"Joe Biden Is Such An Imperialist Shithead"

Democrats & Republicans are exactly alike when they claim "the destruction was mutual" in the US's unprovoked invasions and wars and left "a painful legacy" on all nations involved.

On March 16, 1968, U.S. Army personnel committed premediated mass murder of more than 500 unarmed civilians in the hamlets of Mỹ Lai and Mỹ Khe. Some of the women and young girls were gang-raped before their deaths; others, including infants, were tortured and mutilated. It’s the largest known massacre of civilians by U.S. forces in the 20th century. This photo was taken by U.S. Army photographer Ronald Haeberle. His photographs of the slaughter were first published on November 21, 1969, in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Paul Street, The Paul Street Report, September 23, 2023:

Joe Biden is such an imperialist shithead. At a press conference eleven days ago in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, he said this about the so-called Vietnam War. “I’m incredibly proud of how our nations and our people have built trust and understanding over the decades and worked to repair the painful legacy the war left on both our nations.”

Talk about false equivalency of harm and guilt. The United States, the most powerful nation the world had ever seen, lost 58,000 soldiers in the so-called Vietnam War . . . The US imperialist assault on that region, punishment for the small peasant nation Vietnam’s attempted independent and radical break off from and against the US-run world capitalist system, killed nearly 4 million Vietnamese and 1 million Laotians and Cambodians between 1962 and 1975.

The massive U.S. imperial assault laid waste to vast stretches of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. It spread disease and birth defects across the region. The Vietnamese did not kill a single American solider — much less a U.S. civilian — on U.S. soil. Their American “victims” were invading gendarmes sent by Washington to keep Vietnam savagely unequal and under the thumb of the world’s rich nations, led by the US. . . .

Biden’s noxious comments in Hanoi . . . reminded [me] of something the man who put him on the center stage of history said while gearing up to run for the presidency in 2006. At one especially disgusting point in a brazenly imperialist speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in November of that year, Barack Obama had the unmitigated imperial audacity to say the following in support of his ridiculous claim that most US citizens supported George W. Bush’s monumentally criminal, mass-murderous, and petro-imperialist invasion of Iraq: “The American people have been extraordinarily resolved,” Obama absurdly intoned, “they have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah.” 

I remember doing a double- and then a triple-take after reading that line from Obama’s speech, which I read as part of the research I was doing to try to warn US voters about Obama’s imperialism. “He actually fucking said that,” I said to myself.  It was a spine-chilling selection of locales — Fallujah, a city that was the site for colossal US imperial atrocities, including the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the use of cancer-causing radioactive ordnance, the targeting of ambulances and hospitals in April and again in November of 2004.  Fallujah, of all places,  selected by the American Empire for near destruction to demonstrate the horrific lethal capacity of Superpower terrorism. 

But enough about Obama and Iraq, for now. Back to Vietnam, the site of Uncle Sam’s biggest crime in my lifetime — a country Washington would likely have attacked with nuclear weapons but for the strength of the US antiwar movement in 1969 and 1970.

There’s nothing new about US presidents and politicos, Democrats prominently included, advancing the idiotic and Orwellian, truth-inverting and imperialist narrative of false equivalency in relation to the so-called Vietnam War. In 2001, the former Democratic Party US Senator Bob Kerrey said this in defense of his role in commanding and participating in the slaughter of 21 Vietnamese civilians in Thanh Phong Village on February 25, 1969: “both sides did a lot of damage in the Vietnam War.” Both sides did a lot of damage in the so-called Vietnam War — a preposterous suggestion of moral equivalence for the colossal calamities resulting from a prolonged assault on a poor peasant nation by the most potent military killing machine in history.

The false “Vietnam War” equivalence grandaddy of them all is that great Christian imperialist Jimmy Carter, the sponsor of the Afghan Mujahideen who reminds me of Biden in more ways than one as Sleepwalking Joe’s approval number fall into year three Carter territory. Two months into his presidency in early 1977, Carter was asked at a news conference if he felt “any moral obligation to help rebuild that country.” Carter replied by saying this, explaining why the U.S. owed no special reparations or apologies to Vietnam:  “Well, the destruction was mutual. You know, we went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on other people. We went there to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese. And I don’t feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability.”

Forget for now Carter’s ridiculous bullshit about Washington having no desire to impose their will on the Vietnamese and wanting to defend freedom and just focus on the sheer Orwellian nonsense of the phrase that “the destruction was mutual.” . . .

One of the key ideological roles of the Democratic Party is to “manufacture consent” to the nation’s giant imperial war state, and a fundamental part of that mission is to portray the imperial predator as victim, not perpetrator, as in War is Peace, Love is Hate, black is white, and 2+2=5.

Which reminds me, back to Obama for a second. . . . In his campaign book The Audacity of Hope that year [2006], he preposterously claimed that George W. Bush’s criminal petro-imperialist invasion and occupation of Iraq was undertaken “with the best of intentions,” including a “desire to export democracy.” In his aforementioned speech to the Chicago Council on Global relations, Obama elaborated on this ridiculous claim, arguing that Bush had ordered the invasion with impractical “dreams of democracy and hopes for a perfect government.”

Spoon-feeding bullshit to the masses. It’s never been for just Republicans.

Read Paul Street on “Obama’s Fake Concern for Autoworkers and the 2009 Bailout”.