The Vile Empire: Remember Laos? What the Corporate Media Won’t Mention

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Patrice Greanville

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B-52s doing their thing over Laos and Vietnam. Heinously cowardly, and ultimately ineffective.

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Most people even halfway educated know by now that the US assault on Vietnam—actually extended to all Indochina, except for Thailand, regarded as a friendly—was among the most brutal and sociopathic in the annals of history. Just think the mass assassination Phoenix Program, among other crimes besides just bombing the hell out of these poor countries.  In the aseptic language used by Wikipedia for US crimes, the following is a description of this sordid undertaking:

The Phoenix Program (Vietnamese: Chiến dịch Phụng Hoàng) was a program designed and coordinated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Vietnam War, involving cooperation between American, South Vietnamese and Australian militaries. The program was designed to identify and destroy the Viet Cong (VC) via infiltration, torture, capture, counter-terrorism, interrogation, and assassination.[1][2][3][4] The CIA described it as "a set of programs that sought to attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong".[5] The Phoenix Program was premised on the idea that infiltration had required local support from non-combat civilian populations, which were referred to as the "political branch" that had purportedly coordinated the insurgency.[6] Throughout the program, Phoenix “neutralized” 81,740 people suspected of VC membership, of whom 26,369 were killed and the rest surrendered or were captured. A number of criticisms arose regarding the Phoenix Program, including the number of neutral civilians killed, the nature of the program (which critics have labelled as a "civilian assassination program"[6]), the use of torture and other coercive methods, and the program being exploited for personal politics.

In other words, a mind-boggling, disgusting, heinous project, conceived and executed by our military under orders from our sociopathic ruling plutocracy. No wonder so many vets came home with serious mental traumas. I recently ran across a tweet which is eloquent in reminding us of the magnitude of these crimes. 

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I think we don't talk enough (or at all) about how US bombed Laos 270 Million times, making it the most bombed country ever.

There were approximately more than 580,000 bombing missions on Laos between 1964 and 1973, that’s one every eight minutes, every day, for NINE YEARS pic.twitter.com/n9O6ieW5bH

— ✖️Edug-kun✖️ (@wing_of_night) August 13, 2020

Just imagine the people, innocent animals, blown to bits by such bombing raids. The impossibility of conducting even a minimalist normal life without fear of running into rainstorms of death courtesy of ignorant and brainwashed Americans. 

The Ho Chi Minh trail is very close and between Vietnam and Laos. US saw that they couldn't occupy Laos or put bases due to the geographical aspects of it, so the only way they saw fit was to bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail (in Laos) and eventually bomb Laos to death pic.twitter.com/KNjUA97bUW

— ✖️Edug-kun✖️ (@wing_of_night) August 13, 2020

USA owe significant reparations to Laos for outright murder/genocide during the American war in Vietnam. I had the privilege of visiting Laos last year. the legacy of this atrocity is still impacting innocent people today...heartbreaking.

— ph_litmus (@ph_litmus) August 15, 2020

The shameful role of the media whores who totally underreported or actively supported this war cannot be emphasized often enough. As a result most Americans still have a dense fog of confusion in their minds about the empire's adventures in Indochina: how it started, what purposes it served, and what lessons it should have taught us, but didn't. I'm talking here about moral lessons. Today after almost half a century since the end of this atrocity, the same ruling elites are actively involved not just in pursuing several more criminal wars with no end in sight, but eagerly plotting and provoking not just more conventional wars, but possibly the biggest chestnut of them all, the chestnut that will kill us all: a nuclear war with China or Russia or probably both. All on the basis of gross, easily explained deceptions. Which of course the media presstitutes and utterly corrupt political class won't touch, as their role is in selling us such calamities, not freeing us from them. Meanwhile, the US antiwar movement is nowhere to be seen (or heard). And no one has been able—yet—to reconstruct it. 

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Do people get the government they deserve? 

This bloodsoaked monster is probably the most evil person on planet earth https://t.co/nGq2H1EPHt

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 9, 2020

• remember: ALL CAPTIONS, IMAGES, PULL QUOTES AND ANNOTATIONS BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHOR—