Korea and support for the repressive anti-Communist Syngman Rhee, whose policies were similar to the U.S.-installed Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and helped trigger the devastating Korean War that included bombing North Korea “back to the Stone Age” in one of the greatest aerial attacks in history.22
In 1965, the very same year the United States escalated the war in Vietnam, the CIA aided in the massacre of perhaps 500,000 Communists, alleged Communists, and other progressive activists during a military coup in Indonesia, one of the greatest mass murders in history. The late historian Gabriel Kolko writes that it was “certainly one of the most barbaric acts of inhumanity in a century that has seen a great deal of it; it surely ranks as a war crime of the same type as those the Nazis perpetrated.” No single act by the United States after 1945 “was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate the massacre, and … to see that the physical liquidation of the PKI [Communist Party of Indonesia] was carried through to its culmination. Not a single one of its officials in Washington … questioned the policy on ethical or political grounds.”23
Similarities between Korea and Vietnam include the racist attitudes and actions against people there that helped fuel massacres by U.S. forces in both wars; for example, at No Gun Ri in Korea and My Lai in Vietnam. The death and devastation from the wars in Korea and Vietnam that left more than seven million people dead, and millions more injured and refugees, are the worst suffered by any nations after the Second World War. Too few U.S. citizens know this documented record, having been disabled intellectually and politically—first in their schools, then by the corporate mass media and leading political officials.24
During the Cold War, for example, U.S. violence across the world, always masked as a Noble Cause, strengthened the “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower warned about in his January 1961 Farewell Address. Five years earlier, however, the prominent sociologist C. Wright Mills analyzed this complex in his groundbreaking and powerful book, The Power Elite, a scathing critique of the institutions that later concerned the former president. The influence of this complex, which Mills identified as an “economic-military” link, comprises the all-embracing connection between the Pentagon, industry, Congress, and the academy. It has increased dramatically since Eisenhower’s address, devouring trillions of public funds to support the ever-increasing power of the National Security State (NSS). Decades before Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, Medal of Honor recipient and former Marine major general Smedley Butler addressed the nature of the U.S. imperial violence and the military-industrial complex of his time, including his own role:
I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of … the Marine Corps.… And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscleman for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.… I helped make Mexico … safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of a half-dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.… I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.25
This actual history is, and remains, the essence of U.S. policy abroad—always hidden by the Noble Cause principle. According to the late writer and activist Mike Marqusee, public belief in this principle “obstructs knowledge and understanding of United States history and the pattern of its involvements abroad,” especially the fact that it acts “like any other imperial power, on the basis of self-interest.” U.S. interventions abroad are “presented as an altruistic response to a crisis. Since there is no American empire, no pattern, no habit, or system of extraterritorial domination, the motive for each intervention is assessed at face value,” thus denying the actual record. Marqusee laments the U.S. Noble Cause: “Culturally, emotionally, [belief in this principle] curtails human solidarity. More than ever, ‘America’ is a prison that the U.S. citizenry needs to break out of—in its own interest and in the interests of the victims of U.S. policy.”26
The Noble Cause principle cannot stand up to the endless violence that spans nearly 240 years of United States history—or more than four hundred years if the count begins with Colonial settler wars against Native Americans. This history is the context within which to understand the American war in Vietnam.
2
French Colonialism and the Origins of the American War in Vietnam
In August 1850 “a French naval squadron … attacked the port city of Da Nang.… This started a war of colonial conquest that, aided by the politics of appeasement by the Vietnamese court, resulted in the takeover of the country in stages until its total annexation by the French in 1884.”1 In keeping with their long history of struggle against invasions by the Chinese, Mongols, and Japanese, the Vietnamese resisted French colonialism.
Despite this history of resistance to foreign invaders, French colonialism “totally humbled the Vietnamese state and deeply humiliated the people,” writes historian and former Marine Corps intelligence officer David G. Marr. France’s economic policies put new pressures on the peasantry, who were “exposed as never before to the depredations of money lenders and collaborator landlords.” French exports forced more Vietnamese to deal with the “impersonal fluctuations of the imperialist world market.” Though the profound changes brought by French colonialism led to a great deal of “covert intellectual and political ferment,” this ferment was not organized into a systematic and powerful resistance force until 1941, when the Indochinese Communist party (ICP) under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh (meaning “He Who Enlightens”) met and founded the Vietnamese Independence League (Viet Minh). They would lead the Vietnamese to “victory in the August 1945 Revolution and effective leadership of the anticolonial struggle in Vietnam.”2
French colonial rule was brutal and violent, especially for peasants. It also antagonized the small but influential group of Western-educated (mostly in France) Vietnamese who played an important role in the nationalist movement that emerged after the First World War. But French suppression of anticolonial efforts drove these Vietnamese nationalists underground. After 1930, the Indochinese Communist Party led the underground movement, under the leadership of Ho, who would become the greatest figure in the Vietnamese independence struggle. A nationalist and Communist, he had spent thirty years away from his native Vietnam living in England, where he championed independence for Ireland; in France, where he became a founder of the French Communist Party; in the Soviet Union; and in China. Continually imprisoned for his revolutionary efforts, he helped to build a core of guerrilla fighters led by the former history teacher General Vo Nguyen Giap, who would lead the Vietnamese military until the end of the American war in 1975.
During his stay in France, Ho Chi Minh became the spokesman for Vietnamese independence. In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the First World War, he led a group of Vietnamese who attempted to petition the Allied leaders attending, especially U.S. president Woodrow Wilson. According to historian Mark Lawrence, they wished to have Wilson “honor the principle of self-determination that … [he] had repeatedly avowed during the war.” Wilson and the other powerful officials ignored Ho Chi Minh’s relatively modest appeal, however, “just as they ignored similar demands from groups representing other colonized peoples.”3
Historian Bernard Fall, the eminent and highly influential French military scholar who was killed in Vietnam in 1967 on patrol with U.S. Marines, states that Ho was brushed off by many aides when he tried to see Wilson, and “finally gave up in despair. He realized that his hopes of “a ‘liberal’ solution for his country” were dead, and he saw “what the other unsuccessful petitioners were muttering among themselves—the Irish in the lead—armed revolution
