"Let us never negotiate out of fear but let us never fear to negotiate" "East Germans escape by the tens of thousands until the communists threw up their wall of hate" "The assault has begun on the dictatorship of Fidel Castro" "This generation of americans has already had enough, more than enough of war, and hate, and oppression." "As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men" "I have told them that molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems." "But they asked -and rightly so- what about Vietnam?" "If America's soul becomes totally poisoned part of the autopsy must read Vietnam." "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." "This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala." "It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru" "They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted." "Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today:" "my own government." "Two days into office, on the sunday, the day before John Kennedy was buried, Lyndon Johnson met with his military advisors and said he was not going to lose Vietnam." "He never agreed with Kennedy's memorandum to withdraw and 2 days later he issued a new memo signaling the US would be taking a more hands-on approach." "His foreign policy thinking was profound in a primitive way:" "There are 3 billion people in the world, and we only have 200 million of them." "We're outnumbered 15 to 1." "If might did make right they'd sweep over the United States and take what we have." "We have what they want." "Who is they?" "His analogies may have been coarse but, stated in other words, the struggle was not really about communism but was between the 1st world and the 3rd world." "Abandoning Kennedy's attempts at reform," "Johnson made it clear in the new" "Mann doctrine that all Latin american countries would be judged on how they protected the $9 billion in US investments, not on the interests of their own people." "The US would no longer discriminate against right-wing dictatorships and regarded military aid as a wiser investment than" "Kennedy's economic aid." "The 5th largest country in the world, resource-rich Brazil, would be the first to suffer." "in 1964 new democratically elected president Joao Goulart implemented land reform and sought controls on foreign capital." "Recognizing Cuba was the last nail in his coffin." "Castro's example could not be emulated." "Johnson sharply reduced US aid." "Inflation sky-rocketed." "The CIA financed large anti-government rallies and the US administration prodded right-wing officers to overthrow the government." "Within a month, the new regime arrested 50,000 people." "Torture was instituent." "In the next 6 years, $2 billion in US aid flowed into Brazil and an even more repressive military regime ruled for the next 20 years, worsening an already large gap between rich and poor." "The dominoes, in this case the democracies, began falling once again across south america." "in 1965, Johnson sent 23,000 troops into the Dominican Republic to crush a popular uprising, seeking to restore constitutional order after a military coup." "Johnson told his lawyer:" "There ain't no doubt about this being Castro now him moving other places in the hemisphere might be part of a whole communistic pattern tied in with Vietnam" "in Greece, the birthplace of democracy where the cold war had taken its baby steps and the US had supported a right-wing government for many years, a new yearning for democracy appeared certain to bring the veteran liberal George Papandreu" "back as prime minister." "Johnson called in the Greek ambassador and actually said:" "Listen to me mr. ambassador, fuck your parliament and your constitution" "America is an elephant." "Cyprus is a flea." "Greece is a flea." "If those two fleas continue itching the elephant they may just get whacked by the elephant's trunk." "Whacked good." "We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, mr. ambassador" "If your Prime Minister gives me talk about democracy, he, his parliament and his constitution may not last very long." "In fact, it didn't." "The military junta seized power in 1967, banning mini skirts, long hair and foreign newspapers making church attendence compulsory while engaging in numerous incidents of sexually oriented torture and cruelty." "Its new prime minister, who had been a captain in a Nazi security battalion tracking down" "Greek resistance fighters, became the first CIA agent to become the premier of a European country." "But it was Asia that posed the greatest resistance to US goals" "Aside from Japan which was becoming a prosperous client state red China exploded its first atomic bomb in Oct. of '64 catching Washington totally off-guard." "in Indonesia, sitting astride southeast Asia's principal sea lanes, where more than 3 million members made its communist party the 3rd largest in the world behind the Soviets and Chinese, Sukarno having survived repeated US attempts to remove him further irritated the US" "by declaring he would test an atomic bomb but, he was denied help from China and when he recognized north Vietnam and then expropriated" "US rubber plantations and threatened to nationalize US oil companies" "Lyndon Johnson struck hard." "Almost half the officer corps had received some US training and in Oct '65 with CIA support general Suharto led the army in crushing Sukarno's