The Vietnam War

I am watching The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, the ten-episode documentary that PBS broadcast last year. Based on a few things I read online, I was worried that it would champion a revisionist perspective -- that the U.S. Goliath could have triumphed if not for the cowardliness of politicians and students. But so far, I just finished watching episode five, there's been no revisionism of any sort.

A month or two ago, in preparation for the Burns-Novick documentary, I watched Vietnam: A Television History, the 13-episode WGBH-produced documentary which was broadcast in the fall of 1983. No revision there either. The U.S. was beat fair and square by a much more motivated people fed up with colonial domination.

There are differences between the two documentaries. The Burns-Novick film focuses on average soldiers, where the WGBH documentary had lots of wonderful interviews with people at the top of the heap who were still alive in the late-70s/early-80s -- McGeorge Bundy, Madame Nhu.

This morning Yves Smith reposts a Tomgram by Danny Sjursen, "The War That Never Ends (for the U.S. Military High Command): And It’s Not the War on Terror."

Sjursen helpfully summarizes revision when it comes to the Vietnam War and he traces its influence on GWOT:

Historian Gary Hess identifies two main schools of revisionist thinking. There are the “Clausewitzians” (named after the nineteenth century Prussian military theorist) who insist that Washington never sufficiently attacked the enemy’s true center of gravity in North Vietnam. Beneath the academic language, they essentially agree on one key thing: the U.S. military should have bombed the North into a parking lot.

The second school, including Petraeus, Hess labeled the “hearts-and-minders.” As COINdinistas, they felt the war effort never focused clearly enough on isolating the Vietcong, protecting local villages in the South, building schools, and handing out candy — everything, in short, that might have won (in the phrase of that era) Vietnamese hearts and minds.

Both schools, however, agreed on something basic: that the U.S. military should have won in Vietnam.

[snip] 

Petraeus, Mattis, McMaster, and the others entered service when military prestige had reached a nadir or was just rebounding. And those reading lists taught the young officers where to lay the blame for that — on civilians in Washington (or in the nation’s streets) or on a military high command too weak to assert its authority effectively. They would serve in Vietnam’s shadow, the shadow of defeat, and the conclusions they would draw from it would only lead to twenty-first-century disasters.

[snip] 

Today’s leaders don’t even pretend that the post-9/11 wars will ever end. In an interview last June, Petraeus — still considered a sagacious guru of the Defense establishment — disturbingly described the Afghan conflict as “generational.” Eerily enough, to cite a Vietnam-era precedent, General Creighton Abrams predicted something similar. speaking to the White House as the war in Southeast Asia was winding down. Even as President Richard Nixon slowly withdrew U.S. forces, handing over their duties to the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) — a process known then as “Vietnamization” — the general warned that, despite ARVN improvements, continued U.S. support “would be required indefinitely to maintain an effective force.” Vietnam, too, had its “generational” side (until, of course, it didn’t).

The fundamental thing to understand about the Vietnam War is that South Vietnam was never a real organic entity. Diem managed to kick the French out when he beat the mafia that controlled Saigon. Then when Diem began to lose his grip because of a Buddhist-led popular uprising, the Kennedy administration backed a coup that led to Diem's death. The show was over right there. The U.S. killed the guy who justified the fiction that there was a South Vietnam. Instead, the U.S. decided to pour more and more resources into the country in an attempt to maintain the fiction.

War Criminal Compares Trump to Bearded Lady

I don't normally read Frank Bruni's column. His opinions are usually superficial. I'll read the disingenuous, bilious David Brooks before Bruni. But Bruni's column yesterday I did read.

"To Trump or Not to Trump?" is a description of a telephone conversation Bruni had with corporate Democrat Bob Kerrey, a Vietnam war criminal and discredited president of the New School. The goal of the column is to deride the presidential campaign of surging Donald Trump:

Bob Kerrey served in the Senate with John McCain, is also a Vietnam veteran and has run for president, so he has been asked incessantly over recent days to appear on television and weigh in on Donald Trump’s vile besmirching of McCain’s military record.

He accepted only one of those invitations, from a friend. Otherwise he mostly stayed mum, lest he abet Trump’s ultimate goal, which is to turn his name into a news media mantra: Trump, Trump, Trump.

But on the phone on Tuesday, Kerrey’s frustration — no, let’s call it disgust — boiled over, and he, too, talked about Trump, Trump, Trump. I recount our conversation because I think Kerrey speaks for most Americans and because his comments capture what a conundrum many of us face.

If we discuss Trump, as I’ve done in several columns, we reward his bad and transcendently self-serving behavior, no matter how negative our assessments of him or how many larger truths we engage.If we don’t discuss him, we ignore something real, in a fashion that’s irresponsible.

