Why I am a Holocaust Denier
I am a holocaust denier because the facts don't comport with the version of the holocaust put forward by holocaust promoters. According to them if someone doesn't agree with each and every aspect of their version then they claim that person to be a denier, so I guess that's what I am.
There are two issues here in evaluating what really happened. One is based on usual historical evidence - what does the historic record indicates really happened in the holocaust. If you examine the evidence it doesn't support the traditional holocaust narrative told to Americans since the war, and this record is clear. This is why even holocaust promoters have now changed their stories about the scope of the supposed killing.
The second issue has to do with the credibility of those making claims about the remaining, controversial portion of the holocaust killings because except for those testimonies by individuals there is no historical evidence or documentation.
Let's first turn to the historical evidence and how it's now reduced dramatically what all historians regard as the scope of the killing.
After the war the American public was told that gas chambers were used in sixteen concentration camps in Germany to kill people the Nazis wanted dead, including Jews. The camp in the American zone of occupation was the oldest of all the camps, the one at Dacchau, and there is a gas chamber there which every person who visits there is shown as the gas chamber where people were murdered. As well there are American produced films purporting to show lampshades made out of human skin, and soap made from human bodies...
However in the last twenty years scholars have researched these claims and they all now agree, based on testimony as well as documentation and records, that all of these claims were fabrications made by the US Army Intelligence Corps in cooperation with the British, as well as the Soviet Union.
Why would the allies AFTER the war engage in such misleading propaganda?
The answers are simple and chilling. In the early phases of the war both Britain and the United States made numerous statements against the use of bombing of cities as a horrendous war crime. The British Prime Ministers and other officials as well as President Roosevelt and others continually called the bombing of cities to be horrific war crimes. However during the war both Britain and the United States, contrary to their own assertions, engaged in terror bombing of cities on a massive scale. These bombings were not usually to disable particular strategic targets but to destroy the cities themselves, and to kill their inhabitants.
After the war the United States and Britain needed to justify what they'd done, and the way they chose to do it was to fabricate a whole series of claims of even worse conduct by the Germans to deflect criticisim away from themselves. And of course the Russians were more than eager to amplify these claims with those of their own so that the world wouldn't criticize them so much when they brutally installed their communist partners in their occupied countries, supposedly justified by the fight against fascism.
It has now also been revealed that the testimony of key Germans at the Nuremberg Trials confessing to mass killings and the reasons for the invasions of France, etc., were confessions made under torture by British thugs and were not accurate in any way.
So what then was the documented scope of the holocaust?
The Germans kept records of all the civilians they systematically killed. They never did anything to hide these killings. As the German army moved eastward through the Soviet Union they assisted in the killing of two groups - communists and Jews. These two groups were identified in documents and orders as to be eliminated, and each village, city and town where such killings occurred had its tallies reported back to Berlin. In most cases it was local anti-communists to rounded up these two groups because communists had killed so many people in these areas when they took control that they were universally hated. As for the Jews they were so closely linked to the communists that the anti-communists viewed them as the same. Regrettably it was almost entirely Jews in each of these villages, cities and towns which were the spearhead of support for the communists and their murderous rampages. For the people who lived in these areas they were appalled that few if any Jews dissented from the atrocities of the communists, so when the Germans came they felt little guilt about giving to Jewish women and children what they appeared to have no problem meeting out to others previously. That is simply the truth about what happened on the eastern front, and it was not at all the simple anti-semitic slaughter from traditional hatred of Jews that holocaust promoters claim.
According to the German records over one and one half million Jews were murdered in the east by these means, and it always involved killing by gunfire.
There were no killings of Jews in the sixteen concentration camps and work camps in Germany. That is not to say however that Jews and others in the camps didn't die by the thousands as a result of mistreatment. The conditions in these camps were often horrible, and people were sometimes worked and starved to death. They were kept in conditions in which typhus and other diseases spread and killed many. There were delousing gas chambers in these facilities for killing lice, and that's what the cyclone B gas pellets were actually used for. And there was some medical care provided. But the simple fact is that although the Germans didn't directly kill anyone in these camps, at least not in a systematic way, they created conditions in which many perished, and this indifference and inhumanity is a war crime nonetheless. However it's not the direct killing which holocaust promoters claim to demonize the Germans.