supporters." "In the following months, Suharto's militias and civilian mobs went from house to house killing a half million to a million suspected communists and their families." "US, british and australian intell." "provided thousands of names of suspected communists to the army." "Sukarno was forced out finally in 1967 and replaced by gen." "Suharto who enriched himself, his family, cronies, the Indonesian military and US corp.s for decades until he was overthrown by the people led by student activists in 1998." "In 1968, the CIA acknowledged the Indonesian massacre ranked as one of worst mass murders in the 20th century." "President Kennedy's national security advisor McGeorge Bundy in later crticizing our Vietnam war policy wrote that" "Indonesia was the true breaking point in Asia, far more important to our goals than Vietnam which was, he said, unnecessary." "Yet now in history, even Indonesia's blood bath pales in comparison to what the US inflicted on Vietnam." "Johnson and his advisors understood very little about Vietnam's history and its strong resistance to Chinese and French invasions over the centuries." "They totally underestimated the nationalist aspect of Ho Chi Minh's movement and assumed that if they wreaked enough havoc and killed enough people the Vietnamese would submit." "Within 2 months of JFK's death in Jan. of '64 Johnson and McNamara escalated covert military activities against north Vietnam." "Dropping intelligence and commando teams to destroy bridges, railways and costal installations kidnapping north Vietnamese and bombing border villages." "Johnson was pathological in his ability to lie." "As with the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, it would take years for the american people to discover the false origins of the Vietnam war." "In august '64 Johnson and McNamara used a fabricated incident in north Vietnam's Gulf of Tonkin as an excuse to further escalate the war." "Johnson rushed the congress to authorize direct US military action." "The media echoed the line that a US ship had been attacked and the House after 40 min.s of debate passed a war resolution" "in the Senate, it was 88-2" "A few days later Johnson told his undersecretary of State" "Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!" "... and people remember what this resolution really is, it's a resolution which seeks to give the president in US the power to make war without a declaration of war." "In the election of 1964, Johnson crushed Arizona senator Barry Goldwater who threatened to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam." "These are the stakes." "We must either love each other, or we must die." "The stakes are too high for you to stay home." "It was built as a landslide for peace." "But following the election Johnson began a steady process of escalation sharply expanding the free firezones in which anything that moved was considered a legitimate target." "The US arsenal of accepted weapons grew to include napalm, cluster bombs and white phosphorus which burned from the skins right through to the bone causing horrific deaths." "Do you smell that?" "What?" "Napalm, son." "Nothing else in the world smells like that." "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." "Johnson's lies about his plans snowballed and by july of '65 he'd sent in 75,000 combat troops to Vietnam more than half a million by the end of '67" "The monthly draft reached 35,000 men as the US set out to find Vietnam's breaking point." "Yet, when his Joint Chiefs of Staff at a meeting asked for more fire power or an all-out war, a witness recalled Johnson started screaming obscenities:" "Image that you're me, that you're the president of the US and five incompetents come into your office and try to talk you into starting WW3." "The risk is just too high." "How can you fucking assholes ignore what China might do?" "You just contaminated my office, you filthy shitheads!" "Get the hell out of here right now!" "The generals got out." "And after a pause, Johnson steadily increased the bombing of north Vietnam" "In his inimitable way he explained his strategy:" "I'm going up her leg an inch at a time." "I'll get to the snatch before they know what's happening." "The US dropped 3 times as many bombs on tiny Vietnam as it did in all of WW2." "On the ground in a policy sanctioned by Kennedy millions of peasants, some say 5 some 7, were forced out of villages and resettled in barbwired camps." "Tens of thousands of supposed communists were assasinated as part of a Phoenix program, but it did little to slow the resistance movement." "The murder of civilians became commonplace as the US military leadership exaggerated body counts to tell the public that the communists were on their last legs while still asking for more and more troops." "Five south Vietnamese governments came and went, the last clinging to power through massive corruption." "Anti-war demonstrators protest US involvement in the Vietnam war in mass marches, rallies and demonstrations." "America's college campuses began to buzz with activists." "In oct. '67 one of the first violent confrontations took place at the university of Wisconsin in Madison." "Johnson, convinced the communists were behind the anti-war movement, ordered the CIA to uncover proof with massive surveillence and other information gathering efforts." "Codenamed Chaos, the CIA's