General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Melissa Harris-Perry: Obama Administration Has Institutionalized 'Perpetual War' - HuffPo [View all]Catherina
(35,568 posts)after reading that, there were over 250,000 in Guatemala which isn't mentioned there and the number for Vietnam, according to Robert McNamara is 3.6 - 3.8 million. I believe the figure for Indonesia is 1.5 million. Then we've got places where we don't even bother to count like Colombia, El Salvador, the Congo. And all those little places where the numbers are in the low thousands, hundreds.
250,000 here, 4 million there, another million here, 10,000 here and pretty soon, six million actually seems rather low. But whatever the number is, it's much too high.
I see with your point about covert but first, that's in the uploader's description, not the lecture and 2nd, they were covert at the time because the US public didn't know about them. Congress didn't even know about all of them. Also I would include Vietnam and Korea in CIA operations because that's how they got their American start.
About the Vietnam numbers, I have no problem with McNamara's estimate because the Hanoi government released a similar number in 1995
HANOI (AP) - April 4. Cinq millions de morts: 20 ans apregraves la fin de la guerre du Vietnam, le gouvernement de Hanoi a reacute veacute leacute, lundi, le bilan d'un conflit dent le nombre de victimes avait eacute teacute minore a l'eacutepoque pour ne pas affecter le moral de la population.
Selon Hanoi, il y a eu pres de deux millions de morts dans la population civile du Nord et deux autres millions dans celle du Sud. Quant aux combats proprement dits, les chiffres sent d'un million cent mille militaires tueacutes et de 600.000 blesseacutes en 21 ans de guerre.
Ce dernier bilan comprend a la fois les victimes de la guerilla vietcong et les soldats nord-vietamiens qui les eacute paulaient. Les preacute ceacute dentes estimations de source occidentale faisaient eacute tat d'un bilan de 666.000 morts parmi Ies combattants Vietnamiens.
Loose Translation
The Hanoi government revealed on April 3 that the true civilian casualties of the Vietnam War were 2,000,000 in the north, and 2,000,000 in the south. Military casualties were 1.1 million killed and 600,000 wounded in 21 years of war. These figures were deliberately falsified during the war by the North Vietnamese Communists to avoid demoralizing the population.
Given a Vietnamese population of approximately 38 million during the period 1954-1975, Vietnamese casualties represent a good 12-13% of the entire population. To put this in perspective, consider that the population of the US was 220 million during the Vietnam War. Had The US sustained casualties of 13% of its population, there would have been 28 million US dead.
Anyone who thinks the US lost the Vietnam war should reconsider their definition of "lost". The North Vietnamese Communists were willing to pay any price in terms of the blood of their people to dominate the Republic of Vietnam. General Giap was not a genius: he sent his own men out to be slaughtered. The Hanoi government hid this information from their people not to avoid demoralizing them, but to avoid a rebellion among their own population. The North Vietnamese Army went to extraordinary lengths to remove their dead from the field of battle because they did not want the US to discover their true battlefield losses. Contrast this with the fact that the US government published weekly lists of killed and wounded and disseminated this accurate data to the news media.
http://alabamavva.org/stats.html
Thank you for this conversation because you got me curious enough to google him. His wiki entry was so interesting that now I want to order his books. I'd also like to find his testimony before Congress if that's available.