Street Fighting Years by Tariq Ali

Author:Tariq Ali
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

This racism – anti-black, anti-Asiatic, anti-Mexican – is a basic American attitude with deep historical roots and which existed, latently and overtly, well before the Vietnamese conflict. One proof of this is that the United States government refused to ratify the Genocide Convention. This doesn’t mean that in 1948 the US intended to exterminate a people; what it does mean – according to the statements of the US Senate – is that the Convention would conflict with laws of several states; in other words, the current policymakers enjoy a free hand in Vietnam because their predecessors catered to the anti-black racism of Southern whites. In any case, since 1966, the racism of Yankee soldiers, from Saigon to the 17th parallel, has become more and more marked. Young American men use torture, they shoot unarmed women for nothing more than target practice, they kick wounded Vietnamese in the genitals, they cut ears off dead men to take home for trophies. Officers are the worst: a general boasted of hunting ‘VCs’ from his helicopter and gunning them down in the paddy fields. In the confused minds of the American soldiers, ‘Viet Cong’ and ‘Vietnamese’ tend increasingly to blend into one another. They often say themselves, ‘The only good Vietnamese is a dead Vietnamese’, or what amounts to the same thing, ‘A dead Vietnamese is a Vietcong’ …

Total war presupposes a certain balance of forces. Colonial wars were not reciprocal, but the interests of the colonialists limited the scope of genocide. The present genocide, the end result of the unequal development of societies, is total war waged to the limit by one side, without the slightest reciprocity.

The American government is not guilty of inventing modern genocide or even of having chosen it from other possible and effective measures against guerrilla warfare. It is not guilty, for example, of having preferred genocide for strategic and economic reasons. Indeed, genocide presents itself as the ONLY POSSIBLE REACTION to the rising of a whole people against its oppressors.

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