illegal domestic operations lasted almost 7 years compiling a computer index of 300,000 citizens and organizations and extensive files on more than 7,000 individuals, but failed to prove communist involvement." "Among the FBI's principal targets was the Nobel peace prize winner" "Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." "Welcome in Mr. King" "I'm here to find out why you've been tapping my telephones" "About a year ago you were told some of your advisors had communist connection, but you wouldn't break with them." "Would that ... your planting microphones in hotel rooms I occupied during my travels?" "the same procedure on 14 others the panthers, the muslims, the clan the damage is done mr." "Hoover but I might be worthwhile for the people to know how America's number 1 blackmailer operates don't give me all the credit." "Black America was in a state of near rebellion." "The summer of '67 surpassed all previous ones with 75 major riots many lasting 2 days or more." "National guard troops were called in and, with police, killed 26 blacks in Newark and 43 in Detroit." "A Ramparts magazine march 1967 exposé revealed that the CIA had been funding the National Student Association." "Other liberal groups were exposed as agency fronts with CIA money going to anti-communist professors, journalists, aid workers, missionaries, labor leaders and civil rights activists who did the agency's dirty work." "Among the discredited were the Ford foundation, RadioFreeEurope, RadioLiberty and Congress for Cultural Freedom." "even McNamara with his characteristic rationality was having doubts." "In oct. of '67 100,000 people rallied in Washingtion." "Half marched to the Pentagon." "Armed infantry prevented them from reaching it." "McNamara watched alone from a command post on the roof listening to chants of "Hey, hey, LBJ how many kids did you kill today?"" "Now isolated within the establishment McNamara despaired." "Rumors of a possible mental collapse reached Johnson:" "We can't afford to have another forestall" "When McNamara argued that more bombing would not work" "Johnson was livid, he demanded loyalty, saying of another aide:" "I don't want loyalty." "I want loyalty!" "I want him to kiss my ass in Macy's window in high noon and tell me it smells like roses." "I want his pecker in my pocket." "Johnson arranged for McNamara's ouster to become president of the" "World Bank." "In his last cabinet meeting an aide reported that McNamara finally broke down:" "the goddamn bombing campaign, it's done nothing." "They've dropped more bombs in all of Europe in all of WW2 and it hasn't done a fucking thing." "1968 was an extraordinary year of change." "In jan. on the same day north vietnamese and vietkong forces unleashed a shock attack on most of Vietnam's major cities and provincial capitals." "The attacks were ultimately repelled with great losses to the Vietnamese but the mood in Washington was despair." "A bipartisan group of elder statesmen reassessed the situation:" "It was time to get out." "Lyndon Johnson, his enormous ego deeply wounded by the doubts of his leadership, besieged by enemies internal and external, his popularity plummeting, announced shockingly in march '68 that he would not run for a second term." "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president." "The country was stunned." "The leader of their war effort was giving up." "To those against the war this was a great victory." "But to many americans as well as neutral countries and allies alike the US now appeared as a rudderless, immoral country, an emperor without clause the Chinese said "a paper tiger"." "Wrecked by inner demons, Johnson allowed his heart-felt dream of being a great social reformer to be buried in the killing fields of Vietnam." "He lamented later in the decade to a historian:" "Losing the great society was a terrible thought, but not so terrible as the thought of being responsible for America's losing a war to the communists." "Nothing could possibly be worse than that." "He was a man, a potential giant, who in denying his compassion suffered from a truly American obsession:" "the fear of weakness." "Hoover's FBI was doing everything it could to disrupt the anti-war movement as it had done for years to the civil rights movement." "Hundreds of agents infiltrated new left organizations." "FBI and CIA news flaks went to great lengths to marginilize the war's critics and impune their patriotism." "Hoover was especially worried the antiwar protest would merge with the black liberation struggle, as a disproportionate number of black soldiers died on front lines." "Forever convinced that communists were behind the civil rights movement" "Hoover pursued Martin Luther King with a vengeance doing nothing to protect him, even encouraging him to commit suicide in one notorious anonymous hatefilled letter until the moment King himself was shot and killed by another supposedly lone nut assasin in April of '68." "Rage riots once more erupted across America." "The Berrigan brothers who were priests went to jail for burning draft files." "Benjamin Spock, the world's most prominent pediatrician" "W. Sloane Coffin, a Yale university chaplin" "Jane Fonda, a young movie star and heavy weight boxing idol Muhammed Ali were all speaking up:" "I ain't going no 10,000 miles to help murder and kill other poor people if I'm gonna die I'll die right