About book The Phoenix Program: America's Use Of Terror In Vietnam (2014)
Why didn't the U.S., with it's enormous financial and technological power, bring massive healthcare, hygiene and business development and investment to Vietnam, if it wanted to show the people that it was there to help them? It would have cost much less than the war and nobody would have been killed or maimed. Such aid could have begun in the 50s and could have had enough of an effect by the mid-sixties that the VC troops would have abandoned the hard core ideologues.From p.258: "Responding to the grievances of the rural population and taking steps to correct social injustices might have enabled the GVN(S.Vietnamese) to collect intelligence and contest the VCI(Communists) in the villages. But acknowledging the nature of the conflict would have undermined the reason for fighting the war in the first place." The GVN was of course, taking its orders(and money!) from the U.S., so the war was profitable for the S.Vietnamese elite. How stupid they and all eager beaver money-grubbers really are since they lost their country and in most cases their lives for a greasy fist full of dollars in the lost here and now. The same goes for the corporate asset strippers and their political bag men off-shoring jobs--it's the exact same mentality. These people ruin societies, cultures and civilizations. They are nothing more than bandits and thugs.People know that in most cases, problems can be solved without fighting. Also, most people don't care about Communism or democracy per se, they care about eating and staying healthy and justice by law. Any system that can deliver that and not mistreat people is acceptable.I think that if the powers controlling the U.S wanted to project the positive aspects of the U.S to any foreign country under threat of Communism it could have, especially with the great wealth of goodwill towards it for defeating fascism.The problem was/is that the common good of the majority is of no concern, which renders our defeat of German and Japanese fascism as nothing more than a power struggle. Communism is the primitive response to this cruel negligence. What is really a problem solved by basic worker rights and protections becomes a hopeless war between extreme, short-lived ideologies whose only purpose is maximum power and profit.Douglas Valentine shows you the bureaucratic nightmare of a war machine propped up by empty slogans and run by an elite intent on profit from the very act of war. Remember that there is only a relatively small group of people actually pocketing the big bucks. Many of the military and intelligence people believed in the fight against Communism but I'm convinced that the ones at the top could give a s*** about Communism, fascism or anything else besides money. No war, no business--simple as that to them. Leave the propaganda to the eggheads. To people like them, the only thing Jesus got for his efforts was nailed to the cross. They put their money on the Romans every time.Valentine, as he does in "The Strength of the Wolf" and "The Strength of the Pack"-- his masterful history of drug crime and politics-- uses extensive, detailed interviews with important figures involved in the war. What is conveyed more than anything, along with showing how the various programs were set up, is the chaos of wartime bureaucracy. Inevitably, human personalities dominate any supposedly rational system and everything naturally degenerates into fear, greed, hatred and revenge--the ultimate lesson of Valentine's crucial history.Wars of conquest are doomed from the start. The majority of a nation will always support its native fighters, despite the group of collaborators. The foreigners will always be despised, even secretly by the collaborators.Foreigners are tolerated as an economic/business presence, as long as they are fair; if not, plots will always form to fight and expel them. So with that simple truth in mind, when will business elites learn that the best way to stay in business is to be fair? When will the grocery clerks stop sending the errand boys to collect the bill?
Douglas Valentine's book 'The Phoenix Program' gets the evolutionary information regarding this program correct. While there have been many books written about the 'Phoenix Program', Valentine's book is much more thoroughly researched than the other books. He has done his homework.The program was, at the time and still is controversial. Back in the early days of the Vietnam War, Americans did not assassinate people for political reasons, or so we thought. Since those days, much has been admitted by the various intelligence agencies and our Government, about this practice. Today, information about 'black-ops' squads and their missions is readily accepted as being a necessary evil in War time.When the Phoenix Program was in effect in Vietnam, MACV-SOG reported greatly reduced VC & NVA activities in the targeted AO. In other words, the program was successful. Was it a popular program? Obviously no, it was not. For very real political reasons, these missions were kept out of the main stream media, and in fact much of the program will never be known because, in the last few days of the South Vietnam Government, most of the Program's records were shredded, and are not recoverable.All in all this book is the one book you should read if you want to get the information available today regarding the Phoenix Program, warts and all.
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