Regarding what US GI's did to the soft spoken Buddhist Vietnamese, the United States of America dropped more than twice the amount of bombs on them that were dropped during all of the Second World War in Europe, Asia and Africa by all sides. This was after the US government first brought back in the formerly fascist French Colonial Army in US ships, and financially supported their attempt to recolonize Vietnam for eight bloody years. (Vichy France had turned its colony over to the Japanese during WWII.)
Martin Luther King cried out one year before his assassination, "They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps". So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs" So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers" They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords...What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? ...We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing -- in the crushing of the nation's unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men." [Beyond Vietnam, a blistering sermon by Martin Luther KIng, in New York,1967]
How many African American veterans would continue to wear proudly their I am Vietnam Veteran caps if they read or listened to the video of King's sermon Beyond Vietnam - a Time to Break Silence, which has been blacked out of all mention in US criminal mainstream media since 1967? [http://www.americanrhetoric.
The reason six US Presidents and US mainstream media gave for the many millions of deaths in French Indochina was seeking to prevent a communist government in Vietnam, but in spite of all the six or seven million deaths, maiming, and malformed births throughout Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, Vietnam has had ever since a communist government and is, presently, like the Chinese communist government, a favorite trading partner of the United States of America. How do the families of fallen American GIs who know this feel about their sons and daughters having given their lives for this abject failure of the US government and military in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, which took the lives of so many innocent millions and achieving nothing but death and destruction.
Regarding what American servicemen and women accomplished in Iraq, namely the taking of more than two million lives, almost a million of which were children, we recall a TV interview of President Bush, jokingly peering under his desk for the missing weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq was accused of having as a reason for invading that prosperous oil rich nation which provided good health care to its citizens, and presently is a destroyed country. No compensation, indemnity, reparations were ever given, not even an apology.
"Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child. Each of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of their screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were humiliated. The U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq - mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from small towns and poor urban neighborhoods - are victims just as much as the Iraqis of the same horrendous process, which asks them to die for a victory that will never be theirs" - Arundhati Roy - Source: Arundhati Roy, "Tide? Or Ivory Snow? Public Power in the Age of Empire," 8/24/04
Not this during this year, nor during most probably many years to follow, but in some year future year, when the economic power of the USA wanes and China and other formerly victimized nations supplant the USA as more influential, law will be restored, and because there is no statute of time limitations for murder and genocide, the USA, Europe and the UN Secretariat will be sued for compensation, indemnity and reparations in such mega colossal amounts that Wall Street investments in past illegal and unconstitutional use of US Armed Forces and CIA, will turn out to have been worse than just unprofitable.
"Make wars unprofitable and you make them impossible" - A. Philip Randolph, organized and led Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King gave his I have a Dream speech .
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