RE: Iraq: the case for decisive action

From: Dickey, Michael F (michael_f_dickey@groton.pfizer.com)
Date: Wed Jan 22 2003 - 14:22:50 MST


-----Original Message-----
From: Samantha Atkins [mailto:samantha@objectent.com]

"Do you think that you are inside of my head, "sir"? Do you believe for a
moment that you understand the deep abhorrence I felt from watching the
horror of Vietnam, what it did to this country or those who came back
mangled in body, mind or spirit many of whom I knew and dealt with
personally?"

I notice you say nothing of *that* country, only this country and these
people. What of the 50,000 North Vietnamese peasants killed? The 1 million
South Vietnamese? The 2-3 million cambodians? More civilians and
combatants were killed in Korea than in Vietnam, wheres the outcry over
that?

  ---------------------

Perhaps of all countries, democide in Vietnam and by Vietnamese is most
difficult to unravel and assess. It is mixed in with six wars spanning 43
years (the Indochina War, Vietnam War, Cambodian War, subsequent guerrilla
war in Cambodia, guerrilla war in Laos, and Sino-Vietnamese War), one of
them involving the United States; a near twenty-one year formal division of
the country into two sovereign North and South parts; the full communization
of the North; occupation of neighboring countries by both North and South;
defeat, absorption, and communization of the South; and the massive flight
by sea of Vietnamese. As best as I can determine, through all this close to
3,800,000 Vietnamese lost their lives from political violence, or near one
out of every ten men, women, and children.1 Of these, about 1,250,000, or
near a third of those killed, were murdered.

>From - http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM

The communist regime of North Vietnam - killed 1,700,000 innocent human
beings - men, women and children - by mass executions, death camps, and the
deaths of refugees (boat people) trying to escape

Vietnamese Death Toll (excluding war dead): Total 1945-1987 1,813,000
Democide by (North) Vietnam: Total 1945-1987 1,669,000
Domestic 1945-1987: 944,000
Foreign 1945-1987: 725,000
In South Vietnam 1954-1975: 164,000
In Cambodia 970-1987: 461,000
In Laos 1975-1987: 87,000
(Figures from Rummel

>From - http://vc-crimes.virtualave.net/tacs-pg8.htm

Democide in Vietnam, 1.7 million people killed

The Vietnamese communists had a simple plan for establishing themselves in
power: kill anyone who opposed them. They implemented this plan in 1945 and
have continued using it to this day.

Apart from the normal, workaday murder of fellow communists, the Viet Minh
slaughtered non-communist politicians and sympathizers by the thousands,
including in this class- and therefore murdering as well- the friends,
family members, and children of their political enemies.
This killing continued with the establishment of communist North Vietnam in
1954, while the new power of state allowed for additional forms of murder as
well.

The class of landlords was targeted. When it was discovered that this class
did not exist in any meaningful sense, the communists redefined "landlord"
to mean anyone with an above average income (say, an extra cow), or anyone
who once upon a time had an above average income, or anyone whose ancestors
had had an above average income. The lower class peasants were instructed to
choose which of their fellow villagers fell into this category, and kill
them. The central government laid down a death quota- 5 percent of the
population of each village were to be killed. From 1953-1956, an estimated
150,000 people were killed in this manner. Peasant rebellions that followed
these extermination campaigns were suppressed, at the cost of an additional
10,000 lives.

In 1957, the communists began to supplement the domestic death toll with an
active campaign of murder in the South. This campaign was highly selective,
being directed against those individuals who were capable of mobilizing
opposition to the communists. This could include, not just the outspoken
anti-communists, but anyone who exhibited skill or competence, whether a
government official or a civilian. In the countryside, village leaders were
murdered, disrupting the traditional social structure. Communist guerillas
listened in on the classrooms, and when they found teachers who were not
sufficiently sympathetic, killed them too.

In this way, from 1957 into the early 1960s, the communists denuded South
Vietnam of those individuals who could provide effective leadership, who
could forge resistance among the people, or who could inoculate the children
against communist lies and propaganda. The number of people killed in this
campaign has been estimated at around six to seven thousand. This is a
comparatively small number, but it was precisely those few thousand who
could cause the communists the most trouble. To the communist,
egalitarianism does not mean everyone is equal. It means those who are
superior can be rounded up and shot. The murder campaign put this theory
into practice.

