John Marciano, The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? (2016) — a book review

07 October 2016

A concisely useful — arguably one-sided — indictment of American foreign policy

John Marciano's 160 page — The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? (Monthly Review Press, 2016) — highlights how the American Establishment's actions historically belie its claimed nobility of purpose.

American War proceeds from America's pilgrim origin through the present. The core of the book is structured around examples of nefariousness drawn from the Vietnam War, where propaganda and disinformation were used to justify or conceal American imperialism that killed 3.8 million people. (The author makes it clear that there was no way for American troops to realize what their government was doing behind their backs.)

Even for those who disagree with his data and conclusions, American War provides an efficient framework with which to structure rebuttals. The book is a summarized argument, not a detailed proof. Its value lies in its bullet-like points.

That said . . .

Three stylistic negatives

Marciano's structural style is an example of what I have come to call — after reading lots of Noam Chomsky — Leftist Scattered Brain Syndrome:

Marciano skips around chronologically. Both within and from chapter to chapter.

He erratically repeats blurbs of evidence. It is as if he forgot what he had already written.

He also has difficulty coming up section headings that accurately label the general character of the arguments that follow.

Conservatives and realists may object to Marciano's perspective

We cannot possibly be all that bad, they will think. And Marciano depends too much on "leftist" sources.

The latter rebuke is accurate. But it overlooks the pertinent matter of whether those "lefty" materials are factually or interpretationally wrong.

Marciano suggests that factual ignorance explains our inability to see American actions as they were, as opposed to the way we wish they had been. Government (he demonstrates) conceals truth. And it often substitutes made-up facts for real ones. In the absence of an accurate History, we know little. Marciano's goal is to correct the record.

American War in Vietnam's value lies in its short examples of how Government and Corporatism both lied about their motives and doings in Vietnam.

Readers may learn a few things that they had not known before. Certainly I did. And I am not ignorant when it comes to the Vietnam War and American history.

On the other hand, Professor Marciano does not offer competing explanations or interpretations. His abbreviated treatment of the Gulf of Tonkin "Incidents" is, for example, too incomplete to be fully persuasive.

Marciano's theme — our "nobility" of purpose is bogus

He begins this way:

In May 2012, President Barack Obama and the Pentagon announced a Commemoration of the Vietnam War to continue through 2025 . . . .

Obama claimed that Americans "hate" war. "When we fight, we do so to protect ourselves because it's necessary."

The most fundamental lesson is that the war in Vietnam was fought on behalf of "the ideals we hold dear as Americans." Obama and the Vietnam Commemoration embrace the view put forth by President Ronald Reagan in 1980: "It is time we recognized that ours, in truth, was a Noble Cause."

Americans are asked to believe that government officials who supported the American war as a Noble Cause — and lied about it for decades — are now going to set them "straight" about what happened and why.

The essential message of the dominant view remains the same: U.S. wars are just and honorable, fought for a Noble Cause, the essence of which is the belief that the United States is "a unique force for good in the world . . . .."

The American War challenges this dominant view.

The conqueror's mindset that led to Vietnam, the author says, was formed early on

He quotes Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

"U.S. history cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples." (at page 26)

And David Stannard:

"[B]etween 97 and 99 percent of North America's native peoples were killed . The death rate for the Creeks, Seminoles, and Cherokee was equal to that of Jews in Germany, Hungary, and Romania between 1939 and 1945." (at pages 28-29)

Of course, just killing off Native Americans was not enough for our family of genocidal imperialists. A mindset is difficult to change:

Alongside the imperial destruction of Native American nations, came economic, political, and military aggression against Latin America that began very early in U.S. history and has continued to the present . . . . [including after World War II in] Haiti, Guatemala, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Chile, Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama — and Cuba.

Andrew Bacevich has exposed a central premise of the Noble Cause principle: "The restless search for a buck and the ruthless elimination of anyone — or anything — standing in the way . . . have been central to the American character."

A "noble" purpose in Vietnam? — probably not

Marciano does a good job of reviewing how the United States became involved in Vietnam. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy join Johnson in exhibiting arguably bad judgment.

Most pertinent to Marciano's "no nobility" theme, our leaders knew from the beginning that the communist movement in all of Vietnam was a nationalistic one. Vietnamese communists did not have aims beyond the nation's borders.

