The US Pivot to Asia: Cold War Lessons From Vietnam for Today
Cynthia Chung
There were Cold War preparations underway as early as August 1945 and the two regions selected, Korea and Vietnam, were pre-planned years in advance before the actual wars were to take place, Cynthia Chung writes.
In part one of this series, I discussed how a massive US arms stockpile in Okinawa, Japan that was originally intended to be used for the planned American invasion of Japan was cancelled once the two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
L. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy and was a former Col. in the US Air Force, remarks in his book The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, that these massive arms shipments were not returned to the United States but rather, half were transported to Korea and the other half to Vietnam.
The implications of this are enormous.
It signifies that there were Cold War preparations already underway as early as August 1945 and likely much earlier, and that the two regions selected, Korea and Vietnam, were pre-planned five years in advance and the other ten years in advance respectively, before the actual wars were to take place.
What this means is that the official narrative for why the Korean War and the Vietnam War were fought are fabrications of the Cold War “reality.”
Therefore, it should be asked, what was the real reason that Americans entered these two brutal wars? Why did leading figures among the American elite, many who were so adamant on not joining in the combat against fascism in WWII, become so quickly convinced, that everything having to do with communism, was their personal responsibility to destroy?
These questions will be answered in this series titled The Fascist Roots of the CIA.
The CIA and the Pentagon: A Tale of Two Star Crossed Lovers
As discussed in part one of this series, with the Eisenhower-Nixon victory in 1952, the culmination of years of political strategizing by Wall Street Republican power brokers, the new heads of the State Department and the CIA were selected as none other than Foster and Allen Dulles respectively; and they would go on to direct the global operations of the most powerful nation in the world.
It is for this reason that the 1952 presidential election has gone down in history as the triumph of “the power elite.”
The entire period of April 12th 1945 to that fateful Election Day can be best understood as the first stage of America’s coup. This is especially clear between the period of 1945 and 1949, when a number of new pieces of legislation were passed which successfully reorganised the departments within the United States such that much of the government and military decisions would be beholden to the authority of a few men, men who were much more powerful than the president himself.
The National Security Act of 1947, a Trojan horse, was one of the first of this new breed of legislation and led to the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, placing it under the direction of the National Security Council.
Although it did not explicitly authorize the CIA to conduct covert operations, Section 102 was sufficiently vague to permit abuse. By December 1947, (less than four months after the creation of the CIA), the perceived necessity to “stem the flow of communism” in Western Europe—particularly Italy—by overt and covert “psychological warfare” forced the issue and NSC 4-A was born.
NSC 4-A was a new directive to cover “clandestine paramilitary operations, as well as political and economic warfare,” this provided the authorization for the intervention of the CIA in the Italian elections of April 1948.
It was understood that the US military could have no “direct” role in covert operations, since that would defeat the purpose of deniability.
The Communist Party of Italy, admired for leading the fight against Mussolini, was expected to win in Italy’s first post-war election. This, of course, was considered intolerable under the Iron Curtain diktat and American covert operations were deployed to block the anti-fascist victory. Investigative journalist Christopher Simpson writes in his book “Blowback,” how a substantial part of this funding came from captured Nazi assets. This intervention, according to Simpson, tipped the balance in favour of Italy’s Christian Democrats Party, which hid thousands of fascists in its ranks.
In just a few months from its creation, the CIA went from what was supposed to be a civilian intelligence gathering arm of the government to being responsible for covert operations including “psychological warfare.” This was a far cry from what had organised the United States prior to WWII, and which relied on a civilian army. Such a government mandate for cloak and dagger operations during a time of peace would have been considered unthinkable.
But that is why the Cold War narrative was so imperative, since under this paranoid schizophrenic nightmare, it was thought the world would never be at peace until a significant portion of it was wiped out. The Cold War defined a pixelated enemy that was under-defined and invisible to the eye. The enemy was what your superiors told you were the enemy, and like a shape-shifter could take the form of anybody, including your neighbour, your colleague, your partner…even the president.
There would always be an enemy, because there would always be people who would resist the Grand Strategy.
NSC 4-A was replaced by NSC 10/2, approved by President Truman on June 18th 1948, creating the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). NSC 10/2 was the first presidential document which specified a mechanism to approve and manage covert operations, and also the first in which the term “covert operations” was defined.
From 1948-1950 the OPC was not under CIA’s control, but rather was a renegade operation run by Allen Dulles. OPC was brought under CIA control in October 1950, when Walter Bedell Smith became Director of Central Intelligence, and it was renamed the Directorate of Plans.
Although the CIA was strictly in charge of covert operations, it often needed the military for additional personnel, transport, overseas bases, weapons, aircraft, ships, and all the other things the Department of Defense had in abundance. In reality, the military, whether it liked it or not, found itself forever in the embrace of its toxic lover, the CIA.
Prouty writes in 1992:
OPC and other CIA personnel were concealed in military units and provided with military cover whenever possible, especially within the far-flung bases of the military around the world… The covert or invisible operational methods developed by the CIA and the military during the 1950s are still being used today despite the apparent demise of the Cold War, in such covert activities as those going on in Central America and Africa…the distinction between the CIA and the military is hard to discern, since they always work together.”
A Daring Declaration
On Sept. 2nd, 1945, Ho Chi Minh signed the Declaration of Independence for a new nation, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which stated the following lines:
A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years—such a people must be free and independent.
