During the last 50 years Americans invaded 200

[TokyoTakarazuka]

In both cases, an unpopular and tyrannical ritht wing regime governed propped up by the US. In both, the sympathies of the people of the South was with the anti-government, and anti-US forces. The US was, therefore, responsible in that it prevented the democratic will of the people from prevailing and made civil war an inevitability.

This is a highly debatable proposition which I not only disagree with, but will go so far as to say that modern research has largely disproved it. Although both the North and the South had significant bases of political support to draw upon, the peasants who comprised the majority of the population of both nations were largely apolitical, siding with whoever was winning the war and whoever could provide them with security. I find it highly unlikely that, by the time North Vietnam began sponsoring the Southern communist insurgency in 1959, Ho Chi Minh’s government could possibly have been any more popular than Ngo Dinh Diem’s. In 1953 North Vietnam began a ‘land reform’ campaign that descended into sheer terror as death squads organized at the community level were ordered to fill extermination quotes in each region, initiating waves of indiscriminate killings that ended in 1957 once 50,000 civilians had been killed and 100,000 imprisoned (by contrast, Diem caused about 15,000 deliberate democide deaths during his entire regime (1954-1963), including during the civil war with the Viet Cong). The Canadian peacekeepers stationed in North Vietnam during the 1950’s to ensure that the Geneva Accords were enforced were shocked in 1956 when group of peasants that had been traumatized by the North’s terror ran towards them begging to be taken to the South and were then beaten back violently by North Vietnamese police. This abject cruelty subsequently spawned massive uprisings against Hanoi, even at Ho Chi Minh’s birthplace. The peasants who launched the uprisings were poorly equipped and since the South never sought to aid them, their cause was evidently futile. Nonetheless, the brutality with which the North suppressed the peasant revolts (more than 1,000 died) caused mass defections of communist officials to the South. Diem, of course, was also fighting internal revolts by militant Buddhist sects and also was gaining the ire of significant portions of his population due to repression, but its unlikely that after the horror unleashed by the North from 1953 to 1957 that Diem would be any less popular than Ho was. At any rate, the North did not care whether their insurgency in the South was supported by the people or not; Ho was determined almost from the beginning that force would be required to unify Vietnam. The North infiltrated its first agents into the South in 1955, not even a year after the Geneva Accords were signed. Ho certainly made no attempt to accurately determine whether the majority of the people supported reunification. In fact, during the Inodchina War Ho had such difficulty finding communist recruits in the South that he openly cursed the “individualism” and “market orientation” of Southern peasants. Although the North has never, to this day, held any multiparty elections, the South did hold one free election, in 1967. Nguyen Van Thieu attained the most votes (33%) and therefore won the presidency, largely because his running mate was the highly popular air force marshal Nguyen Cao Ky. Six other parties ran against them on various nationalist or socialist platforms and a self-described ‘peace candidate’, Truong Dinh Dzu, placed second. Although the communists obviously had no choice but to boycott the election, the turnout was nonetheless surprisingly high, with an estimated 80% of South Vietnam’s population casting their vote. In 1966, based on polls and enemy behavior patterns, Professor Robert Scalapino estimated that about 17% of the population supported the communists. Socialist historian Gabriel Kolko estimated after the war that up to 35% of peasants, although very few city dwellers, were communist-aligned. An interesting essay that you can read online called ‘Villager Attitudes During The Final Decade Of The Vietnam War’ suggests that pro-communist attitudes amongst the peasantry reached a peaked in the early-1960’s, but afterwards declined precipitously. During the Tet Offensive of 1968 the North expected a mass ‘general uprising’ in support of them but in fact testimony from communist officials and POWs indicate that only 2% of the guerrillas were supported by the population. Perhaps the best indicator that the majority of Southerners did not support the North is that within ten years following reunification in 1975, two million were willing to leave their ancestral homes and flee the country in rickety, dangerous ships. In fact, the first Premier of a united Vietnam, Pham Van Dong, stated that 60% of the South population would have to be forcibly persuaded to accept union with the North. In other words, even once reunification was an established fact, he still thought he could count on the support of only 40% of the South’s population.

It’s possible that Kim Il-sung was more popular in North Korea than Rhee Syngman was in the South during the Korean War, but irregardless it’s doubtful that the majority of South Koreans supported the 1950 invasion. In 1948 North Korea began a land reform campaign, but unlike in North Vietnam this program was actually fairly successfully and reasonably popular, enough so that certain parts of it were emulated during South Korea’s own land reform program which was completed the following year. By the time the land reform in the North began, nearly one million of the regime’s opponents had already fled the country and these refugees would provide an important base of support for anticommunist sentiments in the South. During the 1940’s and 1950’s South Korea held several multiparty elections of varying degrees of fairness, and once again the North has, so this day, failed to hold one. The freest election in South Korea (up to 1988) occurred in 1948. The United Nations was able to supervise this election and although they recorded a few instances of sporadic voter intimidation, they in the end concluded that the voting was free and fair in the areas of South Korea they supervised (about 2/3rds of the country). The UN recorded a turnout of 75% of the population. Rhee’s party only won 48 of the 200 seats in the national legislature but a compromise was reached with two other parties that resulted in him being elected prime minister anyway. The United States gave the communist party full opportunity to run in the election but they boycotted it regardless. Nonetheless, they did field several ‘independents’ who won a few seats. Kim Il-sung invaded in 1950 in part because his associate Pak Hon-yong told him that 200,000 Southerners would jump to his support. However, Kim later denounced Pak as a liar, declaring that not “even 1,000” Southerners had supported his invasion. This data suggests that even if Kim was more popular than Rhee, the Korean people greatly disapproved of Kim’s violent tactics to achieve reunification.

