also published by NY Review Of Books on November 9, 1967
The last chapter is very simple (shortest chapter in the book) and has nothing to do with McCarthy's experience in South Vietnam but rather the political climate in the US and McCarthy's own anti-war stance. That is, it's a pretty standard op-ed piece rather than anything too interesting. Still, I might as well post a few excerpts.
Early part of the chapter is about the way that the "respectable" anti-war elements get politically neutralised when the inevitable question "how do we withdraw?" is asked. Pro-war argument basically relies on the inertia of war... how are we gonna get 450,000 troops outta there, smartypants? In the end McCarthy advocates for actions like tax refusal, helping draft dodgers out, boycotting war industry (page 118)
These are the errors of an opposition that wants to be statesmanlike and responsible, in contrast to the “irresponsible” opposition that is burning its draft card or refusing to pay taxes. To make sure that it can be told apart from these undesirables, it behaves on occasion like a troop of Eagle Scouts.
(page 103)
For the respectable opposition, unilateral withdrawal has become steadily more unthinkable as United States intervention has widened. It was perfectly thinkable before 1961. It was even thinkable for Bobby Kennedy as late as September 1963, at a meeting of the National Security Council, when he asked whether now might be the time to get out. It is still thinkable, though not by the Kennedy men, who, out of power, dare not reason as they might have in the privacy of a president’s councils.
We could still, if we wished, take “French leave” of Vietnam, and how this should be done ought not to be the concern of those who oppose our presence there. When the French schoolteachers and intellectuals of the Committee of 121 insisted that France get out of Algeria, they did not supply De Gaulle with a ten-point program telling him how to do it. That was De Gaulle’s business. He was responsible, not they. As intellectuals, they confronted their government with an unequivocal moral demand, and far from identifying themselves with that government and thinking helpfully on its behalf, they disassociated themselves from it totally so long as it continued to make war in Algeria. The administrative problems of winding up the war were left to those who had been waging it, just as the political problem of reconciling the French electorate to a defeat was left in the hands of De Gaulle, a politician by profession.
(page 104-105)
There's a sense of sleepwalking through the whole conflict, as it were:
Not being a military specialist, I cannot plot the logistics of withdrawing 464,000 American boys from Vietnam, but I know that it can be done, if necessary, and Johnson knows it too. Everybody knows it.
(page 107)
A feeling of having no choice is becoming more and more widespread in American life, and particularly among successful people, who supposedly are free beings. On a concrete plane, the lack of choice is often a depressing reality. In national election years, you are free to choose between Johnson and Goldwater or Johnson and Romney or Reagan, which is the same as choosing between a Chevrolet and a Ford—there is a marginal difference in styling.
{...}
It is natural that in such a system the idea of freedom is associated with escape, whether through trips or “trips,” rather than with the exercise of one’s ordinary faculties. And at the same time one’s feeling of imprisonment is joined to a conviction of innocence. Johnson, perhaps genuinely, would like to get out of his “commitment” to the war in Vietnam, and the more deeply he involves himself in it, the more abused and innocent he feels, and the less he is inclined to take any steps to release himself, for to do so would be to confess that he is culpable or—the same thing—that he has been free at any time to do what he would now be doing.
(page 114)
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As we drove into downtown Saigon, through a traffic jam, I had the fresh shock of being in what looked like an American city, a very shoddy West Coast one, with a Chinatown and a slant-eyed Asiatic minority.
(page 12)
He looks up and grins (“Morning, Ma’am”) as he shows two slant-eyed kids how to fill sandbags to protect an artillery installation.
(page 51)
And now here was Major Be, his slant eyes gleaming, talking about a “revolution,” stealing the NLF’s thunder to pass on to his cadres.
(page 77)
Probably “Virginia Woolf” and the major {Makeshift_Swahili note: McCarthy is here referring to two South Vietnamese leaders of the Revolutionary Development program} should be classed as fascists, despite or even because of their likeness to doctrinaire Communists of the unreconstructed Stalinist type. Major Be’s beautiful tractor advanced toward us out of the final sequence of an old Soviet movie, and “the Pope’s dirty peace trick” could have been spat out equally well in Albania or possibly Peking.
