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Post by dodger on Sept 19, 2013 23:41:19 GMT
Fine account of horrifying events, 19 Sep 2013
This Will Podmore review is from: War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam (Paperback)
In this horrifying book, Bernd Greiner, a Professor at the University of Hamburg, depicts the war crimes committed by US ground troops in Vietnam. His book is based on the records of the US Army's Vietnam War Crimes Working Group and the Peers Commission, to which the author had unprecedented access.
In the March 1968 massacre at My Lai, US troops killed more than 400 women, children and old men. Greiner shows how this atrocity was not exceptional, or unusual, and that responsibility for this behaviour was shared with the Pentagon and the White House.
Greiner writes, "Operation Speedy Express, carried out by troops of 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta between November 1968 and April 1969, ... left nearly 11,000 dead but in which only about 700 weapons were captured. Contemporary US army evaluations confirmed that civilians made up at least half the dead ..."
A 1968 memorandum, by a Deputy Chief of Staff, on the US treatment of prisoners of war, said, "The incidents authoritatively alleged show a cruel, sophisticated, calculated torture for information and make pious hypocritical arguments of statements about our treatment of POWs by the President ..." Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson remarked that American prisoners in the hands of the Viet Cong seemed to have been better treated than vice versa.
Greiner concludes, "This is violence committed outside the theatres of war and beyond the hostilities, where the perpetrators do not fight like soldiers but slaughter like cowardly marauders."
This book shows how wars of intervention become wars against civilians, wars of rape, torture and murder. This stark warning was not heeded in Iraq, where US troops carried out similar atrocities.
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Post by dodger on Sept 30, 2013 5:46:54 GMT
Useful biography of a great patriot and revolutionary, 15 April 2002
By William Podmore
This review is from: Ho Chi Minh: A Life (Paperback)
Duiker's biography presents a useful portrait of the great patriot and revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh, the founder of modern Vietnam. Despite its predictable anti-communist bias, the book gives us enough evidence to make our own minds up. Duiker gets hung up on the false dilemma - was Ho a nationalist or a Communist? Of course, he was both; there is no incompatibility. It's like asking whether George Washington was a patriot or a revolutionary! Ho's goodness, his morality, his simplicity, modesty and courage shine through the book.
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Post by dodger on Sept 30, 2013 6:47:42 GMT
Our fifth article to mark the 40th anniversary of the CPBML by looking at the past four decades through the eyes of Workers and its predecessor, The Worker. This month: the Vietnamese people's fight for national liberation…
1972: the US lashes out in Vietnam – and fails
WORKERS, JUNE 2008 ISSUE
In the 1970s, both Labour and Conservative governments continued to support the US government's wars of aggression against Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. This complicity was one of the most shameful acts in British history.
The Labour government led by Harold Wilson backed the US April 1970 invasion of Cambodia. In December 1970, Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath said that bombing North Vietnam would be 'justifiable'; on 13 June 1972 he praised President Nixon's 'unparalleled restraint'; and in December 1972 he backed the US bombing of Hanoi.
But however much the US government escalated the war, however much they spent (an estimated $500 billion), they could not win. The US Air Force dropped more bombs on Vietnam than on all targets in all history. US forces killed possibly three million Vietnamese. Yet the heroic Vietnamese people decisively defeated the self-styled most powerful state in the world.
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the CPBML we reprint below the lead article from The Worker of 1 June, 1972.
One War: One Strategy
Protracted War Victorious in Vietnam
"The United States, like a wounded beast, lashes out wildly. The bombing of Hanoi, the mining of Haiphong harbour, the new attempts to turn Vietnam into a raging inferno are last desperate lunges of a defeated Titan. Capitalism is a dying force. On its deathbed, with the hopelessness of the damned, it determines to take with it to Hell as many human souls as it can garner. Hence the viciousness of the vanquished.
Vietnam has lost some of its sons and daughters in this war. It goes without saying that without readiness for sacrifice the war could not have been fought. Workers, fighters may die but a working class, a people cannot die. Every last barbarity perpetrated by U.S. imperialism has been recorded and will not go unavenged. Blood debts are being repaid in blood; in April alone the Vietnamese people's forces took a toll from their enemy of 90,000 killed, wounded or captured.
