http://free.freespeech.org/americanstateterrorism/vietnamgenocide/TrangBang.html“The only lesson that the U.S. government seems to have learned from Vietnam is the need for absolute control of the press.”
— David McGowan
author of Derailing Democracy
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This famous photograph has embarrassed a lot of American patriots. Not because they care the slightest bit about what Americans did to the Vietnamese people, but because it revealed our war crimes to the world. Back in 1972 the U.S. Corporate Mafia Government didn’t have the almost total control of the press that it enjoys today.
Behind the children in the above photo, in that mass of gray smoke in the background, lie the burning, napalmed bodies of their parents, their brothers and sisters and friends. Americans inflicted horrific suffering on innocent children and civilian people all over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos for 13 years. Trang Bang was just one of countless napalm attacks, very few of which were ever publicized in Pulitzer Prize winning photographs. There were thousands of My Lai massacres all over Vietnam, and the U.S. Army routinely photographed its own war crimes.
And yet, incredibly, there are still many Neanderthal apologists for the Vietnam War who seem to think we can evade accepting responsibility for all this evil. One of their tactics is to blame the South Vietnamese air force and army for attacks like the one at Trang Bang. Never mind that American pilots routinely butchered and burned alive Vietnamese women and children in countless villages all over Vietnam. Never mind that the United States dropped over three times as many tons of explosives on the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian people as it dropped in all theaters of World War II combined, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Sweep all that under the rug. If one of the rarely-publicized atrocities like Trang Bang can be blamed on our South Vietnamese puppets, then many grossly immoral American patriots can feel a whole lot better about all of it.
Well, suppose this particular mass-murder was carried out by one of our South Vietnamese servants. The fact remains that South Vietnamese pilots were trained by Americans, the jets they flew were built by Americans, the napalm they dropped was made by Americans, and the South Vietnamese military obeyed the orders of their American masters.
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