now right here fighting you you my enemy, not no chinese no vietkong no japanese," "you my opposer when I want freedom you my opposer when I want justice you my opposer when I want equality you want me to go somewhere and fight for you, you won't even stand up for me right here in America" "I'm announcing today my candidancy for the presidency of the US" "Throughout America in 1968 a newly charismatic Robert Kennedy captured the imagination of young and old tired of the war." "Finishing his brother's legacy, he was calling for a new America, white, black, brown, it didn't matter his eyes had ... once more the fire of change and reform was afoot:" "The country wants to move in a different direction." "We want to deal with our own problems within our own country and we want peace in Vietnam." "Johnson, secretly hoping to be a last minute choice for president if called, feared him as much as any man." "But the fates were cruel beyond imagining to the Kennedy brothers, as on this hot june night of his victory in the california primary he was brutally gunned down in another strange hard to believe set of circumstances by a supposedly deranged young Palestinian." "This was a serious and devastating blow to the heart of the reform movement." "Post-war baby boomers had begun flooding college campuses in 1964 imbued with idealism, dismissive of cold war ideology, upset with their parents' conformist values and fears, their protests spread worldwide." "Students and workers convulsed industrial nations." "Confrontations shook Prague, Tokyo, west Berlin, Rome and Mexico City where soldiers massacred hundreds of protesting students." "In the summer of '68 at the democratic convention 10,000 protesters were manhandled along with the media by Chicago police." "TV was now presenting a reality the public had never seen before." "American authority figures acting as aggressors both at home and abroad." "It seemed that the country was coming apart." "People spoke of the gulf between the antiwar left and prowar right as a civil war like the one that had ripped the country apart over 100 years earlier." "It was in the midst of this terrifying turmoil that the anticommunist hardliner Richard Nixon, so bitterly denied the presidency by John Kennedy in 1960, found his life's destiny." "But he almost lost, stunningly in this climate." "The right-wing segregationist Alabama governor" "George Wallace running with the retired general" "Curtis Lemay was pulling 21% and threatening Nixon's chances for victory barely a month before the election:" "As far as this problem of law-and-order is concerned, I'm the only one of the candidates who has laid out a precise program for stopping the rise in crime and for reestablishing freedom from fear." "Riding the resentment of what he later called the 'silent majority', Nixon's law-and-order message resonated with white voters scared of ghetto rebellions campus disruptions and rising crime and it eked out the narrowest of victories." "America's in trouble today not because our people have failed but because our leaders have failed, and what America need's our leaders to match the greatness of our people." "Nixon was also claiming a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam refusing to divulge its details." "What Richard Nixon actually delivered to the country was not peace, law or order but war, chaos and disorder as the only president to resign his office in disgrace." "Nixon and his national security advisor and later secretary of state Henry Kissinger actually expanded the war which lasted 7 more years." "Half the total of US casualties from the war occurred under Nixon." "Kissinger later said:" "I refuse to believe that a little 4th rate power like north Vietnam does not have a breaking point." "And he and Nixon set out to find it." "Nixon's secret plan to end the war turned out to be withdrawing US forces starting April '69 and replacing them with US trained and equipped Vietnamese while systematically and ruthlessly bombing north and south Vietnam into submission." "Drawing parallels with Eisenhower's nuclear threats in Korea which, he said, ended that war, Nixon boasted to an aide:" "I call it the Mad Man theory." "We'll slip the word to them that" "Nixon is obsessed about the communists we can't restrain him when he's angry he has his hand on the nuclear button" "Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days, begging for peace." "Two months into office Nixon began a secret bombing campaign inside neighboring Cambodia to destroy north Vietnamese military sanctuaries." "He took extraordinary measures to hide it from Congress." "Even the crew members involved believed they were hitting targets in south Vietnam." "Though most americans remained in the dark about the country they were invading the truth occasionally seeped out, as when freelance journalist S. Hersh in nov. 1969 broke the news that a year and a half earlier US forces had massacred up to" "500 civilians in the village of My Lai nicknamed Pinkville for its strong enemy sympathies." "Babies, pregnant women and old people had been scalped and mutilated as command of the situation broke down." "Not a single shot had been clearly fired at US forces." "Indicative of the growing dehumanization of this time, and resembling US attitudes towards the Japanese in WW2" "65% of Americans told pollsters they were not