War and Propaganda
US Crimes in Vietnam: Livre Noir, the Black Book
Abstract
When Will it Stop? Do Americans Want it to?
© 2003 Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Thursday, 10 April 2003, Friday, 2 October 2009
Blindness to Decency?
There’s an intense innate decency about the American people, and there’s also a huge sentimental blind side to them that fails to see we’re not the most beloved people on earth.Bret Easton Ellis
It is a curious dichotomy that Americans answer by saying that jealous foreigners do not like the American way of life. What they cannot comprehend is that the ungrateful foreigners do not like the American way of life being shoved down their throats. Offered cultural advisers instead of military ones, most countries would chose the American way of life quickly enough, but that has never been the American way, in spite of their innate decency. There is no profit in it for the US defence industry. As for the sentimental blind side, there is no need for it. It comes from the sheer lack of memory, and lack of critical faculties that too many US citizens seem to have. The reason for the overseas dislike of Americans is available in the US, and has had tremenedous publicity, but Americans are conditioned to ignore it.
Only thirty years ago, the American invaders of Vietnam massacred unarmed peasants, shooting in cold blood nearly all the inhabitants of whole villages to “pacify” them, including women, children and the aged. These were not merely individual acts of barbarity, but part of the US armed forces “accelerated pacification” programme in South Vietnam.
The German magazine Spiegel found Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon guilty in 1971 of war crimes in Vietnam. Perhaps today, they would find George W Bush guilty in the same way. It was a journalistic device used for a story about US war crimes, and showed clearly that they were guilty of them.
Innately decent human beings cannot tolerate such deeds and must condemn them now as they did then, when an International Inquiry Commission on US War Crimes was set up by decision of the Fifth International Stockholm Conference on Vietnam. A Livre noir des crimes Americains au Vietnam (Fayerd, Paris, 1970) had also been published, compiled on the recommendation of the National Conference on Vietnam, held on the initiative of 35 French political and public organizations. The US Pentagon Papers confirmed it all even more graphically and from US sources. The atrocities perpetrated by the US military in Indo-China were so great that eventually even the loyal US press had to expose it.
Livre Noir
The Livre Noir was compiled as a dossier of facts relating to 1968-70. Wide use was made of American sources, as well as Vietnamese ones. The compilers wrote:
We believe that the factual data we have presented offers conclusive proof of the American crimes in Vietnam end the exceptional gravity and progressive aggravation of these crimes in the past two years.
The documentary material and eye witness reports in the Black Book were divided into three sections: mass killings, chemical warfare, and bombings. This strategy was thoroughly elaborated by the Pentagon and the CIA after the American blitz plans for South Vietnam failed completely in 1965. It provided for the following measures:
- Free fire zones—A troop of soldiers is landed by helicopter in a village where the Americans decided the enemy were operating. They shot the suspects on the spot, usually anyone able bodied. They burnt down the houses creating an open space that was now a free fire zone where anything that moved would be shot.
- Carpet bombing—any areas that US “intelligence” considered were enemy, were carpet bombed by B52s. This was not targetted bombing, the modern ploy for excusing it, but heavy bombing everywhere from aircraft seven miles high.
- Defoliation—supposedly clearing the forests so that the enemy had no cover, but curiously vast amounts of defoliants fell into rice paddy fields and village kitchen plots. The defoliants were also known to cause genetic damage but that was no deterrent, in fact was certainly considered advantageous, since genocide was the obvious unmentioned strategy here.
Song My
The first section of the Livre Noir includes massacres in several villages as examples of the free fire startegy. No one, surely, can have forgotten the awful events of Song My on 16 March 1966 when a whole village was killed off by US soldiers even though it consisted on only women, children and old people. The Song My massacre was an exceptional and isolated incident, the Washington spin doctors claimed, utterly unable to deny it, since US troops present had been so horrified, they had blown the gaff themselves. The Pentagon revelations have confirmed that the US military in Vietnam were intent on genocide. South Vietnam is drenched with the blood of hundreds of Song Mys says the Black Book.
During operation “Sea Tiger”, one of 90 punitive operations carried out in Quang Nam Province in 1969, the Song My method of total murder was also practised by the Americans. In Laos and Cambodia, 4,790 civilians were killed and 12,400 buildings burned down.
The same conclusions had been arrived at by the Citizens Commission of Inquiry on US War Crimes in Vietnam, an organization set up by a group of progressive Americans. Here are some excerpts fron evidence submitted to this commission by former American servicemen who had fought in South Vietnam, as quoted by Spiegel.
Mike McCasker, former public relations officer of the First Marine Division:
On 7 September 1966, leathernecks killed 150 civilians in two villages north east of Tam Ki. On 27 October, 1966, they destroyed the village of Don Ful.
Charles David Locke, former private:
Between 20 and 25 per cent of American soldiers in Vietnam could be charged with the same crimes as the murderers of Song My.
The Americans were using toxic agents on a vast scale. As a result of the jungle defoliation programme, the purpose of which was to deprive the guerillas of cover, millions of hectares of forestland and even of arable lands were wasted. Tens of thousands of tons of chemical poisons were dumped on South Vietnam. American Senator Gaylord Nelson estimated that 3 kilogrammes of toxic agents had been sprayed for every man, woman and child in South Vietnam.
Besides herbicides, the American army command made wide use of poison gases against the civilian population. The so-called “neutralizing” CS gas frequently caused mass deaths. Millions of people have suffered from the effect of toxic agents, and thousands of them died. Spiegel said almost 1.5 million Vietnamese had been poisoned by chemicals and many of them had died.
The compilers of the Black Book expressed serious concern the consequences of chemical warfare may have for future generations. From the deformed children caused by genetic defects from the poison chemicals, we now know their warning 30 years ago was right.
Massive Bombings
The massive bombings of South Vietnam by B52 planes were another crime. This was part of the war of total annihilation, for the bombings were conducted over wide areas and were not aimed at any particular targets. Senator J William Fulbright said that American bombs and artillery fire had killed a quarter of a million South Vietnamese civilians. Other American sources, according to Spiegel, put the number of civilians murdered in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos at 350,000. The Black Book said:
A monstrous crime was perpetrated before our eyes in Vietnam. Chemical warfare, intensive bombings, mass extermination of people the disastrous social and psychological effects of these US crimes are not isolated accretions attendant upon, the vicissitudes of war. They are a global crime, the result of an overall strategy. This global crime is the result of the strategy adopted by top-level American authorities.
The book told of the impressions of a France Presse correspondent who visited a rural area near Saigon after a B52 raid:
No one can live any longer in these nightmarish areas, where for dozens of kilometres around the earth is pitted with craters 12 metres wide and 3 metres deep made by the bombs dropped by the giant bombers.
Asked whether he was troubled by the large number of victims among the South Vietnamese civilians, an American general replied:
Yes, it’s a problem but, then, we are leaving the enemy without a population.
What, then, is that? Genocide? But not only genocide. It is destruction not only of the population but of the whole environment, all forms of life, fauna and flora. It is the deliberate annihilation of a portion of the biosphere.
The political effect of the total annihilation policy was the exact opposite of what the American invaders intended. The compilers of the Black Book note that the merciless annihilation of the inhabitants pointed to the loss of all hope of winning the political support of the population.
Is it conceivable now that South Vietnam pitted with millions of craters made by American bombs, with over 40 per cent of its rice fields and forests ruined by chemicals dropped by American planes, South Vietnam, which has suffered the death of hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants, seen millions of its children maimed and orphaned by the American war—is it conceivable that this country could tomorrow become a true friend and ally of the United States?
