Résumé Points for the New Head of U.S.-Run University in Vietnam

Slit the Throat of an Old Man, Shot Women and Babies... You’re Hired!

June 13, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

On February 24, 1969, Lieutenant Bob Kerrey led a squad of Navy SEALs into the tiny Vietnamese village of Thanh Phong. Kerrey’s mission was to kill the mayor of Thanh Phong. That is itself a war crime—it is illegal to target noncombatants for assassination—but this was Standard Operating Procedure for the U.S. in Vietnam.

The U.S. was fighting to crush the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF), which was widely supported by the people, and which had established working local governments, schools, etc. throughout much of Vietnam. In the eyes of the U.S. invaders, not only every official of that government, and every teacher in those schools, but every civilian living in those areas, was considered a “legitimate target.” As such, Thanh Phong was officially considered a “free-fire zone,” meaning that U.S. troops had authority to kill any living thing that moved.

According to the account of Gerhard Klann, a veteran member of Kerrey’s squad, and the very similar account of Pham Tri Lanh, a Vietnamese woman who survived the massacre, here is what happened on February 24:

The squad first came to an isolated hut with an older man, a woman and three young children. Kerrey and two other men took the old man away from the others, stabbed him and then slit his throat, nearly decapitating him. While they did this, others in the squad murdered the woman and three children with knives.

They marched 15 minutes further to a group of huts, rounded up the occupants—about 15 people, all women, children, or elderly people—and questioned them about the whereabouts of the mayor. There were no men in the village, no soldiers, no weapons. They learned nothing.

Here is the New York Times report of what happened next:

[The squad] debated their options, Klann says, and finally decided to “kill them and get out of there.” Lanh, who had been checking to see that her children were safe, says she crept close enough to witness what happened next. Klann says that Kerrey gave the order and the team, standing between 6 and 10 feet away, started shooting—raking the group with automatic-weapons fire for about 30 seconds. They heard moans, Klann says, and began firing again, for another 30 seconds.

There was one final cry, from a baby. “The baby was the last one alive,” Klann says, fighting back tears. “There were blood and guts splattering everywhere.”

The pretext for this slaughter was that Kerrey was afraid that if he left any civilians alive, they would report the squad’s presence to the NLF, and then they would have to engage actual armed opponents instead of shooting unarmed women and children—this is the “heroism” of U.S. forces. But even this outrageous excuse is apparently a lie, since blasting away with their weapons for a full 60 seconds would surely have alerted any NLF soldiers in the area far more quickly than the civilians could have.

Something like this, a war crime this savage and premeditated, the merciless murder of even a crying baby—surely that would lead to the arrest and trial of the participants, and definitely the leader, Bob Kerrey, right?

No, that is not the American Way!

After this “mission” was over, Kerrey reported that his unit had engaged in a firefight with NLF soldiers and had killed 21 of them. He received a Bronze Star for his “heroism,” and later received the Congressional Medal of Honor for another mission. Kerrey used his status as a “war hero” to launch a political career, becoming governor and then senator from the state of Nebraska.

Only 30 years later, when Klann, unable to live with this crime any longer, publicly spilled his guts about what happened on CBS’s 60 Minutes and in the Times, did Kerrey finally admit that his squad had killed unarmed civilians, not soldiers. And even then, he continued to lie, claiming that he personally didn’t kill anyone, that the massacre was a response to his squad being fired on, that they had no idea that the people they were killing were civilians, and so on. He claimed that it was all a terrible “mistake,” and intimated that really, no one has suffered more than he has, “haunted” with the burden of having “accidentally” killed innocents.

And in truly classic American style, he even claimed that the fake guilt he was expressing “is what makes American leadership at its best so different and so vital in a world where evil still controls too many innocent lives,” and specifically that it made the U.S. morally superior to the Vietnamese!

In spite of this “moral superiority” displayed through many, many massacres such as this one, in spite of massive U.S. military power that killed well over three million Vietnamese, mostly civilians, the U.S. military got its ass righteously kicked in Vietnam and was finally sent running for their helicopters to escape being overrun by the NLF in 1975.

