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Here is how Ron Unz summarized in 2010 the essence of Sydney Schanberg’s prolix numerous accounts of the matter regarding Vietnam (and America’s refusal to pay reparations was just as outrageous in that instance as it now is regarding Iraq, Lybia, and Syria):
So: even that reporter shamed himself by lying in order to protect the honor of the U.S. Government by his pretending that this incident was embarrassing to both Governments instead of primarily (or even only) to his own Government (to which the POW — prisoners of war — matter wasn’t merely embarrassing, but it was outright traitorous against its own people). Schanberg lied by calling this a ‘ransom’-demand. He was playing along with the Nixonian myth, even though he was a partisan Democrat who could instead have cited it as being yet another reason to condemn that Republican President.
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Another important dispatch from The Greanville Post. Be sure to share it widely.
This article is part of an ongoing series of dispatches by historian Eric Zuesse
| America’s Government leads a “coalition” of gangsters... |
Different from the smooth hypocrites that preceded it, the erratic Trump regime is often arrogantly clear about its imperialist-fascist DNA, the true face of the empire, and one of the reasons the old establishment wants to get rid of him and his gang.
I Am an American, And I Am Ashamed of My Government.
It Is Now Strangling Syria to Death — Iraq & Libya Redux.
George Floyd’s Murder Is the Surface of Deeper Scandal.
This is not the America of the U.S. Constitution and of its Founders; it is not consistent with their ideals, neither in domestic policy, nor in foreign policy. This is the government that has a higher percentage of its population locked up in prison than any other nation on the planet. Some “Land of the Free!” Such hypocrisy! This Government is rot. And it is bipartisan rot — both of its political Parties. Both of them are controlled by America’s aristocracy. This is a one-dollar-one-vote Government, and it overwhelmingly locks up its poorest and least educated, not the actual big-time crooks, who own and run America’s international corporations and pollute and poison the entire world, while getting away scot-free as honored billionaires. America’s aristocracy must be brought down, but the public are duped by it into accepting it as a ‘democracy’ — despite its deep-seated contempt against the poor, and its racism, and America’s increasingly scandalous imperialism (an extension abroad of its supremacist attitude, which is routine for any aristocracy), trying now even to threaten the International Criminal Court into accepting the idea that America and its allies are immune from prosecution, or even from investigation, regarding possible international war crimes. This Government is the absolute pits, an imperialistic-fascist regime on steroids.
On June 12th, America’s Associated Press (AP) headlined “Syria Economic Meltdown Presents New Challenge For Assad”, and reported that,
In Syria nowadays, there is an impending fear that all doors are closing. After nearly a decade of war, the country is crumbling under the weight of years-long Western sanctions, government corruption and infighting, a pandemic and an economic downslide made worse by the financial crisis in Lebanon, Syria’s main link with the outside world.
Syria faces near complete isolation as the toughest U.S. sanctions yet start to come into effect next week. While Assad may have won the military war against his opponents with the help of allies Russia and Iran, he now faces an even bigger challenge of governing while more than 80% of his people live in poverty.
No mention is made there of the fact that the U.S. Government, which ever since 2009 had been planning to overthrow Syria’s Government and replace it with one that would be selected by the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia, refuses to pay any reparations for the resulting ‘civil war’ that has simply destroyed Syria and brought it, by now, into penury. The U.S. Congress, on 17 December 2019, passed into law a draconian new increase in economic sanctions to punish any entity or nation that trades with Syria — buys or sells to it. It’s an economic blockade. America’s pro-imperialist AP headlined “Congress takes aim at Syrian war crimes, Russian aggression” and reported that on that date, Congress “ratcheted up pressure on Syria, Russia and China while making it more difficult for the Trump administration to” do anything to reduce America’s efforts to conquer Russia and any of its allies, including Syria, China, and Iran. This legislation is called “SEC. 102. SANCTIONS WITH RESPECT TO FOREIGN PERSONS THAT ENGAGE IN CERTAIN TRANSACTIONS” and it stated that “On and after the date that is 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the President shall impose the sanctions described in subsection (b),” which dictates to America’s President that he will economically destroy Syria in order to bring down its Government. As that December 17th AP report stated, “The act seeks to deter Trump from walking away from the NATO alliance — something his critics fear is his intention — by barring the use of funds ‘to terminate, suspend, or file notice of withdrawal for the United States from NATO.’ And it will prohibit the Pentagon from reducing the number of U.S. troops in South Korea below 28,500 without a determination from the defense secretary that such a withdrawal is in the national security interest.” Trump’s longstanding refusal for the U.S. to pay any restitution to Syria for the estimated $250 billion-plus war-damage to the country which had been caused by America’s leadership isn’t enough, and Trump’s proud theft of Syria’s oil isn’t enough — there must (Congress demands) be also this increase in sanctions, so as to cause Syria’s Government to collapse. 
