I don't see how that invalidates Raymond's point. Another perspective on Viet Nam:
flipside.org
Mainstream media accounts have ignored the fact that recent JFK revelations cast serious doubt on the official U.S. doctrine about the cause and conduct of the Vietnam War.
Audio tapes of John F. Kennedy show the former U.S. president gave approval for the 1963 Saigon coup which resulted in the assassination of South Vietnam President Ngo Ninh Diem and his brother Nhu.
"I feel we must bear a good deal of responsibility for [the coup]. I should never have given my consent to it..." Kennedy says on tape.
According to the State Department, the corporate media, history texts and encyclopaedias, the CIA and the U.S. government were not involved in the coup.
In contrast, Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor and American foreign policy critic, has said Kennedy gave approval for the coup to maintain a hard line and remove an unpopular, terrorist regime which the U.S. government originally installed.
"The United States overturned the Diem regime in 1963 because of its ineptitude in conducting the war, as well as because of fears that it was moving toward a negotiated settlement with the National Liberation Front (NLF)."
Chomsky, about whom the National Film Board made the documentary, "Manufacturing Consent," has said the U.S. did not want to see the unification of the North and South which was part of the Geneva agreements following the withdrawal from Vietnam by France in 1954. "The U.S. wanted any government which would continue to fight," against the NLF, he said.
U.S. and Canadian media have portrayed the NLF, which they call "the Viet Cong," or "communists," as aggressors in what the State department called "the Vietnam conflict." According to their version, the U.S. Administration was merely coming to the aid of the South Vietnamese people, protecting them from the communist hordes of the North.
Chomsky and other critics have maintained that the U.S. Administration opposed Vietnamese nationalist forces struggling for freedom and representing the overwhelming majority of the population. To do this, they established the Diem government as a client state in South Vietnam in the 1950s.
"The U.S. imposed a terrorist regime on the familiar Latin American model," Chomsky says. "From 1954 to 1960, this client state had massacred perhaps some 75,000 people. Its terrorism and repression evoked renewed resistance – naturally called ‘Communist aggression.'"
This resistance eventually compelled Kennedy and the CIA to intervene directly by having the Diem brothers assassinated.
What the American government and corporate media call "communism," in effect amounts to popular local resistance, according to Chomsky's view of U.S. foreign policy.
The JFK tapes also reveal a CIA plot to overthrow Cambodian leader Norodom Sihanouk. Kennedy himself later sanctioned an abortive CIA plot to kill Cuba's Fidel Castro.
CBC TV's Newsworld reported these facts and then went on to comment, "...these recordings reveal an affectionate husband and a proud father doting about his daughter Caroline."
Andrew Cohen, Washington correspondent for the Globe and Mail, reported on Kennedy's involvement in the Diem coup and assassination, mentioning his "anguish" over "the coup in Saigon that went terribly wrong," and then dropped the subject, turning to Kennedy's play with his daughter Caroline.
In fact, the coup and assassinations went terribly "right" for Kennedy, as they were precisely what he had ordered. Later, he was merely expressing on the tape some personal regret for his own murderous actions.
As for why Globe correspondent Cohen treated Kennedy with kid gloves, the answer came in a feature article he wrote on journalist Seymour Hersh, published January 10.
Cohen, entrusted to report objectively for Canada's "national newspaper," on Kennedy, Hersh, and American policy generally, wrote as follows:
"Seymour Hersh, it seemed, had the power to debunk much of what I believed about John Kennedy and his brothers, Robert and Edward. That unsettled me. I had read and written about the Kennedys, visited their shrines, followed their careers, sought out their chroniclers and contemporaries. When one of JFK's old friends once told me, ‘you know, Jack would have like you,' I was strangely touched."
"I was too young to cry over Jack's death and too old not to over Bobby's. My attachment deepened when I went to Choate, the same boarding school in Connecticut as had JFK, worked in George McGovern's presidential campaign in 1972 (convinced he was carrying the torch) and attended quadrennial conventions of the Democratic Party."
"I could put the things of childhood away, but I never put away the Kennedy's. I still listen to recordings of their speeches, absorbing the rhythms of JFK's Inaugural Address or the anguish of RFK's elegy to his brother...I still make visits to their graves at Arlington National Cemetery, after hours, when the sun slants in the sky and the imperial city glows."
Obviously, Cohen is deeply caught up in Camelot, is still visiting the Kennedy shrines, and cannot be entrusted to report to Canadians on matters concerning the Kennedys.
But as the Newsworld story indicated, this is not a problem that is limited to Cohen, or stories about the Kennedys. |
