwater to the extent that re-growth would
become impossible. There is no shortage of publicly-available
photographs showing US Army helicopters and C-123 transports spraying Agent
Orange over Vietnamese agricultural land, rivers, lakes and water
reservoirs. The
official version was that President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam asked the
United States to conduct aerial herbicide spraying in his country, but that
claim is ridiculous nonsense. Diem was an American gangster transplanted from
New Jersey by the US government and installed as the fictitious president of a
fictitious ‘South Vietnam’.
Agent Orange was an
attempt at the genocide of the Vietnamese people, and totally unrelated to
defoliation of anything. The record clearly states that in Quang Ngai province
alone, 85% of all the croplands were scheduled to be destroyed in 1970 alone,
leaving hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese starving to death. Many authors
have noted testimony that US military personnel were officially informed the
destroyed crops were being produced to feed “insurgents” and “guerillas”, but eventually
discovered they were simply eradicating the entire food supply of the civilian
population.
The Americans
sprayed more than 100 million liters of this chemical in South Vietnam alone,
resulting in at least 10 million hectares of agricultural land being ultimately
totally destroyed and perhaps never recoverable. In fact, in Congressional testimony in
1965, it was admitted by the US military that “crop destruction is ….
the more important purpose … but the emphasis is usually given to the
jungle defoliation in public mention of the program.” And it was once again the pathologically
genocidal “analysts” at the RAND corporation who engineered this travesty,
stating in one memorandum (5446-ISA/ARPA) “the fact that the VC obtain most of their
food from the neutral rural population dictates the destruction of civilian
crops … if they (the VC) are to be hampered by the crop destruction program, it
will be necessary to destroy large portions of the rural economy – probably 50% or
more”. Using the
RAND memo and Congressional testimony as references, it becomes abundantly
clear the only purpose of the chemical was to destroy Vietnam’s entire food supply and
force a military surrender from starvation. Of the millions of Vietnamese living in the
contaminated areas, many hundreds of thousands were reported suffering from
severe malnutrition and there is little doubt many or most of those died, but
the Western media have completely censored this topic, maintaining the fiction
of Agent Orange and other lethal herbicides as ‘defoliants‘ to ‘deter snipers‘.
Even today, after
nearly 50 years, the Americans refuse to accept any responsibility or liability
for the human and ecological destruction of much of Vietnam. The US government
repeated states it “does not recognize any legal liability for damages
alleged to be related to Agent Orange“, and it refuses to accept the accuracy of tests
or validity of claims of damage to either human health or the ecosystem,
refusing to discuss the issue and denying the credibility of all claims. In one
recent Congressional Report, “Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange and
U.S.-Vietnam Relations Michael F. Martin Specialist in Asian Affairs August 29,
2012”, the typical American position is that:
“Virtually every
aspect of the effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam is infused with uncertainty
and/or controversy. There is some question about the amount of Agent Orange and
other herbicides sprayed in Vietnam, as well as the amount of dioxin contained
in the Agent Orange used. It is also unclear exactly where the herbicides were
sprayed and the amount sprayed at each location. Nor is it known who was
exposed to Agent Orange and its dioxin, and for what duration they were
exposed. Finally, there is limited information about the long-term effects of
Agent Orange on the environment and people of Vietnam. The uncertainty and
controversies are in part attributable to the general “fog of war.”
And there we are.
The Americans don’t actually know if, when, or where, they sprayed Agent
Orange, or if the spray contained any toxic chemicals, nor who might have been
exposed, nor if the dioxins were really toxic after all. The fact that
international agencies have repeatedly discovered toxic concentrations in many
locations in Vietnam at nearly 400 times the maximum permitted international
levels, is apparently irrelevant. The Vietnamese government of course filed claims
in US courts for compensation and damages for the irreparable environmental and
human carnage resulting from those 100 million liters of dioxins poured on
their country and its people. But, following the well-established principles of
rule of law, those US courts dismissed the claims. In their rulings, they cited
the principle of sovereign immunity, but they could just as well have applied
the doctrine of ‘self-inflicted injury‘, from their fatuous claim that the
Vietnamese government asked the US to conduct aerial herbicide spraying in the
country. So, it was really
their own fault anyway.