In America, President Kennedy was very clear about America's role in Vietnam
- assist the South Vietnamese in their war, without fighting it for them. In
1964 President Johnson reversed this policy. Americans have been very
creative in explaining this change, but the most compelling reason may have
been the success of the North Vietnamese murder campaign. The South
Vietnamese could not fight their own war- they no longer had the able
officials and competent leaders to do so, this apart from the fact that
their top level government was totally unstable. The South was heading
towards collapse. Without direct American intervention, Vietnam would fall,
and the communists, enthused by the success of their murder campaign, could
very well have repeated it elsewhere. But instead, the murder campaign led
to a massive American invasion.

This did not mean the campaign came to an end. On the contrary, it continued
with greater force than before. In the years of direct American involvement
in the war, the South Vietnamese singled out and murdered because of their
anti-communism, their association with anti-communists (as friends or
family), or simply because of their competence and ability, numbered in the
tens of thousands.
Alongside this assassination campaign was a more general terror campaign. An
entire village might be massacred, breeding fear in other villages. Roads
used by the civilian population would be mined. Buses would be ambushed with
machine guns and mortar fire, residential neighborhhods were shelled, for no
other purpose than to kill innocent civilians. Refugee camps were attacked
as a matter of policy.
All told, through assassination, terrorism, and massacre of civilians and
prisoners of war, the communists killed an estimated 164,000 non-combatants
in South Vietnam.

The killing did not end with the the surrender of the South in 1975. War and
rebellion continued in Vietnam, costing an estimated 160,000 lives. Vietnam
was invaded by both Cambodia and China, costing tens of thousands of lives.
In turn, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and Laos. The total killed in battle is
estimated at 149,000. A staggering 3 million people may have been killed in
foreign democide, including those killed by Vietnamese puppet regimes.

Vietnamese concentration camps, called "re-education camps," left perhaps
95,000 people dead. Deportations to "new economic zones" left some 48,000
people dead. The number of people simply rounded up and shot for whatever
reason has been estimated at 100,000, with much higher estimates coming from
various sources.

Perhaps the best way to gauge the true nature of the murderous peace in
Vietnam is the vast number of people who, having tolerated decades of war,
risked their lives to flee the unmitigated brutality of communist rule. The
"boat people," refugees who attempted to escape by sea, numbered in the
millions. An estimated 500,000 of these people drowned trying to escape.

Vietnamese Death Toll (excluding war dead): Total 1945-1987 1,813,000
Democide by (North) Vietnam: Total 1945-1987 1,669,000
Domestic 1945-1987: 944,000
Foreign 1945-1987: 725,000
In South Vietnam 1954-1975: 164,000
In Cambodia 970-1987: 461,000
In Laos 1975-1987: 87,000
(Figures from Rummel)

Ho Chi Minh

Ho Chi Minh, the long-lived dictator of North Vietnam, was a loyal Stalinist
throughout his life. He attended the founding congress of the French
Communist Party in 1920, acquired a revolutionary education in Moscow during
the early 20's, and served as a Comintern advisor in China until 1927.

During World War II, he fought the Japanese in China and in Vietnam,
proclaiming himself leader of a provisional government in 1945. His
following at this stage was still small, but over the course of a nine-year
guerrilla war against the French, Ho crushed internal opposition in order to
make himself the Stalin of Vietnam:

As the Viet Minh struggled against the French, they also fought a vicious
hidden war against their noncommunist nationalist competitors. They
assassinated, executed, and massacred whole groups of nationalists,
including relatives, friends, women, and children.
Nationalists were not the only victims: "class enemies" were also
"punished," and communist ranks were purified of Trotskyites and others who
deviated from accepted scripture. Thousands among the most educated and
brightest Vietnamese were wiped out in the years 1945 to 1947 that it took
the communists to firmly establish their power. (R.J. Rummel, Death By
Government)

After French defeat, Ho followed standard Communist operating procedure.
First, kill off peasant leaders and better-off peasants to decapitate future
peasant resistance; then forced collectivization can proceed unhindered.
Slave labor camps sprang up, as did show trials. By all accounts several
hundred thousand people perished during the 1953-1956 period. The Geneva
Agreements divided Vietnam into the northern region held by Ho, and the
southern region outside of Communist control. The people of Vietnam voted
with their feet.
Tallies for 1953-56 speak volumes: about 1 million northerners chose to flee
south, while only one-tenth as many southerners chose to flee north.

