This is a cross post. It was originally posted on Harry’s Place at October 4th 2012, 1:39 am
When Christopher Hitchens died, this blog published panegyrics. This was not the case when Eric Hobsbawn died. Alan A of this blog determined that Hobsbawm was “wicked” (subsequently changed) and wrote a post largely consisting of an extract of a review of one of Hobsbawm’s books by Hitchens.
Regular readers of this blog will be aware that comments below posts are not viewable one week after a post goes up. In this instance, it is a shame as an interesting debate occurred between some of this blog’s regular commentators from both below and above the line. Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi suggested that there were double standards at play between the treatment by this blog of Hobsbawm and its treatment of Hitchens. In my opinion, Aymenn’s complaint is justified.
He accurately quoted Christopher Hitchens as saying in 2004:
The media cliche about the war is that it‘s like Vietnam. The Vietnamese were a very civilized foe and if they had had weapons of mass destruction, for example, wouldn‘t have used them and didn‘t target civilians, did use women as fighters and organizers, were not torturers and mass murderers and so forth.
In a dispute, another regular commentator, declared that Hitchens was mentioning “facts.”
This is simply not true. The North Vietnamese Communists and the Viet Cong certainly did use torture. Guenter Lewy (America in Vietnam [Oxford University Press, 1978], pp.337-8) discusses the treatment of American prisoners :
The most frequent mode of torture was to put a prisoner into ropes – arms tied tightly behind the back and head and shoulders forced down until the mouth practically touched the feet. As a result of constricted circulation, after a while the pain became so excruciating that the prisoner was prepared to do anything his captors demanded….. Col Kenneth North told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that according to statistics kept by the prisoner organization, approximately 95 percent of the men in the North Vietnamese prisons were tortured.
As regards mass murderers, one can consider what happened at Hue early 1968 when, in the course of 26 days:
some 5,800 civilians were killed or abducted; most of the missing are considered dead…. mass graves were discovered gradually during the following 18 months and yielded some 2,800 bodies. The lack of visible wounds on a large number of these victims, who included two Catholic priests, indicated that they had been buried alive.
Source: Ibid., p.274.
Commenting on terror killings, Lewy adds (p.277):
The killing of noncombatants through VC terror, on the other hand, was systematic and intentional, in violation of the most basic principles of humanitarian conduct in time of war forbidding deliberate attacks on the civilian population.
Mass murders by Vietnamese Communists had occurred even before the Second IndoChina War had begun. Communist policy in the Soviet Union and China had led to millions of deaths as a result of Stalin’s collectivization and Mao’s so-called Great Leap Forward. Michael Lind (Vietnam the Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America’s Most Disastrous Military Conflict [Free Press, 1999], p.152) explains what happened in Vietnam:
Collectivization began on March 2, 1953 with the promulgation of a “Population Classification Decree” that divided the subjects of the Hanoi dictatorship into five categories from “landlord” to “agricultural worker.” Somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 Vietnamese were summarily executed for being of the wrong class category; many more were imprisoned in the Vietnamese Gulag.
After the war, many Vietnamese were so scared as to what the Communists would do that they left the country in rickety boats. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that 1 million people fled Vietnam in the aftermath of the the 1975 communist takeover of which some 400,000 died at sea.
Source: Associated Press, June 23, 1979.
Those fleeing had good cause to be worried. According to Doan Van Toai, after the fall of Saigon, the whole of the county was turned into a “Vietnamese Gulag” with food rations dependent on whether the Communist Party bosses were obeyed. And then, after hard days at work in rice fields, free time was restricted as peasants had to attend indoctrination lessons. (Source: Human Events, March 17, 1979.) And in terms of deaths etc, Human Events (August 27, 1977) reported one former elected Communist government official estimated by 1977 that
between 50,000 and 100,000 people had been slaughtered outright; that there are another 200,000 or more in the “re-education” camps; an additional 200,000-300,000 who have been processed through these camps, released, but kept under the equivalent of house arrest; and perhaps one million or more sent to “new economic areas” to perform forced labour.
And so it goes on.
Michael Lind (Vietnam The Necessary War, [Free Press, 1999], p.156) comments:
members of the Western left who minimised or made excuses for the North Vietnamese Land reform terror were apologists for state-sponsored genocide
There does indeed seem to be a double standard.
