Isn't Vietnam one of the greatest holocausts of our time? [View All]

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.