14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Dog from the Freeway 117
This wisdom further dictates that one withdraw from failing companies
rather than having to ensure the food supply of the entire neighbourhood, as a
feudal lord would have been obliged to do ...
The special history of the US is a special history of civilisation where power
was exercised internally and externally, and the fact that its supremacy has
never been in danger has given US imperialism an essentially extensive
character.
Did the Vietnamese beat the US in 1975, or was it just not that important for
the US to crush the Vietnamese?
5
The book North Vietnam’s Strategy for Survival deals with the US bombing war
against the DRV in the period from 1965 to 1968. 7 It is based on a seminar on
national security policy held at Harvard University and was directed in part
by Kissinger. The source material for the book included pamphlets from the
DRV, statements by North Vietnamese prisoners in the south, travel reports by
journalists, and military aerial reconnaissance material. It is a book that attacks
Vietnam from the air and offers explanations.
A bomb is dropped (one of eight hundred tons dropped daily on average),
and a reconnaissance plane takes a photo and another the next day. The pictures
are compared. Has anything changed, is there any sign of life? The criteria
obtained and verified are based on the reality of Vietnamese life; however,
whereas it is usually the terminology which creates a distance from its object,
here it is inherent in the method itself. The country is ploughed under by
American science, whereby its surface area becomes greater, and it can more
easily be perceived; this methodical cruelty is expressed less stiltedly if one
simply speaks of a child poking at an anthill.
In each bombing raid flown over Germany during World War II, about a
quarter of the planes that took off from England were shot down. The US
planes over Vietnam did not have to reckon with much resistance. The American
superiority was so great that the American pilots were scarcely prepared
for encounters of resistance; as a result they were occasionally shot down by a
farmer armed with a rifle. The Vietnamese frequently deployed artillery
mock-ups, thus keeping the bombs away from the real targets. Or they protected
a possible target with a host of fake cannons and presented the Americans
with easier targets. Or they lulled the Americans into believing themselves
safe from the false guns, so that they flew within range of genuine
artillery. Because of the inferiority of their own planes and pilots – some had