"The Painful Legacy the War Left on Both Our Nations"

Joe Biden, the "Vietnam War," and the Mass Murderous US Empire as Victim

For those of you who prefer written to spoken word, here is a write up of my audio from yesterday….

Joe Biden is such an imperialist shithead. At a press conference eleven days ago in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam,  he said this about the so-called Vietnam War. “I’m incredibly proud of how our nations and our people have built trust and understanding over the decades and worked to repair the painful legacy the war left on both our nations.”

Talk about false equivalency of harm and guilt. The United States, the most powerful nation the world had ever seen, lost 58,000 soldiers in the so-called Vietnam War, which ought to be called the arch-criminal US War on Vietnam or better, to use Noam Chomsky’s phrase at the time, the US crucifixion of Southeast Asia. The US imperialist assault on that region, punishment for the small peasant nation Vietnam’s attempted independent and radical break off from and against the US-run world capitalist system, killed nearly 4 million Vietnamese and 1 million Laotians and Cambodians between 1962 and 1975.

The massive U.S. imperial assault laid waste to vast stretches of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. It spread disease and birth defects across the region. The Vietnamese did not kill a single American solider – much less a U.S. civilian – on U.S. soil. Their American “victims” were invading gendarmes sent by Washington to keep Vietnam savagely unequal and under the thumb of the world’s rich nations, led by the US.

Reading the Ukraine warmonger and Saudi Arabia ally Biden’s noxious comments in Hanoi, I was reminded of something the man who put him on the center stage of history said while gearing up to run for the presidency in 2006. At one especially disgusting point in a brazenly imperialist speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in November of that year, Barack Obama had the unmitigated imperial audacity to say the following in support of his ridiculous claim that most US citizens supported George W. Bush’s monumentally criminal, mass-murderous, and petro-imperialist invasion of Iraq: “The American people have been extraordinarily resolved,” Obama absurdly intoned, “they have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah.” 

I remember doing a double- and then a triple-take after reading that line from Obama’s speech, which I read as part of the research I was doing to try to warn US voters about Obama’s imperialism. “He actually fucking said that,” I said to myself.  It was a spine-chilling selection of locales – Fallujah, a city that was the site for colossal US imperial atrocities, including the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the use of cancer-causing radioactive ordnance, the targeting of ambulances and hospitals in April and again in November of 2004.  Fallujah, of all places,  selected by the American Empire for near destruction to demonstrate the horrific lethal capacity of Superpower terrorism. 

But enough about Obama and Iraq, for now. Back to Vietnam, the site of Uncle Sam’s biggest crime in my lifetime – a country Washington would likely have attacked with nuclear weapons but for the strength of the US antiwar movement in 1969 and 1970.

There’s nothing new about US presidents and politicos,  Democrats prominently included, advancing the idiotic and Orwellian, truth-inverting and imperialist narrative of false equivalency in relation to the so-called Vietnam War. In 2001, the former Democratic Party US Senator Bob Kerrey said this in defense of his role in commanding and participating in the slaughter of 21 Vietnamese civilians in Thanh Phong Village on February 25, 1969: “both sides did a lot of damage in the Vietnam War.” Both sides did a lot of damage in the so-called Vietnam War --- a preposterous suggestion of moral equivalence for the colossal calamities resulting from a prolonged assault on a poor peasant nation by the most potent military killing machine in history.

The false “Vietnam War” equivalence grandaddy of them all is that great Christian imperialist Jimmy Carter, the sponsor of the Afghan Mujahideen who reminds me of Biden in more ways than one as Sleepwalking Joe’s approval number fall into year three Carter territory. Two months into his presidency in early 1977, Carter was asked at a news conference if he felt “any moral obligation to help rebuild that country.” Carter replied by saying this, explaining why the U.S. owed no special reparations or apologies to Vietnam:  “Well, the destruction was mutual. You know, we went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on other people. We went there to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese. And I don’t feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability.”

Forget for now Carter’s ridiculous bullshit about Washington having no desire to impose their will on the Vietnamese and wanting to defend freedom and just focus on the sheer Orwellian nonsense of the phrase that “the destruction was mutual.” 

Oh indeed.  You betchya. Absolutely. What good American late Baby Boomer literal child of the Sixties can ever forget the fearsome fleets of Vietnamese bombers that wreaked havoc on major U.S. cities and pulverized and poisoned our fields and farms during the 1960s and 1970s…the legions of Vietnamese killers who descended from attack helicopters to murder U.S. citizens in their homes…the Vietnamese gunships that strafed our schools and hospitals…the Vietnamese mining of U.S. harbors…the naked American children running down streets in flight from Vietnamese napalm attacks. Yes, the Vietnamese occupation of the U.S. was Hell. I’ll never forget the terror I felt when the North Vietnamese planes descended upon Chicago and leveled my neighborhood in the summer of 1969. Then came the North Vietnamese troops and NLF fighters to set fire to the ramshackle huts we built to live in.  My relatives out in DeKalb, Illinois  were burned alive by the Vietnamese napalming of northern Illinois. It was terrible.

No, I’m sorry, the most traumatizing thing that happened to many Chicagoans in 1969 was the collapse of the Ernie Banks Chicago Cubs as the amazing New York Mets swept past them in the Eastern division of the National League in August and September of that year.  The Bleacher Bumbs were emotionally devasted.  

Our destruction in Vietnam.  Our sons and daughters killed in the streets of Fallujah. Please. One of the key ideological roles of the Democratic Party is to “manufacture consent” to the nation’s giant imperial war state, and a fundamental part of that mission is to portray the imperial predator as victim, not perpetrator, as in War is Peace, Love is Hate, black is white, and 2+2=5.

Which reminds me, back to Obama for a second.  Above I briefly referenced the absurdity of Jimmy Carter’s claim that the US attacked Vietnam in the interest of defending Vietnamese freedom and with no desire to impose US will on Vietnam. As I looked at Carter’s statement, I  was reminded of some other nauseating imperialist bullshit that Obama said in 2006. In his campaign book The Audacity of Hope that year, he preposterously claimed that George W. Bush’s criminal petro-imperialist invasion and occupation of Iraq was undertaken “with the best of intentions,” including a “desire to export democracy.” In his aforementioned speech to the Chicago Council on Global relations, Obama elaborated on this ridiculous claim, arguing that Bush had ordered the invasion with impractical “dreams of democracy and hopes for a perfect government.”

Yeah, right.

I tried to warn liberals and progressives about what an imperialist and capitalist criminal Obama was, to little avail, from the summer of 2004 on. Just like I tried to warn people about what a flat out fascist Trump was and how Hillary Clinton and Obama were opening the door for his rise to power in 2016,  and like I tried to warn people about how Trump was not going to leave office peacefully in 2020 and how I tried to warn people about what a deeply conservative corporate imperialist Joe Biden was in 2019 and 2020, and how I’ve been warning folks about how Biden and his party are opening the door to a second horrific Trump administration for the last two and three quarter years.  But I digress. It’s not about me and the thrill of clairvoyance is long gone as The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock clicks closer to Midnight than it’s ever