In addition to the 1.5 million Jews which were killed in the east what are we to believe about the supposed mass killings at Auschwitz/Berkinau and the four camps in Poland, the so-called "Operation Rheinhart" camps in which people were transported for the purpose of killing.
Well there's no evidence of mass killing at even these five camps except for the testimonial claims of a few dozen people there, out of tens of thousands still there when they were occupied by the Russians. As well there were hundreds of thousands that had lived at those camps who were survivors who were moved to the sixteen camps in Germany as the Russians approached. So there are hundreds of thousands of survivors of these camps and only a few dozen make these claims of mass extermination. That's clearly a disparity of testimony under the circumstances. Additionally there is the clear exaggeration which the Soviets made about what happened at these camps. For example all during the period of communist rule in Poland the plaque at Auschwitz said that five million people were killed there, but after the communists fell the plaque was changed to read only 2.5 million. So is there anymore basis for the 2.5 million number than for the 5 million number? I don't think so. The plaque was changed because holocaust scholars claimed that only 5 million Jews were killed during the war, and that would mean that they were all killed at Auschwitz and no where else, so they changed the plaque to imply that maybe half of all the Jews killed were killed there - hardly any evidence.
The simple truth is that the people making claims that anyone was killed in mass at any of the camps, anywhere, simply have no credibility because they've been caught lying over and over again.
My mind is open to the claim that there may have been gas chambers at the five camps in Poland, and that these chambers were used to kill Jews and others. But the lack of credibility of all those making these claims compels me to discount their claims. It rests entirely on their testimony and they've destroyed their own believibility entirely.
Monday, March 31, 2014
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Understanding the Vietnam War
A good place to start in understanding the diabolical nature of the American government, and how easily misled it's media and opinion leaders are, is to study the American war in Vietnam. Today the American public knows the war was lost, and that many at the time thought that the war was "wrong," though they can't clearly articulate why it was less noble than other American wars.
The simple truth is that the architects of the American intervention in Vietnam prosecuted the war with utter ruthlessness in a near genocidal way to prevent the region from falling into communist hands. And in order to do so they had to fabricate a totally untrue narrative to get the public and their opinion leaders to support the whole mess. So lets look at what actually happened and how those who brought it about sold it to the public by creating a phony narrative.
Vietnam was a feudal society in which most people lived a simple farmers, working land owned by absentee owners living lavish lives in the cities. For these surfs there was no hope of any improvement whatsoever...none, and for them the ideology of communism was irresistible. Once exposed to communist ideas pretty much every person in the rural villages wanted to become a communist, but not because they wanted the collectivism of Stalinist Russia or China. What they wanted was to throw off the oppression of the aristocratic landlords and own the land themselves - they wanted to be entrepreneurs.
That is the simple reason why pretty much all patriotic Vietnamese became communists, and therefore it was the communist Viet Mihn which fought with fierce dedication to throw out the French by 1954. And it didn't hurt that the ruthless French imperial exploitation there [with collaborating Vietnamese aristocrats and bourgeousee] fit precisely the Marxist explaination of imperial capitalist exploitation.
Of all the places on earth Vietnam was the one where conditions made 90% of the population embrace Marxism pure and simple for their own perceived interests of national self-determination and economic freedom and opportunity. It was no wonder that Ho Chi Min himself admired these traits so greatly in the American myth that when he first established the independent Vietnamese government after the defeat of the Japanese there in 1945 that his first public speech was to repeat the American Declaration of Independence.
However his independent Vietnamese state didn't last long, as the US and other powers grudgingly supported the return of the imperial French to the place, which also included Laos and Cambodia. Thereafter the US supported the French in their hopeless effort to beat back the total mobilized efforts of the entire southeast Asian population against them. The French left in 1954 in an agreement settled upon in Geneva, the Geneva Peace Conference, and there was to have been popular elections in the south to determine what party would rule there and if they would join with the communist north under Ho Chi Min.
Well....to anyone at all who knew the public mood in the south that was a given - the communists in the south were about 90% of the population. The few people who weren't communists were the landed aristocrats and catholics who were anti-communist for religious reasons. To make thing more dramatic C.I.A. conducted a psychological warfare program of black propaganda to scare the catholics living in the north that their new communist leaders would butcher them - causing them all to flee for their lives to the south. In actually the north did experience a brief reign of terror. Zealous communists in the rural areas were savage towards anyone owning land, and they cooked up phony charges of criminality against landowners everywhere in which they were brutally killed. That's par for the course anywhere communism was conducted.