Ho began guerrilla war against South Vietnam almost immediately. The war
escalated quickly; with South Vietnam close to defeat in 1964, the United
States joined in the war to prop up the failing government of South Vietnam.
This delayed the North's victory for about ten years. Throughout the war,
both North and South Vietnam engaged in large-scale killing of civilians.
The United States did so as well, although it appears that more effort was
made to avoid civilian targets than in World War II.

Ho was dead of old age by the time Communist forces triumphed in 1975, but
the post-war atrocities were in his Stalinist tradition. Slave labor plus
brain- washing yielded the infamous "re-education camps" to which
anti-Communists, dissidents, former civil servants of South Vietnam,
prostitutes, and others were condemned. The death rate of the hundreds of
thousands of inmates in these camps was high. Fear of these camps led to the
exodus of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese of makeshift boats; many of
these refugees perished at sea. Even Vietnamese who escaped the re-education
camps were often deported to the country for milder slave labor in the "new
economic zones." The post-war executions, concentration camps, and
deportations probably produced several hundred thousand additional deaths.
A final major atrocity of the Vietnamese Communists began in 1979. The Khmer
Rouge, a Cambodian Communist faction, had been in power since 1975.
Relations between the Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge were however
hostile. Vietnam invaded and quickly defeated Cambodia in 1979, revealing to
the world the ghastly killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. Now that the
Vietnamese were in charge, however, mass murder was merely curtailed rather
than abolished. The Vietnamese puppet ruler, Heng Samrin, was himself merely
a dissident member of the Khmer Rouge, so what else could be expected?
Supported by Vietnamese troops, the Samrin regime exterminated perhaps an
additional half million Cambodians.

The following is Uwe Siemon-Netto's mea culpa to the English magazine
Encounter,1979:

"Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German
publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over
there. Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the
Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed
in North Vietnam. [As Nguyen Manh Tuong stated at the 1956 National Congress
in Hanoi: 'It is better to kill 10 innocent people then let one enemy
escape.'] We knew that after the division of the country nearly 1 million
North Vietnamese had fled to the South.

"Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women and
children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many
of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw [take note, Mr Patterson]
the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the
Vietnamese New Year. Why, for Heavens sake, did we not report these
expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively
as of the Mai Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were
definitely not part of the U.S. policy in Viet Nam?

"What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in
power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and
foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist
victory would result in a massacre? Why did we ignore the fact that the man
responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was - and
still is - one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi? What made us think
that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South
Vietnamese? What compelled, for example, Anthony Lewis shortly after the
fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and wri'e, "so much for the
talk of a massacre?' True, no Cambodian-style massacre took place in
Vietnam. It's just that Hanoi coolly drives its ethnic Chinese opponents
into the sea. That's what Nasser threatened to do to the Israelis, no
massacre intended, of course.

"Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of
thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile
reception accorded to those who survive? Did we not turn public opinion
against them, portraying them, as one singularly ignoble cartoon did in the
United States, as a bunch of pimps, whores, war profiteers, corrupt generals
or, at best, outright reactionaries?

"Considering that today's Vietnam tragedy may have a lot to do with the way
we reported yesterday's Vietnam tragedy; considering that we journalists
might have our fair share of guilt for the inhuman way the world treats
those who are being expelled by an inhuman regime which some of us had
pictured as heroic, I think at least a little humility would be in order for
us old Viet Nam hands, Mr Lewis included. And if I did not strongly believe
in everybody's right of free expression at any time, I would even admonish
him to keep quiet about Indo-China, at least for a while".

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