JFK's Vietnam Policy as a Major Motive of the Plotters

[James DiEugenio]

Dave:

7.3 million tons of bombs was not enough.

540,000 combat troops was not enough

We condemned those poor people to this:

 

[James DiEugenio]

Everyone should watch the above and note 4 things:

1. How many caucasians.  Tourist industry.

2. The Vietnamese dress western style.

3. Everyone has a motor bike like Gary Dean said.

4. It is literally wall to wall businesses.  Santa Monica. 

Why is this not shown by Ken Burns in his film. After all Novick went there.

Edited November 3, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Pat Speer]

A brief anecdote, FWIW. I have a close female friend who is a bit of a world traveller. 25 years ago or so, she got it in her head to travel the world by bicycle. Her first stop was Vietnam. She rode a bicycle from one end to the other, and met an Israeli guy along the way. The two of them then traveled through India, Pakistan, Italy and France. She then moved with him to Israel. I'm probably skipping a few places. In any event, she said that Vietnam was by far the friendliest of all the nations she visited. She said it was beautiful and that the people were very welcoming to Americans. She said as well that they had to cut their trip to Pakistan short, due to the dirty looks they received, and that Italian men were by far the rudest, always whistling and saying sexist crap. But that's beside the point. The point is that her takeaway from all this was that Vietnam was the nicest and friendliest country she visited. Go figure. 

[James DiEugenio]

Traveled the world by bicycle?   Wow.

And Vietnam was the nicest place she visited. 

Humdinger.

Again, I hope everyone watches the video above. Its one of the best I saw on You Tube about Hanoi.

Then ask yourself why we do not see this on MSM TV.  At least I have never seen it.

[Michael Griffith]

17 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Dave:

7.3 million tons of bombs was not enough.

540,000 combat troops was not enough

We condemned those poor people to this:

 

Why don't you show a picture of people celebrating in North Korea and pretend that things turned out just fine in North Korea and that it wouldn't have been so bad if North Korea had won the Korean War?

It's really sad that you would minimize the very real human suffering of millions of people in South Vietnam, and that you would make light of the reign of terror that the Communists imposed on them right after the war, rather than admit that liberal Democrats sided with evil during the war and betrayed an entire nation to tyranny. Even a former high-ranking Viet Cong leader, Truong Nhu Tang, was so shocked by the brutality that he witnessed that he eventually left the country. You should read his book A Vietcong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1985). 

Asia scholar Jacqueline Desbarats’ chapter in the 1990 book The Vietnam Debate presented some of the results of her research into the bloody aftermath of the Vietnam War. Among other findings, she concluded that about 65,000 South Vietnamese were executed by the communists, and she added that this was probably an “underestimate.” Here is a portion of her chapter, which was titled “Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation”:

          Careful examination of public records does indeed supply evidence that there was an execution program after 1975. It also supplies evidence that the execution program was political in its intent rather than merely concerned with dealing with the crime wave that swept South Vietnam after the liberation. Who, then, were the victims of these summary executions? Among the victims brought to my attention were a number of government officials of the former regime: province chiefs, district chiefs, mayors, members of the police, high ranking members of the army, and members of the intelligence community. The victims also included a handful of members of the compradore bourgeoisie, a few leaders of popular, ethnic, or religious groups, including a couple of Hoa Hao, a number of people who tried to escape from the country, and a large number of people who tried to escape from reeducation camps. But by far the most widespread alleged reason for those executions was "antigovernment resistance." This reason alone accounted for forty nine percent of all the executions, including both armed resistance and passive resistance, such as refusal to register for reeducation.

          The empirical data collected in the interviews allows one to look at the pattern of executions over time and space. Two thirds of the executions occurred in 1975 and 1976, at which time the number of executions seems to have tapered off. A secondary peak occurred in 1978 at the time of the nationalization of commerce and business in South Vietnam. Over geographic space, we also find a rather clear pattern. Almost two thirds of the reported executions occurred in the Saigon and the Delta areas, and those were mostly executions that took place very soon after liberation. Subsequently, there is a geographic diffusion phenomenon, whereby executions started to spread to the areas north of Saigon. Those coastal areas became especially important after 1976. We also find a pattern in the kinds of reasons given for the executions. For instance, the executions motivated by anti­ government resistance were practically ubiquitous, as we find them everywhere, though mostly after 1976. On the other hand, executions of high­ranking officers are essentially found in the Mekong Delta area and occurred very soon after liberation, most of them in 1975. Executions of people who tried to escape from reeducation occurred mostly in the areas north of Saigon, and those are also widely spread over the ten year period examined.

          What are the numbers involved in extrajudicial executions? Looking only at deaths that were due to active willful acts rather than passive neglect, and using highly conservative coding and accounting procedures in the study's sample estimation, I came to an estimate of approximately 65,O00 persons executed.[9] I suspected all along that this probably was an underestimate. But I am more convinced now that it is an underestimate because the computations are based in part on the assumption that no more than one million people were processed through reeducation camps. As a matter of fact, we know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation. The change in statistical parameters resulting from that recent admission would indicate that, in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years. (Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (reaction.la))

Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen puts the number of executed South Vietnamese at 65,000, and this isn’t counting the untold thousands who died in the reeducation camps (Detention Camps in Asia, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022, p. 160).

Of the one million-plus South Vietnamese who were imprisoned in these camps, we have the oral histories of thousands of them, and those histories describe the brutal conditions in most of the camps, and they also describe numerous cases of prisoners being killed by various means, ranging from beatings and forced mine-clearing to malnutrition and deliberate deprivation of medical care (Detention Camps in Asia, pp. 158-172). A prisoner in one camp remembered having “to bury one or two prisoners every day” (Detention Camps in Asia, p. 170).

Three other sources on the horrors of the reeducation camps are Tran Tri Vu’s Lost Years: My 1,632 Days in Vietnamese Reeducation Camps (Berkeley: University of California, 1988), Nghia Vo’s The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment in Communist Vietnam (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), and Nguyen Van Canh’s Vietnam Under Communism, 1972-1985 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1983).

Do you just not care that every single human rights organization continues to rank Communist Vietnam as one of the most repressive regimes on the planet? 

Edited November 3, 2022 by Michael Griffith