Just so it doesn’t
go unsaid, some
people promote the myth that dioxin has a short ‘half-life’ and degrades
quickly, and that is not true. The lethal dioxin components can remain stable –
and lethal – for 100 years or more, especially in underground aquifers, resulting in
health problems and birth defects for generations, either through ingesting the
contaminated water or from high concentrations in the plant life. In many areas
of the country, these dioxins are still at levels many hundreds of times higher
than the maximum ‘safe limits’ stated by medical
experts. The
Vietnamese government estimates that nearly 500,000 people have died from Agent
Orange poisoning to date, and that more than half a million children have been
born with birth defects. The Red Cross of Vietnam estimates that perhaps 1
million people are currently disabled or suffering serious health problems from
Agent Orange contamination, including the fact that even today high levels
of dioxins are found in the breast milk of many Vietnamese mothers. The US
government of course refutes all these figures and claims on the basis that
“the Vietnamese are notoriously unreliable”, as are all other nations
presenting evidence of American military-flavored democracy.
NAPALM
Napalm –
essentially jellied gasoline with incendiary additives – was developed by a
team led by the Jewish chemist Louis F. Fieser in 1942 at Harvard
University in a
top-secret war research collaboration with the United States government. It was
made from a mixture of powdered aluminum soap of naphthalene with palmitate
and, when added to gasoline it acted as a gelling agent. It was originally used
to increase the range of flamethrowers almost tenfold, but found its most
inhuman use in incendiary bombs.[4][5] Napalm burns at
around 2,000 degrees Celsius, and sticks to human flesh, making it impossible
to wipe off. In Vietnam,
civilians quickly discovered they could extinguish the flames by immersing
themselves in water, so the geniuses at Harvard concocted the practice of infusing napalm
with white phosphorus, which cannot be extinguished once lit, and will burn a man
right through his bones even under water.
Independence Day,
1942: the first field test of napalm, behind Harvard Business School.Photograph
courtesy of Harvard University Archives/ Louis Fieser, The Scientific Method
The US used napalm
in attacks on Germany in 1944, in Saipan, Iwo Jima, the Philippines and
Okinawa, in Korea, China, and in Japan. In Vietnam, the US dropped nearly
400,000 tons of napalm on Vietnamese military and civilian locations, and
Curtis LeMay and his team dropped 700,000 pounds of it on Tokyo, in one of the
most inhumane war atrocities ever committed. In Vietnam, napalm was used on
military installations, but it was applied at least as often on Vietnamese food
supplies and on the civilians.
“The horrifying
photograph of children fleeing a deadly napalm attack has become a defining
image not only of the Vietnam War, but of the 20th century.”[6] One of the most famous photos emerging from the
Vietnam war is of a naked 9-year-old girl, burning with napalm on her back,
running in terror from the attack. The girl, since identified as Phan Thi Kim
Phuc, ultimately survived her injuries.
The children from left to right are: Phan Thanh Tam, younger brother of Kim Phuc, who lost an eye, Phan Thanh Phouc, youngest brother of Kim Phuc, Kim Phuc, and Kim's cousins Ho Van Bon, and Ho Thi Ting. Behind them are soldiers of the Vietnam Army 25th Division, June 8, 1972. (Nick Ut/AP Photo)
Bombs with a mixture of napalm and white phosphorus jelly dropped by Vietnamese Air Force Skyraider bombers explode across Route 1, amid homes and in front of the Cao Dai temple on the outskirts of Trang Bang, Vietnam, June 8, 1972. (Nick Ut/AP Photo)
The CIA’s Phoenix Program
This was one of the
most brutal and corrupt series of events in American history, involving the
most violent acts of torture and terrorism conducted on an unbelievably
widespread scale against the innocent civilians of Vietnam. Like all such
American programs in the third world, this was an organised program of
genocide, one which the US government and media denied then, and continue to
deny today in spite of volumes of documented proof. The objective of the
Phoenix Program – and many similar since, conducted by the US military and the
CIA – was to eliminate by destruction the entire social infrastructure of the
Vietnamese resistance to American colonisation. This was accomplished by mass
murder on an unprecedented scale, astonishing use of terror tactics against
civilians, and one of the most brutal torture programs ever initiated in the
history of the world.[7]
A man named Barton
Osborne who was assigned to this CIA and military project at the time,
wrote that “It was basically a psychological operation, and it was very well
done. Americans have done it many times before. The theory is you don’t kill
the leader, you kill his children, or his family. Basically, what you do is you
destroy the chief’s family … when the guy [returns home], he sees this mess –
you know, his wife beheaded, and her infant child stripped out of her abdomen,
and beheaded and bleeding on her body, hung from a rafter, [excrement] all over
the walls, those kind of things – that’s how you do it. So the whole operation
loses its fighting will. And that’s basically “The American Way.” Osborn
testified further before the US Congress, “I never knew in the course
of all those operations any detainee to live through his interrogation. They
all died. Not a single suspect survived interrogation … and the majority were
either tortured to death or thrown out of helicopters.”