By something real, I mean the fact that Trump has measurable support, at least for now. In a nationwide ABC News/Washington Post poll of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents that was released Monday, he was in the lead for the party’s presidential nomination, the favorite of 24 percent of respondents. The next closest contenders were Scott Walker (13 percent) and Jeb Bush (12).

Why not discuss the fact, reported in Bruni's own paper, that Bob Kerrey, as a former Navy SEAL in Vietnam, stands accused of mass murder and mutilation, including children and pregnant women, in the village of Thanh Phong? According to a display devoted to the incident at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City:

From 8PM to 9PM February 25th, 1969, a group of Seal Rangers [sic] (one of the most selective rangers of U.S. Army) led by Lieutenant Bob Kerry [sic] reached for Hamlet 5, Thanh Phong Village, Thanh Phu District, Ben Tre Province. They cut 66 year-old Bui Van Vat and 62 year-old Luu Thi Canh's necks and pulled their three grandchildren out from their hiding place in a drain and killed two, disembowelled one. Then, these rangers moved to dug-outs of other families, shot dead 15 civilians (including three pregnant women), disembowelled a girl. The only survivor was a 12-year-old girl named Bui Thi Luom who suffered a foot injury. It was not until April 2001 that U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey confessed his crime to the international public.

Instead we get Kerrey delivered up as some sort of sage of what passes for permissible political discourse in the United States:

“This is not a national primary,” Kerrey said, noting that Trump’s 24 percent has dubious predictive power for a consequential handful of individual contests in early states that aren’t exactly mirrors of America. “So who the hell cares what his numbers are nationally?”

“He’s not going to do that well in Iowa,” Kerrey continued. “There’s nothing about Trump that indicates that the evangelical community there is going to embrace him. And does anyone seriously think he has the kind of ground organization in New Hampshire to turn people out to vote?”

“He’s got no ground game,” Kerrey continued. “It’s all up in Donald’s head! Everything’s in Donald’s head. It’s the political version of ‘Being John Malkovich.’ ”

I'm sure Trump will do better in Iowa than Kerrey did in his home state of Nebraska. In 2012, he lost the election to the U.S. Senate to state senator Deb Fisher. Kerrey squeaked by in the two largest counties, but he lost all the rest except for three. I guess he didn't have a ground game either.

What we are witnessing now, and Bruni's column is an example, is the media's attempt to deflate or harness the Trump boom that it has helped create. Trotting out stale, past-the-sale-date corporate politicos like Bob Kerrey to take pot shots at The Donald is weak stuff:

But for all Trump’s antics and nonsense, he placed second to Bush in a New Hampshire poll late last month. In a more recent Iowa poll, he trailed only Walker. 

Kerrey conceded: “I don’t think you can really ignore it. But you have to evaluate, with some expertise, what his odds of being the Republican nominee are. And they’re practically zero.” 

“Yeah, 5,000 people showed up at your event,” he said. “I could get 5,000 people to show up at the bearded lady. He is, in his way, a freak show.”

The obvious that goes unmentioned is that Trumps' popularity tracks back to a large segment of voters who have lost all trust in politicians like Bob Kerrey (who voted for the repeal of Glass-Steagal when he was in the U.S. Senate). People would sooner burn the whole motherfucking political charade to the ground than back a Bush or Clinton yet again.

People are angry. Trump is a vehicle for that anger. That is why his popularity spiked when he went after Mexican immigrants.

People want to hate. When a leader arrives on the scene and says, "Yes, it is okay to hate. Go grab your pitchforks and your torches." Of course people will take note. It worked for Hitler and Mussolini, and it worked for Ronald Reagan when he played up black welfare mooches.

The Fourth Estate is going to continue to hack away at Trump. But at this point The Donald's candidacy might have achieved critical mass and is beyond the control of the Fourth Estate. One thing is for sure: A cadaver like Bob Kerrey will not harm Trump at all.

The Logic of U.S. Support for the Khmer Rouge

This morning the Gray Lady offers a story by Julia Wallace, "Genocide Trial Begins for Khmer Rouge Leaders," about the trial for genocide and war crimes of two top Khmer Rouge officials:

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Hearings began on Friday into the most far-reaching charges, including genocide, against two former leaders of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge in what is likely to be the last chance to seek justice for 1.7 million deaths during their disastrous 1970s rule. 

The defendants, Nuon Chea, 88, and Khieu Samphan, 83, the most senior surviving leaders of the group, were sentenced to life in prison in August for masterminding mass evacuations of Cambodians from their homes. They have appealed those convictions. 