(page 83)
south-vietnamese anti-communists should be classed as fascists because of their similarity to stalinists... fuck outta here 
so im gonna go read some stuff about the history of opium, might turn this into an "opium and empire" thread for a while....
feel free to use in your own thread if getfiscal doesn't post
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found this cool book on my bookshelves that i forgot I had, thought you might be interested:
Makeshift_Swahili posted:Already from the very start we get a detail which I don't think turned up in Karnow:
At the airport in Bangkok, the war greeted the Air France passengers in the form of a strong smell of gasoline, which made us sniff as we breakfasted at a long table, like a delegation, with the Air France flag planted in the middle. Outside, huge Esso tanks were visible behind lattice screens, where US bombers, factory-new, were aligned as if in a salesroom. On the field itself, a few yards from our Caravelle, US cargo planes were warming up for takeoff; US helicopters flitted about among the swallows, while US military trucks made deliveries. The openness of the thing was amazing (the fact that the US was using Thailand as a base for bombing North Vietnam was not officially admitted at the time); you would have thought they would try to camouflage it, I said to a German correspondent, so that the tourists would not see.
(page 11-12, my emphasis added)
Actually this is mentioned at least on page 437 of Karnow "In addition to flying from bases within the country, the air armada operated out of Guam and Thailand and from carriers in the South China Sea"
defoliants are also mentioned on page 437.
wish these books were indexed better!! i don't like dissing karnow and then finding out that he did mention something (if briefly). i only came across this by accident my Mary McCarthy books aren't indexed at all.
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tears posted:ive been working my way through your good thread swahili, thanks
found this cool book on my bookshelves that i forgot I had, thought you might be interested:
Ah that's cool. It mentions USSR aid to North Vietnam. I've highlighted this before; between USSR and China, the Vietnamese were getting a pretty good deal on aid: "The North Vietnamese and Vietcong need no more than 15 tons of supplies a day from the north in order to sustain the effort in the south".. compared to the 6,000 tons of daily aid supplied by China and the USSR (pages 454-455 in Karnow).
Compare this to the amount of supplies the US had to bring in every day. Karnow says by 1967 "a million tons of supplies a month" (page 436). That's ~33,000 tons per day.
33,000 tons vs 15 tons 
crazy. although i'm sure the North was probably using much of the 5,985 tons in aid left over to rebuild stuff in the north.
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in 1968, in accordance with requests from the DRV the soviet Union will deliver to the DRV aircraft, anti-aircraft missiles, artillery and firearms, ammunition and other millitary supplies and also complete sets of equipment, vehicles, oil products, ferrous and non-ferrous metals, food, chemical fertiliesers, medicaments and other items for the furtherment of the DRV's defence capability and the development of its national economy
theres also mention of "further non-repayable aid and further credits".
The book is pretty dull for reading, theres a lot of mutual backslapping and denouncement of imperialism, but from a historical pov into USSR official stance its great. (if you're in the US swahili) do you get books like this round there, official ussr published stuff? they tend to show up in charity shops quite a lot in europe, what with the proximity to the ussr but i'd expect not as common in the us?
V.G Kiernan on the difference between British opium dealing and French opium dealing:
A Briton who smoked opium in India would have been guilty of a derogation only less unpardonable than a native wife; he could drink unlimited whisky to float him through his dusky years of exile, because whisky was not a native product. It was another odd differential that John Bull, the strange convolutions of whose conscience have never been fully anatomized, did not sell Indian opium to his own Indian subjects; he dumped it on the Chinese, for whose vices he was not responsible. Envious of his opium profits, and more logical, the French made opium a government monopoly in Indochina and sold it to the public for revenue. In the 1920s three quarters, at a guess, of the French themselves were partakers. In pipe-dreams they could still be the philosopher-kings of the Utopian colony of French official theory.
from The Lords of Human Kind, V.G. Kiernan page 100.
"A New Vice: Opium Dens in France", an illustration from Le Petit Journal, 5 July 1903. many french in indochina brought their habit back to france and there was a bit of a moral panic over it.
Makeshift_Swahili posted:yeah i've only ever seen one ussr thing like that here, it was documents from one of the congresses they held i think, maybe kruschev era? i can't really remember. i shoulda bought it just for the historical interest but im sure the content would have been very dry & boring.
have you ever been to gould's in sydney? they def have stuff like this but can be a little pricey e.g. http://gouldsbooks.com/product_info.php?cPath=61&products_id=137756
Petrol posted:Makeshift_Swahili posted:yeah i've only ever seen one ussr thing like that here, it was documents from one of the congresses they held i think, maybe kruschev era? i can't really remember. i shoulda bought it just for the historical interest but im sure the content would have been very dry & boring.
have you ever been to gould's in sydney? they def have stuff like this but can be a little pricey e.g. http://gouldsbooks.com/product_info.php?cPath=61&products_id=137756
havent been. i buy a lot of cheap shit from charity shops and have access to a good library
Makeshift_Swahili posted:Petrol posted:Makeshift_Swahili posted:yeah i've only ever seen one ussr thing like that here, it was documents from one of the congresses they held i think, maybe kruschev era? i can't really remember. i shoulda bought it just for the historical interest but im sure the content would have been very dry & boring.
