American's Loosing Sleep
"In his recent memoirs In Retrospect, Robert McNamara, the architect
of America's intervention in Vietnam, relates that, by 1967, 'the
stresses and tensions' were so bad that he sometimes had to take a
sleeping pill. Fortunately, for the nation's health, there
is not much else that might cause Americans to 'lose sleep' as we
commemorate events of recent history.":
"Hanoi reported that 2 million civilians had been killed, the
overwhelming majority in the south, along with 1.1m North Vietnamese and
southern resistance fighters (Viet Cong, in the terminology of US
propaganda). An additional 300,000 were listed missing in action.
Washington reports 225,000 killed in the army of its client regime
('South Vietnam'); and the CIA estimates 600,000 Cambodians killed
during the US phase of what the one independent governmental inquiry (by
Finland) calls the 'Decade of Genocide' in Cambodia: 1969 to 1978.
Thousands more were killed in Laos, mainly by US attacks that were in
large part unrelated to the war in Vietnam.
The US bears responsibility for these dead, just as Japan is
responsible for deaths in China and Russia for deaths in Afghanistan.
The same applies to whoever pulled the trigger, a truism understood very
well by Western intellectuals when responsibility can be laid at someone
else's door."
Guilt of War Belongs to All - by the great Noam Chomsky - Published
in The Observer, July 30, 1995
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19950730.htm
See Images of U.S. Conquest;
A Top Marine's Words and
Iraq = Vietnam |