But as for the south the US installed a catholic zealot as President, No Din Diem, who with his brother Nu turned the south into a terror state in which all known communist party members were tortured to death or otherwise murdered. The purpose was to frighten everyone from becoming communist, however with nothing much to lose this strategy didn't go very far. The Diem brothers found that no amount of torture and killing was working. The communists were looking forward to winning at the election of 1956 determined by the Geneva Agreement, so the US and Diem cancelled the elections. With no other option for simple survival the communists reluctantly resorted to armed revolution. When the revolution started in the south the communists there had no support from the north. The communists in the south had to obtain their own weapons, and often villages formed their own communist governments without any direction or much support from other communists anywhere. It's hard for Americans steeped in their own war propaganda to understand but it was the villagers themselves who wanted to become communists because it was their only hope of improvement - they were not coerced or terrorized into supporting communist fighters of the south, the Viet Cong, or National Liberation Front as they called themselves. Nor is it true that the people in the villages were caught between the NLF and the anti-communist government of Diem, or those which followed after his demise in the American-sponsored coup of 1963. The villagers were not non-political simple farmers who just wanted to be left alone. They were dedicated and loyal communists pretty much to a man, or woman or child.
By 1963 the Diem brothers clearly realized that nothing they could do would prevent a communist victory. They faced the same near-universal public contempt that the public directed against the French, and it was clearly a hopeless situation. Then the outlook of north Vietnam changed regarding the communists in the south, who began receiving material support from the north. Despite the Diem's efforts at controlling the countryside by corralling villagers into "hamlets," [fenced camps] armed conflict escalated everywhere outside of the cities. Diem's military of conscript and criminal soldiers and assassins had no motivation to fight [except for the money the convicts were paid for their services] so the communists prevailed in every action.
With the death of President Kennedy those in the military and intl agencies who favored that the US take over the war had no barriers to their goals. Kennedy's doctrine in the third world was to deny the communist powers these countries by seeking neutralist solutions. To Kennedy as long as places like Brazil, Indonesia and India were not puppets of the Russians or Chinese he would not disturb or intervene to overthrow their governments or subject them to other actions. This was a tremendous shift away from Eisenhower, and CIA had adopted an intense culture of intolerance for non-aligned and neutralist governments. In my opinion this is why CIA and the military assassinated him. When Johnson became President he reverted immediately to the Eisenhower practice of overthrowing non-aligned regimes and replacing them with far right governments which were usually criminal in nature but agreed to support the CIA's goals of suppressing any neutralist or socialist elements in their mists. This brought about a strange situation for many CIA officers, as many were highly-educated socialists themselves who found themselves assassinating and torturing fellow socialists pretty much everywhere in the third world. CIA policy was to tolerate only far- right, conservative, traditionalist regimes which of course were very unpopular and therefore had to maintain themselves in power by terrorizing constitutionalists, democrats, socialists and others. The Norwegians and Germans and Dutch could of course have socialist governments but the Brazilians and Indonesians could not.
Throughout 1963 Diem's position became weaker and more hopeless, and American leaders ignored that his unpopularity was because of his brutality [which they denied to all] and therefore settled upon the theory that he was unpopular because of heavy-handedness toward the Buddhists, which did actually lead to a particular crisis. American leaders settled on the idea the Vietnamese military, whose officers were Buddhists rather than Catholic, were the answer. Therefore the White House and State Department sponsored a coup against Diem. Within the US military and CIA there was division however, as many US military officers and CIA personnel had personally loyal relationships with the Diem brothers and could not conscious such a betrayl against them. As it was however those within the US military and CIA which were willing to cut the Diem's throats proceeded with the coup advocates in State and the White House. The result was that the Diem brothers were murdered and a military Junta seized power. In the streets of south Vietnamese cities the public celebrated as they knew it was only the Diems and their zealous brutality explained the terror state which had been imposed upon them.