bothered by the news of massacre" "The only officer found guilty was given a partial pardon by Nixon public opinion strongly in favor." "There were few limits to Nixon's thinking he and Kissinger planned for a savage attack possibly using nuclear weapons in the fall of 1969 but were thwarted when millions parti- cipated nationwide in an Oct. moratorium and 3/4 million protesters flocked to Washington in november" "Still, Nixon recklessly put the military on secret alert flying 18 nuclear armed B-52s over the polar ice cap towards the Soviet union trying to force them, once again unsuccessfully, to pressure the north Vietnamese to peace terms." "Le Duan took over the leadership when Ho Chi Minh died in 1969 later told a visiting journalist that the US had threatened to use nuclear weapons on 13 different occasions." "But that had not changed their policies." "Although they would pay a terrible price for their independence the Vietnamese understood a basic truth the american leaders never grasped the Vietnamese foreign minister later said we knew that they could not stay in Vietnam forever, but Vietnam must stay in Vietnam forever." "The Vietnam war was about independence and time not territory or body counts." "America's 6th president J. Quincy Adams a century before had warned that a nation should not go abroad," "It was here in Vietnam that the US ran into its ultimate monster, an enemy that could not be defeated because they were fighting to protect their homeland against foreign invaders." "The US would win every major battle, but it never won the war." "According to his lawyer John Dean and other insiders, Nixon was actually obsessed with war protesters and often adjusted his bellicosity to diminish their outrage but now stilling himself by drinking heavily and watching the movie Patton over and over again." "Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser." "Americans play to win all the time" "I wouldn't give a hoot and hell for a man who lost and laughed." "That's why americans have never lost and will never lose a war." "Because the very thought of losing is hateful to americans." "Nixon in april 1970 announced a joint US-south Vietnamese ground invasion of Cambodia to destroy bases along the border." "6 students were shot and killed by the national guards at Jackson State in Missisippi and Kent State in Ohio" "More than 400 campuses went on strike or shut down 4 million students, 300,000 faculty members, 30 ROHC buildings burned or bombed more than 700 colleges experiencing some kind of protest activity" "Kissinger described Washington as a" "the airwar intensified." "Nixon said in 1970:" "I want everything that can fly to go in there and crack the hell out sounding more like a gangster than a statesman, Kissinger conveyed the order to bomb" "words that could have been spoken by a defendant in the ... at Nuremberg" "When Nixon, after he resigned, was confronted with his law breaking he replied:" "when the president does it, that means it's not illegal." "By this time, Cambodia had been subjected for 5 years to a brutal air bombardment and an escalating civil war that left" "100s of thousands of Cambodians, many of them civilians, dead." "The communist rebels the Khmer Rouge used his atrocities to recruit angry peasants from the country side and grew exponentially during the bombing." "They finally seized power in 1975 from a corrupt US backed military dictatorship and then unleashed new horrors on their own people." "On top of the half million Cambodians killed in the US phase of the war" "1.5 million more perished during Pol Pot's monstrous regime." "Perhaps 25% of Cambodia's population died during this period." "Meanwhile in Vietnam many troops were making individual choices, whether to go into combat or not" "Recent surveys estimate that well over 50% of soldiers in Vietnam use marijuana." "In a remarkable admission in 1971 the armed forces journal revealed that the conditions of the troops in Vietnam were only exceeded by the" "French army mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Russian army in 1917." "Still, Nixon persisted." "By bombing Cambodia and continuing the secret and crippling bombing of tiny Laos which was started in 1964, Nixon bombed north Vietnamese cities for the first time since '68." "Civilian casualties soared." "And after a landslide re-election over antiwar candidate George McGovern in 1972, Nixon unleashed a 12-day christmas bombing on the north the heaviest yet of the war." "The outcry in the world was deafening." "A peace agreement was concluded the next month in Paris it was essentially the same deal that had been offered to Johnson in '68 and which Nixon had secretly undermined in order to win election." "The US promised to pay the north 3.25 billion dollars in reparations but later reneged." "Elections were promised, promptly, but south Vietnam dithered and delayed for the next year and a half." "We today have concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam and in southeast Asia." "Nixon brought home the last american combat troops in march '73." "As it would decades later in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US invested huge amounts of money into training and equipping a corrupt south Vietnamese ally to fight for themselves." "It did not work." "Nor did Nixon's mad man thesis." "In april '73 trying to buy time for the south