Ho Chi Minh had been leading the nationalist Viet Minh independence movement since 1941 against the colonial rule of Japan. Like most of the world, Ho Chi Minh viewed the war against the fascists as aligned to a war against imperialism.
He believed that if the world was to finally make a stand against such tyranny, than there would be no place for colonialism in the post-war world. The world would have to be organised according to the recognition and respect of independent nation states, along the lines of Roosevelt’s post-war vision.
After a long and horrific battle against the ruthless Japanese fascists, with support during the war from the United States and China, it was the hope of Ho Chi Minh that Vietnam could return to its former days of peace with its new-found independence from colonial rule.
The Japanese had surrendered and were leaving. The French had been defeated by the Japanese and would not return—or so it was thought.
Vo Nguyen Giap, Ho Chi Minh’s brilliant military commander, while serving as Minister of the Interior of the provisional government, delivered a speech describing the United States as a good friend of the Viet Minh. That, too, was in September 1945. Ho Chi Minh had been supplied with a tremendous stock of military equipment by the United States, and he expected to be able to administer his new government in Vietnam without further opposition.
But on September 23, 1945, shortly after the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had issued its Declaration of Independence, a group of former French troops, acting with the consent of the British forces (who had been given jurisdiction of the area from the Potsdam Conference) and armed with Japanese weapons stolen from surrender stockpiles, staged a local coup d’état and seized control of the administration of Saigon, in South Vietnam, known today as Ho Chi Minh City.
By January 1946, the French had assumed all military commitments in Vietnam and reinstalled the French government.
It should be understood that the removal of the French presence in Indochina was no small feat, since it was not only their military presence that had to be dealt with, but also its business interests including French banks, among the most powerful in Asia. The French had imposed its colonial presence in Indochina since 1787.
Negotiations between the French and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam began early in 1946. Ho Chi Minh traveled to Paris, but the conference failed due to French intransigence.
The French Indochina War broke out in 1946 and went on for eight years, with France’s war effort largely funded and supplied by the United States.
In 1949, Bao Dai, the former emperor who spent most of his time in the lap of luxury in Paris, France, was set up by foreign interest to be the puppet government of the State of Vietnam (South Vietnam).
On May 8, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced that the United States would give both economic and military aid to France and to the State of Vietnam. The value of this military assistance surpassed $3 billion.
There was never any official reason for why the United States changed its allegiance from Ho Chi Minh to the French colonial interests and their puppet government. Although Ho Chi Minh’s belief in communism was used to justify this betrayal, the truth was that he was a threat because he considered himself first and foremost a nationalist, who believed that the Vietnamese people were one and that his nation deserved independence from colonial dominance.
It was this nationalism that could not be tolerated in areas of the world which were regarded as imperial territories and subject lands. It is for this very same reason that MI6 and the CIA staged a coup against the beloved nationalist Mosaddegh in Iran, a non-communist who held a Ph.D. in law and was well on his way to removing all British imperial claims on oil in the country after winning his case against the British at the Hague and at the UN Security Council in 1951.
This is why the interests of imperialism and fascism were often linked hand in hand, as seen with Edward VIII (though he was not alone in the British Royal family in his views), the Vichy government in France, King of Italy Victor Emmanuel III who appointed Benito Mussolini as Prime Minister in 1922 (who only deposed Mussolini in 1943 when it was clear they were going to lose the war) and Imperial Japan under Emperor Hirohito.
It is for this reason that we saw, before WWII was even over,the imperialists and the fascists in discussion with each other as to what would form the post-war world. It is for this reason that the countries chosen to oversee this Grand Strategy would be the US, Britain, France, Germany and Japan, rather than Roosevelt’s choice of the US, Russia, Britain and China.
It is for this reason that the Iron Curtain, that was originally announced, not by Churchill, but rather by German Foreign Minister Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, reported in the London Times on May 3, 1945, was to announce the terms of an indefinite war against communism.
In reality, it meant any country opposed to imperial rule, opposed to the idea that some were born to rule and others to be ruled, in other words, imperialism and sovereign nation states could not co-exist.
Ho Chi Minh was an ally to the Americans under the leadership of Roosevelt. However, with Roosevelt’s death and the soft coup that followed, Ho Chi Minh was now an enemy.
The Saigon Military Mission
On January 8, 1954, at a meeting of the National Security Council, President Eisenhower made his views clear that Americans did not belong in the Vietnam War. But that did not really matter.
Eisenhower, who was used to people diligently following his line of command as a General of WWII, was soon to learn that this did not apply as President of the United States.
Among those at the January 8, 1954 meeting of the National Security Council were Allen W. Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles. There was no way that the Dulles brothers could have misunderstood the words of President Eisenhower.
Yet, on January 14, 1954, only six days after the President’s “vehement” statement against the entry of US armed forces in Indochina, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said:
Despite everything that we do, there remained a possibility that the French position in Indochina would collapse. If this happened and the French were thrown out, it would, of course, become the responsibility of the victorious Vietminh to set up a government and maintain order in Vietnam…[I do] not believe that in this contingency this country [the United States] would simply say, “Too bad; we’re licked and that’s the end of it.”
Thus, the seed was planted. If the French were forced out, which was rather predictable, it was understood that the US would not engage in open warfare with the Viet Minh. However, it could carry out clandestine operations against Ho Chi Minh’s forces so as to cause them trouble, or in the words of Foster Dulles “to raise hell.”
This is how American intervention and direct involvement in the Vietnam War began, a war in which the Americans had been arming both sides since 1945 and to which there was no official military objective except “to raise hell.”