As these things happen there wasn't any understanding beforehand between anyone in the US government and the coup leaders as to what they would actually do when they took power. Once they did they of course did what anyone would do in their situation when faced with an unconquerable insurgency - they told the Americans they intended to negotiate with the communists and seek an end to the fighting, hopefully a neutralist solution could be found. At that time the French abruptly sought to intervene by advancing themselves as the offices by which a neutralist solution could be reached which might head off a total war. This of course was extremely unwelcome to the Americans. The new Junta leaders by informing the Americans that they intended to prevent a war and seek neutralism sealed their fate. CIA and the US military immediately set in motion plans to replace that government also, and of course even those new Junta members also weren't crazy enough to seek what the US wanted - a military solution only in which the communists would be defeated. So once again the US put together yet another coup, and finally everyone left in the south Vietnamese military got the message that the only option the US would tolerate was a war and anyone in a south Vietnamese government seeking compromise would be disposed of. That's how the Vietnam war happened. It happened only because the US after Kennedy insisted that it happened, and this was completely against the wishes of the officers of the south Vietnamese military. The final government of Thu and Nugyen Cao Key knew that if they didn't continue with the war that they would be disposed of or even killed by the Americans.
So did the American strategy work? Of course not. The US leadership who were aware that 90% of the public were loyal communists never told the American public or soldiers serving in the US military that this was the case. Instead Johnson and the Pentagon and CIA leadership fabricated the story that south Vietnam wanted to be capitalist and was being assaulted from north Vietnam in an effort to turn them communist by force, such as what actually happened in Korea. Not knowing any different millions of American servicemen went to Vietnam thinking that the Viet Cong were terrorizing the villages into submission to communism when that was the opposite of the truth. In fact the communists had a parallel government operating everywhere in the countryside with the villagers, who were hoping the south Vietnamese Junta in Siagon and their rampaging soldiers and American allies would all die and go to hell. That was the situation. Was it any wonder when American soldiers would be distressed when they found indications in the villages that people there were supporting the communists and lying to the contrary? To American soldiers who had been brainwashed into believing that the Viet Cong were a minority of terrorist evildoers what were they to think when they would run across ordinary Vietnamese who unmistakably supported them?
As the war continued through the Johnson Presidency there was no progress in meeting any of the Americans goals, and all this was contrary to what the public was told. As Americans are when they're told something will work and it clearly doesn't they start to become skeptical, about the tools if not the goals. The costs and the apparent unimportance of the distant place caused support to collapse in the same way it did in Korea. As support waned Johnson continued to repeat the false narrative that we were coming to the aid of an embattled small ally when in fact that was the opposite of what was going on.
Two thing did happen however which gave the US some success. One was the US sponsored coup in 1965 in Indonesia next door in which the neutralist President Sukarno was finally ousted, a long-time CIA goal. The military Junta which succeeded Sukarno wasn't the relatively benign kind found in south Vietnam however. The Indonesians being as they are they have never been bothered by mass killing, and so the solution their Junta chose, along with CIA and the White House and State Department, was to simply kill anyone either in their communist party or anyone who might be. The result was that easily over a million villagers and others were slaughtered by the military and their death squads of criminal convicts and others. This destroyed any chance of Indonesia ever becoming even neutralist any time in the future.
The other factor of success was the CIA's programs of rooting out and killing the communists running their parallel government in the countryside. The "Phoenix" program and many other such efforts employed irregulars, criminals and others to torture out of people the names of communist government members, who were then tortured and killed. This tactic not only decimated the communist "infrastructure" but also terrorized everyone else from participating, and so it was the old and reliable tactic of mere terror which pretty much destroyed the communist government in the south. This may have "pacified" the south in one manner, but it didn't mean that the military dimension was solved. Bands of Viet Cong fighters still were able to conduct ambushes and set mines and traps which were the cause of most American casualties. In addition north Vietnamese regular army troops also began fighting in the south, and it was they who also brought about large numbers of American casualties such as at the seige at Khe Song near the border with north Vietnam.
A good place to start in understanding the diabolical nature of the American government, and how easily misled it's media and opinion leaders are, is to study the American war in Vietnam. Today the American public knows the war was lost, and that many at the time thought that the war was "wrong," though they can't clearly articulate why it was less noble than other American wars.
The simple truth is that the architects of the American intervention in Vietnam prosecuted the war with utter ruthlessness in a near genocidal way to prevent the region from falling into communist hands. And in order to do so they had to fabricate a totally untrue narrative to get the public and their opinion leaders to support the whole mess. So lets look at what actually happened and how those who brought it about sold it to the public by creating a phony narrative.