Any Government — such as the U.S. regime’s foreign allies — that adheres to U.S.-imposed sanctions, is thereby participating in international war-crimes, because the imposition of what are called “secondary sanctions” constitutes in today’s world the very first stage of international aggression... Here was the final Senate vote on that (the bill was added, on December 17th, into the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020,” which Trump signed three days later), and it passed there by the margin of 86 to 8. Instead of even merely one of the 5 Democratic Party U.S. Senators who were running for the Presidential nomination of their Party taking a public position against it, and thereby bringing prominently to the American public’s attention that this country, which had already destroyed Iraq and Libya, was now set upon doing much the same thing to Syria — and that this U.S. imperialism is outright evil and must now stop, and condemning all of the other contenders who were pushing for it — each one of those 5 Presidential contenders were “Not Voting”: Sanders, Warren, Klobuchar, Booker, Harris. What kind of a Presidential ‘choice’ is that, between Donald Trump versus any one of them — or Joe Biden, who was no longer in the Senate, but who was just as hawkish as Hillary Clinton? (And Biden won his Party's nomination by lying to Blacks about his record — and Sanders didn’t have the nerve to point it out and condemn him for it.) That’s supposed to be a ‘democracy’? That’s ‘leadership’? What kind of ‘leadership’?
Any Government — such as the U.S. regime’s foreign allies — that adheres to U.S.-imposed sanctions, is thereby participating in international war-crimes, because the imposition of what are called “secondary sanctions” constitutes in today’s world the very first stage of international aggression...The U.S. Government’s traitorism against its own people goes back a long way, at least back to Richard Nixon. Consider, for example, Nixon’s having dragged out the war in Vietnam for political advantage and then abandoned about 600 U.S. prisoners-of-war there and then become backed up by all subsequent U.S. Presidents and congresses in order to continue duping the American people into accepting continued U.S. imperialism, and the rule over this country by its own military-industrial complex, the owners of the corporations that sell mainly weapons to the U.S. Government, such as Lockheed Martin.
Schanberg became a hero to liberals with his reportage about Pol Pot's Cambodia, but his journalism was always partisan and mendacious, and perfectly within the margins of anti-communist imperialist propaganda.
Following the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Vietnamese refused to return their French POWs unless Paris agreed to pay financial compensation for the war. The French leaders paid the money and got their men back. Similarly, the Vietnamese refused to return their American POWs unless the U.S. government agreed to pay reparations. Nixon signed a document promising to do exactly that, but the Vietnamese, being cautious, kept many of the POWs back until the money was delivered. Then Congress refused to authorize the funds because “America doesn’t lose wars.”
And here is how, in that same issue of Unz’s magazine in 2010, Schanberg himself finally gave his first and only decent summary account of it, in his article there that was headlined “Silent Treatment: My four-decade fight to report the truth” (and that article is being hidden, even now, by Google, if you try to find it by googling that title, but here you will be able to see both Schanberg’s full article and Unz’s introduction to it — and this was Schanberg’s summary, there:
I’m referring to the evidence that North Vietnam — after the peace treaty had been signed on Jan. 27, 1973 in Paris — held back hundreds of American prisoners, keeping them as bargaining chips to ensure getting Washington’s promised $3.25 billion in war reparations. The funds were never delivered, and the prisoners were never released. Both sides insisted to their people and the world that all POWs had been returned, challenging the voluminous body of facts to the contrary. But behind the scenes, where the press did not go then or now, President Nixon accused Hanoi of not returning a multitude of prisoners.
Then, on 21 July 2016, at Strategic Culture, I reported on the continuing U.S. press cover-up about this:
There were two reader-comments to that at reddit:
anonymous
So that's what happened to the POW's forgotten there. Christ.
ridestraight
And that’s the reality. In a dictatorship. Getting to the truth, and getting it published, can be dangerous to one’s career, if one’s country is a dictatorship, such as in the U.S.
and this was the cover-up by Schanberg himself, in which he lied by calling Vietnam’s demands upon the U.S. Government ‘ransom’, instead of “reparations”:
So: even that reporter shamed himself by lying in order to protect the honor of the U.S. Government by his pretending that this incident was embarrassing to both Governments instead of primarily (or even only) to his own Government (to which the POW — prisoners of war — matter wasn’t merely embarrassing, but it was outright traitorous against its own people). Schanberg lied by calling this a ‘ransom’-demand. He was playing along with the Nixonian myth, even though he was a partisan Democrat who could instead have cited it as being yet another reason to condemn that Republican President.
