Historical ID of now US Secretary of State John Kerry, who today quite rightly condemned the terror attack on the offices of a Paris newspaper plus a history of French colonial and neocolonial terror.
What first comes to mind is US Secretary of State John Kerry’s prestige for his heroic Swift Boat killing of a Vietnamese in his own beloved country during the holocaust the US committed in Vietnam. A wounded Vietnamese freedom fighter, who had been aiming a rocket launcher at the Swift Boat Kerry commanded, was shot by Kerry as he was running away. Kerry by daringly running his boat right at the danger was decorated for having saved the boat and its crew. [“KERRY leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hootch and killed him” from official Silver Star Citation “For the President, E.R. Zumwalt, Vice Admiral, Commander of US Forces in Vietnam”]
Secondly, that Kerry quite amazingly had enlisted more than a year after the obvious sham Tokin Bay incident and the extending the bombing in the South to include North Vietnam as well. Kerry would later star in headline news condemning the US war on the Vietnamese, describing atrocities as nearly continuous during his testimony before a congressional committee of the US House of Representatives.
Next, we recall, during then Senator Kerry’s run for the presidency, the spectacle of him hailing Vietnam war veterans marching across the stage before his addressing a rally – and that during his losing campaign, Kerry was (logically) nick named, Mr. Flip-Flop.
Your author is still interested to know whether millionaire John Kerry ever sought to contact the family of the Vietnamese patriot he managed to shoot dead to see if those that survived the war perhaps could use some compensation, especially since the war had been called a mistake by Secretary of State, Robert McNamara, who had run the war for years.
In his televised press conference with his French counterpart standing at his side, Kerry, contrasted the “uncivilized” behavior of the terrorists, who had murderously attacked the personnel of a French newspaper in a France which “gave birth to democracy” with the French Revolution.
Correction! The ideals and successes of the French Revolution notwithstanding, shortly after it, French troops massacred up to a million Haitians and abducted their revolutionary hero president in business like revenge for the loss of about a third of France’s colonial revenue for the successful (and extremely brave) Haitian slave revolution that brought Haitian independence.
No, Secretary Kerry, France has infamous history of terror, inhumanity and mass murder in its colonies Vietnam and Algeria, and during a thirty year occupation of Syria, all three in part as fascist Vichy France. France is committing crimes against humanity, as I write, arming, funding, secretly advising murdering gangs invading and destroying Syria. France preceded this with French-British-American warplanes destroying the most prosperous (formerly poorest) nation in Africa (a former British/French colony) with a UN Quality of Life Index higher than nine European countries, between 42 and 44 billion in Gold in its State Bank, and citizens, who against overwhelming odds are still fighting to regain Libyan independence. So much for French civilization as praised by John Kerry, who might believe himself to be civilized as well, but has made himself ridiculous in lying about America’s dozens of invasions of innocent nations as being in the name of freedom.
French President Hollande correctly called the deadly attack on the French newspaper’s personnel “exceptional barbarism.” Millions citizens in the phenomenal number of nations formerly occupied by the brutal military of the French Empire, as well as good people everywhere, have long considered such words spoken by the French president appropriate to past merciless French colonialism as well as recent neocolonialism with present French heartless and death-dealing violations of the UN Nuremberg Principles of which France is signatory (and prosecutable under them).
Yours truly doubts anyone with an ounce of memory would take the absurdly self-righteous words of Mr. John Kerry seriously. They are, frightfully and sadly, quite in keeping with corporate monopoly media suckering of millions of ‘why-me-worry’ Americans into accepting the label ‘Vietnam War Hero” for every single American who ‘served’ in the US genocidal depopulation of French Indochina.
It goes without saying that criminal American media profiles special honors to Americans holding government office, who are ‘heros’ for having participated in bringing death to all-told, five or six-million soft-spoken Buddhists of an ancient culture, most of whom, children of rice farmers.
John Kerry is in fine company: recent Secretary of Defense and hero Chuck Hagel; Senator John McCain, who heroically bombed the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong twenty-six times; former Seal commander, US senator, governor, presidential possibility, now university president, Bob Kerrey, accused by his Seal ‘point man’ on ‘Sixty Minutes” and in New York Times magazine of having ordered the gunning down of eighteen young ladies and a baby, after holding down an elderly man while his throat was cut.
As far as the particular religious protestations and assumed complaint of the terrorists reported in the press regarding today’s terror today in Paris, one might imagine more significant as to motive would be an obvious fighting back with terror against the infinitely more massive terror France is still presently participating in throwing on the innocent Muslim population of the entire Middle East ‘cradle of civilization.’jay janson is a regular contributor to Counter Currents, Kerala, India, and Minority Perspective Birmingham, UK; is coordinator of the Howard Zinn and Ramsey Clark founded, King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign and historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now, an educational and stimulus website featuring the laws pertaining and a country by country history of US crimes in nineteen countries.
Swift Boat casualty rates
Swift Boat casualty rates were extraordinarily high, some say as high as 90%. I believe you had to volunteer for this duty as it was so dangerous they would not take anyone but volunteers. Regardless of what one feels about the entire Vietnam enterprise I believe that it would have been dereliction of duty for Kerry not to have fired upon some one who had shot a rocket at his swift boat. As for the statement that the Viet Cong fellow was running away, it was a war situation and Kerry and the men in his boat were under constant fire from on shore rockets, all swift boats were. And the nature of this war was that they would fire and then run and hide, guerrilla warfare. But it appears that Mr. Janson feels that soldiers should sit placidly in the line of fire when a war is unjustified. Probably not going to happen too often.
Ms Rosa B. Said it better than I could
But I will tip my hat to her.