Vietnam was a feudal society in which most people lived a simple farmers, working land owned by absentee owners living lavish lives in the cities. For these surfs there was no hope of any improvement whatsoever...none, and for them the ideology of communism was irresistible. Once exposed to communist ideas pretty much every person in the rural villages wanted to become a communist, but not because they wanted the collectivism of Stalinist Russia or China. What they wanted was to throw off the oppression of the aristocratic landlords and own the land themselves - they wanted to be entrepreneurs.
That is the simple reason why pretty much all patriotic Vietnamese became communists, and therefore it was the communist Viet Mihn which fought with fierce dedication to throw out the French by 1954. And it didn't hurt that the ruthless French imperial exploitation there [with collaborating Vietnamese aristocrats and bourgeousee] fit precisely the Marxist explaination of imperial capitalist exploitation.
Of all the places on earth Vietnam was the one where conditions made 90% of the population embrace Marxism pure and simple for their own perceived interests of national self-determination and economic freedom and opportunity. It was no wonder that Ho Chi Min himself admired these traits so greatly in the American myth that when he first established the independent Vietnamese government after the defeat of the Japanese there in 1945 that his first public speech was to repeat the American Declaration of Independence.
However his independent Vietnamese state didn't last long, as the US and other powers grudgingly supported the return of the imperial French to the place, which also included Laos and Cambodia. Thereafter the US supported the French in their hopeless effort to beat back the total mobilized efforts of the entire southeast Asian population against them. The French left in 1954 in an agreement settled upon in Geneva, the Geneva Peace Conference, and there was to have been popular elections in the south to determine what party would rule there and if they would join with the communist north under Ho Chi Min.
Well....to anyone at all who knew the public mood in the south that was a given - the communists in the south were about 90% of the population. The few people who weren't communists were the landed aristocrats and catholics who were anti-communist for religious reasons. To make thing more dramatic C.I.A. conducted a psychological warfare program of black propaganda to scare the catholics living in the north that their new communist leaders would butcher them - causing them all to flee for their lives to the south. In actually the north did experience a brief reign of terror. Zealous communists in the rural areas were savage towards anyone owning land, and they cooked up phony charges of criminality against landowners everywhere in which they were brutally killed. That's par for the course anywhere communism was conducted.
But as for the south the US installed a catholic zealot as President, No Din Diem, who with his brother Nu turned the south into a terror state in which all known communist party members were tortured to death or otherwise murdered. The purpose was to frighten everyone from becoming communist, however with nothing much to lose this strategy didn't go very far. The Diem brothers found that no amount of torture and killing was working. The communists were looking forward to winning at the election of 1956 determined by the Geneva Agreement, so the US and Diem cancelled the elections. With no other option for simple survival the communists reluctantly resorted to armed revolution. When the revolution started in the south the communists there had no support from the north. The communists in the south had to obtain their own weapons, and often villages formed their own communist governments without any direction or much support from other communists anywhere. It's hard for Americans steeped in their own war propaganda to understand but it was the villagers themselves who wanted to become communists because it was their only hope of improvement - they were not coerced or terrorized into supporting communist fighters of the south, the Viet Cong, or National Liberation Front as they called themselves. Nor is it true that the people in the villages were caught between the NLF and the anti-communist government of Diem, or those which followed after his demise in the American-sponsored coup of 1963. The villagers were not non-political simple farmers who just wanted to be left alone. They were dedicated and loyal communists pretty much to a man, or woman or child.
By 1963 the Diem brothers clearly realized that nothing they could do would prevent a communist victory. They faced the same near-universal public contempt that the public directed against the French, and it was clearly a hopeless situation. Then the outlook of north Vietnam changed regarding the communists in the south, who began receiving material support from the north. Despite the Diem's efforts at controlling the countryside by corralling villagers into "hamlets," [fenced camps] armed conflict escalated everywhere outside of the cities. Diem's military of conscript and criminal soldiers and assassins had no motivation to fight [except for the money the convicts were paid for their services] so the communists prevailed in every action.
