◆ SpookStack

- 3= Meanwhile U.S. and Japanese businesses share in the profits from the war. Over — 800 U.S. firms have commercial representatives in Ssigon.selling automobiles, motor scooters, radio and electronic equipment, food products, air-conditioning equipment, and a wide range of other luxury consumer goods. Thus as Vietnam's own productive capacities a are being destroyed the Dnited States finds itself using Vietnam as a cumping ground for excess U.S. dollars and excess U.S. and Japanese manufactured goods. Those who profit are the U.5. and Jepanese manufacturers, the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam who are in on the graft, and the high-salaried Americans and top Vietnamese who are running the 7 war and its related activities. Those who are victimized are the Vietnamese peasants, young people, and urban poor; also the young Americans who are sent into combat. Those who foot the bill are the American tax-payers. —- Thus, economicelly the war exploits the Vietnamese people and the American tax payers for the profit of American and Japanese industry, The enormous wealth which top Vietnamese acquire in the process is incidental. (1 question whether this economic exploitation was initially a direct motivating cause of the war; it is however a elear and dominant aspect of the war situation as it has developed, and it is a powerful barrier now to peace.) YI. The cultural life of the common people of Vietnam is being obliterated. Over 80% of the South Vietnamese peopie have normally lived in villages or in the countryside. Approximately 3 million of these have become refugees during recent years of hefghtened U.S. military operations in Vietnam, Thus with a tetal non-urban population of about 12,500,000, about 25% of the peasant and village population of South Vietnam have been driven from their homes and their rice paddies and they have been crowded into refugee camps and into city siums. Informed Americans in Vietnam estimate that 85% of the refugees have fled not to escape the Viet Cong, but to get away from U.S. bombing and H& I fire. Their homes have been fired on, their villages have been deliberately burned or bombed, and whole areas have been literally bull- dozed out of existence. : While a peasant society is both more vulnerable and more resilient than a more sophisticated society to some forms of attack from without, we can get some notion of the dimensions of the carnage of war in Vietnam if we ask ourselves what the effect on our society would be if a proportionate number of our people had been driven from their homes by war and had had their homes destroyed. For us the number would be about 35 or 40 million people. This approaches the dimensions of disaster which we would experience in an initial nuclear attack. - When our military leaders talk of the war continuing for years, what do they think will be left of Vietnam? How can e country suffering such havoc survive? <At what point does the further extension of a war cross the Line that divides mass killing from genocide, wat damage from War crime? The creation of refugees is not s by-product of this war but an integral part of it, planned as a necessary strategy to destroy the base of NLF guerilla operations. This strategy takes for granted the supporting relationship between NLF forces and the Vietnam village people. To destroy essential support for the NLF militarily our armed forces now destroy the villages and turn the village people into refugees. Y