The American War in Vietnam. John Marciano
Commenting on the commonsense view about Noble Cause claims, scholar and activist Robert Jensen questions the dominant story about the United States, “the model of, and the vehicle for, peace, freedom, and democracy in the world.” This story can only be believed, however, “by people sufficiently insulated from the reality of U.S. actions abroad to maintain such illusions.”3
The Vietnam veteran and historian Andrew Bacevich challenges the guiding premises of the Noble Cause principle in U.S. foreign policy, particularly the political leaders “who have demonstrated their intention [to] reshape the world in accordance with American interests and values.” He asserts that we “have it on good authority that the ideals we espouse represent universal truths, valid for all times.” In pursuing such policies the United States has “touted [its] status as God’s new Chosen People.… We acted at the behest of providential guidance or responded to the urgings of our ‘manifest destiny.’”4
The Noble Cause principle, promoted by presidents and other powerful government officials, the corporate mass media, influential intellectuals, and the educational system, is at the heart of the Commemoration of the American war. But it is long on passionate beliefs and empty on evidence. Its supporters, therefore, can only maintain their allegiance to American benevolence by omitting or rejecting the evidence, since the false story unravels from the start. According to historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz:
U.S. history cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twenty-first century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, and removals of Indigenous children to military-like boarding schools. The absence of even the slightest note of regret or tragedy in the annual celebration of the U.S. independence betrays a deep disconnect in the consciousness of U.S. Americans.
Essentially, she argues, the United States has been “fundamentally imperialist” from its origin, “rather than imperialism being a divergence from a well-intentioned path.”5
The European settlement in America in the Colonial period, writes historian Richard Drinnon, is based on the philosophy of “Indian-hating,” a form of “white hostility that for four centuries had exterminated ‘savages’ who stood in the path of Anglo-American expansion.” The massacres that were committed “in Vietnam’s ‘Indian country’ in the 1960s [at] My Lai and all the forgotten My Khes” followed logically from those committed against Native Americans here and against Filipinos in the early twentieth century. What has been referred to as “Indian removal,” therefore, is the foundation of ethnic cleansing upon which U.S. history is based. The atrocities that are part of this “defining and enabling experience” are not exceptions to an otherwise humane and Noble Cause history, they are essential to it.6
At the time of the U.S. War of Independence in the late 1770s, for example, aggression into what is now the northeast United States was blocked by the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. Scholars have pointed out that the Confederacy’s democratic governance structure “not only predated the United States Constitution but also influenced the evolution and development of the ideas that shaped the document, as well as other fundamental expressions of the American character.” Evidence of this influence “is clearly present in the colonial, revolutionary, and early records of the United States and in the oral and written traditions of the Iroquois.”7
Despite this rich history and culture, General George Washington, in May 1779, instructed Major General John Sullivan to attack those nations of the Confederacy that sided with the British during the U.S. War of Independence—the Seneca and Mohawk, and those that tried to remain neutral, the Cayuga, Tuscarora, and Onondaga. Only “the Christianized Oneidas” supported the Colonial “separatist settlers.”8
Washington instructed Major General John Sullivan “to take [preemptive] action against” these nations. He told Sullivan
to lay waste to all the settlements around … that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed.… You will not by any means listen to any overtures of peace before the total ruin of their settlements.… Our future security will be in their inability to injure us … and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.9
The immediate object is their total destruction and devastation and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.10
How many students, teachers, and citizens know about Washington’s scorched earth campaign against the Iroquois? Vietnam veteran S. Brian Willson writes that Washington’s direct orders to General Sullivan “established imperial U.S. military principles for centuries to come.” They included “(1) total war/genocide targeting all inhabitants for elimination; (2) preventing peace; (3) pre-emptive war; (4) terror; (5) crime of self-defense; (6) revenge.” Willson points out that Sullivan’s campaign has been called “‘the most ruthless application of a scorched-earth policy’ in U.S. history,” on a par with Sherman’s March to the Sea in the Civil War, General Curtis LeMay’s firebombing of North Korea, and the American search-and-destroy missions in Vietnam.11
According to historian David Stannard, the aggression against Native Americans who lived in North America (excluding Mexico) was a genocidal assault without parallel in human history. From the first European arrival in North America to the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890, “between 97 and 99 percent of North America’s native peoples were killed.” Most political leaders supported this horrific assault, but “few did so with such evident glee” as President Andrew Jackson, who once ordered his troops “to slay all the Indian children they could find, once they had killed the women and men”; who once “supervised the mutilation of 800 or so Creek Indian corpses—the bodies of men, women, and children that he and his men had massacred.” Jackson ordered his troops to “specifically seek out and systematically kill Indian women and children who were in hiding in order to complete their extermination.”12
In what is known as the Trail of Tears, President Jackson ordered the forced removal of tens of thousands of Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, and Seminole from their homes in the Southeast to the Indian Territory—now Oklahoma. Although the U.S. government granted this land to the Five Nations forever after they had been brutally removed from their original homes, this was just another promise that was broken as thousands of white settlers rushed in and claimed Native American lands. The Trail of Tears ethnic cleansing opened up some 25 million acres of land for white settlement, slavery, land speculation, and cotton production. The overall death toll rate from this “presidentially ordered death march … was almost as destructive as the Bataan Death March of 1942.” More than eight thousand Cherokee “died as a result of their expulsion from their homeland. The death rate for the Creeks, Seminoles, and Cherokee was equal to that of Jews in Germany, Hungary, and Romania between 1939 and 1945.”13
Jackson is the preeminent figure in the early U.S. history of genocide, “the archetype Indian killer, slave trader, speculator, merchant and then president … as whites took over much of present southern states.” His murderous and genocidal brutality clearly contradicts the Noble Cause principle. He claimed that the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that led to the Trail of Tears would advance the Native Americans “from barbarism to the habits of enjoyments of civilized life,” as if he were a deeply concerned and humane person, stating: “Toward the aborigines of the country no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself, or would go further in attempts to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people.” After a particularly brutal attack that killed Cherokees who had resisted removal, Jackson told Congress: “Severe as is the lesson to the Indians, it was rendered necessary by their unprovoked aggression.”14
This rationale would be repeated in later U.S. violence around the world, as resistance became “aggression” that justified “honorable self-defense” by U.S. forces that would later define the