Three years later: victory as the South Vietnam Liberation Army enters Da Nang City on 29 March 1975
For us it is time to take stock of this world-historic achievement of the Vietnamese. Vietnam is the international touchstone of our age – the contemporary classic of confrontation between exploiter and exploited, as instructive for us as the Paris Commune of a century ago. It has been in essence a third world war – a war in which no-one in the world could remain uninvolved and unmoved. And in this war, how have we the British people performed?
Governments, Labour identical with Tory, have tailed obediently three steps behind their Washington masters, excusing and explaining each new enormity.
The working class, with a few honourable exceptions, have tried to look the other way.
The various 'Left' factions in the social democratic circus have acted entirely true to form. The 'Left wing' of the Labour Party and the King Street revisionists, never daring to support the Vietnamese, made little deprecating noises about the bombing of north Vietnam. (The burning alive and bloody murder of people throughout the country was all right – just stop bombing the north). The Trotskyists were happy to support the Vietnamese as long as they were convinced the Americans would win – at which point they could condemn the 'treachery' of the Stalinists (i.e. Ho Chi Minh). When it became clear even to them that the Vietnamese were not going to lose they made themselves scarce, found other carrion to crow over.
A whole generation of youth in Britain received their political baptism of fire from the guns of the Mekong Delta. For them Vietnam has been an almost sacred cause, a rock of faith in a shifting, doubtful world. Yet they did not translate their faith into deeds. They did not build for victorious Vietnam a movement to compare with that built by their parents for defeated Spain.
Why? Why have we, the working class of Britain, failed in our internationalist duty? Why have we left it to the Vietnamese people, in the way an earlier generation left it to the Soviet working class, to carry the burden of revolutionary war without our taking the action here that would have complemented their struggle? Can we shake off this social democratic sleeping sickness before it numbs us entirely?
Ho Chi Minh said the only true internationalism is to make revolution in your own country. We rejoice with the Vietnamese people in their victories. We grieve with them in the destruction wrought upon their land. Let us now vow that we the workers of Britain will match their intellect, their heroism and their achievement in the very heartland of the imperialist beast."
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Post by dodger on Oct 6, 2013 10:44:18 GMT
english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/government/86089/vo-nguyen-giap---a-general-of-great-talent.html
Vo Nguyen Giap - a General of great talent
Legendary General Vo Nguyen Giap, former Commander-in-Chief of the Vietnam People’s Army, was regarded as the 20th century’s greatest military talent by many historians and scholars.
Vo Nguyen Giap became the Vietnam People’s Army’s first general at the age of 37. He was one of the rare military leaders to earn the admiration and respect of even his ostensible enemies.
Giap worked as a teacher, a journalist, a historian, and a revolutionary activist, never completing any official military training. His autodidacticism, personal experiences, and combative spirit transformed him into a clear-sighted strategist, a commander-in-chief of great virtue, and Vietnam’s leading military organiser during the Ho Chi Minh era.
He was known for his righteousness, generosity, directness, democracy, tolerance, and decisiveness, cited as an international example for all Vietnamese.
Born into a rice farming family, Giap became involved in politics at an early age. President Ho Chi Minh and the Party entrusted him with the task of building the nascent Vietnamese army from its initial primitively equipped 34 member guerrilla force into the elite regiments and brigades responsible for the earth-shaking victory of the Dien Bien Phu campaign.
His leadership and that of the Party and President Ho Chi Minh was instrumental to defeating the French military’s most redoubtable fortress.
President Ho Chi Minh once said that along with Bach Dang, Chi Lang, and Dong Da, Dien Bien Phu was a golden milestone marking colonialism’s collapse.
The successful Dien Bien Phu campaign triggered France’s withdrawal from Indo-China.
In the war of resistance against the US, Giap continued to serve as a military leader who worked with the Politburo on masterminding strategy.
General Giap went on to defeat the US-backed South Vietnamese Government in April 1975, reuniting the country.
His outstanding contributions to the nation were made while holding a variety of senior positions, spanning Secretary of the Central Military Commission, Defence Minister, and Commander-in-Chief of the Vietnam People’s Army.
His efforts with the Politburo and the Central Military Commission built an armed force operating a people’s war following Vietnamese military theory that triumphed over the country’s most powerful enemies.
Great cultural activist
The shine of General Giap’s career achievements and personality were not restricted to the battlefield but illuminated in cultural and ideological spheres with regular frequency.
