When President Lyndon B. Johnson decidedin 1965 to significantly increase the number of American troops to fight the growing war in Vietnam, he felt obligated to justify this major escalation to the American people (this was from a quaint, obsolete era when Washington believed public support was mildly important for starting or escalating American wars). On April 7 of that year, Johnson went to Johns Hopkins University topresent his definitive casefor why the U.S. must fight a war on the other side of the world, against a country that had not attacked and could not meaningfully threaten the U.S.

Johnson presented the American war as one of benevolence, selflessness, and a noble desire to liberate the world’s oppressed peoples from a uniquely murderous, tyrannical regime. “Tonight Americans and Asians are dying for a world where each people may choose its own path to change,” Johnson proclaimed. He compared American motives in Vietnam to those of the freedom-craving American Founders who waged the Revolutionary War to liberate themselves from the British Crown: ”This is the principle for which our ancestors fought in the valleys of Pennsylvania. It is the principle for which our sons fight tonight in the jungles of Viet-Nam.”

While Johnson invoked some geo-political justifications, he emphasized that the U.S. was deploying and putting at risk tens of thousands of young American soldiers in Vietnam simply because we wanted to help the Vietnamese people be free. “We want nothing for ourselves — only that the people of South Viet-Nam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way,” Johnson said.

Central to this propagandistic narrative was the repeated parading around by the American media of a handful of South Vietnamese activists with deep connections to the West. These camera-ready “natives” assured Americans that the Vietnamese people — on whose behalf they claimed to speak — desperately craved American invasion and bombing of their country in order to liberate them. Individuals like Phan Quang Da, a Harvard-educated physician, and CIA-fronted groups, like The American Friends of Vietnam, were used as battering rams against American opponents of the war to accuse them of being indifferent, even contemptuous, of the desire of the Vietnamese people to have the U.S. military free the population. “The Vietnamese people are asking for this, but you do not care about them,” was the refrain war opponents invariably confronted.

Central to this pro-war campaigning were claims that the Vietnamese enemy did not merely use violence and repression as other bad governments do, but rather engaged in unprecedented, unfathomable, inhuman, and Nazi-like barbarism and savagery rarely seen in human history. An oft-cited book from American pro-war voices was Tom Dooley’s best-selling “Deliver Us From Evil,” whichclaimedthat the North Vietnamese routinely used violence so sadistic and inhumane that only the Nazis could compete with such sadism:

It told of the Viet Minh having partially torn off the ears of several teenagers with pliers and left them dangling—supposedly as punishment for their having listened to the Lord’s Prayer. And he described the Viet Minh taking seven youths out of their classroom and forcing wooden chopsticks through their eardrums…As for the teacher, Dooley claimed the Viet Minh had used pliers to pull out his tongue, as punishment for having taught the religious class.

The consensus of historians is that much, if not all, of the most lurid stories were fabricated. Such inventions were necessary because the CIA and Pentagon understood that Americans could be convinced to support virtually any new war if they believed that the enemy’s crimes were not ordinary but of the greatest historical evil. (This same recognition is what motivated the series of Israeli lies regarding October 7: Hamas beheading babies and cutting them out of wombs to justify Netanyahu’sdescription of Hamasas “worse than ISIS”; who could possibly oppose or even care about the unleashing of infinite violence against a group that isworse than ISIS?)

And then there was the very orchestrated vilification of those who opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam. Such anti-war activists clearly loved and supported the North Vietnamese Communists (if not, why would they oppose a war to remove them from power?). Even worse, American war opponents stood accused of being indifferent to the cries of the Vietnamese people to be rescued and to enjoy the same freedoms that these selfish American war opponents enjoy. Anyone opposing the U.S. war in Vietnam hated not just the Vietnamese people (whom they did not want to bomb and kill) but also hated America itself, since they rejected America’s singular mission to spread freedom and democracy around the world.

To say that the U.S. war in Vietnam helped nobody beyond the U.S. military industrial complex — and that it certainly did not “help” the Vietnamese people — is a drastic understatement. The bloody, savage fighting, bombing, and use of chemical agentsmeantthat “at least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war deaths, an estimated11.7 millionSouth Vietnamese were forced from their homes, and up to4.8 millionwere sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange.” Chemical agentsharmed generationsof the Vietnamese people we were told our war would rescue.

And, of course, the U.S. — despite fighting for more than a decade, with 58,000 Americans dead and countless more permanently wounded and scarred — lost the war. Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers proved that the U.S. Government was systematically lying to the public for years about the prospects of victory. And, perhaps worst of all, it was ultimately revealed that the stated 1964casus bellifor the war — that the North Vietnamese had attacked American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin — was a complete fabrication, as even the U.S. Naval Institute nowdocuments.

Source: Glenn Greenwald