Isn't Vietnam one of the greatest holocausts of our time?

[NNN0LHI]

I keep reading that the Iranian president can't be trusted because he denies the Holocaust during WW II ever happened. They say he is unstable for not believing it happened.

What about us? Has the USA ever admitted to the holocaust we brought to the Vietnamese? Or even acknowledged that it happened? I don't think so. Why is that?

Don



http://www.nnn.se/levande/lessons1.htm

The first U.S. helicopters arrived in 1961, carrying death and destruction. Thousands more were to follow.


Lessons of the Vietnam War: Part I

Back to the Stone Age

By Edward S. Herman

The United States has used its enormous military superiority with great ruthlessness in the post-World War II era. During the Vietnam War, it dropped more bombs on the Indochinese peninsula than were employed by all sides during World War II. The U.S. also employed vast quantities of the cruellest weaponry, including phosphorus and fragmentation bombs, napalm, and chemicals that damage humans while killing vegetation.

The U.S. attack on Vietnam was one of the great holocausts of our time. But since it was perpetrated by the United States, it is not regarded as such. It may therefore be useful to review the basic facts of the war and its long-term consequences. snip

The U.S. ignored the Geneva Accords, the rights of the Vietnamese, and the U.N. Charter by installing a dictator of its choice in what came to be known as South Vietnam. Southern puppet

The U.S. invasion force of 500,000 troops was supplemented by mercenaries from South Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, and Australia. Their assigned task was to "pacify" the country, which they did by carrying out merciless "search and destroy" operations in which domestic animals and crops were destroyed, villages burned down, and large numbers of innocent people were raped, killed and made homeless. It was soon discovered that the "enemy" had deep roots among the people, who were therefore treated as enemies. snip

The final toll in Indochina will never be known, but it continues to grow. The death toll may be as high as four million; the numbers injured and traumatized also run into the millions. Since the formal conclusion of the war in 1975, thousands have been killed and wounded by some of the millions of unexploded bombs still littering the ground. There are also a great many victims of the ecocidal Agent Orange program, and the land destroyed by that and other chemicals may never recover. snip

The Vietnamese enemy was quickly labelled ”terrorist” and aggressor-- allegedly committing "internal aggression"-- and was effectively demonized. The media averted their eyes from all but a minuscule fraction of the enormous U.S. violence, focusing instead on the relatively minor and more selective acts of the "terrorists." This helped make the almost unlimited use of force and high-tech warfare against the distant peasant society acceptable.

[leftchick]

1. yes indeed

and we are now in the process of our next one in Iraq. Great country, eh?

:puke:

[ThomWV]

2. It Wasn't A Sparrow's Fart Compared To What The USSR Endured

The Soviet Union lost more people under Stalin, and at the hands of Hitler than the combined populations of North and South Viet Nam, Laos, and most of Cambodia.

There is simply no comparison.

On Edit: I do not detract from the horror of the war in Viet Nam, I served 3 tours there (a grunt, on the ground) and was wounded 3 times as well as catching malaria while I was there. I understand full well how bad it was.

[William769]

3. agreed.

On EDIT: People that make excuses of someone just because they disagree with Bush are really starting to scare me.

[NNN0LHI]

4. 6 million Jews and 4 million Vietnamese is no comparison?

Sounds pretty comparable to me.

Don

[ThomWV]

6. 20 Million Russians nt

[Hav]

7. .

I would assume that the Iranian leader is not talking about the incredibly high Russian sacrifices by referring to the Holocaust.

[datasuspect]

12. those were evil commies they don't count

sarcasm

[datasuspect]

11. those were brown people they don't count

sarcasm

[MrModerate]

5. Collateral damage is a great evil . . .

But it doesn't compare with extermination camps.

[Hav]

8. .

What about the Native Americans? With that I mean North and South America.
How are they viewed?

[Selatius]

9. Nobody talks much about Native Americans

Because nobody could justify what was done to them no matter how hard they tried.

[robcon]

10. Yes, but the real holocaust was after the U.S. left.

The murder of suspoected sympathizers to the South Vietnam regime was horrific.

[FloridaPat]

17. Yes, all 4,000 of them. Terrible just terrible.

[Taxloss]

13. I'm unsure of your reasoning here.

Are you saying that the Iranian president's belief that the systematic destruction of European Jewry never happened is on a par with the USA's state of national forgetfulness over Vietnam? Because there simply isn't a parallel.

For a start, Iran wasn't responsible for the Holocaust, and its regime denies it thanks to extreme hatred of Jews, not collective guilt.

Second, the USA was not attempting to wipe out every single Vietnamese person on the face of the planet. The scale of the destruction was horrific, evil, but it was not genocide. The Vietnamese were not exterminated by list, rota, timetable and batch.

Third, the justifications you cite the USA as using for continuing the Vietnamese War were not the justifications the Nazis used for the Final Solution ...

In short, there are no points of comparison other than the fact that a great many people died. So I don't see your reasoning.

Also, the contnued efforts by some here to downplay Holocaust denial as a crime and to paint the Iranian President as a misunderstood humanitarian are very, very worrying.

[rpannier]

15. Your points are all well taken

and they are correct.
It becomes extremely dangerous when people use the words "Genocide" and "Ethnic Cleansing" with too broad a stroke. The death of thousands of people, while horrific, does not mean that genocide is occurring (or has occurred).

[vickitulsa]

14. I've begun saying lately that we're no longer "good guys."

It's so very sad, especially for someone like me who was raised by WWII-era parents to feel strongly patriotic and to look at my nation as clearly in the "good" column.

NOT THE BAD!