One American
official who was an “advisor” in the Phoenix program stated, “It was common
knowledge that when someone was picked up [to be ‘interrogated’] their lives
were about at an end.” I won’t go into details of the inhumanities inflicted on
the victims but one example of the ingenuity of Americans is worthy of note.
Barton testified that the “interrogators” (There is always the pretense of an
interrogation, suggesting questioning for vital military information. The
pretense is always false.) would take a six-inch wooden dowel and pound it into
a man’s ear and into his brain, then letting him wander around crazed, until he
died.
“There are chilling
accounts of direct CIA atrocities in South Vietnam, particularly in the Bien
Hoa Mental Hospital in Saigon. It is reported that in 1966 Dr Lloyd H. Cutter
and two other psychiatrists were sent with an electroshock machine provided by
the Technical Services Division of the Office of Public Safety (OPS), to test
whether certain depatterning exercises worked on the brain to alter human
behavior. Utilizing the Phoenix ladder, Viet Cong prisoners were brought to
the hospital and given excessive shock treatments. For one week straight, they
were subjugated to 60 shock treatments every day. Not a single captive
survived.“[8]
All the brutal
inhumanities, and the very existence of the Phoenix Program itself, were
vehemently denied by the authorities and the media until Barton’s testimony and
the publication of several books on the program. Upon being forced to appear
before the US Congress to testify, then CIA Director William Colby admitted the
existence of Phoenix and the deaths of perhaps 20,000 Vietnamese civilians. The
Vietnamese have a much higher number of confirmed deaths from this program,
many official and apparently documented estimates ranging well over 250,000.
American officials dismiss Vietnamese claims on the basis that “Vietnamese
statistics are notoriously unreliable.” Barton had testified there were
“quotas” of nearly 2,000 such torture deaths to be performed each month, for a
program that lasted ten years or more, all under the watchful eye of Robert
McNamara.
THE PHOENIX PROGRAM — Douglas Valentine
There was of course
the traditional and mandatory Congressional investigation that exposed the
crimes then quickly buried the evidence and airbrushed the entire episode from
public memory. The investigation stated “the Phoenix Program had been used by
the CIA as “an instrument of mass political murder” to neutralize politicians
and activists who opposed America’s puppet government in Vietnam.” After the
Congressional investigations, various authors published books on the program,
T.P. Wilkinson and Douglas Valentine for two, but the
media refused to publish reviews of these and other books, bitterly attacking
the authors and their sanity. A common tactic was to claim the authors were
suffering from “serious psychological scars” from their wartime experience and
were therefore not credible witnesses. Most wrote that the object of the
program was to identify and terrorise every supporter of Vietnam and every
opponent of the American presence in Vietnam, and that “What followed was
murder and torture … on a grand scale. Untold thousands died and were
tortured.”
In fact, the
Phoenix Program was following prior CIA experience in the destruction of
nations, and became a template the US would use in many other nations,
post-Vietnam, in Nicaragua, Iraq, Libya, most of Central and South America, as
well as Africa and Asia. This is what the Israelis do in Palestine against the
Arabs, and was what the Americans did when they spawned the massive genocidal
massacre in Indonesia. It is worthy of note that a Director of the new
US Department of Homeland Security was a major officer in the Phoenix Program,
with many citizens concerned the same tactics will essentially be utilised
to dispel dissention within the US. Valentine wrote of the “insidious”
infiltration of these methods into the militarisation of the US police and
their new “methods of population control and suppression of dissent“.
One author wrote that “It is no accident that the torture methods [Barton]
documented [in Vietnam] are strikingly similar to those revealed in the
December 2014 Senate torture report [for Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib], since
Vietnam was the first testing ground for “a new paradigm in the practice of
torture developed by the CIA”.” He stated further the CIA “had launched a
multi-billion-dollar research program” on the methods for such programs. It
should be noted too that the CIA had prepared, from its extensive experience, a
1,000-page torture manual which it not only applied as a template around the
world, but used as
the prime teaching material in the curriculum at its famous “torture
university”, the School of the Americas, and which it shared with all the 50
dictators the US installed around the world.