have you ever been to gould's in sydney? they def have stuff like this but can be a little pricey e.g. http://gouldsbooks.com/product_info.php?cPath=61&products_id=137756
havent been. i buy a lot of cheap shit from charity shops and have access to a good library
charity shops are the best obviously, ive also found a lot of interesting stuff at trash n treasure type stores, like when some old bastard dies and his surviving relatives think his collection of james last LPs and anticommunist pamhplets from the 60s will actually be worth money, and im the only person willing to drop a couple of bucks on both
but yeah gould's is worth checking out some time just for the selection, the harder to find stuff isnt cheap but you might be able to haggle if you visit in person. theres also a huge collection of stuff like old penguin books with multiple copies so they're generally v well priced.
chickeon posted:
Makeshift_Swahili posted:this vietnam documentary thing is timed to roughly coincide with anzac day, big propaganda day here. australian nationalism/national-identity and 'anzac myth' (ww1/gallipoli) are closely related, they're always looking to rehabilitate and include australian involvement in other wars (for the most part its built around WW1 but all those have died off obviously). in another 10 years itll be iraq vets.
http://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/648673859700/vietnam-the-war-that-made-australia-the-war-before-the-war
im watching this for curiosities sake and it's taking a very interesting approach in terms of australian mythmaking & autralia's role in vietnam (through interviews with an elite australian army team). that is, while the documentary is anti-communist (note it says south vietnam under ngo dinh diem was democratic at the start lol) it is also anti-CIA and even anti-american to some degree. the overall vibe is that while the vietcong were bad, americans got their hands too dirty and were counter-productive. however, the australians (often working at the CIAs behest) and the south vietnamese deathsquads being trained by australians are not to blame for atrocities *washes hands*.
just thought i'd post this here since it came up in another thread. there's only 3 days left that you can stream it from sbs. its a unique way to try to rehabilitate vietnam war for australian patriotic purposes. can americans access this content or are y'all region blocked?
Makeshift_Swahili posted:im watching this for curiosities sake and it's taking a very interesting approach in terms of australian mythmaking & autralia's role in vietnam (through interviews with an elite australian army team). that is, while the documentary is anti-communist (note it says south vietnam under ngo dinh diem was democratic at the start lol) it is also anti-CIA and even anti-american to some degree. the overall vibe is that while the vietcong were bad, americans got their hands too dirty and were counter-productive. however, the australians (often working at the CIAs behest) and the south vietnamese deathsquads being trained by australians are not to blame for atrocities *washes hands*.
anti-americanism is only really allowed in australia in the context of nation-building mythology, and only to the extent of saying we're like a better version of the yanks.
the truth, though, is that australians did work hand in glove in developing special ops strategy, death squads, etc. one of the most interesting characters ive come across in my reading is ted serong. his wiki page gives a good idea of how deeply involved he was and also how fucking reactionary and bloodthirsty he remained after the war. i actually have a relatively recent biography of him that i picked up second hand, it has some v interesting details.
Makeshift_Swahili posted:just thought i'd post this here since it came up in another thread. there's only 3 days left that you can stream it from sbs. its a unique way to try to rehabilitate vietnam war for australian patriotic purposes. can americans access this content or are y'all region blocked?
i have downloaded this from the source so if anyone is curious to see it just let me know and ill post it somewhere.
incidentally, any aussies out there wanting a convenient way of downloading stuff from the catchup tv services, try webdl. you'll need python but the instructions are pretty clear and it's well worth it. doesn't work for plus7, there's rarely anything worthwhile there anyway but this will do the trick if you really need it
http://tinyurl.com/z8kbcf9
http://tinyurl.com/jqbz865
for hgefils click the green download thinger at the very bottom after putting the capcha in; hitting enter instead will take you to the useless premium whatever the fuck thing. then hit the create download link thing in the next thing it takes you to
chickeon posted:idk what form the streamed version takes but it was aired on tv i guess in parts, donno how many but here's ddl links for the 'first' two
http://tinyurl.com/z8kbcf9
http://tinyurl.com/jqbz865
ah to make it clear, what i linked is just the first episode. im watching no.2 now, the 3rd (final) episode is yet to be aired. thnx for the links
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i'm reading night vision which has the above unsourced snippet.
any info on that, or even ideas where to look?
xipe posted:
any info on that, or even ideas where to look?
karnow doesn't really mention the gender of the 19 vietcong that attacked the us embassy aside from a male driver/infiltrator (page 526) but its plausible. there definitely were at least some women involved in the tet offensive in saigon. on page 527 he mentions that "thirteen men and a woman" vietcong tried to attack the presidential palace.
i'll keep an eye out to see if i can get further info...