I'm not sure if it was wholly true that the United States of America was a "good guy state" even back then -- or at the time this democratic republic was officially established through a revolutionary war in the eighteenth century. But it certainly seems to have worn that mantle more genuinely from WWII on back than it can do so now!

I'm not sure when the transformation occurred, from a basically good nation to one that can be fairly labeled BAD these days, but like most such transmogrifications, it probably happened over an extended period of time. I guess it's the old "frog in the heating pot" story yet again. We didn't notice it because it did happen slowly!

But it seems clear to me that by the time the U.S. military engaged in the overall atrocity that was the Vietnam War, we'd become a truly BAD country. --It might be of interest to some to note that in modern Vietnam, the people refer to that long period of devastation of their country as "The American War."

I can think of many other reasons to add to those in the article as qualifying that war for a "holocaust." In fact, the list is almost too long to recount! I lost my only child to that war, even though that loss did not occur due to combat or any direct involvement in military action. The indirect devastation caused by such a war broadens the impact immensely, after all....

Now, with this criminal administration in charge and flaunting its ability to break the law unpunished at every turn, and demonstrating its unrestrained authoritarian imperialism run amok in Afghanistan and Iraq (and heaven only knows in how many other places covertly), I have decided I can no longer look at my country, the good ole U.S. of A., as a "good nation."

NOW WE ARE THE BAD GUYS; and it's damn well time we FACE it and then stand UP to this lawless regime in power here and let them know we will NOT allow this evil mutation to go unchallenged! What's the difference if they "hose us down" as they used to do to the Vietnamese (with M-60 machine guns) if we protest in the streets by the hundreds of thousands, if the only other end result is an American peasant class slaving our lives away for the super-rich? Or locked up behind the fences of the many "camps" they'll have to build to contain all those they arrest....

Time to get serious folks -- the true "bad guys" got serious with us a long time ago in our own country, and they've gotten away with it for far too long!

Will the NEXT holocaust be one within our own borders??

[vickitulsa]

16. Interesting discussion here, but I confess I don't understand it.

I don't think Don was trying to create an argument over the precise usage of the term "holocaust" as much as he was pointing out the hypocrisy of an administration that accuses others of things it also does. We call them "evil" but for US to do the same sorts of things is apparently okay.

To me, the first paragraph of the cited article in the OP sorta says it all:

The United States has used its enormous military superiority with great ruthlessness in the post-World War II era. During the Vietnam War, it dropped more bombs on the Indochinese peninsula than were employed by all sides during World War II. The U.S. also employed vast quantities of the cruellest weaponry, including phosphorus and fragmentation bombs, napalm, and chemicals that damage humans while killing vegetation.

Here's the definition of "holocaust":

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.0.1)
hol‧o‧caust  /ˈhɒləˌkɔst, ˈhoʊlə-/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation
–noun
1. a great or complete devastation or destruction, esp. by fire.
2. a sacrifice completely consumed by fire; burnt offering.
3. (usually initial capital letter) the systematic mass slaughter of European Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II (usually prec. by the).
4. any mass slaughter or reckless destruction of life.


Note def. #4. The heart of the OP (to me) seems to be about hypocrisy -- and the mutation of the United States into the "bad guy" nation that it has become. Just IMO, but in view of some of the posts to this thread, I wanted to add these comments.

[Hav]

18. .

I also believe that this thread was not intended as a defense for the denial of the Holocaust or all the garbage that the Iranian President ever said.
I thought about a hypocrisy as well but I rather had this thing in mind that history gets written by the winners. That's why we sadly tend to judge inhuman treatment differently depending on who did it.

[Taxloss]

19. You're confusing "a holocaust" with "the Holocaust".

The latter, of course refers to the genocide of European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s - that's what the Iranian president is denying. So, while it might be true to say "the killing of innocents during the Vietnam War is a holocaust", it is categorically NOT true to say "the killing of innocents during the Vietnam War is equivalent to the Holocaust". See?

[vickitulsa]

20. I'm smiling.

Surely you must be kidding me (I'm still smiling), because of course I do know the difference between "a" holocaust and "the" Holocaust.

I guess something about this OP may (I emphasize MAY) have been a tad confusing, though, because of the responses it garnered. OR maybe it's just one of those times when our thoughts go off on tangents or into a bit strange lines of thinking? (OR maybe it's just me!)

What seems clearest to me in the whole thing is that the inhuman and illogical abomination that was the "Vietnam War" ought to rank right up there in ANY nation's history as an outrage from deception-based start to dubious finish.

And since it certainly involved the killing of a great many (probably several million) people, in my eyes that qualifies it as a holocaust. A great many of my close pals are Nam vets, so I've learned a lot about that war; and it seems to be a consensus generally in what I've read that a minimum of two million Vietnamese lost their lives to American action.

And the way I see it, our pResident, the Chimperor, is constantly criticizing leaders of other nations for things he himself does. It's the way of the deceivers and tricksters of the world, who use words and appellations wrongly on purpose. It's such a common practice that Orwell carried it to an extreme when he created "Newspeak" in his novel 1984.

The saddest thing about such (mis)use of words by politicians IMO is that people are so confused by these tactics that they actually buy into lines fed them by their favored "leaders." These days I keep wondering how on earth any Americans -- confused or not -- are still buying what this crooked, malicious administration is selling.

It's downright disturbing.

[NNN0LHI]

21. The "Vietnam War" does rank right up there...

...in ANY nation's history as an outrage from deception-based start to dubious finish.

And when Stalin and Hitlers horrors need to be used comparatively to show that we aren't all that bad the jig is up.

Don