According to a record of the January 14, 1954 National Security Council meeting, it was:
Agreed that the Director of Central Intelligence [Allen Dulles], in collaboration with other appropriate departments and agencies should develop plans, as suggested by the Secretary of State [John Foster Dulles], for certain contingencies in Indochina.
And, just like that, the entire overseeing of the Vietnam War was placed into the hands of the Dulles brothers.
Two weeks later, on January 29, Allen Dulles, selected Colonel Lansdale to head the team that was going to be deployed in Vietnam “to raise hell.”
Edward G. Lansdale, chief of the Saigon Military Mission, arrived in Saigon on June 1, 1954, less than one month after the defeat of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, for the purpose of a covert operation to conduct psychological warfare and paramilitary activities in South Vietnam.
Prouty writes:
It was not a military mission in the conventional sense, as the secretary of state had said. It was a CIA organization with a clandestine mission designed to “raise hell” with “guerrilla operations” everywhere in Indochina, a skilled terrorist organization capable of carrying out its sinister role in accordance with the Grand Strategy of those Cold War years.
…With this action, the CIA established the Saigon Military Mission (SMM) in Vietnam. It was not often in Saigon. It was not military. It was CIA. Its mission was to work with the anti-Vietminh Indochinese and not to work with the French. With this background and these stipulations, this new CIA unit was not going to win the war for the French. As we learned the hard way later, it was not going to win the war for South Vietnam, either, or for the United States. Was it supposed to?
It should be noted here that although NSC and Department of State records show that the Saigon Military Mission did not begin until January 1954, there were other CIA activities in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (such as the White Cloud teams) long before 1954, and some members of the SMM had participated in these earlier activities as far back as 1945.*
Though Lansdale is listed as a US Air Force Col. who was put in charge of the SMM, this was just a ploy. He would continue in Vietnam, as he had in the Philippines, to exploit the cover of an air force officer and to be assigned to the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) for “cover assignment’’ purposes. He was always an agent of the CIA, and his actual bosses were always with the CIA.
With Ho Chi Minh’s defeat of the French in 1954 at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, ending the First Indochina War, it was understood that new oppositional leadership would be required if Ho Chi Minh were to be prevented from taking control of South Vietnam.
Ngo Dinh Diem would oust Bao Dai in a rigged referendum vote in 1955, becoming the first President of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). The South Vietnamese were not interested in either candidate.
The reader should take note here that South Vietnam (otherwise known as Cochinchina for centuries), had never had a real form of government because it had never been a nation in its entire existence but rather had been made up of ancient villages for several centuries with relatively little change. There was no congress, no police, and no tax-system – nothing essential to the function of a nation. Diem’s “government” was nothing but a façade of bureaucracy.
Despite this, Diem’s Republic of Vietnam was treated as an equal member of the family of nations, as if it could stand on its own two feet and respond accordingly to the crisis its people were being thrown into. The Vietnamese government that Eisenhower believed ought to be fighting the Viet Minh on its own behalf did not exist.
The choice of a predominant number of Indochinese was overwhelmingly for Ho Chi Minh. They felt no loyalty to Bao Dai, who lived in Paris, and they hated the French. Ngo Dinh Diem was a nobody, who never accomplished anything to win the hearts of his people.
The Vietnam War, as it understood today, was full of oversights. But perhaps the most serious oversight of all was that not one of the six US administrations who oversaw the Vietnam War ever stated a positive American military objective for that war. The generals sent to Saigon were told not to let the “communists” take over Vietnam, period. As Prouty stated repeatedly in his book, this does not constitute a military objective.
The Saigon Military Mission was sent to Vietnam to preside over the dissolution of French colonial power. The Dulles brothers knew, by January 1954 if not long before that, that they would be creating a new Vietnamese government that would be neither French nor Vietminh and that this new government would then become the base for continuing the decade-old war in Indochina.
That was their primary objective.
The Geneva Conference, A Genocidal Exodus
The defeat of the French resulted in the Geneva Accords in July 1954 which established the 17th parallel as a temporary demarcation line separating the military forces of the French and the Viet Minh. Within 300 days of the signing of the accords, a demilitarized zone, or DMZ, was created, and the transfer of any civilians who wished to leave either side was to be completed.
Ho Chi Minh and all northern Vietnamese believed the nation to be “one.” They did not want a division of their country, as the Geneva Agreements had guaranteed.
The closing article of the Geneva Agreements, Number 14, a scarcely noticed few lines, read; “…any civilians residing in a district controlled by one party, who wish to go and live in the zone assigned to the other party, shall be permitted and helped to do so by the authorities in that district.”
The ominous meaning of this was concealed under the guise of humanitarian words. The American-British note spoke of a “peaceful and humane transfer,” as if they were being kind and sensitive to the situation at hand, ready to uproot people who had lived all their lives in a settled village that had existed for tens of thousands of years.
The people of the world, most of whom had no knowledge of the Tonkinese, were led to believe that this offer was a most compassionate gesture. And, what is worse, the planners of this sinister plot were certain that the people of the world would never learn the truth, that this movement of one million North Vietnamese was really intended to be the kindling that would set the country on fire. It was a set-up and would lay the essential groundwork for America’s direct entry into the war.
The mass exodus of North Vietnamese to South Vietnam would be orchestrated by the Saigon Military Mission. This was a terrible upheaval for these people but it was sold to the West as if they were refugees fleeing Ho Chi Minh. In reality, they were fleeing the “psychological warfare” and “paramilitary tactics” today called “terrorism” that the SMM were unleashing in these small Northern villages.
