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| Noam Chomsky |
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Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated -- Japan’s
attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example. Others are
ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is
likely to lie ahead. Right now, in fact.
At
the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of
President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and
murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the
invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead
and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the
long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most
lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food
crops.
The prime target was
South Vietnam. The aggression later spread to the North, then to the
remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia,
which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in
the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this, Henry Kissinger’s orders were
being carried out -- “anything that flies on anything that moves” -- a
call for genocide that is rare in the historical record. Little of this
is remembered. Most was scarcely known beyond narrow circles of
activists.
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