With the death of President Kennedy those in the military and intl agencies who favored that the US take over the war had no barriers to their goals. Kennedy's doctrine in the third world was to deny the communist powers these countries by seeking neutralist solutions. To Kennedy as long as places like Brazil, Indonesia and India were not puppets of the Russians or Chinese he would not disturb or intervene to overthrow their governments or subject them to other actions. This was a tremendous shift away from Eisenhower, and CIA had adopted an intense culture of intolerance for non-aligned and neutralist governments. In my opinion this is why CIA and the military assassinated him. When Johnson became President he reverted immediately to the Eisenhower practice of overthrowing non-aligned regimes and replacing them with far right governments which were usually criminal in nature but agreed to support the CIA's goals of suppressing any neutralist or socialist elements in their mists. This brought about a strange situation for many CIA officers, as many were highly-educated socialists themselves who found themselves assassinating and torturing fellow socialists pretty much everywhere in the third world. CIA policy was to tolerate only far- right, conservative, traditionalist regimes which of course were very unpopular and therefore had to maintain themselves in power by terrorizing constitutionalists, democrats, socialists and others. The Norwegians and Germans and Dutch could of course have socialist governments but the Brazilians and Indonesians could not.
Throughout 1963 Diem's position became weaker and more hopeless, and American leaders ignored that his unpopularity was because of his brutality [which they denied to all] and therefore settled upon the theory that he was unpopular because of heavy-handedness toward the Buddhists, which did actually lead to a particular crisis. American leaders settled on the idea the Vietnamese military, whose officers were Buddhists rather than Catholic, were the answer. Therefore the White House and State Department sponsored a coup against Diem. Within the US military and CIA there was division however, as many US military officers and CIA personnel had personally loyal relationships with the Diem brothers and could not conscious such a betrayl against them. As it was however those within the US military and CIA which were willing to cut the Diem's throats proceeded with the coup advocates in State and the White House. The result was that the Diem brothers were murdered and a military Junta seized power. In the streets of south Vietnamese cities the public celebrated as they knew it was only the Diems and their zealous brutality explained the terror state which had been imposed upon them.
As these things happen there wasn't any understanding beforehand between anyone in the US government and the coup leaders as to what they would actually do when they took power. Once they did they of course did what anyone would do in their situation when faced with an unconquerable insurgency - they told the Americans they intended to negotiate with the communists and seek an end to the fighting, hopefully a neutralist solution could be found. At that time the French abruptly sought to intervene by advancing themselves as the offices by which a neutralist solution could be reached which might head off a total war. This of course was extremely unwelcome to the Americans. The new Junta leaders by informing the Americans that they intended to prevent a war and seek neutralism sealed their fate. CIA and the US military immediately set in motion plans to replace that government also, and of course even those new Junta members also weren't crazy enough to seek what the US wanted - a military solution only in which the communists would be defeated. So once again the US put together yet another coup, and finally everyone left in the south Vietnamese military got the message that the only option the US would tolerate was a war and anyone in a south Vietnamese government seeking compromise would be disposed of. That's how the Vietnam war happened. It happened only because the US after Kennedy insisted that it happened, and this was completely against the wishes of the officers of the south Vietnamese military. The final government of Thu and Nugyen Cao Key knew that if they didn't continue with the war that they would be disposed of or even killed by the Americans.
So did the American strategy work? Of course not. The US leadership who were aware that 90% of the public were loyal communists never told the American public or soldiers serving in the US military that this was the case. Instead Johnson and the Pentagon and CIA leadership fabricated the story that south Vietnam wanted to be capitalist and was being assaulted from north Vietnam in an effort to turn them communist by force, such as what actually happened in Korea. Not knowing any different millions of American servicemen went to Vietnam thinking that the Viet Cong were terrorizing the villages into submission to communism when that was the opposite of the truth. In fact the communists had a parallel government operating everywhere in the countryside with the villagers, who were hoping the south Vietnamese Junta in Siagon and their rampaging soldiers and American allies would all die and go to hell. That was the situation. Was it any wonder when American soldiers would be distressed when they found indications in the villages that people there were supporting the communists and lying to the contrary? To American soldiers who had been brainwashed into believing that the Viet Cong were a minority of terrorist evildoers what were they to think when they would run across ordinary Vietnamese who unmistakably supported them?
As the war continued through the Johnson Presidency there was no progress in meeting any of the Americans goals, and all this was contrary to what the public was told. As Americans are when they're told something will work and it clearly doesn't they start to become skeptical, about the tools if not the goals. The costs and the apparent unimportance of the distant place caused support to collapse in the same way it did in Korea. As support waned Johnson continued to repeat the false narrative that we were coming to the aid of an embattled small ally when in fact that was the opposite of what was going on.
