"Self-Pity" and Other Character Flaws

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

*****   Year 501 Copyright © 1993 by Noam Chomsky. Published by South 
End Press.
Chapter 10: Murdering History Segment 7/17

5. "Self-Pity" and other Character Flaws

The 50th anniversary was commemorated with cover stories in the major 
newsweeklies, articles in the press, and TV documentaries.  Several 
were applauded by Wall Street Journal critic Dorothy Rabinowitz for 
their "unrelentingly tough historic view of the Pearl Harbor attack," 
with no ambiguities about the distinction between pure righteousness 
and absolute evil (December 2).  She reserves her condemnations for 
the "journalists of the fashionable Left and the terminal Right" who 
"invariably" portray the Japanese "as victims" of the dastardly 
Americans.  Examples of these lunacies are omitted; the actual 
historical issues receive not a phrase.

The opposite side of the page carries an article by Robert 
Greenberger headlined "U.S.-Vietnam Ties Remain Held Back By the MIA 
Issue," describing a Vietnamese plan "to solve the main issue 
blocking a resumption of relations: accounting for Americans missing 
since the Vietnam War."  This news report is so conventional as to 
merit no particular notice, apart from the interesting layout.  It is 
a staple of the media, and the culture generally, that we were the 
injured party in Vietnam.  We were innocent victims of what John F. 
Kennedy called "the assault from the inside" (November 12, 1963), the 
"internal aggression" by South Vietnamese peasants against their 
legitimate government and the saviors who imposed it upon them and 
defended their country from them.21  Later we were treacherously 
assaulted by the North Vietnamese.  Not content with attacking us, 
they also imprisoned Americans who had mysteriously fallen into their 
hands.  Unrelenting, the Vietnamese aggressors proceeded to abuse us 
shamefully after the war's end, refusing to cooperate fully on the 
fate of US pilots and MIAs, even failing to devote themselves with 
proper dedication to locating the remains of pilots they had 
viciously blasted from the skies.

Our suffering at the hands of these barbarians is the sole moral 
issue that remains after a quarter-century of violence, in which we 
vigorously backed the French effort to reconquer their former 
colonies; instantly demolished the 1954 diplomatic settlement; 
installed a regime of corrupt and murderous thugs and torturers in 
the southern sector where we had imposed our rule; attacked that 
sector directly when the terror and repression of our clients 
elicited a reaction that they could not withstand; expanded our 
aggression to all of Indochina with saturation bombing of 
densely-populated areas, chemical warfare attacks to destroy crops 
and vegetation, bombing of dikes, and huge mass murder operations and 
terror programs when refugee-generation, population removal, and 
bulldozing of villages failed; ultimately leaving three countries 
destroyed, perhaps beyond the hope of recovery, the devastated land 
strewn with millions of corpses and unexploded ordnance, with 
countless destitute and maimed, deformed fetuses in the hospitals of 
the South that do not touch the heartstrings of "pro-life" 
enthusiasts, and other horrors too awful to recount in a region 
"threatened with extinction...as a cultural and historic entity...as 
the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest 
military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size," in the 
words of the hawkish historian Bernard Fall, one of the leading 
experts on Vietnam, in 1967 -- that is, before the major US 
atrocities were set in motion.22

>From all of this, one single element remains: the terrible abuse we 
have suffered at the hands of our tormenters.

Reactions to our adversity are not entirely uniform.  At the dovish 
extreme, we find Senator John Kerry, who warns that we should never 
again fight a war "without committing enough resources to win"; no 
other flaw is mentioned.  And there is President Carter, the noted 
moral teacher and human rights apostle, who assured us that we owe 
Vietnam no debt and have no responsibility to render it any 
assistance because "the destruction was mutual," an observation so 
uncontroversial as to pass with no reaction.  Others less inclined to 
turn the other cheek forthrightly assign the blame to the Vietnamese 
Communists alone, denouncing the anti-American extremists who labor 
to detect lingering ambiguities.23