The “targets” of
the Phoenix Program in Vietnam were civilians, not soldiers, as has been true for US
involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq and so many other nations. The local
population who rebel against American oppression and terror are invariably
categorised as “terrorists” to be hunted down and killed. This was
precisely Obama’s policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with his use of drone
aircraft, targeting and killing members of the domestic population who object
to the American presence in their country. One former US military official
wrote that the US was a country “where all common decency” has
disappeared. An American author, William Shirer, wrote in 1973, at the time of the intense and
inhuman conflict in Vietnam,
Until we go through
it ourselves, until our people cower in the shelters of New York, Washington,
Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere while the buildings collapse overhead and
burst into flames, and dead bodies hurtle about and, when it is over for the
day or the night, emerge in the rubble to find some of their dear ones mangled,
their homes gone, their hospitals, churches, schools demolished — only after
that gruesome experience will we realize what we are inflicting on the people
of Indochina.”
The RAND Corporation
Joint Chiefs of
Staff meet at the LBJ Ranch; Scope and content: Location: LBJ Ranch. Depicted:
Major General Chester Clifton, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, President
Lyndon B. Johnson, General Curtis LeMay, General Earle Wheeler, Deputy
Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, General Harold Johnson, Admiral David
McDonald, General Wallace Greene. SOURCE
Before Robert
McNamara left his position as US Defense Secretary, he created a group to write
what he termed an “encyclopedic history of the Vietnam War”, which eventually
comprised about 7,000 pages in 47 volumes and was classified Top Secret. Copies
of this material were supplied to the RAND corporation where an analyst
named Daniel Ellsberg found them. Ellsberg copied the entire
files which contained an astonishing amount of information on illegal CIA
programs, massacres, deaths, cover-ups and more, and tried to expose the
criminality to various high-level government officials including Henry
Kissinger, none of whom were apparently interested. Ellsberg then released the
material to the media, which became known as the scandal called “The
Pentagon Papers“. They revealed for the first time the illegal American
bombing of Laos and Cambodia and the fact that four successive US Presidents
had lied enormously to the public about US military activities in South-East
Asia. Ellsberg wrote at the time, “I felt that as an
American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in
concealing this information from the American public.”
Anthony Russo and
Daniel Ellsberg leave a Los Angeles courthouse after promising to appear later
before a federal Grand Jury investigating the leak of the so-called Pentagon
Papers. (AP Photo/GB) source: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/secret-origins-cias-torture-program-and-forgotten-man-who-tried-expose-it/
But there was more.
One of Ellsberg’s associates at the RAND Corporation named Anthony
Russo had written a paper on the Phoenix and other Programs that
Ellsberg claimed was “the first to document American complicity in the routine
use of torture”. Russo had apparently written three such papers on the subject,
a project for which he was eventually fired. The RAND corporation refuses to
release copies of those documents, the reason being, according to many military
experts, that RAND analysts performed all the research that led to the
creation of the CIA’s torture practices and to the existence of the Phoenix
Program itself. In other words, Russo had independently catalogued not only
the existence of the CIA’s massive torture and civil repression programs, but
unwittingly also catalogued the RAND Corporation’s responsibility in creating
those programs.
RAND is an acronym
for Research and Development”, originally created immediately after World War
II as a private research arm of the US Air Force, under the control of Curtis LeMay who was
responsible for the genocidal fire-bombing of Japan and the genocide in North
Korea. RAND staff concentrated on areas like new weapons development, including
biological and chemical warfare, and performing what was called “advanced
strategic thinking” on how to wage war. One grave concern is that RAND
has recently published (internally) a comprehensive report on a proposed
US war with China, discussing strategy and tactics and probable losses,
apparently concluding the US would suffer much less from the conflict than
would China. This is what RAND does. RAND Corporation “analysts” were present
and active in Vietnam during the period of the Phoenix Program and were so
active that reports state “RAND’s Saigon villa became the requisite “prestige
stop” for anyone with an interest in the war”, and that the RAND
Corporation actually served as a “command center” for Project Phoenix. It
was this deep involvement that Russo wanted to expose to the public, the fact
that this so-called ‘think tank’ had quietly not only affected but created this
inhuman political policy totally unknown to the public.