American leadership was probably also aware that the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China were not initially using Vietnamese communists as proxies against the United States. Both communist powers held Vietnamese communists in low regard.

In sum, from the beginning of our involvement in Vietnam, everything important that our leaders told us about the "domino" march of Vietnamese communism was a lie.

The author's most fundamental take is that killing 3.8 million Vietnamese, and intentionally destroying much of their biosphere, was not strategically or morally defensible.

Some of the details from this period are not widely known

I had not realized that American Merchant Mariners (on 4 ships) objected to transporting French colonial troops back to Vietnam after Japan surrendered. Nor had I known that the United States helped the French rearm surrendered Japanese troops so that the Japanese soldiers could help the French re-subjugate the Vietnamese. The Merchant Mariners thought that American-aided re-imposition of colonial authority over the Vietnamese was unfair.

The United States also knowingly violated the 1954 Geneva Accords that freed Vietnam from French rule. We made sure that the Accords' guaranteed free elections never took place. The U.S. knew, thanks to the CIA, that the communists would easily (and fairly) win those. Thus, the allegedly democracy-loving United States crushed the same impulse in Vietnam. It afterward killed 3.8 million people trying to make that nasty bit of hypocrisy stick.

As an example of equally ugly American-sponsored disinformation, Marciano offers evidence that the alleged communist-inspired massacre of 3,000 innocents in Hue was a lie concocted by American Government. This propaganda was intended to mask our massacre of women and children at My Lai, as well as to conceal the disproportionate American firepower-caused slaughter of much of Hue's population.

You see the power of summary?

Maricano's conclusions

Paraphrased:

The Vietnam War was imperialistic (page 126)

U.S. committed war crimes, including torture (page 127)

American government lied repeatedly (page 129)

War was deliberate, not a golden purpose gone unworkable (130)

Martin Luther King Jr was reviled for his opposition (page 130)

American corporate media did not oppose the war, just its tactics (page 132)

Concocted myths obscure the war's facts (page 136)

"Supporting the troops" runs out when real support is required (page 142)

My Lai and other similar incidents were massacres, not "incidents" (page 144)

Ecological destruction by Agent Orange is one legacy (page 146)

American government actually loves war (146)

Vietnamese resistance was morally legitimate (page 148)

Students and teachers should review their books for accuracy (page 149)

Marciano's broadest conclusion is (somewhat illogically) buried within the above list

He says that:

The Conflict Proves Again that "War Is the health of the State" — The American war in Vietnam and endless U.S. wars since confirm what antiwar intellectual Randolph Bourne asserted nearly one hundred years ago about the First World War:

War is the health of the State. it automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense . . . Other values such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed.

© 2016 John Marciano, The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? (Monthly Review Press, 2016) (at pages 147-148)(quoting Randolph Bourne, War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919, ed. Carl Resek (Hackett Publishing, 1999) (at page 71))

From this perspective, Government succeeds because it coerces. It creates illusionary foreign threats, so as to deepen its psychological grip on The Rabble at home.

However, with regard to this coercion issue, Marciano's moral argument omits a key conservative point. Warmongering imperialism may benefit a large enough segment of society to justify its transgressions in a utilitarian way. Big Dogs do what they do because they can. It is good to be a Big Dog.

Marciano's implied "ethical nation" argument is compelling, but only to those already inclined to take a moral view toward how government and leadership should act.

People grounded in existential anxiety, fear and arguably normal selfishness — and especially those lusting after profit derived from oppression-spreading — will not agree with him.

Given Professor Marciano's long list of deadly U.S. forays, we can probably conclude that the American ethos actually amounts to chanting the mantra, "It's good to gobble smaller dogs."

The American War in Vietnam is recommended — to those already inclined its argument's way

American War invites us to rethink our "moral nation" perspective.

Many people will (or would) resist its conclusions. This is not a criticism of them or the book. Summarized cogency cannot convince the skeptical because too many details are left out. Open-minded readers can, however, use the book's footnotes to track down more thorough sources.

American War's summarizing brevity is its strength.

PeteFree.com

John Marciano, The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? (2016) — a book review