Far East

NOVANEWS By James DiEugenio  Richard Nixon spent years rebuilding his tattered reputation after he resigned from office in disgrace on Aug. 9, 1974. The rehabilitation project was codenamed “The Wizard.” The idea was to position himself as an elder statesman of foreign policy, a Wise Man. And to a remarkable degree – through the sale of his memoirs, his appearance with David Frost in a series of highly rated interviews, and the publication of at least eight books after that – Nixon largely succeeded in his goal. There was another aspect of that plan: to do all he could to keep his presidential papers and tapes classified, which, through a series of legal maneuvers, he managed to achieve in large part. Therefore, much of what he and Henry Kissinger wrote about in their memoirs could stand,...

NOVANEWS By David Swanson  Jimmy Carter called a war waged in Vietnam by the United States — a war that killed 60,000 Americans and 4,000,000 Vietnamese, without burning down a single U.S. town or forest — “mutual” damage. Ronald Reagan called it a “noble” and “just cause.” Barack Obama promotes the myth of the widespread mistreatment of returning U.S. veterans, denounces the Vietnamese as “brutal,” and has launched a 13-year, $65 million propaganda program to glorify what the Vietnamese call the American War: As we observe the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, we reflect with solemn reverence upon the valor of a generation that served with honor. We pay tribute to the more than 3 million servicemen and women who left their families to serve bravely, a world away . . . They pushed thro...

NOVANEWS By Binoy Kampmark Global Research Despite sharing the same diplomatic table as the United States, and forging ahead with trade agreements, Vietnam still remembers. Remembers, that is, those countless barbarous crimes, as the countrys prime minister calls them, committed by the United States during the long wars of the 1960s and 1970s. On April 30, 1975, Saigon was stricken by scenes of evacuation and panic. Our homeland, explained Nguyen Tan Dung, had to undergo extremely serious challenges. Both countries provided mirrors of violent change, a form of toxic exchange that seemed share more with disease than nutrition. A distant country that was supposedly off the radar of American homes became a round-the-clock transmission feast of gore and depravity. Then came the battlefield...

NOVANEWS By Prof Michel Chossudovsky Global Research April 1975 marks the official end of the Vietnam War. Yet today, Vietnam is an impoverished countries. The Hanoi government is a US proxy regime. Vietnam has become a new cheap labor frontier of the global economy. Neoliberalism prevails. In a bitter irony, Vietnam which was a victim of US war crimes has become a staunch military ally of the US under Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” which threatens China. In 1994, I undertook field research in Vietnam with the support of Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture, which enabled me to visit and conduct interviews in rural areas in both the North and South. This article was written twenty years ago, initially published on April 30th 1995 in the context of the 20th anniversary of the Liberation of Saigon...