In their own words, as found in documents released with the Pentagon Papers, leaders of the SMM wrote that the mission had been sent into North Vietnam to carry out “unconventional warfare,” “paramilitary operations, ” “political-psychological warfare,” and rumor campaigns and to set up a Combat Psy War course for the Vietnamese. The members of the SMM were classic “agents provocateurs.”
Prouty writes:
This movement of Catholics — or natives whom the SMM called “Catholics” — from the northern provinces of Vietnam to the south, under the provisions of the Geneva Agreement, became the most important activity of the Saigon Military Mission and one of the root causes of the Vietnam War.
The terrible burden these 1,100,000 destitute strangers imposed upon the equally poor native residents of the south created a pressure on the country and the Diem administration that proved to be overwhelming.
These penniless natives…were herded into Haiphong by the Saigon Military Mission and put aboard US Navy transport vessels. About 300,000 traveled on the CIA’s Civil Air Transport aircraft, and others walked out. They were transported, like cattle, to the southernmost part of Vietnam, where, despite promises of money and other basic support, they were turned loose upon the local population. These northerners are Tonkinese, more Chinese than the Cochinese of the south.
They have never mixed under normal conditions. wherever these poor people were dumped on the south were given the name ‘‘Communist insurgencies,” and much of the worst and most pernicious part of the twenty years of warfare that followed was the direct result of this terrible activity that had been incited and carried out by CIA’s terroristic Saigon Military Mission.
…Nothing that occurred during these thirty years of warfare, 1945-75, was more pernicious than this movement of these 1,100,000 “Catholics” from the north to the south at a time when the government of the south scarcely existed.
It didn’t take long before the disturbance caused by the Diem-favored northern intruders onto the southern natives broke out into violence. Before long, the “friends,” according to the Diem government and its CIA backers were the one million northern Catholics, and the “enemy” — or at least the “problem” — was the native Cochinese of the south.
The time was right to fan the flames into war and to bring in the Americans.
Part Two of a trilogy of articles originally published on Strategic Culture. Part one is available here. Part three of this series “The Fascist Roots of the CIA” will discuss the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations in relation to the Vietnam War and Kennedy’s last stand against Allen Dulles before he was gunned down on the streets of Dallas, Texas in broad daylight. The author can be reached at [email protected]
Cynthia Chung is a lecturer, writer and co-founder and editor of the Rising Tide Foundation, she can be contacted at [email protected].
*L. Fletcher Prouty “The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy” pg 61
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The Dullas brothers. How do such useless turds float to the top? The same hubris and narcissism is the reason america’s empire is no more, if it ever was.
Nazism was never defeated, it moved countries.
The author is completely wrong about the historical status of Cochin-China. The area was settled by Vietnamese in the 17th Century, having been conquered by them in war against the Chams. It was administered as part of the Annamese Empire with its capital at Hue, and ruled and taxed like any other part. My former wife’s ancestor Phan Thanh Gian was appointed Viceroy of Cochin-China in about 1860. It was he who was forced to cede several provinces to the French imperialist aggressors, an action which cost him his life (he committed suicide in 1862 in protest). The Vietnam War from the Vietnamese perspective was all about restoring the territorial integrity of the nation and eliminating local traitors who collaborated with foreign forces seeking to divide it.
Insightful article.
I have also wondered about whether the partition of India in 1947 was allowed by the British so that this part of the continent is controlled by US-UK through the ‘divide and conquer’ policy. India
In terms of numbers of people displaced by the Partition of India, it was probably larger than any other in history.
My grandparents and parents (who were kids at that time) were forced to migrate from Karachi to Bombay during the Parition. That also makes a child of the refugee.
I didn’t know Princess Diana, nor his Dad..but she used to go to the gym right opposite of where I used to work–she was just normal but also a Princess I was gutted when she was Assassinated, but I just assumed she was killed in an accident..I was just gutted when she died. She used to take her kids to the Ballet on the South Bank – English National Ballet, at the same time as we did and sit in the stalls like us I am not surprised that the Ginger haired kid, f’cked off to The USA with his South American Bride He took the p1ss out of them since when he was a kid, growing his own stuff in Kensington Gardens for his Mum who was Dead, and wearing a NAZI Uniform – at his coming out Party I mean wtf do you do, if you are born… Read more »
A comment so asinine & off topic that it can only be Cointelpro. Fuck off “Tony”
Ms. Chung is a gifted author & her work here is appreciated. That said, there is still a breathless, naive quality to the writing- as if somehow it’s a shock that wars are planned
The bit about the US arms stockpile on Okinawa becomes even more relevant when one considers the dramatically low odds that “nuclear weapons” were ever developed, much less used on Japan
Tony,
why are you posting this here?
OffGuardian,
removing complete off topic comments is fine in every way and not the same as the censoring going on at The Guardian etc.