In conclusion, there is significant evidence suggesting that, although the Southern governments may not have been extremely popular, they were as least as popular, by the time war broke out, as their Northern counterparts. As for your claim that the United States was staunching the “democratic will of the people”, keep in mind that South Vietnam held one more multiparty election in its history than North Vietnam did, and South Korea has held several more elections than the North. The multiparty elections that did occur in Vietnam and Korea reflect a tolerance in the South for political pluralism that was and is considered completely unacceptable in communist nations, where opposition candidates are not only banned from entering elections, but are to this day banned from existing altogether.

[TokyoTakarazuka]

The numbers that you het from White's website do not agree with those that have been commonly cited on the numerous investigative programmes and reports in the past couple of years. The US, quite deliberately, and without the cooperation of its allies, slaughtered hundreds of tousands of innocent civilians in Korea -for one example- lest the refugees had been infiltrated by enemy.

If you look at the individual statistics cited by Matthew White you will notice that his estimates are in each case based upon a very broad base of data reflecting the academic consensus, as well as including the opinions of both left-leaning and right-leaning scholars. Although it certainly isn’t the final word on the subject, the vast number, the fair selection, and reliability of the sources used at Matthew White’s website make me doubt that there is a better source available online. The numbers I have given are thus similar to and reflect the estimates of such sources as official statistics from the United States and communist nations, scholarly estimates from academic sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica, and even the opinions of left-wing activists such as Noam Chomsky.

I suspect your claims that the United States massacred ‘hundreds of thousands’ of innocent civilians is in fact based upon North Korean propaganda. Although American soldiers did commit several significant atrocities, by far the largest of which were the indiscriminate bombings of residential cities (sometimes support by Canadian fighter planes by the way), it’s false to say that deliberate democide by US forces exceeded 100,000. Both the government of South Korea and the United States agree that reports of a systematic policy to murder refugees are false. The largest single massacre committed by American troops was probably about 200 refugees who were murdered at No Gun Ri. Although there was probably also a massacre at Sinchon, the number of deaths was almost certainly no where near the 900 claimed by North Korean sources.

The numbers killed by US action in Cambodia have been put as high as 2 million by some investigators - I recall hearing Kissinger trying to defend himself on that.

That is the death toll of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship, not the Cambodian Civil War. Most sources estimate about 600,000 deaths during that war and even Noam Chomsky agrees that no more than one million died. I do not attribute any of the deaths caused by the Khmer Rouge dictatorship to the United States because no direct military or economic aid was given to them. Although it is true that for a brief period the United States encouraged China to assist the Khmer Rouge, the minuscule amount of aid that resulted from this was not influential and at any rate did not reach the Khmer Rouge until they had already been ousted from power. Aside from Pol Pot and his associates, China and North Vietnam undoubtedly bear the largest responsibility for the KR regime because both of them supplied vast quantities of economic and military aid. This is especially the case for North Vietnam which, in 1970 and 1971, was actually supporting the Khmer Rouge offensives with tens of thousands of conventional soldiers. Formerly, some scholars considered the United States partly to blame for the rise of the Khmer Rouge based on the claim that American bombing drove civilians in the KR’s arms. However, huge gaps have since emerged in this thesis, as even the author of it admits. The communist military units that overran Phnom Penh, for instance, were largely recruited before 1970. Moreover, since KR collectivization began piecemeal wherever they gained new territory, KR terror was already killing, by the early-1970’s, almost as many as people as US bombing.

The oil-for-food programme was kept in force at US insistence when others at the UN wished to end it. The numbers killed are far higher than you suggest. 500,00 children under five died before the new attack on Iraq. Take the number older and add in adults. What the number is, I have not seen, but it is certainly well over 1 million. Since the invasion, the rate of deaths amongst the civilian population has increased. That is known.

The 500,000 figure was originally reported by UNICEF and many scholars have noted that it was based off questionable methods of statistical analysis and yet had been cited by numerous other sources without properly verifying it. It’s most likely that the death toll from the Iraqi embargo was about 500,000, and Matthew White’s estimates suggest a number between 350,000 and 500,000. That being said, Iraq earned enough food aid and medical supplies from the oil-for-food program to care for a million people several times over; the embargo did not have to result in any deaths at all. In my opinion the United States is the nation second most to blame for those 500,000 deaths, after Iraq.