Vietnamese army, he ordered the most intense bombing of the entire war of both north and south, but overwhelmed by Watergate revelations, he was forced to rescind the order." "The war dragged on 2 more years until the south Vietnamese army simply collapsed and fled." "The north Vietnamese forces overran Saigon in april '75." "Disturbing images of fleeing civilians, deserting south Vietnamese soldiers, their officers a step ahead of them, and US embassy marines beating down deperate US connected Vietnamese trying to escape on the last helicopters off the embasy roof" "would remain indelibly imprinted in the american psyche." "They also added fuel to the already angry hardliners who, like Nixon, contended that the media had sold out Vietnam." "Nixon, meanwhile, caught at a web of crimes known as the Watergate Scandal paranoid over his domestic enemies and further revelations that would expose his illegalities on several fronts, grew increasingly erratic." "His defense secretary instructed military leaders not to respond to Nixon's orders." "The system was truly beginning to crack." "I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow." "Vice-president Ford will be sworn in as president at that hour in this office." "Nixon, thus, avoided impeachment." "But over 40 of his people were convicted of crimes, several of them going to jail." "Nixon was pardoned by his newly appointed vice-president Gerald Ford." "As the war, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon faded from american" "TV screens, trust between the presidency and the american people was betrayed." "Kissinger, now promoted to secretary of state, came through unscathed." "He and north Vietnam's Le Duc Tho were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace prize." "Knowing that the peace had not yet been achieved," "Le Duc Tho had the grace to turn the prize down." "The US licked its wounds, but few in power reflected on the deeper meaning of what had occurred." "The Eisenhower dominoe theory proved to be a myth, the feared virus had not spread." "Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia Taiwan, the Philippines, and most importantly Japan, all prospered and remained firmly in the western camp." "Worried about US loss of prestige in Asia and clearly not having learned the lessons of supporting dictatorships, Nixon and Kissinger turned with fresh eyes to Latin America to reassert US power." "Chile had survived as a model democracy since 1932." "It would not survive Nixon and Kissinger." "When socialist Salvador Allende won the election of 1970 promising to nationalize US companies like ITT that essentially controlled the Chilean economy," "Nixon told his CIA chief:" "make the economy scream." "The IMF and the World Bank, with Robert McNamara at its helm, denied loans to the regime." "The CIA funded opposition parties, pushed propaganda and disinformation, offered bribes, organized demonstrations and strikes against the government." "And finally condoned the murderer of the most powerful Chilean general who'd vowed to defend democracy." "When Salvador Allende took his case against the US to a pack general assembly at the UN in december '72, he was cheered wildly, but may well have signed his death warrant:" "We find ourselves opposed by forces that operate in the shadows without a flag with powerful weapons from positions of great influence." "We're potentially rich countries, yet we live in poverty." "We go here and there begging for credits and aid, yet we're great exporters of capital." "It's a classic paradox of the capitalist economic system." "The CIA urged its Chilean agents to act." "Military leaders directed by gen." "Augusto Pinochet executed their coup d'etat on sep 11, 1973" "As the military closed in, Allende made a final radio address from the presidential palace:" "Allende took his own life with the rifle given him by Fidel Castro." "Pinoched seized power." "His junta killed or disappeared over 3200 opponents and jailed and tortured tens of thousands more in a rain of terror known as the" "Caravan of Death." "For the Chilean people, 9/11 has a far more tragic meaning than our 9/11 that marked the end of their government at the hands of the US." "Argentina would follow with a terrifying dirty war against leftists that would last from 1976 to '83 and kill or disappear an estimated 9-30 thousand people." "The new Pinochet regime in Chile was quickly recognized and given aid, and lasted in power until 1988." "Chile's intelligence service was master-minded by col." "Manuel Contreras who became a paid CIA agent." "He organized death squads that hunted down political opponents in Latin America, Europe and the US." "His secret police even sent agents to Washington DC to blow up a former Chilean diplomat critical of the regime." "Called operation Condore, the assasination ring included the right-wing governments of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil." "Assasination squads tracked down and killed more than 13,000 dissidents outside their home countries." "Hundreds of thousands more were thrown into concentration camps." "At a minimum, the US facilitated comm.s among these intelligence chiefs." "In an internal CIA history that was de-classified in 2007 it was revealed that under the leadership of counter-intelligence chief" "who was obsessed with the idea of Soviet union infiltrating his