Schanberg even had the gall there to assert that “We are the democracy and they are not.” Even after all of his long-hidden-by-the-press attempts to get this history out, finally, to the American public, he still needed to continue the myth, the lie, that today’s America is a democracy, instead of a dictatorship. It’s just a multi-Party dictatorship by its own aristocracy, an aristocracy that, like most aristocracies, has more than one Party, and all of its Parties despise its public. Nowhere in Schanberg’s article was any suggestion made that the U.S. Government had anything to apologize for to Vietnam’s Government and people — only that the U.S. Government should “utter a formal apology to the American people, and in particular to the families of the men still unaccounted for.” After all, “We are the democracy and they are not.” Honesty couldn’t be expected, not even from himself. He’s apparently proud of how he handled this matter — as a Democratic-Party flak, against the Republican Party. He’s just a typical example of what the most-successful ‘journalists’ are in America. Play along to get along — with the people who own the press. That’s the ‘journalist’s game. (The alternative for them is failure, which happens to any reporter who won’t play the propagandists’ game. America’s journalistic profession is part of the PR profession. That’s an acronym for PRopaganda. In that profession, the term “objective” — as in the profession’s mantra to “be objective” — refers to purpose, as in “What is the objective of the client, or of my boss?” Always follow the objective. Read the boss’s mind, and do what it wants, not necessarily what it says. That’s what the ‘journalism’ game is, in America. Here, the adage applies: “He that pays the piper calls the tune.” ‘Journalism’ is merely another field of commerce, in America.)
This is a situation in which there are no heroes — certainly not in the Government, nor in its press (neither the Democratic, nor the Republican side of it).
The French Revolution needs to be done here (but better-controlled), in order to restore the American Revolution, and finally in order to enforce the U.S. Constitution against the traitors to it, who for decades have run this land as being their dictatorship, over its people (Black, White, Hispanic, male, female, hetero, and otherwise). Divide and rule is the way aristocrats for thousands of years have protected themselves from the public, by redirecting the public’s problems onto and against each other, instead of all against the aristocrats and their aristocracy — against the behind-the-scenes rulers, rule by the richest.
For thousands of years, the aristocracy has been in control, and it certainly now controls in America. To call this a ‘democracy’ is simply to lie. It’s unfortunately an extremely effective lie. On June 15th, Gallup reported its survey of Americans, finding “42% ‘extremely,’ and 21% ‘very,’ proud to be an American”, though these percentages were down from the all-time highs, during late 2002 and until our 2003 invasion of Iraq, of 69% “Extremely proud,” and 21% “Very proud,” to be an American.
On 31 March 2020, Geopolitics Alert bannered “Saudis Air Drop Masks Contaminated with COVID-19 into Yemen”, and reported that “The United States plays a pivotal role in the Saudi war against Yemen. Washington provides troops, training, fighter jets, fuel for warplanes, and precision-guided smart missiles to Riyadh specifically for their war against Yemen. Furthermore, the United States also supplies logistical support for selecting airstrikes, intelligence, and troops for manning airstrike command centers.” Moreover, before the U.S. and its allies had coronavirus-19 to use as a weapon, Geopolitics Alert had headlined, back on 27 July 2018, “The US-backed Coalition in Yemen is Trying to Trigger Another Massive Cholera Epidemic”. Obviously, therefore, eliminating America’s aristocracy would benefit not only Americans, but the entire world.
America’s Government leads a “coalition” or “alliance” of gangsters. Any Government — such as the U.S. regime’s foreign allies — that adheres to U.S.-imposed sanctions, is thereby participating in international war-crimes, because the imposition of what are called “secondary sanctions” constitutes in today’s world the very first stage of international aggression, just before the coup-attempt stage, which comes before the final invasion stage (if no coup succeeds), and all of these international aggressions are war-crimes because they are not in retaliation for having been aggressed-against by any of those targeted nations. They’re not, at all, authentically defensive in nature. They’re based all, or almost all, on lies. Iraq didn’t invade America, Libya didn’t invade America. Syria didn’t invade America, Venezuela didn’t invade America. Iran didn’t invade America. Yemen didn’t invade America. China and Russia are up next, and neither of them ever invaded America. All of those sanctions are purely aggressive; they’re all international war-crimes. Any government that participates in them should likewise be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. Only a unified world can stand against the Nazi regime of today, which is the U.S. Government. U.S.-and-allied Governments should go to hell, because they already actually are there.
Imperialism needs to end, and it needs to end now. Slaves were brought to and sold in America only because that was part of imperialism — originally, British imperialism. Racism is part of the system.
If the International Criminal Court won’t put its foot down now against the world’s worst imperialist, the U.S. Government, then it should just quit, terminate its ongoing charades; and the imperialistic fascist regime in Washington should publicly announce that it’s quitting the U.N., so that the public throughout the world might respond appropriately — by demanding international boycotts of all U.S. brands, and by demonstrating against any visiting U.S. official: total isolation of the world’s leading fascist nation. Why not? Does no foreign nation possess the courage? The basic decency? And why can’t the governmental officials in U.S.-allied nations be voted out of office and replaced by politicians who publicly condemn them for whoring their nation to the barbaric U.S. aristocracy?
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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