The historical details hide the glaring and obvious truth — the establishment in the old colonial powers fear communism above all else and will spare no effort to contain and eradicate it. The wars in Korea and Vietnam were just yet more collateral damage. Even WW2 was a sideshow in this great struggle – fascism (and Japanese Imperialism) was tolerated, even tacitly encouraged, while it served the purpose of imperialism (especially as it was openly anti-commuist) and only needed dealing with when it got out of control. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Paris commune. This short lived experiment has historical significance for us because it effectively caused the cessation of a major war, the Franco-Prussian war. Recognizing the threat of ordinary people ‘losing their chains’ the two sides with English involvement rapidly came to a peace agreement (which actually rather favorable to the French given that Prussia… Read more »
Hear, hear…
Conned by the Chinese … what absolute nonsense. The USA billionaires invested heavily in China, and still do, in order to continue pursuing their first priority, greed. The CCP was a perfect vendor, it had just murdered most of its intelligensia – people who could threaten them – in the cultural revolution, it was desperate for contracts to employ its less educated workers – factory work was ideal – whom it would farm out at very cheap rates, it was all powerful within mainland China, capable of making anything happen without the people problems inherent in a democracy. A billionaire manufacturer’s dream: cheap workers, no regulations, no people problems, no legal problems. Of course, that changed with time, as China developed, for a start the labour got more expensive, but China does not yet look fit to surplant the USA. The Chinese have not yet discovered the art of creativity… Read more »
I have read the supply of vast amounts of Western arms to Russia near the end of WW2 were delivered in a timely way to Mao. (Truth is a Lonely Warrior – J Perloff). The nature of monopolism is war on truth and life – for it assumed as a ‘God’ position outside and set over life. It operates as substitution of natural polarity expression of one Life in all – that is the dance or relational expression -by a polarised exclusion and reversal. Such that the centre from which all else embodies and relates, is usurped and masked by denial that sets all else as war to protect ‘life’ as control set over life set in fear, pain, unworthiness, and lack. As such, a dissociative fantasy, given priority and power runs all sides of every conflict as a darkness to be protected from light of open disclosure. As such… Read more »
Matrix Pat Mar 20, 2021 10:00 AM ‘Spring Break Beach Party Walk Fort Lauderdale Beach, FL Bikini Beach’ Thanks for Cheering me up. My Perception of Americans just went up about 10,000% But then I thought how the hell do walk around the beach of these completely normal Americans on the beach..I even turned the sound on. I can’t currently compete with that. Do you do underwater too? little camera is it I wouldn’t walk round any beach even half as conservative openly with a mobile phone or a camera – unless I was completely obvious about it with a big camera and a full sound crew… No one seemed to notice you were filming Its as if you weren’t there, but you quite obviously were. I rarely learn anything much from Americans, but thanks for leading the way of all of us towards freedom – so we can go… Read more »
Policemen and Policewomen, are just ordinary people. The sons and daughters of ordinary people, like you and me. I am not denying that some of them are bastards, but the vast majority of them, are providing the best service they can, under extremely difficult circumstances… When they take their uniform off, they are just the same as us. If the shit hits the fan, who are you going to phone??? So I just got back from Sailing, and I had 4 of them knocking on my door at 8:00 am. I hadn’t done anything wrong..He says we are not after you..We want to talk to your son. I wasn’t going to let them in..My son wasn’t here… But my wife came down in her jimjams, and said let them in… So I did. Fortunately our front room was in reasonable shape – no smell of dead cats… So I asked… Read more »
WAR IS CLASS WAR
It is important to understand that the wars in East Asia, were not and could not be, CIA conspiracies. The wars in Korea and Vietnam (and others in SEA), were extensions of WWII, understood as a global class conflict and imperialist competition. CIA activity and operations were only the effects of that wars, not the causes of them. Individual actions, especially of those in powerful positions, are more representations of class politics than personal options and choices. That is why, in spite of the assassinations of Dihn Diem and JFK, most likely by US military interests, the Americans lost the war (as they did lose half of Korea). The US military (including CIA), fought hard to win the war, using all kind of dirty means, pushing to brutal extremes, but they found the limits of revolution at home and the USSR and Red China abroad.
“As discussed in part one of this series, with the Eisenhower-Nixon victory in 1952, the culmination of years of political strategizing by Wall Street Republican power brokers, the new heads of the State Department and the CIA were selected as none other than Foster and Allen Dulles respectively; and they would go on to direct the global operations of the most powerful nation in the world.” The author implies that if Adlai Stevenson had won the 1952 or the 1956 presidential elections, it would have made the slightest difference in terms of the SE Asian wars, as if the position of president made any difference by that point. The murder of JFK, partly for his decision not to enlarge the war in Vietnam, emphasized that point. Adlai Stevenson’s continued role as ambassador to the UN after the JFK hit, with LBJ being one of the primary conspirators, indicated the status of Stevenson’s… Read more »
OT Closer to home:
https://www.ruptly.tv/en/events/202103201300-LIVE6531-Londoners-join-the-worldwide-anti-lockdown-protests
Hooray! Biden is going to stop the endless wars and take down the CIA:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/us/politics/biden-harris-atlanta.html
Oh, that’s not what he meant….
Harris is a very worrying psychopath. Biden will be dead soon and much evil will happen under her watch, given her record of complicity with brutality against the American poor.
LEFTIST GOSSIP These articles show the characteristically ‘gossipy’ and, essentially, empty way of a leftist ‘historiography’ that pretends to substitute grandiose and lengthy ‘bitching’ for serious discussion, analyses and materialist history and politics. To think that the wars in Korea and Vietnam were ‘pre-planned’ to the minute (by a couple of very bad fascist individuals or brothers), as scenarios of Cold War confrontation, is not only not serious, but amounts to willingly ignore the realities and forces of war and history. To put too many hopes in the munitions stockpile in Okinawa is absurd, as the military situation in the whole region could explain and explains perfectly its use. Besides, the economy of Japan was actually, and literally, revived by the wars in East Asia, which makes of Okinawa just a relatively unimportant issue (not to mention that, after the war, millions of tonnes of munitions were dumped into the… Read more »
“leftist ‘historiography’”
“Again with the Corporate Fascist Oligarch Mobster Psychopath right-center-left political paradigm baloney to get WE THE PEOPLE (HUMANITY) at each others throats and distract from the fact that they are being robbed blind by criminal creeps like the one pictured below.”