General Giap wrote literature, articles, and essays encompassing a diverse range of fields.
He was a perceptive leader always willing to analyse victories and losses equally honestly and consider the advice of his soldiers, experts, intellectuals, and scientists.
General Giap proposed many innovative, far-sighted ideas relating to knowledge-based economies, maritime economies, advanced science and technology, agricultural economies, and human resource development strategy.
The great military leader strongly supported the Party’s renewal (Doi Moi) in economics, politics, and leadership, never losing sight of the ultimate goals of a strong country, wealthy people, and a democratic, equitable, and civilised society.
He was a steadfast advocate for history’s and geography’s utility in broadening knowledge, promoting patriotism, and inculcating a sense of social responsibility. His passionate championing of education recognised its socially progressive role and its capacity for cultivating cultural, spiritual, moral, and aesthetic values.
His clear mind and sharp wit never diminished and he continued offering his leadership insights to the Party, the Government, and the Army after his official retirement.
giap
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Post by dodger on Oct 6, 2013 14:14:37 GMT
CPP salutes Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, 102October 06, 2013  Communist Party of the PhilippinesThe Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) salutes Comrade Vo Nguyen Giap, erstwhile general of the Vietnam People’s Army, who led the Vietnamese people’s guerrilla warfare against the French and American colonialists from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Comrade Giap died last October 4 in a hospital in Hanoi, Vietnam. He was 102.
Comrade Giap was born in Central Vietnam on August 25, 1911. At the age of 14, he became active in the patriotic movement. He would later become a teacher and journalist before joining the Communist Party of Indochina led by its chairman Ho Chi Minh. The Indochinese peninsula comprising Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia was then a French colony.
During World War II, Comrade Giap traveled to southern China in 1944 together with Chairman Ho to avoid arrest. With the support of the Communist Party of China, Comrades Giap and Ho prepared to launch the revolutionary armed resistance in Indochina, which was then occupied by the Japanese. Comrade Giap led the first full-time platoon of guerrilla fighters, driving away the Japanese occupation forces.
In 1945, the French recolonized Indochina, rousing the patriotic spirit of the Vietnamese people and their desire for national liberation. Led by the Communist Party of Indochina, they waged an epic guerrilla war against the French colonialists. To this day, the victory of the Vietnamese people’s war over the French colonialists continues to inspire heroism among the exploited and oppressed peoples of the world desirous of national freedom.
Comrade Giap led the Vietnamese People’s Army in the historic Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the center of French military power in Indochina. Here, the Vietnamese people demonstrated how they could defeat a more modern army through the use of guerrilla tactics. They marched in their thousands to build hidden trails, dug hundreds of kilometers of trenches, dismantled their cannons and artillery and manually pulled them up to high mountain ridges in order to quietly encircle the overly confident French troops. They launched a blitzkrieg attack against the French military base and after 55 days of fighting, forced the complete surrender of the French colonialists on May 7, 1954.
In succeeding negotiations in Geneva, Vietnam was temporarily divided into North Vietnam which was under the people’s government led by the Communist Party; and South Vietnam, which would be colonized by the US after the withdrawal of the French forces.
In the next two decades, the Vietnamese people would continue to wage revolutionary resistance against the US colonialists. Despite having a modern war machine, the US forces would eventually be defeated in Vietnam. Comrade Giap led the Vietnamese People’s Army in making use of smaller and less modern weapons against the bigger and more advanced weapons of the US military.
The victory of the Vietnamese people in defeating the US military forces in 1976 paved the way for the reunification of Vietnam under the banner of the Communist Party of Vietnam.
The lessons of the Vietnamese people’s war of resistance continue to illumine people’s wars around the world, including that being waged by the Filipino people through the New People’s Army. The military writings of Comrade Giap, especially in waging guerrilla warfare, have been translated into Pilipino and other local languages, enabling Filipino revolutionaries to study the lessons of the people’s war in Vietnam.
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Post by dodger on Oct 27, 2013 7:52:43 GMT
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Post by dodger on Nov 26, 2013 7:58:15 GMT
1.0 out of 5 stars Rubbish, 25 Nov 2013
This Will Podmore review is from: Serial Killers : Ho Chi Minh (Kindle Edition)
Are Quik eBooks just a CIA front? "Read the horrific history of one of the world's most brutal killers in this Quik eBook." Oh yes right, Ho - not good old Uncle Sam - killed 4 million Vietnamese people in one of the most brutal wars in history. Vietnamese forces invaded the USA and killed a twelfth of the US population ... need I go on?
