Click here to access article by Pete Dolack from Systemic Disorder. (Commentary modified at 4 PM Seattle time.)
Dolack reviews the war crimes the US committed in Vietnam and adjacent areas and the US policies and actions to stifle any democratic aspirations of the people in this area. All the while our criminal actions were going on, we Americans were lied to about our government's actions. I think it is useful to provide a little historical background in order to understand why the US ruling class pursued the Vietnam War and other such war crimes.
After WWII the war lords in the Pentagon, who are employees of the ruling capitalist class situated in Wall Street, saw the overwhelming and unrivaled power that the US possessed. Only one power clearly stood in the way--the Soviet Union which did not allow for capitalist operations in their country or their satellites. There was also an ideology which they rather poorly represented, but it was a major inspiration of downtrodden people throughout the world: public ownership of the economy under the control of the people. However, due to the chaos caused by invasions from capitalist nations, civil war, famine, and disease immediately following their 1917 revolution, the institutions of public control of the economy, the soviets or workers councils, were dispensed with. The management of the economy quickly devolved into a rigid ruling class based on a self-serving bureaucracy.
Thus, the capitalist empire builders of the US and its embryonic Empire were intensely focused on ridding the earth of not only the Soviet Union but this ideology which was regarded as an abomination by capitalists. This fear/hatred of all such ideas became an intense, fanatic obsession. The communist goblins were everywhere! (This obsession was also manifested within the US in the forms of the Hollywood witch hunts, purging leftists in labor unions, education and government offices in general (loyalty oaths), and other such measures.) Most of the initial efforts were focused on Europe in the form of CIA operations, since revealed as Operation Gladio (see this and this), using various covert forms of subversion and terror to prevent any leftist organizations coming to power. Added to this type of subversive operation were direct military attacks on countries which posed a threat to capitalist enterprise. (They also made extensive use of propaganda media such as Voice of American, Radio Free Europe, etc. and "cultural" exchange programs.)
Because the Soviets soon obtained nuclear weapons, our capitalist masters could not directly attack them, but other nations were a target, the first of which was Korea. Koreans had long suffered under Japanese colonial rule. Many Koreans looked to Russia for inspiration, thus the US rulers immediately saw a "communist" takeover which immediately triggered their fanatic reaction to prevent this from happening. US forces immediately occupied the southern part of the country, and all independent voices were quashed even to the extent that former Japanese collaborators were placed into positions of power. Briefly, this lead to the division of the country. (The real history of the Korean War can be learned by reading The Origins of the Korean War by Bruce Cumings.)
Our communist-obsessed ruling class also saw in the Vietnamese aspirations for independence the same kind of communist ideology. In the Vietnam War our spin-masters covered up their imperial policies and actions and replaced them with lies (the "domino theory" was one of the biggest followed by a false-flag event, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the lies have continued after the war as described in this piece by Dolack. This triple strategy of subversion and direct military attacks against perceived foreign enemies and the use of lies and obfuscation against the domestic population have been repeated countless times since then.
Since the demise of the malformed "socialist" countries and the apparent demise of the dream of people controlling their own economies, our capitalist masters and their allies became drunk with power. They became megalomaniacs who claimed that capitalism had triumphed and the historical development of societies had reached their zenith with this triumph. With this intoxication of power they have set out to build an Empire. Mainly Russia and China stand in their way and they have become the new enemy. Thus, today we see the most outrageous lying by our spin-masters against Russia primarily, and China to a lessor extent.