Now, Flash Forward to Recent Years:

The world has changed. The Vietnamese revolution did not go forward to build a truly liberating society and instead it became a neo-colony, under the domination of now one, now another imperialist country. Meanwhile, capitalism was restored in China, and it has emerged as a major capitalist power in the region, threatening U.S. domination. And the U.S. has been pulling together an alliance of smaller countries in Asia to oppose China, including militarily, and has been working to bring Vietnam into this. (See “Obama Trip to Asia: The Bloody-Jawed Wolf Offers Peace and Prepares for War.”)

Because of the incredibly bloody history of U.S. crimes against Vietnam, this has involved a process of “reconciliation,” where the U.S. makes some vague gestures of “regret” for the past and offers up some minimal aid and so forth.

So in 2013, as part of cementing this new military alliance, the U.S. and the current Vietnamese government agreed on a plan for Fulbright University to be built in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon, which had been the capital of U.S.-occupied South Vietnam). Fulbright University offered the promise of world-class education in an impoverished Third World country; it was meant to be sugar on the bitter pill for the Vietnamese of “reconciling” with the big power that unleashed an ocean of suffering on them. Its development got $20 million in funding from Congress, and is “affiliated” with Harvard University and is being “coordinated” by the U.S. State Department; it was publicly opened by Obama during his recent trip to Vietnam.

And who did the Obama administration decide was the best person to run Fulbright University Vietnam? None other than Bob Kerrey, who Obama personally praised during his visit to Vietnam. Now Kerrey would have the opportunity to oversee the education of Vietnamese youth not so far from the place where he had once mercilessly slaughtered their parents, grandparents, and children who would never live to have families!

Think of what it means to the Vietnamese people to have such a person brought back to their country to hold an important position educating their children. Someone who committed these horrendous crimes, was never punished for them, lied about them for 30 years, blamed the victims for their own deaths, and who built a successful political career and accumulated wealth and prestige on the blood and bones left in the wake of his crimes.

It is an insult beyond imagination, a way of telling the Vietnamese people that in the eyes of the U.S., they are nothing, not even human, and that their feelings and dignity do not have to be taken into account in the slightest degree. It is like taking a woman who has been kidnapped and held for years and raped repeatedly, and telling her that her new professor is... her rapist, and that she better just shut up and learn to like it.

Making Kerrey the head of Fulbright University Vietnam is quite simply making his atrocity a permanent open wound in the hearts and souls of the Vietnamese people. And it has elicited an angry reaction from many Vietnamese, which has burst into the open in spite of the efforts of the current Vietnamese government to sell this outrage with talk of “reconciliation” and “forgiveness.” The following comments were written on Facebook and reported in the New York Times and other news outlets:

• Dinh Thi Thu Ha: “The appointment of a person who has committed crimes against our compatriots to lead a prestigious American university in Vietnam is like once again sticking the criminal knife into the Vietnamese people’s scar.”
• Pham Thuy Huong, 40, of Hanoi: “I cannot look at his face... All the gruesome details of that genocide are still there.”
• Nguyen Duc Hien, a journalist at a legal newspaper in Ho Chi Minh City: “After killing and lying, he should not represent knowledge and contributing the values of America in Vietnam!”
• Bao Anh Thai, a lawyer in Ho Chi Minh City: “Please tell me the name of any prestigious university in this world, where a killer in cold blood of women and children—he admitted it and he is not charged for it—could be the president.”

Yet even in the face of the anger, and the obvious truth of what these Vietnamese people are saying, the U.S. has so far held firm to Kerrey’s appointment, and even liberal columnists in the New York Times, while “acknowledging” the legitimacy of people’s anger, argue that Kerrey should stay on as part of his personal journey of “atonement” for what he did—in other words, fuck the emotional damage to the victims, the important thing is that American war criminals should be able to sleep soundly at night!

Besides being sick and twisted on an almost unbelievable level, this is also a very cynical power move by the U.S. This is Obama saying to the Vietnamese government, “Yes, we have an ‘alliance,’ and we will even throw you a few bones here and there, but don’t forget for a second that we are in charge, we are setting the terms and calling the shots. And we will prove it by insisting that you accept a notorious war criminal back into your country, not in chains and on trial, but in a place of honor and position of great authority.”

This is the world of imperialism, where horrific crimes against children are “qualifications” for running a university, and where the masters of this savagery flaunt their power in order to humiliate and discipline not only their enemies, but even their allies.

It is a world that humanity cannot tolerate, and which cannot tolerate humanity. It is a world that has to be overthrown, and remade.

 

 

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