The worse the crime, the bigger the lies about it.
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Post by dodger on Feb 7, 2014 14:54:50 GMT
Brilliant study of Morgenthau's anti-war activities, 7 Feb 2014
This William Podmore review is from:
Vietnam War Debate: Hans J. Morgenthau and the Attempt to Halt the Drift into Disaster (Hardcover)
Louis Zimmer is professor emeritus of history at Montclair State University. This brilliant book is a study of the anti-war activities of University of Chicago professor Hans J. Morgenthau, a leading opponent of the US war of aggression against Vietnam.
Three million Vietnamese people were killed. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed, and more than 300,000 injured. It was a civil war, between the US-installed Diem regime and the people of Vietnam. No outside country had any vital interests there. Zimmer sums up, “American national interests (and the interests of the Vietnamese) did not require American military intervention in a civil war among indigenous Vietnamese ten thousand miles away to fight for a morally dubious cause the outcome of which would have no bearing on America’s vital security interests.”
Morgenthau denounced the role of idealist thinking in foreign policy. Zimmer observes, “Wilsonian moralism, Morgenthau writes, ‘asserts that the American national interest is not somewhere in particular, but everywhere, being identical with the interests of mankind itself.’ Thus, Wilsonian moralism does not concern itself ‘with the concrete issues upon which the national interest must be asserted’: indeed, it ‘soars beyond’ the concrete and ‘applies the illusory expectations of liberal reform to the whole world.’ And we are now well aware of Morgenthau’s basic contention that any ‘foreign policy guided by moral abstraction, without consideration of the national interest’ in terms of specific and concrete detail, ‘is bound to fail.’”
Morgenthau argued that nations should act in their national interests. To refuse to act on this basis is also to refuse to accept the legitimacy of other nations’ national interests. Empires do this, claiming their right to enforce moral principles. But, as historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote, “international relationships are likely to come closer to practical morality if nations act on the basis of national interest and accept the legitimacy of the interests of other nations than if they act as executors of universal moral principles.”
The US government blamed the opponents of war for prolonging it. They tried to split the anti-war movement by demanding that its representatives denounced each other’s acts or statements. But, as Morgenthau commented, “It is preposterous to assume that a participant in a debate who does not explicitly dissociate himself from every statement he finds objectionable thereby becomes positively identified with it.” This would mean that “whenever someone agrees with you in some respect and disagrees with you in another, you have to rush into print to make clear the difference.”
Zimmer observes, “Communist governments, Morgenthau writes, hold the dogma that capitalistic governments are class societies ruled by an exploiting minority and regard dissent, whether ‘responsible’ or ‘irresponsible’, as insignificant. ‘The dogma’, Morgenthau writes, ‘stands on its own feet’ as ‘an integral part of the received Marxist-Leninist’ belief system. For two decades, Communist writers ‘berated the ‘warmongers of Wall Street’ who drag an unwilling American people toward war, regardless of the evidence pro or con’.”
Morgenthau never asked whether this ‘dogma’ was realistic. After all, this whole book provides the evidence that the ruling minority dragged the American people into the war against Vietnam, regardless of the evidence pro or con, and that Morgenthau’s dissent had no effect on the war.
Later, in 1970, Morgenthau wrote that he no longer believed in ‘the power of truth to move men’, and one of ‘the main tenets of liberal philosophy’, that ‘power positions’ would yield to ‘arguments rationally and morally valid’, had now been ‘definitively refuted’.
Morgenthau opposed idealism, but it is again idealism to believe that wrong ideas drive wrong foreign policy. Wrong ideas may help to sustain a wrong foreign policy, but solid material interests drive foreign policy: in capitalist societies, capital drives policy and drives to war.
One can refute the rulers’ arguments for war, but this does not stop the war. Power rules; ideas don’t. The argument of power defeats the power of argument.
The author hopes that his book might teach us arguments that might help us to avoid future unnecessary wars. To stop war, we need to do far more than just refute the warmongers’ arguments. Lenin’s essays ‘Socialism and war’ and ‘The military programme of the proletarian revolution’ analysed the causes of war and showed how to end wars. We have ignored Lenin, so we have suffered the consequences – war after war.
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