<<I always toyed with the idea that we fought in Vietnam because we had so little at stake. If we were willing to fight so hard there, just imagine what would happen to someone where we had strategic investments.
In the film, Burn, mentioned a few days ago, the British destroyed their "own" island to prove a point. In the same sense, Vietnam may have been a "demonstration project" to prove our resolve to fight communism.>>
Carrol Cox writes:
<<This is precisely what Sartre argued in his essay, "On Genocide." (It was published in *Ramparts* and I may have a copy of it buried in the basement.) He rejected all the "practical" reasons for the U.S. invasion, and suggested that it was actually waged against the core of the U.S. empire, Latin America, to teach the people of that continent what would happen to them if they dared to resist.>>
On that (very shrewd) note, see the Cuban essayist Roberto Fernandez Retamar's famous piece, "Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America" (in his fine book of essays, CALIBAN, translated by Edward Baker, Univ. of Minn P, 1989). Here he makes a point that very few US leftists have ever made (with the exception of African American radicals like Langston Hughes and DuBois and Baraka): namely, that Hitler got a lot of his ideas about keeping the German working-classes in line, and destroying the most radical groups and organizations among them, from the US bourgeoisie, whose most tried and true method of social control has been (since Bacon's Rebellion) white racial oppression. Here's Fernandez Retamar:
<<The white population of the United States (diverse, but of common European origin) exterminated the aboriginal population and thrust the black population aside, thereby affording itself homogeneity in spite of diversity and offering a coherent model that its Nazi disciples attempted to apply even to other European conglomerates--an unforgivable sin that led some members of the bourgeoisie to stigmatize in Hitler what they applauded as a healthy Sunday diversion in westerns and Tarzan films. Those movies proposed to the world--and even to those who are kin to the communities under attack and who rejoiced in the evocation of our own extermination--the monstrous racial criteria that have accompanied the United States from its beginnings to the genocide in Indochina (p. 4).>>
On this same note, it'd be interesting to me to see dialogues about white racial oppression. Aren't many of the debates/dialogues going back and forth recently (about the militias, religious groups and abolitionism, the rancid state of leadership in organized labor) really about the failure of the left to see white skin privilege as the achilles heel of the labor movement as a whole?
Easy,
Jonathan Scott