The trial that began Friday, expected to last until 2017, covers a broader range of crimes against humanity, as well as genocide and war crimes. It will address accusations that the Khmer Rouge ran work camps that enlisted Cambodians as slave laborers to build dams and airports and ran execution sites where those who fell afoul of the government’s policies were slaughtered, and will consider charges of genocide committed against Muslims and ethnic Vietnamese minorities.

“Of all the crimes in Democratic Kampuchea, there were none graver than the relentless and systematic effort of the senior Khmer Rouge leaders to identify and smash those they feared could one day oppose them,” said Chea Leang, one of the prosecutors. Democratic Kampuchea was the name of the state headed by the Khmer Rouge during their rule from 1975 to 1979. 

The first witnesses will appear later this month to testify about work sites in Tram Kak, the “ideological center” of the Khmer Rouge movement, where collectivized labor and communal living, the hallmarks of the rule, were enforced with extreme brutality. 

Mr. Nuon Chea is often described as the Khmer Rouge movement’s chief ideologue and was second-in-command to Pol Pot, the leader of the movement who died in the jungles of northwestern Cambodia in 1998. Mr. Khieu Samphan, a former teacher and Parliament member, joined the revolutionary Communist movement out of frustration with the corruption and decadence of 1960s-era Cambodia and became the Khmer Rouge’s head of state in 1976.

The tribunal, a joint effort of the Cambodian government and the United Nations, had split the case against the men into two trials to expedite a verdict. 

Both defendants said in court Friday that they would boycott the second trial because they were unhappy over the way it had been split. Mr. Nuon Chea rose to criticize judges for what he said was a lingering bias against him. He said he had been “hurt” by the court’s refusal to acknowledge the role that aggression by neighboring Vietnam played in the Khmer Rouge killings, and vowed that he would not come back to court until his motion for their disqualification had been heard.

For those of you like myself who have been aware of longstanding allegations by critics of U.S. hegemony, like Alexander Cockburn and Noam Chomsky, that the  United States actually supported the Khmer Rouge, but you weren't exactly clear about the dialectics of that support there was an excellent article that appeared yesterday on the Counterpunch web site by Gregory Elich, "Who Supported the Khmer Rouge? How the US Backed a Regime of Unrivaled Barbarism," that is well written and lays it all bare.

Nuon Chea wants to be able to use the purported aggression of Vietnam in his defense because that was the main reason the United States along with China, for decades no less, backed the uber-Maoist butchers of the Khmer once they were toppled -- they were a thorn in the side of the Vietnamese. As Elich explains,

With the conviction last summer of former Khmer Rouge officials Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea for crimes against humanity, the subject of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 received a small amount of attention in the Western mass media. What the media failed to mention was how the Khmer Rouge was maintained as a military and political force long after its fall from power. Nor has it been suggested why, at Western insistence, the scope of investigations at the tribunal would exclude the period after 1979.

*** 

Khmer Rouge leaders had a manic hatred for the Vietnamese and expended considerable effort in trying to whip up anti-Vietnamese sentiment. Claiming Southern Vietnam as their territory, the Khmer Rouge launched numerous cross-border raids, burning down villages and massacring their inhabitants. In all, around 30,000 Vietnamese civilians lost their lives in the attacks. 

No nation could long countenance the murder of its citizens by marauders from a neighboring nation, nor was it easy to remain blind to the ongoing genocide in Cambodia. On December 25, 1978, following repeated refusals by the Khmer Rouge to negotiate, Vietnamese armed forces in conjunction with Cambodian rebel forces, struck back. Such was the level of hatred the population felt for their rulers that uprisings spread throughout the nation and it took only two weeks to drive the Khmer Rouge from power.

The campaign by Vietnamese armed forces and the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation was one of history’s great liberations. The United States and China did not see it that way, however. Both shared an antipathy for Vietnam’s alliance with the Soviet Union and sought a way to overturn the recent turn of events. U.S. Secretary of State Harold Brown denounced Vietnam for its “minor league hegemonism,” and China sent troops into northern Vietnam to fight a two-week war to “teach Vietnam a lesson.” 

According to journalist Elizabeth Becker, U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski “himself claims that he concocted the idea of persuading Thailand to cooperate fully with China in its efforts to rebuild the Khmer Rouge.” Brzezinski said, “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the D.K. [Khmer Rouge government-in-exile of Democratic Kampuchea]. The question was how to help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.” In fact, U.S. support went well beyond encouraging others to rebuild the Khmer Rouge. 

In neighboring Thailand, the Khmer Rouge formed a large guerrilla army, while Cambodian politician Son Sann established an army that would be ultimately named the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF). Prince Norodom Sihanouk launched his private army, the Armée Nationale Sihanoukiste (ANS). 

