America is an exceptionally arrogant and barbaric nation

THE AMERICAN memory hole must be as vast as the Grand Canyon.

It would have to be to bury the truth about all its crimes against humanity.

The examples of their criminality are endless but one that comes to mind is the Vietnam War.

An American TV series with the same name has just been launched, presumably as a 50-year commemoration of the conflict. The acclaimed directors of the series believe “they will inspire our country to begin to talk and think about the Vietnam War in an entirely different way”.

To have an understanding of this conflict one needs to know that perhaps as many as 4 million Vietnamese and more than 58 000 Americans died. One northern province had more bombs dropped on it than all of Germany during World War II.

The narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings”.

So that’s all right then. As a final fig leaf we are also told that the “indispensable nation” meant well.

How comforting for those at the receiving end of such misplaced goodwill. The pretext for the war was based on a false flag incident referred to as the Gulf of Tonkin “incident”. The film does not expose this lie. Furthermore, the carpet bombing of the country was euphemistically called “free fire zones”. General William Westmoreland referred to the Vietnamese as termites so exterminating them made sense.

The My Lai incident takes hypocrisy to a new level where almost 500 men, women and children were massacred by American soldiers.

A leading article in Newsweek at the time described it as an “American tragedy”, an aberration, bad apples and so forth. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There were numerous My Lais. This fact has been documented in great and gory detail by Nick Tursk in his aptly named book Kill anything that moves. These massacres all formed part of the Central Intelligence Agency killing programme Operation Phoenix.

The rape of Vietnamese women (between the ages of 8 and 80) was endemic and considered “standard operating procedure”. Not only would they be raped but frequently the last participant would execute the victim.

The murderer would thereafter be referred to as a “double veteran”.

This has been graphically recorded by GM Weaver in her book Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War.

You will never see this in a Hollywood movie or read about it in so called studies of the Vietnam War. They were all too busy erasing this from history.

One can only hope that history will not be kind to the “exceptional” nation. America needs its phony mask removed. For all the white wash it will be shown to be an exceptionally arrogant and barbaric nation.

Brian van der Vijver

Cape Town