organization and taking over ultimately most of the world, the CIA had been actively involved in creating and using foreign police forces and counter-terrorism units, and training close to 800,000 military and police officers in 25 countries" "including secret police and death squad leaders." "After a dismal decade marked by Vietnam, Watergate and initial congressional investigations into the activities of the CIA, America felt confused." "What kind of country were we?" "The answer was a perturbing one." "Despite the deep drift between left and right, and young and old" "Americans were enjoying rising standards of living, and a loosening of strict sexual gender and moral codes it was even halting progress in race relations." "No war taxes were levied, and the draft was finally muff ball" "Those who could afford a college education, by-and-large, did not go to Vietnam." "The working class did." "Most Americans happily enjoyed the fruits of the 1960s economic boom, a boom driven in part by the military- industrial complex with its huge arm sales." "By example, more than 5,000 helicopters out of close to 12,000 were lost in Vietnam." "Between 1951 and '65, the state of California alone received $67 billion in defense contracts, which helped revitalize the empty American west, employing huge numbers in new cities and towns." "This, in turn, redistributed the power in Congress with many representatives throughout the gun belt, becoming dependent on the arms industry for their positions in government." "And, as it would later in Iraq and Afghanistan, the government would pay for the war by printing more dollars, straining its ability to convert dollars into gold, inflating the currency and helping to create a deficit that grew from" "$3 billion in the early '60s to a staggering $25 billion by 1968." "Speculation, ... productive reinvestment lagged corruption also abounded in Vietnam where" "US shipped huge warehouses of goods to the warzone." "Enormous base camps with giant merchandising centers called PX's flowered in a primitive landscape like mini Las Vegas's fueling dreams of consumption." "Black markets thrived as cars, refrigerators, TV sets, food and drink distorted a 3rd world economy." "Deadly weapons disappeared stolen by racketeering insiders, both US soldiers and civilians, who greedily sold to both south and north Vietnamese." "Financial scandals, as in most wars, disappeared in the debris and chaos." "Ominous signs began to emerge." "Factories fled either to developing countries or the non-union south as older northern industrial cities began to decay from unemployment, poor housing and schools, and drugs." "Real wages not only stagnated, they were actually declined for the next 30 years as the middle and working class' standard of living steadily eroded." "In 1971, Nixon removed the US from the $35/ounce gold standard and abrogated the Bretton Woods treaty that had governed the post-war economic alliance." "OPEC, an organization of oil producing countries, mostly in the mideast, now felt powerful enough to punish the US for supporting Israel in the 1973 war." "Oil prices quadrupled in the next year." "The US which, prior to the 1950s, produced all the oil it needed was now importing 1/3 of its supply." "The country would suffer deep cycles of inflation and recession with Wall st. profiting from the increasing volatility and insecurity of a speculative bubble economy, that reached its nadir in the great recession of 2008." "The Vietnam war would indeed spell the end of the last significant period of social and political reform the US had seen." "Was the country now a paper tiger living on borrowed money and time?" "This question would haunt the national imagination through 1970s and even the 1980s into the '90s when, with the fall of the Soviet union, the sense of American domination re-emerged" "The accepted mythology of the time was the US lost the war in Vietnam." "But as linguist, historian and philosopher" "Noam Chomsky has pointed out it's called a loss, a defeat, because they didn't achieve the maximal aims the maximal aims being turning it into something like the Philippines." "They didn't do that." "They did achieve the major aims:" "It was possible to destroy Vietnam and leave." "Elsewhere he wrote, south Vietnam had been virtually destroyed, and the chances that Vietnam would ever be a model for anything had essentially disappeared." "When an aging and wiser Robert McNamara returned to Vietnam in 1995 he conceded, somewhat in shock, that despite official US estimates of" "2 million Vietnamese dead, that 3.4 to 3.8 million Vietnamese had perished." "In comparison 58,000 americans died in the fighting and 200,000 were wounded." "The US had destroyed 9,000 of south Vietnam's 15,000 hamlets, in the north all 6 industrial cities, 28 of 30 provincial towns and 96 of 116 district towns." "Unexploded ordnance still blankets the country side." "19 million gallons of herbicide had poisoned the environment." "Almost all of Vietnam's ancient triple canopy forrests are gone." "The effects of chemical warfare alone lasted for generations, and can be seen today in the hospitals in the south where agent orange was used dead fetuses kept in jars, surviving children born with horrid birth defects and deformities, and cancer rates much higher than in the north." "And yet, incredibly, the chief issue in the US was for