Yes his comment is tripe but you are Wrong: It is not a pantomime, the left really does/has represent the interests of the working population, historically and even now, if you can find it represented by any political party. (rare)…….
You are the lie, because you want to equate fascist and socialism as the same, they are not, one is the only force that has achieved anything for the working populations of the UK and Europe the other a brutal illogical anti human tyranny bases on illusions of national greatness and xenophobia. You are the fraud and class traitor for misrepresenting that struggle.
“See the latest screed from deranged jackbooted crocodile teared corporate fascist fabian eugenicist brownshirt charlatan fraudster Louis? Still pushing the SCAMDEMIC ‘Big Lie’ and focusing on Frances and the sorry lot A-hats at CUNY Grad Center.”
https://louisproyect.org/2021/03/18/whither-dsa-jacobin/
Whilst the a far-right government in the UK and an Alt right President in the USA implemented all the lockdown policies I don’t see what the point is.
Hijacking the real left has been happening since Tony Blaire was elected, and of course the fake left are now the enemy of the working class, just like their bothers and sisters in the far-right are. The UK has adopted the US model of a fake left-wing opposition party vs a fake libertarian right wing party both serving the same clients.
Didn’t Blair and Brown perpetrate the hijacking of the “real left”? Didn’t it happen because the working class loved Thatcher enough to keep on returning her to power? Didn’t the working class sell out to Thatcher in return for home ownership of council houses? It could be argued that Thatcher did more for the aspirational working class than did any left wing politician, especially the clowns running the labour party in the twenty years before Blair.
It can SEEM so. And that is part of how it runs. There is a game of musical chairs. As a process of depletion in which competition for position drives shifting deceits and well as overt coercions. Seeking to fit life into ideological straitjackets is its sacrifice to Identities of coercion and deceit. Up to a point we can use such references within a limited range of broadly shared agreements. But is there any life in it? The solidarity and love of brotherhood that might have been a social reformation is anathema to the persistence of established identity of possession and control. Merely seeking to dispossess and ‘share’ (sic) control under state mandate is a reactive hate to a sense of victimised grievance. That is harnessed and used by those in the ‘seat’ of possession and control. Regardless whether anyone agrees, I see a spiritual conflict, denied and masked over… Read more »
Thatcher was successful and received much working class support. Foot, Kinnock etc were not and did not. Why?
You didn’t really understand me. Never mind.
Covid receives much working class support. So what?
She took them to soup kitchens and food banks where they are now.
We have to bear in mind the Hegelian dialectic so favoured by sociopathic leaders . Create two opposing parties, start them fighting and in the ruins come in with your solution- what you wanted in the first place. The added bonus being the profit from lending credit to both sides to fund armaments and then reconstruction.
If you name one side fascist and the other socialist you’ll be on a real winner. Despite this trick going on for centuries it’s still guaranteed to get them at it like cats and dogs. Rinse and repeat.
You think having zero polital knowledge is an asset don’t you?
Is that a zero decree?
Socialism isn’t a trick but people calling themselves socialists while doing something entirely different are.
It’s the people who call themselves socialists that aren’t who seem to run the party. But it’s not the people that put me off so much as the centralisation of it all. They all have a central bank which is a magnet to every user within a thousand miles. Before it’s been open for a week it will be taken over and the scams will be operating. If you can pass off the cold and the flu as the black death on the whole world you can convince people of anything, including socialism. It’s a great idea but not for lambs in a world with wolves.
Question: If you do not believe in government because all governments are the instruments of parasitic predators, some to somewhat lesser extent than others, does that make you leftwing, rightwing, or wingless?
History shows you government is not always the instrument of predators. So you are just wrong.
Looks like he’s just been turned down for a leading role in the UK TV series “The Walking Dead.”
She does not characterise the war as a fight against left-wing ideology, which is what the thing the US fears above all else. That is her error.
Thank you. I was just going to say it was a load of bollocks. How can this statement of fact:
be closely folowed by the assertion that the use of this materiel in the the Korean and Vietnam Wars shows they were preplanned? This is in the introduction!
Badly written sub-undergraduate drivel.
That’s right. That’s the level reached in this era of faffing. Even in school, people used to be quite intelligent. It’s just gossip that leads them to the magical worlds of Disney.
Thank you Cynthia Chung for drawing this important article.
In Indochina, French Cancer metastasised into American Cancer.
Off topic but what do you think about this?: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-56462390 “Police have warned students in the UK against using a website that they say lets users “illegally access” millions of scientific research papers. The City of London police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit says using the Sci-Hub website could “pose a threat” to students’ personal data. The police are concerned that users of the “Russia-based website” could have information taken and misused online.” A Russian website! Well of course! Russian bastards! “The Sci-Hub website says it “removes all barriers” to science. It offers open access to more than 85 million scientific papers and claims that copyright laws should be abolished and that such material should be “knowledge to all”. It describes itself as “the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers“.” Well – isn’t that what everyone would want?… Read more »
“Potentially dangerous” presumably means information contradicting the mainstream narrative.