You can read the
RAND Corporation’s version of their internally-conceived and created Phoenix
Program that was designed for Vietnam,[9] with RAND telling us that “Phoenix made positive
contributions to counterinsurgency in South Vietnam”. Even more usefully, RAND
claims that “One of the major advantages of Phoenix was that it was a
relatively low-cost program”. What more do you need to know about the RAND
Corporation and the people who work for it?
It wasn’t only
torture programs that emerged from RAND; others have claimed RAND was
responsible for a huge range of inhuman practices relating to Vietnam, items
like recommending the use of red-colored plastic shrapnel that would be
invisible to x-rays and render difficult or impossible its removal from wounded
soldiers. Another was the recommendation that American soldiers should not
shoot to kill, but should shoot Vietnamese in the abdomen or the bowels so as
to strain the enemy’s medical resources. There are no human beings
working at the RAND Corporation
Abandoned POWs in Vietnam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NJn6kY4Rdk
Another despicable
atrocity the US government has heavily censored to prevent public exposure is
the thousands of prisoners of war deliberately left behind and abandoned in
Vietnam. The matter first came to light during the court-martial of Robert Garwood in 1985, where he testified at his trial that the US
government had knowingly and deliberately abandoned its soldiers for the sake
of cheap politics and money. Garwood claimed there were many Americans
remaining in Vietnam long after the war ended, with his testimony being supported
by many veterans with impeccable credentials. One of these was the former head
of the US Defense Intelligence Agency General Tighe, and a Captain McDaniel, who held the Navy’s top award for bravery. It was
revealed that the Vietnamese government had held back many thousands of American
POWs as a means to ensure the US would pay the more than $3 billion in war
reparations to which it was committed. But the US government had no intention
of paying those reparations, and so simply abandoned the prisoners to their
fate. This was known by many government leaders including Senator John McCain who had himself been a prisoner of war in
Vietnam, and has been kept as a state secret for 40 years. In simple terms, the
US balked at paying reparations to Vietnam because that would constitute a
public admission of not only guilt and wrong-doing but of having been defeated
by Vietnam, and since paying the money was the price of releasing the prisoners
of war, the US government just abandoned them and for decades threatened people
with execution if they talked.
If that weren’t
enough, by 1975, after North Vietnam’s victory over both South Vietnam and the
Americans, and the US exit from the country, then US President Gerald
Ford was so unapologetic and embittered he severed all diplomatic relations with Vietnam and
imposed a brutal trade embargo on the country in an attempt to achieve
through economic war what the US military had failed to achieve.
*
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into
32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and
politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English
language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and
businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting
firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a
visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in
international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai
and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and
the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new
anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing
with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at:
2186604556@qq.com
*
NOTES
[1] What is Agent
Orange?
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/agent-orange-in-vietnam-program/what-is-agent-orange/
[2] Agent Orange
Wasn’t the Only Deadly Chemical Used In Vietnam
https://www.history.com/news/agent-orange-wasnt-the-only-deadly-chemical-used-in-vietnam
[3] Agent Orange
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange
[4] How Napalm
Went From Hero to Villain During the Vietnam War
https://historycollection.com/napalm-hero-villain-vietnam-war/
[5] Napalm in
Vietnam War
https://thevietnamwar.info/napalm-vietnam-war/
[6] 'Napalm Girl'
at 50: The story of the Vietnam War's defining photo - with video
https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/napalm-girl-50-snap/index.html
[7] The Phoenix
Program: America's Use of Terror in Vietnam
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22309162-the-phoenix-program
[8] Mercy of the
Wicked: The CIA’s Phoenix Program
https://greydynamics.com/mercy-of-the-wicked-the-cias-phoenix-program/
[9]The Phoenix Program and
Contemporary Counterinsurgency -- RAND_OP258
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers/2009/RAND_OP258.pdf
*
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Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai, Moon of Shanghai, 2023
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers/2009/RAND_OP258.pdf
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This document may contain copyrighted material, the use of which has not
been specifically authorised by the copyright owner. This content is being made
available under the Fair Use doctrine, and is for educational and information
purposes only. There is no commercial use of this content.
Copyright
© Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai, Moon of Shanghai, 2023