many years the hunt for 1300 soldiers missing in action, a few hundred of them presumed taken as captives by the north Vietnamese." "High grossing action movies were made out of it." "No official apology from the US has ever been issued, and absolutely no appreciation of the suffering of the Vietnamese" "President Bill Clinton finally recognized Vietnam in 1995 20 years later." "Ever since the war, american conservatives have struggled to vanquish the" "Vietnam Syndrome, which became a catch phrase for americans' unwillingness to send troops abroad to fight." "For a war that so mesmerized and defined an entire generation, surprisingly little is known about Vietnam today among american youth." "This is not accidental." "There's been a conscious and systematic effort to erase Vietnam from historical consciousness." "It's time that we recognized ours was in truth a noble cause." "We dishonored the memory of 50,000 young americans who died in that cause when we gave way to feelings of guilt as if we were doing something shameful." "It was not only conservatives who white-washed history" "Whatever we may think about the political decisions of the Vietnam era, the brave americans who fought and died there had noble motives." "they fought for the freedom and the independence of Vietnamese people." "The outcome has been shrouded in sanitized lies." "The Vietnam veterans' memorial in Washington, dedicated in nov. of '82, now contains the names of 58,272 dead or missing americans." "The message is clear;" "the tragedy is the death of those americans." "But imagine if the names of 3.8 million Vietnamese and millions of Cambodians and Laotians were also included." "The supposed shame of Vietnam would be finally avenged by Ronald Reagan, the 2 Bush's and even to an extent Barack Obama in the decades to come." "The irony is that the Vietnam war represented a sad climax of the" "WW2 generation from which Johnson," "Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr." "and all the generals in high command came;" "those proclaimed by the mainstream media in the late 1990s as the greatest generation." "Yet, that same media ignored the arrogance of a generation that over-confident from WW2, dismissed Vietnam as a 4th rate power that could be easily defeated." "From, what the ancient Greeks call, hubris or arrogance comes the fall." "And from this initially obscure war came a great distortion of economic, social and moral life in America." "A civil war that polarized the country to this day, with much denied, little remembered, nothing regretted and, perhaps, nothing learned." "History must be remembered, or it will be repeated until the meanings are clear." "The second president of the US, John Adams, once said: 'Power always thinks it has a great soul and that it is doing God's service when it's violating all his laws.' which makes the details of the oncoming history a sad, inevitable blood bath" "that repeats itself again and again as the USA much too often stood on the side of the oppressors." "Propping up allies with financial and military aid, war-on-drugs programs, police and security training, joint military exercises, overseas bases and occasional direct military interventions the US empowered a network of tyrants who were friendly to foreign investors" "who could exploit cheap labor and native resources on terms favorable to the empire." "Such was the British and French way and such will be the American way." "Not raping, looting Mongols; but rather benign, briefcase toting, Ivy League educated bankers and corporate executives who would loot local economies in the name of modernity, democracy and civilization to the benefit of US and its allies." "During the cold war, politicians and the media side-stepped debate over the basic morality of the US foreign policy by mouthing platitudes about" "US benevolence and insisting that harsh, even dirty, tactics were needed to fight fire with fire." "The Kissingers of the world called it Realpolitik but even when the Soviet union collapsed in the early 1990s, our nation's policies did not change, as the US time and again has taken the side of the entrenched classes or the military, against those from below seeking change." "It was the American war against the poor of the earth, the most easily killed, the collateral damage." "As was asked at the beginning, was it really about fighting communism or was it a misunderstood or disguised motivation?" "It was George Kennen, America's leading early cold war strategist, who went to the heart of the matter in a memorandum written in 1948:" "'with 50% percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment." "Our real task is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity." "To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality, and daydreamings." "We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards and democratization." "We are going to have to deal in straight power concepts." "The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.'" "But George Kennen, who lived to be 101 years old in 2005, was an intellectual who never sought political office." "Never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined the barbaric proportions of the upcoming presidency of Ronald Reagan." "I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free cause there ain't no doubt I love this land" "God bless the USA."