2012
> .. we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching #SouthVietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops.
https://tomdispatch.com/noam-chomsky-hegemony-and-its-dilemmas/
#KennedyOnVietnam #JFK #RethinkingCamelot
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> The prime target was South Vietnam. The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this, #HenryKissinger’s orders were being carried out — “anything that flies on anything that moves” — a call for genocide that is rare in the historical record. Little of this is remembered.
#CallForGenocide
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> .. persistent factors in state action are generally well concealed.. The #Iraq War is an instructive case.. the #Vietnam case.. [the concern was that the virus of independent development might infect #Indonesia.. ], the rational choice was to destroy..successful independent development and to impose brutal dictatorships in the surrounding regions. Those tasks were successfully carried out — though history has its own cunning...
#StateAction #StatePolicy
@bsmall2@fedibird.com