On the political front, in 1979 the United States and China wielded their influence and pushed through a vote in the UN General Assembly in favor of granting Cambodia’s UN seat to the ousted Khmer Rouge regime, and terminated a UN investigation into Khmer Rouge crimes. The following year, the United States again supported the Khmer Rouge in the UN as the “legitimate” representative of the Cambodian people. With U.S. backing, Cambodia would continue to be represented in the United Nations by a Khmer Rouge diplomat until 1993.

Elich's story goes on, providing layer upon layer of detail about the multitudinous ways the U.S. hijacked peace talks and funneled aid to the Khmer Rouge.  For anyone unconvinced that the U.S. could play a double game of supporting Islamic State at the same time marshaling an international coalition to degrade and destroy it, the American experience with the Khmer Rouge should be very illumininating.

John Pilger in a story last week, "From Pol Pot to ISIS: 'Anything That Flies on Everything that Moves.' " explores the connection from another angle. The exercise of U.S. military supremacy does not solve problems, it creates new ones. In the case of the Nixon administration's "Operation Menu," the saturation bombing of Cambodia to eradicate the North Vietnamese bases there led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. In the case of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the specious claim that Saddam Hussein was collaborating with jihadis to attack America, actually becomes self-fulfilling with the rise of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

What is interesting is that I think we in the U.S. are closer now to understanding the nature of Great Power conflict -- that a hegemonic state will foster adversaries in order to maintain a state of war -- than we have been since the Vietnam era. The failure of Obama's putative anti-war presidency is the prime mover here. But what is different now from 40 years ago is that democracy -- the feedback mechanism between ruled and rulers -- is far weaker in the U.S. People are beginning to realize that war is permanent and that there is nothing, absent a mass uprising, that we can do about it.

My prediction is that over the next several elections cycles a pronounced rejection of the two-party system will emerge.

Isaac Hayes' Wattstax "Ain't No Sunshine"

To piggyback on the last post, devoted as it was in part to Neal Adams' run on the Inhumans in Amazing Adventures from 1971, here is the powerhouse version of "Ain't No Sunhsine" by Isaac Hayes which concludes the two-disk remastered Wattstax concert album.

I heard it on my iPod while running this morning. Wattstax, a documentary of a concert put on by performers of the Stax Records label, was filmed at the L.A. Coliseum in August 1972. This is what the California I grew up in looked like. The dominant powers were tainted -- Vietnam, Watergate in the pipeline -- and the people were on the rise. Rejecting the sanctity of those at the apex of the chain of being, people felt as if they had a little room to breathe.

The feeling wouldn't last long. Wattstax documents a moment in time when people thought that feeling would last forever.

Hippies vs. Punks: Disco-Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes 1975

To recapitulate. Hippies vs. Punks. In a very short period of time, from 1975 to 1979, the Punks replaced the Hippies as the vanguard youth movement in the West (though on Fridays to come we will consider the possibility of the continuation of a Hippie vanguard, albeit greatly shrunken, contemporaneous with the Punks). This is the same period of time, the late Seventies, when our current (now exhausted) Zeitgeist takes wing. Call it neoliberalism, or a political economy defined by the hyper movement of wealth from working people to the top tier, the rent-seekers, the 1%.

The idea I introduced earlier is that 1975 is the last hurrah of Hippies. What happens in 1975? The Vietnam War officially ends with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. And what makes a Hippie a Hippie? Being a longhair and being antiwar. Hippies are said to have got their start the summer of 1964 when Ken Kesey took his Merry Pranksters cross country in the psychedelic bus Futhur destined for the New York City World's Fair. While Babbs, Cassady, Kesey and the rest fried on acid Congress passed The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing LBJ to rapidly escalate the military conflict in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war. When the "war" ends ten-years later so does a main reason for being a Hippie.

But the social characteristics -- such as long hair, promiscuity, and recreational drug use -- popularized by the Hippies not only remain but spread throughout Middle America. It is a mass libertinism minus any revolutionary ideology or social critique. This is Disco, a vital interregnum between the Hippies and the Punks, and crucial to understanding why the Hippies disappeared as a vanguard movement as quickly they did.

From the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 1975, coming in at #100, is "Get Dancin'" by Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes. I was in 6th grade in 1975. That year I purchased a cheap copy of Disco-Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes; it was a cut-out bargain bin LP that I found at Tower Records in San Jose. When I wanted to drive my older sisters crazy (one was a prog rocker, the other was a Joni Mitchell devotee) I would put "Get Dancin'" on the turntable:

The Punks are coming.