I had a go at connecting to sci-hub and got a “connection for this site is not secure” message with no option to continue anyway. Then I tried http instead of https and got “Virgin Media has received an order from the High Court requiring us to prevent access to this site”.
Here’s a how to:
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2018/04/how-to-use-sci-hub-to-get-academics-papers-for-free/
Hello George Mc: THE important question that should have been considered by civil populations since the establishment of copy-write and patent laws, is: Who benefits from copy-write and patent law? Answer: The owners. > No one else…
“The Sci-Hub website says it “removes all barriers” to science.
It offers open access to more than 85 million scientific papers and claims that copyright laws should be abolished and that such material should be “knowledge to all”.
It describes itself as “the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers“.
“Knowledge to all” might inspire civilian populations to tell their owners to fob off… Andrew Pitts (and others) know this…
Aaron Swartz. (The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz, 2014)
It is now believed that he stumbled upon an MIT pedophile ring, possibly linked to Jeffrey Epstein and friends, and that got him suicided, either directly or under pressure by his own hand.
But Aaron’s passion was that publicly-funded content, especially university research, should be accessible to all for free.
Instead we face the creeping commercialization of even public imagery, by poisonous tentacles posing as the housewife’s friend, such as Pinterest, and of research by Corporatist front organizations like Jstor. And the buying up and copyrighting of the public domain by fossil parasites like the Gettys, while their cheerleaders the Rockefellers threaten murder from the shadows.
Look what they did to Aaron Swartz for thinking the same thing, that knowledge should be free to all, and that all of these publicly funded books and papers should be made easily available. Cuddly Barry Obama’s administration shut him up forever.
On the topic of copyright law, would you believe that, in the UK, the King James Bible (from 1611) is still under copyright and will apparently remain so perpetually? From a 2011 letter to the Guardian, regarding a 400th Anniversary edition of this book, from one Jim Killock, Executive director of Open Rights Group: Michael Gove and the government are making a gift of the King James Bible to every school in the UK (Report, 25 November) but continue to restrict how we use it. The crown has a perpetual copyright on the King James Bible, through “letters patent” originally issued to stop unofficial editions and then to protect the country from ranters, shakers, Quakers, nonconformity and popery. Thus today we can’t freely reprint, circulate passages, write commentaries and draw upon the text in the way we might with other texts of the time, such as Shakespeare’s plays. Bizarrely, these… Read more »
potentially dangerous to you, because it is proscribed information the maggot regime in westmonster and its hired goons has declared verboten.. so be careful criminal..
and don’t think about protesting because that will be jail time.. as decreed by your ‘occupation governors’..
The Russians have had enough of Global warming and Covid then.
SELLOUTS!!! Rand Paul
https://odysee.com/@HighImpactFlix:ca/RandPaulPromotesBigPharma:a
Ron & Rand Paul are libertarians, which is by definition makes them pro-Corporate power and anti-government restrictions and regulations to control them. It is you that have not understood what he was, he is consistent with his disgusting beliefs.
About Rand Paul. Some people are just not combustible enough…
ANTI ESTABLISHMENT HERO
“Drink the Kool-Aid!”
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“The more you drink, the higher in Heaven you will go.”
ESTABLISHMENT criminal.
Astra Zenica placebo celeb jab perhaps?
“peaceful and humane transfer”. Population transfers are what they do, the Vietnamese example is one of many. There were massive population transfers in the wake of WW2 little known in the Anglosphere. Nur Masalha’s book EXPULSION OF THE PALESTINIANS makes it clear that Zionist leaders like Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir were expecting a wholescale “transfer” of the Palestinians in their letters in the 1930s. This is called ‘ethnic cleansing’ when the bad guys do it. Otherwise it’s just moving pieces around the chessboard. “MI6 and the CIA staged a coup against the beloved nationalist Mosaddegh in Iran”. And what was one of their tactics but the now admitted use of false flag attacks. The CIA have been doing this from the start. However I would correct the article’s somewhat misleading impression that US intelligence operations started with the CIA. Intelligence agencies existed in the US before the CIA, they just… Read more »
like much of this type of information and aggregation of governmental historic data.. the usual tropes and classifications are rolled out, confidently pointing fingers at the usual narrow band of culprits, naming the usual alphabet criminals, and ‘fascist imperialists’ drawing the wrong conclusions (subterfuge?) overlooking entirely the shadowy groups of men orchestrating the symphony.. and that communism and fascism are merely tools in the same box.
‘
for example: ‘the focus’ group’ WW2, ‘baruch’, FDL and poland, the obtaining of enigma and it’s use to orchestrate the theatre of war..
she almost gets ‘it’ but retreats when noting korea and vietnam had been planned years in advance..
The dark forces and fraudsters who are perpetrating this scamdemic are making ex Nazi Allen Dulles proud. The question is are they going to get away with it?
Not if Irish Dr Anne McCloskey has anything to do with It! Her latest powerful video has just gone “viral” exposing the ‘Great Reset’ agenda behind the Covid hoax a must watch for all doubters! The video can be viewed at kickthemallout.com and davidicke.com.
There’ll always be someone who disagrees -that’s the way of the world!
We are now so convinced that it is possible to open up because of the vaccine, but the figures are telling us that it was safe to open up even before anyone was ever vaccinated. I calculated my risk of dying from this virus at 0.1%. Oh how the propaganda seeps into all our minds and how we are now totally hostage to the illusionary power of these ‘vaccines’.
‘Spring Break Beach Party Walk Fort Lauderdale Beach, FL Bikini Beach’
The US is laughing at the rest of the world as they live their lives normally, and where only the mentally retarded still wear masks.
