The
Killing of History
By John
Pilger
September 21, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
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One of the
most hyped “events” of American television,
The Vietnam War, has started on the PBS
network. The directors are Ken Burns and Lynn
Novick. Acclaimed for his documentaries on the
Civil War, the Great Depression and the history
of jazz, Burns says of his Vietnam films, “They
will inspire our country to begin to talk and
think about the Vietnam war in an entirely new
way”.
In a
society often bereft of historical memory and in
thrall to the propaganda of its “exceptionalism”,
Burns’ “entirely new” Vietnam war is presented
as “epic, historic work”. Its lavish advertising
campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of
America, which in 1971 was burned down by
students in Santa Barbara, California, as a
symbol of the hated war in Vietnam.
Burns says
he is grateful to “the entire Bank of America
family” which “has long supported our country’s
veterans”. Bank of America was a corporate prop
to an invasion that killed perhaps as many as
four million Vietnamese and ravaged and poisoned
a once bountiful land. More than 58,000 American
soldiers were killed, and around the same number
are estimated to have taken their own lives.
I watched
the first episode in New York. It leaves you in
no doubt of its intentions right from the start.
The narrator says the war “was begun in good
faith by decent people out of fateful
misunderstandings, American overconfidence and
Cold War misunderstandings”.
The
dishonesty of this statement is not surprising.
The cynical fabrication of “false flags” that
led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of
record – the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964,
which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The
lies litter a multitude of official documents,
notably the
Pentagon Papers, which the great
whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971.
There was
no good faith. The faith was rotten and
cancerous. For me – as it must be for many
Americans -- it is difficult to watch the film’s
jumble of “red peril” maps, unexplained
interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin
American battlefield sequences.
In the
series’ press release in Britain -- the BBC will
show it -- there is no mention of Vietnamese
dead, only Americans. “We are all searching for
some meaning in this terrible tragedy,” Novick
is quoted as saying. How very post-modern.
All this will be familiar to
those who have observed how the American media
and popular culture behemoth has revised and
served up the great crime of the second half of
the twentieth century: from
The Green Berets and
The Deer Hunter to
Rambo and, in so doing, has legitimised
subsequent wars of aggression. The revisionism
never stops and the blood never dries. The
invader is pitied and purged of guilt, while
“searching for some meaning in this terrible
tragedy”. Cue Bob Dylan:
“Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?”
I thought
about the “decency” and “good faith” when
recalling my own first experiences as a young
reporter in Vietnam: watching hypnotically as
the skin fell off Napalmed peasant children like
old parchment, and the ladders of bombs that
left trees petrified and festooned with human
flesh. General William Westmoreland, the
American commander, referred to people as
“termites”.
In the
early 1970s, I went to Quang Ngai province,
where in the village of My Lai, between 347 and
500 men, women and infants were murdered by
American troops (Burns prefers “killings”). At
the time, this was presented as an aberration:
an “American tragedy” (Newsweek
). In this one province, it was estimated that
50,000 people had been slaughtered during the
era of American “free fire zones”. Mass
homicide. This was not news.
To the
north, in Quang Tri province, more bombs were
dropped than in all of Germany during the Second
World War. Since 1975, unexploded ordnance has
caused more than 40,000 deaths in mostly “South
Vietnam”, the country America claimed to “save”
and, with France, conceived as a singularly
imperial ruse.
The “meaning” of the Vietnam war
is no different from the meaning of the
genocidal campaign against the Native Americans,
the colonial massacres in the Philippines, the
atomic bombings of Japan, the levelling of every
city in North Korea. The aim was described by
Colonel Edward Lansdale, the famous CIA man on
whom Graham Greene based his central character
in
The Quiet American.
Quoting
Robert Taber’s
The War of the Flea, Lansdale said, “There
is only one means of defeating an insurgent
people who will not surrender, and that is
extermination. There is only one way to control
a territory that harbours resistance, and that
is to turn it into a desert.”
Nothing
has changed. When Donald Trump addressed the
United Nations on 19 September – a body
established to spare humanity the “scourge of
war” – he declared he was “ready, willing and
able” to “totally destroy” North Korea and its
25 million people. His audience gasped, but
Trump’s language was not unusual.
