“…if the wind blew the tree, they chopped down the tree. If the cow moved, the cow got shot…And the chicken, duck, pig–anything alive was murdered.” Quoted in the documentary.

The documentary “Vietnam – American Holocaust” is from Linux Beach Production, produced by Clay Claiborne. It is a great documentary, with contemporary relevance, which raises the question, “Has our failure to fully understand what happened in Vietnam condemned us to repeat it in Iraq?”

Similar to Iraq, it asks about the number of deaths: “How many people died in the Vietnam War? We know the number of Americans with some precision: it is just over 58,000….But how many Vietnamese?” In 1995, Vietnam released a figure of 4 million civilians, and 1 million combattants, killed. “Nobody has officially challenged those figures.” Even Robert McNamara is quoted as saying 3.5 million, which proportionately is “the equivalent of 27 million Americans.” But we don’t ask a burglar what was stolen from the house!

The primary tool that the US used in the Vietnam War was aerial bombardment. That is how the most people were killed, both North and South. The US used napalm, they used cluster bombs, they used white phosphorus, they used checmical agents. But, most of all, they used old-fashoned, high-explosive bombs. And, by the time it was all over, US government had dropped three times the amount of bombs dropped by all parties in WWII. More than eight million tonnes, or the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.

And, for Monsanto’s part (GMO seeds anyone? Just check your groceries!): “For nearly ten years, the US sprayed more than nineteen million gallons of Agent Orange, which contains the lethal chemical Dioxin, on Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. Not just jungles were sprayed; 3181 villages, and as many as four million people, were also directly sprayed.”

body count, which was the number one career-enhancement statistic in Vietnam

Really, race is all over this. Though Germans may point to the bombing of Dresden, the subtext to all of this is race: the gooks were less than human to the decision-makers.  I remember watching a documentary about the experience of African Americans in the Vietnam war. At one point, one of the soldiers recounted a sudden insight he had: “I realized what gook meant: gook meant nigger!”  Watching this is a clear reminder of David E. Stannard’s book “American Holocaust: Columbus & the Conquest of the New World”.

Near the end, it shows the remains of people burned to death by White Phosphorus (“Willie Peter”). Gaza is not the only connection to recent events.

Where are the documentaries made by the Vietnamese? Some of the few quotes from this documentary:

They seemed to hate us.

Wherever the Americans went, they burned and destroyed and killed. I didn’t see any guerillas being killed, only villagers.

And, lest there were any doubts about the racial foundation of the genocide, the following is just one of the quotes from the Americans:

 It wasn’t like they were humans. You know, we were conditioned to believe that this was for the good of the nation, for the good of our country, that anything was OK….When you shot someone, you didn’t think that you were shooting a human; they were a gook or a commie, and it was OK.