Michael Ezra
Nonsense on the Vietnam War
In Commentator, Vietnam War on June 3, 2012 at 8:14 AMThis is a cross post. It was originally published on Harry’s Place on May 31st 2012, 9:15 am
On The Commentator blog, James Boys has an article which ostensibly attacks President Obama’s statement that would put the commencement of the Vietnam War in 1962, a year when John F Kennedy (JFK) was President. In practice, the article presents a severe distortion of the reality. Boys tries to suggest a substantial difference of view between JFK and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), of American involvement in Vietnam.
Specifically, Boys states:
Defence Secretary Robert S. McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor reported back from Vietnam that One thousand troops could be withdrawn by the end of 1963, and that the United States would be able to withdraw all military personnel by the end of 1965.”
This plan was outlined in the Top Secret national Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263, dated October 11th, 1963. This was the order to start the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. “It’s their war,” President Kennedy stated “they’re the ones who have to win it or lose it.” This stance was a serious deviation from the cold war policies of the past, and many speculated that it would be indicative of Kennedy’s second term….
John F. Kennedy had never been an advocate of fighting a land war in Asia, agreeing with General Douglas McArthur that to do so would be futile.” Lyndon Johnson however saw the situation in a different light….To Kennedy, Vietnam had been a distant war, and one to be avoided. To Lyndon Johnson, it was almost personal.
One of Johnson’s first acts as President was to sign National Security Action Memorandum 273, reversing Kennedy’s withdrawal policy….
The image that Boys wishes to leave readers is clear: had JFK not been assassinated, there would have been no ground troops and the horrors of the US decisions for war can be laid fairly at the feet of LBJ.
While it is true that according to NSAM 263 that “The President [JFK] approved the military recommendations contained in Section I B (1-3) of the [McNamara-Taylor] report,” he also “directed that no formal announcement be made of the implementation of plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.” It can be also noted when looking at the McNamara-Taylor report that the withdrawal of troops was due to be “In accordance with the program to train progressively Vietnamese to take over military functions” and “without impairment of the war effort.”
Fredrik Logevall, in his analysis of the situation, (Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam, [University of California Press, 1999], pp.69-74), argued that the withdrawal of 1,000 troops was “primarily a device to put pressure on [South Vietnamese leader] Diem,” only designed to be a “token” withdrawal and that “nothing in the voluminous internal record for 1962 and 1963” suggested otherwise. Logevall is explicit, “When judged together, the McNamara-Taylor report, NSAM 263, and the accompanying documents all demonstrate clearly that the one-thousand-man withdrawal signalled no lessening of the American commitment to South Vietnam.”
Boys quotes Kennedy as saying, “It’s their war. They’re the ones who have to win it or lose it.” While he does not provide his source, these were part of Kennedy’s remarks to Walter Cronkite in a television interview on September 2, 1963. This interview has been uploaded in full to YouTube. The relevant quote used by Boys can be seen between sections 14:00 and 14:04. What Boys has missed out are Kennedy’s further comments. I quote below the section between 16:41 and 17:07:
. . in the final analysis it is the people and the Government [of South Vietnam] itself who have to win or lose this struggle. All we can do is help, and we are making it very clear. But I don’t agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake. I know people don’t like Americans to be engaged in this kind of an effort. Forty-seven Americans have been killed in combat with the enemy, but this is a very important struggle even though it is far away.
By missing out this section where Kennedy makes it clear that he does not think America should withdraw from Vietnam, Boys has presented a distorted picture of Kennedy’s views.
Boys suggests that LBJ’s NSAM 273 (signed on November 26, 1963, a few days after Kennedy was assassinated) was a reversal of Kennedy’s withdrawal policy. This is false. NSAM 273 clearly states:
The objectives of the United States with respect to the withdrawal of U. S. military personnel remain as stated in the White House statement of October 2, 1963.
But more importantly, a very similar draft of this document, was prepared on November 21, 1963. The document refers to the President, who, on that date, was JFK as he was not assassinated until the following day. Consequently, while NSAM 273 was signed with a reference where LBJ was President, that was mainly because JFK has been assassinated. Had the assassination not occurred then NSAM 273 would have been JFK’s document. LBJ’s policy in Vietnam commencing with NSAM 273 was not therefore a reversal of JFK’s policies, but a continuation of them.
This nonsense of Boys is more suited to a film by Oliver Stone and the babble of JFK assassination conspiracy theorists than to a discussion on historical reality. It is a great shame that The Commentator published it.