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EmanuelaBrolandi posted:Another poster has entered the running for the 'brown Moses of the left" position
rude...
Makeshift_Swahili posted:im watching this for curiosities sake and it's taking a very interesting approach in terms of australian mythmaking & autralia's role in vietnam (through interviews with an elite australian army team). that is, while the documentary is anti-communist (note it says south vietnam under ngo dinh diem was democratic at the start lol) it is also anti-CIA and even anti-american to some degree. the overall vibe is that while the vietcong were bad, americans got their hands too dirty and were counter-productive. however, the australians (often working at the CIAs behest) and the south vietnamese deathsquads being trained by australians are not to blame for atrocities *washes hands*.
chickeon posted:oh yeah here's the third ep http://tinyurl.com/z8m4q3c
a few scattered thoughts on the series as a whole;
there's the continuing undercurrent of "the USA mismanaged this war and was too brutal, although our overall intentions were correct". i'm interpreting this in two ways. firstly (and most importantly), its a good way of rehabilitating a relatively unpopular war. secondly, it very much fits with the perspective of the people interviewed for the series. elite advisers working hand-in-hand with the CIA? im sure they were more into using local proxies, "tactical precision" etc rather than the widespread bombings that the documentary criticises.
the last episode especially focuses on the vietnam war as a breaking down of racial prejudices, as australia took in large amounts of refugees after the war. this basic theme is also applied to the australian soldiers who served who made good friends among ARVN soldiers while serving. but how exactly can we interpret this action as some sort of racial egalitarianism? australians were there fighting against the self-determination of a people. does it really matter that some soldiers were buddy-buddy with the ARVN under their command? the racial (and imperialist) implications of this kind of propaganda is obvious to the rhizzone im sure. but i think this kinda shit works really well on the "left" which has no material analysis and cannot understand imperialism.
lastly, the series paints "vietnamisation" as some sort of betrayal by the yanks of our south vietnamese friends. that is, now that racial barriers have broken down and we're mates with south vietnamese deathsquads we should not abandon them by pulling out troops and making the ARVN fight alone. of course, this is basically in contradiction with point number one (the brutality of war). if we're to help our ARVN friends by keeping ~450,000 troops in south vietnam indefinitely, what kind of war do we expect?
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I started in Vietnam. I was scared, a rednecked honkie had just shot my best partner for no cause at all. I was afraid for my life, just like any other young Black man over there with these honkies, scared. They were scared, we were scared. Yes, I started using heroin because I was psychologically feared of the white man. The first drug I used, it was morphine. I had got shot. It was a bullet straight through the thigh. The medics gave me a shot of morphine and they got me high and all of a sudden I forgot I had got shot and I wasn't scared. So, each time we went in the jungle to a fire fight, I wanted the same feeling from my life
interview with a vietnam vet from "Life With Heroin" Beschner/Bovelle pg. 83
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Interesting critique of classic Vietnam-cinema interesting in Antony Easthope's article "Realism and it's subversion: Hollywood and Vietnam":
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Makeshift_Swahili posted:apparently on June 2 1972 there was a senate committee hearing where alfred mccoy talked about the cia & opium. anyone know where i could get a transcript (or recording) of this online? or is that the kinda stuff they bury deep in some library archive in washington dc?
Which committee? But that's pre Church/Pike, so its very unlikely to have gotten enough attention that someone put it online.
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cool cameo by pepsi. Cola Wars
shriekingviolet posted:Lol what a litany of testimony, confessions, evidence. It's cool that whenever someone tries to speak truth to power against empire we're told that they lack professional qualifications and are "one-dimensional and slanted" ie have politics that actually interact with material reality instead of meaningless pantomime and ritual.
from "Hep-Cats, Narcs & Pipe Dreams" by Jill Jonnes, page 272-273:
By May 1971 administration officials could pick up the Washington Post and read, in a front-page article headlined, "GI HEROIN SALES IN VIETNAM: CHEAP, FAST, IGNORED BY POLICE", how soldiers laughingly reported that heroin was still as readily available as ever: "You can go anywhere, ask anyone, they'll get it for you. It won't take but a few seconds"
that some of this stuff was front-page news at the time intrigued me. this is early 1971, more than a year before that article about McCoy i posted. im looking through wapo archives, and yea, some of the signs of south vietnamese official complicity are there in early 1971. im kinda wondering if this stuff turned up in more detail in any other major newspapers. the things i've found so far would be easy to dismiss as 'bad apples' though. also some other interesting articles turning up in my search....
anyway, my point was the testimony/evidence probably woulda been there if the senate committee looked a bit harder for it.
shriekingviolet posted:cool cameo by pepsi. Cola Wars
u4MAYyM_wh0
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