Two thing did happen however which gave the US some success. One was the US sponsored coup in 1965 in Indonesia next door in which the neutralist President Sukarno was finally ousted, a long-time CIA goal. The military Junta which succeeded Sukarno wasn't the relatively benign kind found in south Vietnam however. The Indonesians being as they are they have never been bothered by mass killing, and so the solution their Junta chose, along with CIA and the White House and State Department, was to simply kill anyone either in their communist party or anyone who might be. The result was that easily over a million villagers and others were slaughtered by the military and their death squads of criminal convicts and others. This destroyed any chance of Indonesia ever becoming even neutralist any time in the future.
The other factor of success was the CIA's programs of rooting out and killing the communists running their parallel government in the countryside. The "Phoenix" program and many other such efforts employed irregulars, criminals and others to torture out of people the names of communist government members, who were then tortured and killed. This tactic not only decimated the communist "infrastructure" but also terrorized everyone else from participating, and so it was the old and reliable tactic of mere terror which pretty much destroyed the communist government in the south. This may have "pacified" the south in one manner, but it didn't mean that the military dimension was solved. Bands of Viet Cong fighters still were able to conduct ambushes and set mines and traps which were the cause of most American casualties. In addition north Vietnamese regular army troops also began fighting in the south, and it was they who also brought about large numbers of American casualties such as at the seige at Khe Song near the border with north Vietnam.
Friday, March 7, 2014
The Folly of "Statecraft"
Politicians and bureaucrats involved in national security are all incompetents. They are all captives to institutional cultures in which all rationality is suppressed. They regard themselves has possessing competence when in fact all they have is an indoctrination in the false assumptions of their national and institutional myths. National security figures and bureaucrats are without rationality, intelligence or reason. They almost always behave irrationally, emotionally, and without any understanding at all. In the modern age at least this is how all wars have come about. Yet if you listen to historians and the media it is all a different story. If you listen to politicians and pundits they laud the "foreign affairs competence" of this person or that, as if any of them could possibly know why foreign leaders do what they do, or even cared. What such people really mean is that the person mentioned has familiarized himself with the names of foreign leaders and the list of issues they are involved with, and nothing more.
The example I like to use of total institutional irrationality is that of the Vietnam war. The Vietnam war was bitterly fought by Americans. They sacrificed life, limb and treasure in a titanic struggle.
Yet in the Spring of 1975 when the communists finally overthrew the pro-western government of South Vietnam what was the result for Americans? The simple truth is that this outcome didn't bring any harm to any American. Not a single American was harmed whatsoever when South Vietnam fell to communism. Furthermore American prestige and national commitment were not harmed either. No one in Europe questioned the will of America to defend them against the prospect of a Soviet attack. And no one in China or the USSR believed that they'd achieved any gain against the United States.
So given this outcome what was it all about? Why then were so many Americans told that if they didn't go to Vietnam and fight and kill and die or be maimed that something horrible would happen to them and their countrymen? Why were these Americans told that they, and their country, had no alternative than to fight? Why were they all so terribly, obviously wrong about the prospect of communist victory there? Why couldn't they see that if the communists prevailed in South Vietnam that no one in the U.S. would be harmed in the least? Wasn't this obvious? Why couldn't any one of these leaders simply imagine, in their minds, what would actually happen if the communists rolled into the capital of South Vietnam, as they eventually did in 1975? Why was it so difficult to face that all their assumptions of a catastrophy for America was all exaggeration, all hysteria?
The answer is that it was actually obvious to many, and should have been obvious to everyone. But it was the opposite of obvious to everyone in the national security institutions as well as the majority of politicians and the public. They were blind to the simple facts, and instead were willing and enthusiastic dupes of a wildly exaggerated and overblown, totally implausible set of perposterous myths.
Note that I said that they were "willing" and "enthusiastic." This is because they were led purely by EMOTION.
This is typical of all national security evaluations and assumptions. They are almost always exaggerations, at least when dealing with existing threats for which they have been tasked to deal with. If a matter is not presently regarded as a threat they've been tasked to manage then it's always overlooked, marginalized and disregarded, such as Osama bin-Laden was before 9-11. However once he was branded as the culprit of that event then everything having to do with any possible similar actors were treated with extreme paranoia, exaggeration, and hysteria. The only thing that determines this is that the bureaucracy is either tasked with the issue as a threat or it isn't. The fact that it is tasked will ensure that all views and evaluations will thereby be tailored to fit the institutional and career requirements that the mission is of highest urgency and must therefore warrant tremendous resources. In short, all perceptions are distorted to fit what the careers of those making their living want there to be, and rationality doesn't enter into it.