His rival
for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, had boasted
she was prepared to “totally obliterate” Iran, a
nation of more than 80 million people. This is
the American Way; only the euphemisms are
missing now.
Returning
to the US, I am struck by the silence and the
absence of an opposition – on the streets, in
journalism and the arts, as if dissent once
tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a
dissidence: a metaphoric underground.
There is
plenty of sound and fury at Trump the odious
one, the “fascist”, but almost none at Trump the
symptom and caricature of an enduring system of
conquest and extremism.
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Where are
the ghosts of the great anti-war demonstrations
that took over Washington in the 1970s? Where is
the equivalent of the Freeze Movement that
filled the streets of Manhattan in the 1980s,
demanding that President Reagan withdraw
battlefield nuclear weapons from Europe?
The sheer
energy and moral persistence of these great
movements largely succeeded; by 1987 Reagan had
negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev an
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF)
that effectively ended the Cold War.
Today,
according to secret Nato documents obtained by
the German newspaper,
Suddeutsche Zetung, this vital treaty is
likely to be abandoned as “nuclear targeting
planning is increased”. The German Foreign
Minister Sigmar Gabriel has warned against
“repeating the worst mistakes of the Cold War …
All the good treaties on disarmament and arms
control from Gorbachev and Reagan are in acute
peril. Europe is threatened again with becoming
a military training ground for nuclear weapons.
We must raise our voice against this.”
But not in
America. The thousands who turned out for
Senator Bernie Sanders’ “revolution” in last
year’s presidential campaign are collectively
mute on these dangers. That most of America’s
violence across the world has been perpetrated
not by Republicans, or mutants like Trump, but
by liberal Democrats, remains a taboo.
Barack
Obama provided the apotheosis, with seven
simultaneous wars, a presidential record,
including the destruction of Libya as a modern
state. Obama’s overthrow of Ukraine’s elected
government has had the desired effect: the
massing of American-led Nato forces on Russia’s
western borderland through which the Nazis
invaded in 1941.
Obama’s
“pivot to Asia” in 2011 signalled the transfer
of the majority of America’s naval and air
forces to Asia and the Pacific for no purpose
other than to confront and provoke China. The
Nobel Peace Laureate’s worldwide campaign of
assassinations is arguably the most extensive
campaign of terrorism since 9/11.
What is
known in the US as “the left” has effectively
allied with the darkest recesses of
institutional power, notably the Pentagon and
the CIA, to see off a peace deal between Trump
and Vladimir Putin and to reinstate Russia as an
enemy, on the basis of no evidence of its
alleged interference in the 2016 presidential
election.
The true
scandal is the insidious assumption of power by
sinister war-making vested interests for which
no American voted. The rapid ascendancy of the
Pentagon and the surveillance agencies under
Obama represented an historic shift of power in
Washington. Daniel Ellsberg rightly called it a
coup. The three generals running Trump are its
witness.
All of
this fails to penetrate those “liberal brains
pickled in the formaldehyde of identity
politics”, as Luciana Bohne noted memorably.
Commodified and market-tested, “diversity” is
the new liberal brand, not the class people
serve regardless of their gender and skin colour:
not the responsibility of all to stop a barbaric
war to end all wars.
“How did
it fucking come to this?” says Michael Moore in
his Broadway show,
Terms of My Surrender, a vaudeville for the
disaffected set against a backdrop of Trump as
Big Brother.
I admired
Moore’s film,
Roger & Me, about the economic and social
devastation of his hometown of Flint, Michigan,
and
Sicko, his investigation into the corruption
of healthcare in America.
The night
I saw his show, his happy-clappy audience
cheered his reassurance that “we are the
majority!” and calls to “impeach Trump, a liar
and a fascist!” His message seemed to be that
had you held your nose and voted for Hillary
Clinton, life would be predictable again.
He may be
right. Instead of merely abusing the world, as
Trump does, the Great Obliterator might have
attacked Iran and lobbed missiles at Putin, whom
she likened to Hitler: a particular profanity
given the 27 million Russians who died in
Hitler’s invasion.
“Listen
up,” said Moore, “putting aside what our
governments do, Americans are really loved by
the world!”
There was
a silence.
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