In the New York Times, we read stories headlined "Vietnam, Trying to 
be Nicer, Still has a Long Way to Go," with Asia correspondent 
Barbara Crossette reporting that though the Vietnamese are making 
some progress "on the missing Americans," they are still far from 
approaching our lofty moral standards.  And a hundred others with the 
same tone and content.  Properly statesmanlike, President Bush 
announces that "It was a bitter conflict, but Hanoi knows today that 
we seek only answers without the threat of retribution for the past." 
Their crimes against us can never be forgotten, but "we can begin 
writing the last chapter of the Vietnam war" if they dedicate 
themselves with sufficient zeal to the MIAs.  We might even "begin 
helping the Vietnamese find and identify their own combatants missing 
in action," Crossette reports.  The adjacent front-page story reports 
Japan's failure, once again, to "unambiguously" accept the blame "for 
its wartime aggression."24

As the 1992 presidential campaign heated up, Vietnam's savage 
maltreatment of suffering America flared up into a major issue: had 
Washington done enough to end these abuses, or had it conspired to 
efface them.  A front-page New York Times story by Patrick Tyler 
captured the mood.  Tyler reported that the White House had rejected 
Ross Perot's 1987 proposal that easing the pressures against Hanoi 
might be "a way to win the repatriation of any American servicemen 
still held in Southeast Asia."  "At the time," Tyler observes, 
"Washington was taking a harder diplomatic line with Hanoi to achieve 
the same end."  "History has shown that concessions prior to 
performance is death," said Richard Childress, NSC official 
supervising POW/MIA policy.  "They'll take and take and take," he 
added.  "We've learned that over 25 years."  "United States 
negotiators were holding onto their leverage until Hanoi made 
progress on a step-by-step `roadmap' to improved relations, through 
cooperation on P.O.W./M.I.A. investigations," Tyler adds, without 
even the most timid query about Washington's declared intentions or a 
hint, however faint, that someone might fail to appreciate their 
righteousness.25

As the country solemnly contemplated "the Mind of Japan," deploring 
the disgraceful "self-pity" of the Japanese, their failure to offer 
reparations to their victims, or even to "come forward with a 
definitive statement of wartime responsibility," the US government 
and press escalated their bitter denunciations of the criminals in 
Hanoi who not only refuse to confess their guilt but persist in their 
shameful mistreatment of innocent America.  In a lengthy report on 
this rising indignation over Vietnam's morbid insistence on punishing 
us 17 years after the war's official end, Crossette wrote that 
expectations for diplomatic relations between the US and Vietnam "may 
be set back by a resurgence of interest in one piece of unfinished 
business that will not go away: the fate of missing Americans." 
Properly incensed by Vietnam's iniquity, George Bush, opened Year 500 
in October 1991 by intervening once again to block European and 
Japanese efforts to end the embargo that the US imposed in 1975, 
while Defense Secretary Dick Cheney reported to Congress that 
"despite improved cooperation," the Vietnamese will have to do more 
before we grant them entry into the civilized world.  "Substantial 
progress" on the MIA issue is required as a condition for normalizing 
ties, Secretary of State James Baker said, a process that could take 
several years.  Meanwhile, officials in one of the world's poorest 
countries continue to show irritation, as they did "last week when 
the United States blocked a French proposal calling for the 
International Monetary Fund to lend money to Vietnam," the Times 
reported.26

21 Adlai Stevenson, defending the US war at the UN. See FRS, p. 114f.

22 Fall, Last Reflections.

23 Elizabeth Neuffer, BG, Feb. 27; Pamela Constable, BG, Feb. 21, 
1992. Carter, news conference, March 24, 1977; see MC, 240.

24 Ibid., 240ff. and NI, 33ff., for samples from the press. NYT, Oct. 24, 1992.

25 Tyler, NYT, July 5, 1992.

26 Crossette, NYT, Jan. 6, 1992. Mary Kay Magistad, BG, Oct. 20; Eric 
Schmitt, NYT, Nov. 6; Steven Greenhouse, NYT, Oct. 24, 1991.

<http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/year/year-c10-s07.html>   *****

Yoshie