Granted, however, even if we do use the controversial figure of one million, and attribute 50% of it to the United States, and then add 50% of the deaths caused by the wars in Indochina and Korea, that still does not come close to 8 million. Even these calculations, which to me are far too high, we arrive at only about 3.5 million. I have shown clearly in my posts exactly how I arrived at that number. However, no one here as come close to a decent documentation of the 8 million.

Therefore, I propose we do away with the preposterous figure of 8 million altogether. In discussing the total number of US-induced deaths since the end of World War II, I propose we use figures of no more than 4 or 5 million at the most.

[Guest eureka]

I propose that we stick with 8 million or so since, in spite of your efforts to work out a different figure, you are all supposition. Mathew White simply contradicts many experts.

[moderateamericain]

The numbers that you het from White's website do not agree with those that have been commonly cited on the numerous investigative programmes and reports in the past couple of years. The US, quite deliberately, and without the cooperation of its allies, slaughtered hundreds of tousands of innocent civilians in Korea -for one example- lest the refugees had been infiltrated by enemy.

If you look at the individual statistics cited by Matthew White you will notice that his estimates are in each case based upon a very broad base of data reflecting the academic consensus, as well as including the opinions of both left-leaning and right-leaning scholars. Although it certainly isn’t the final word on the subject, the vast number, the fair selection, and reliability of the sources used at Matthew White’s website make me doubt that there is a better source available online. The numbers I have given are thus similar to and reflect the estimates of such sources as official statistics from the United States and communist nations, scholarly estimates from academic sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica, and even the opinions of left-wing activists such as Noam Chomsky.

I suspect your claims that the United States massacred ‘hundreds of thousands’ of innocent civilians is in fact based upon North Korean propaganda. Although American soldiers did commit several significant atrocities, by far the largest of which were the indiscriminate bombings of residential cities (sometimes support by Canadian fighter planes by the way), it’s false to say that deliberate democide by US forces exceeded 100,000. Both the government of South Korea and the United States agree that reports of a systematic policy to murder refugees are false. The largest single massacre committed by American troops was probably about 200 refugees who were murdered at No Gun Ri. Although there was probably also a massacre at Sinchon, the number of deaths was almost certainly no where near the 900 claimed by North Korean sources.

The numbers killed by US action in Cambodia have been put as high as 2 million by some investigators - I recall hearing Kissinger trying to defend himself on that.

That is the death toll of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship, not the Cambodian Civil War. Most sources estimate about 600,000 deaths during that war and even Noam Chomsky agrees that no more than one million died. I do not attribute any of the deaths caused by the Khmer Rouge dictatorship to the United States because no direct military or economic aid was given to them. Although it is true that for a brief period the United States encouraged China to assist the Khmer Rouge, the minuscule amount of aid that resulted from this was not influential and at any rate did not reach the Khmer Rouge until they had already been ousted from power. Aside from Pol Pot and his associates, China and North Vietnam undoubtedly bear the largest responsibility for the KR regime because both of them supplied vast quantities of economic and military aid. This is especially the case for North Vietnam which, in 1970 and 1971, was actually supporting the Khmer Rouge offensives with tens of thousands of conventional soldiers. Formerly, some scholars considered the United States partly to blame for the rise of the Khmer Rouge based on the claim that American bombing drove civilians in the KR’s arms. However, huge gaps have since emerged in this thesis, as even the author of it admits. The communist military units that overran Phnom Penh, for instance, were largely recruited before 1970. Moreover, since KR collectivization began piecemeal wherever they gained new territory, KR terror was already killing, by the early-1970’s, almost as many as people as US bombing.

The oil-for-food programme was kept in force at US insistence when others at the UN wished to end it. The numbers killed are far higher than you suggest. 500,00 children under five died before the new attack on Iraq. Take the number older and add in adults. What the number is, I have not seen, but it is certainly well over 1 million. Since the invasion, the rate of deaths amongst the civilian population has increased. That is known.

The 500,000 figure was originally reported by UNICEF and many scholars have noted that it was based off questionable methods of statistical analysis and yet had been cited by numerous other sources without properly verifying it. It’s most likely that the death toll from the Iraqi embargo was about 500,000, and Matthew White’s estimates suggest a number between 350,000 and 500,000. That being said, Iraq earned enough food aid and medical supplies from the oil-for-food program to care for a million people several times over; the embargo did not have to result in any deaths at all. In my opinion the United States is the nation second most to blame for those 500,000 deaths, after Iraq.

Granted, however, even if we do use the controversial figure of one million, and attribute 50% of it to the United States, and then add 50% of the deaths caused by the wars in Indochina and Korea, that still does not come close to 8 million. Even these calculations, which to me are far too high, we arrive at only about 3.5 million. I have shown clearly in my posts exactly how I arrived at that number. However, no one here as come close to a decent documentation of the 8 million.

Therefore, I propose we do away with the preposterous figure of 8 million altogether. In discussing the total number of US-induced deaths since the end of World War II, I propose we use figures of no more than 4 or 5 million at the most.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

tokoyo 4tw! eureka now your just being hardheaded. excellent analysis tokyo.