Eye-openers: from Vietnam to Gaza, ways to hold power to account

The Hindu

01-05-2025

On April 30, Vietnam celebrated 50 years of the reunification of the North and South after the decades-long Vietnam War ended with the government of Saigon surrendering to the North Vietnamese forces in 1975. The American entanglement in the South East Asian country began in November 1955, with the U.S. fearing a communist takeover of the South by North Vietnam. After U.S. Army troops landed in South Vietnam in 1965, it dragged on for 10 more years.
By the mid and late 1960s, however, there was growing disenchantment with the war effort and the rising numbers of the dead. Stories were emanating about atrocities committed by the U.S. troops in Vietnam and anti-war protests began to grow across campuses and in cities including in the capital Washington D.C.
In 1969, journalist Seymour Hersh's attention was drawn to a small news item that a certain Lieutenant William Calley had been charged with the 'murder of 102 'Oriental human beings'' in the hamlet of My Lai in Vietnam.
Journalists get to work
Hersh tracked Calley and other members of the 'Charlie Company' who had led the assault on March 16, 1968, and reconstructed the story of the atrocity.
His book, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and its Aftermath, is a chilling read about over-reach, and how the killing began without warning, with even women and babies not being spared. The purpose of American troops to be at My Lai that day — to stop the Vietcong troops in their tracks — wasn't served either.
Hersh, like Daniel Ellsberg later with The Pentagon Papers leak, was going against the grain of what most journalists were covering on the Vietnam war. Most of them supported the 'noble cause'. The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam War, by Neil Sheehan and others, first appeared as a series of articles in The New York Times in 1971, on the study, revealing in detail, 'and in the government's own words', how several U.S. administrations had blundered through a disastrous war. The study had been commissioned in 1967 by then Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, who had created a unit in the Pentagon to 'collect as many internal documents as possible on the Vietnam War.' There were 47 volumes in all, covering all aspects of the U.S. involvement in Indochina for decades. Sheehan, a celebrated Vietnam reporter, had got wind of the study and pursued Ellsberg, a senior member of the government-funded Rand Corporation who was privy to it, to share them with him. The war finally ended in 1975, with the Pentagon Papers playing a crucial role in its closure.
Bearing witness
In the face of fierce opposition in the late 1960s, philosopher and writer Bertrand Russell, then in his nineties, brought together prominent cultural and political personalities to 'bear witness to unrestrained American military action' in Vietnam. In his book, Vietdamned, Clive Webb brings to light the peace activism of Russell and other luminaries of the literary world including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Peter Weiss to end the war.
They were derided for their activism but Webb sees the tribunal as a cautionary tale and writes about it as a reminder of the 'ruthlessness with which politicians and the press attempted to discredit their evidence, and the lessons to be learned about our continued need to hold to account those in power.'
That's what journalist Omar El Akkad does in his recent book, One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This. He wonders aloud why the U.S. and the West have been largely immune to the unimaginable suffering of civilians in Gaza unleashed by Israel since the October 7 Hamas attack.
In chapters with titles including Departure, Witness, Fear, Resistance, Language, Arrival, Akkad tries to make sense of the happenings in Gaza; why, for instance, was an 18-month-old found with a bullet wound to the forehead.
The Egyptian-Canadian journalist and writer watched the Gulf War on CNN — 'Baghdad cityscapes detonating sporadically in balls of pale white light' — and was soon surprised that there was no reaction at all. 'It was just what happened to certain places, to certain people: they became balls of pale white light. What mattered was, it wasn't us.' As a journalist, Akkad has travelled to several countries in West Asia and also to Afghanistan, and his view on political malice is fierce: 'Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.'
The Gaza tragedy
Things came crashing down after October 2023, he writes, when Israel with the support of a vast majority of the Western world's political power centres enacted a 'campaign of active genocide' against the Palestinian people, documented for posterity. More than 50,000 people have died, thousands injured and millions displaced. Death by disease and famine stalks a population wilfully denied aid and medical help. 'Over and over, residents were ordered from their neighbourhoods into 'safe zones', and then wiped out.'
Akkad is scathing when he writes that 'once far enough removed, everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen. But for now, it's so much safer to look away.'
The antidote, of course, is to 'slip the leash' as Wilfred Burchett put it when he fled from the embedded journalists with Allied forces in Japan in 1945 and set out for Hiroshima. He then went on to record the annihilation he witnessed after the atomic bombing and despatched his piece with the words: 'I write this as a warning to the world' (Tell Me No Lies/Ed. John Pilger).