There’s nothing ‘normal’ about the way Americans live their lives – masks, or no masks.
And our representatives always imitate them.
It’s called the “Special Relationship”, and what’s special about it is that it only flows one way.
“It is called conditioning. A population of complaint prole slave sheeple do not rise up while they are being fleeced. Oh yes, the so-called ‘representatives’ are merely props placed there to give the illusion of choice, when in fact there is no choice, just owners.”
https://www.tumblr.com/search/v+debs/photo
he religion of Neo-liberalism guts the soul out of any society, everything is commoditised, even love and happiness is given a price in dollars, debased and made uniform. This is why it is of no importance that their economy is destroyed, there is no humanity, history or quality to save unlike in Europe.
Off Topic
PCP Papers Laid Alleging Pandemic Fraud Against Hancock, Whitty, Vallance & Ferguson
https://www.thebernician.net/papers-laid-alleging-pandemic-fraud-against-hancock-whitty-vallance-ferguson/
Do you in any way monitor the number of emails that are part of OG ‘fleets’ or are they set up to disappear?
This war led by the CIA has been supplanted onto the internet, where the power to influence on the ground by individual CIA agents has been replaced by virtual mass persuasion technics. The CIA’s use of the news media’s propaganda has been replaced by social media persuasion on a grand scale. Their war on socialism, has intensified and bypassing the consent and mediation of european governments, who have been cut out of the ‘management chain’. The attacks on the BBC, priming it for Com-cast take-over, the Brexit movement to wreck the EU, the torment of the woke-’left’ to discredit real socialism, the destruction of small business, the enforced ‘Amazon’ and ‘McDonalds’ lockdowns, the attacks on the NHS and drive to its privatisation, the pushing of the anti-socialist rants of the alt-right, revealing their foreign origins in their completely inappropriate alien doctrine in the UK’s political history, are all part of… Read more »
“the two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki”. A few questions about that narrative: 1) Is Robert Oppenheimer a remotely plausible head of the Manhattan Project? 2) Where did the enriched uranium in the Hiroshima bomb come from? (It wasn’t Oak Ridge which wasn’t producing anywhere near enough). 3) The Hiroshima bomb type had never been tested (the Trinity test – conducted on the 33rd paralell, natch – was of a different type of bomb) – does it seem plausible that an untested bomb would have been dropped given that if it failed to detonate it would give away many technological secrets? 4) The second bomb is rather neglected – but there’s much strange about it. Officially Nagasaki was the back-up city used because the first choice was obscured by clouds – but this is not what the weather reports of the day show. Nagaski happens to be… Read more »
Yes, the entire so-called nuke bomb narrative is fake, false and/or misleading, all we have is endless fake/fraudulent footage and a bogus narrative. I do not believe that these so-called nukes ever existed; Anders Bjorkman (Tripod) is one of many good sources of info –
https://heiwaco.tripod.com/bomb.htm.
However this level of research is way over the heads of the many, including some who regularly post here. It’s sad when otherwise seemingly intelligent people refuse to look into subject matter such as this, especially now whilst the parasite class are currently fooling the masses yet again with a fake worldwide pandemic.
Big lies are told and sold all the time, the biggest lies tend to be the most enduring. We live in a world of lies and deceit, they’ve lied about everything. This world is ultimately controlled by very dark unseen forces…
like the moon landings, the photographic evidence is dubious to say the least.. so make of that what you will…on the upside the herd is beginning to question the false god of scientism and it’s mendacious imbecilic priest class.
‘Hiroshima Revisited’ by Michael Palmer reviews the medical evidence.
https://archive.org/details/Hiroshima_revisited/
Fuck sake. Now the atom bombs dropped on Japan were some sort of conspiracy?
The constantly maintained image of an under-defined enemy who could be anywhere and everywhere is the most fundamental prop of ruling class control. And covid is the logical culmination of this image: an enemy that is literally invisible, possibly attaching itself to everyone you see and possibly in front of your face right now or even festering inside you. Thus you cannot even be sure of yourself! It’s the ultimate divide and rule!
”under-defined enemy”
It is an illogical, almost religious war, against socialism and the redistribution of wealth, to protect an extremely wealthy elite and maintain the ‘natural order’ of inequality and injustice.
Its called the induction of paranoia George ! People can easily become paranoid through fear of contagion if they are genuine virus and Covid believers – the virus is out to get you if you don’t keep your distance and wear your mask!! If Dick Turpin always wore his mask how come the perpetrators of this fraudulent scamdemic don’t wear theirs – not to mention names of course? !!!
The US Has Been at war 225 out of 243 years since 1776Research conducted by the “Jang Group and Geo Television Network” reveals that the United States has been at war for about 225 of the 243 years since its inception in 1776.
While the number of US foreign military interventions had stood at 188 till 2017, the world super power was found involved in 117 “partisan electoral interventions” between 1946 and 2000 or around one of every nine ballot exercises held since Second World War.
The United States of Terrorism just loves living like this…
This site is going in a very good direction, by address real issues and the history that dictates the shape of our world. Just avoid the many red-herrings pushed by the CIA’s shills and you are there.
addressing*
Until the CIA closes it down, of course…
indeed.
Thank you, Cynthia.
Seconded. Thank you for explaining what was going on in the world while I was still at school; too young to understand, only not liking what I saw on the Newsreels from Korea with their relentless, loud, yammering commentary of self-justification.