And added onto institutional interests are the cultural and national myths about threats from outsiders, and all this is compounded by media, which never reports anything which would contradict what the public wants to hear. Even scholars fall in line completely with such historical myths about the evils of prior foes or present devils abroad. Historians are typically do not stray from the narratives popular culture has adopted at any time. Historians don't even have a theoretical framework for understanding why actors do what they do in foreign affairs. They are genuinely at sea when it comes to interpreting what any actor does in foreign affairs.
Politicians and bureaucrats involved in national security are all incompetents. They are all captives to institutional cultures in which all rationality is suppressed. They regard themselves has possessing competence when in fact all they have is an indoctrination in the false assumptions of their national and institutional myths. National security figures and bureaucrats are without rationality, intelligence or reason. They almost always behave irrationally, emotionally, and without any understanding at all. In the modern age at least this is how all wars have come about. Yet if you listen to historians and the media it is all a different story. If you listen to politicians and pundits they laud the "foreign affairs competence" of this person or that, as if any of them could possibly know why foreign leaders do what they do, or even cared. What such people really mean is that the person mentioned has familiarized himself with the names of foreign leaders and the list of issues they are involved with, and nothing more.
The example I like to use of total institutional irrationality is that of the Vietnam war. The Vietnam war was bitterly fought by Americans. They sacrificed life, limb and treasure in a titanic struggle.
Yet in the Spring of 1975 when the communists finally overthrew the pro-western government of South Vietnam what was the result for Americans? The simple truth is that this outcome didn't bring any harm to any American. Not a single American was harmed whatsoever when South Vietnam fell to communism. Furthermore American prestige and national commitment were not harmed either. No one in Europe questioned the will of America to defend them against the prospect of a Soviet attack. And no one in China or the USSR believed that they'd achieved any gain against the United States.
So given this outcome what was it all about? Why then were so many Americans told that if they didn't go to Vietnam and fight and kill and die or be maimed that something horrible would happen to them and their countrymen? Why were these Americans told that they, and their country, had no alternative than to fight? Why were they all so terribly, obviously wrong about the prospect of communist victory there? Why couldn't they see that if the communists prevailed in South Vietnam that no one in the U.S. would be harmed in the least? Wasn't this obvious? Why couldn't any one of these leaders simply imagine, in their minds, what would actually happen if the communists rolled into the capital of South Vietnam, as they eventually did in 1975? Why was it so difficult to face that all their assumptions of a catastrophy for America was all exaggeration, all hysteria?
The answer is that it was actually obvious to many, and should have been obvious to everyone. But it was the opposite of obvious to everyone in the national security institutions as well as the majority of politicians and the public. They were blind to the simple facts, and instead were willing and enthusiastic dupes of a wildly exaggerated and overblown, totally implausible set of perposterous myths.
Note that I said that they were "willing" and "enthusiastic." This is because they were led purely by EMOTION.
This is typical of all national security evaluations and assumptions. They are almost always exaggerations, at least when dealing with existing threats for which they have been tasked to deal with. If a matter is not presently regarded as a threat they've been tasked to manage then it's always overlooked, marginalized and disregarded, such as Osama bin-Laden was before 9-11. However once he was branded as the culprit of that event then everything having to do with any possible similar actors were treated with extreme paranoia, exaggeration, and hysteria. The only thing that determines this is that the bureaucracy is either tasked with the issue as a threat or it isn't. The fact that it is tasked will ensure that all views and evaluations will thereby be tailored to fit the institutional and career requirements that the mission is of highest urgency and must therefore warrant tremendous resources. In short, all perceptions are distorted to fit what the careers of those making their living want there to be, and rationality doesn't enter into it.
And added onto institutional interests are the cultural and national myths about threats from outsiders, and all this is compounded by media, which never reports anything which would contradict what the public wants to hear. Even scholars fall in line completely with such historical myths about the evils of prior foes or present devils abroad. Historians are typically do not stray from the narratives popular culture has adopted at any time. Historians don't even have a theoretical framework for understanding why actors do what they do in foreign affairs. They are genuinely at sea when it comes to interpreting what any actor does in foreign affairs.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)