The Ironical Chronicle Superpower War: First, as a super power, one is certain of a cheap victory; Then one expects the enemy to lose; Then, one is satisfied that he is suffering; In the end, as a lesson to the rest of the world, one hopes to inflict such an ecological and genocidal catastrophe on the enemy for daring to resist his subjugation that he will never recover.

February 4, 2005

On September 3, 1967, elections were held in South Vietnam to cloak a US puppet regime with a veneer of respectability. The electees were Generals Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky as President and Vice-President, respectively.

The appended article is a translation of one that appeared in the German newspaper, Neues Deutschland, on January 16, 2004 and is an objective and brief backward look at Ky's career. It is a good companion piece to the NY Times' September 3, 1967 gushy description of the election which elected Thieu and Ky. The following opinions of Thieu/Ky held by high US officials did not appear in the Times' report nor did they inhibit the US from using them for its own purposes:

  • "Ky drank, gambled, and was an inveterate womanizer."
  • Ky was an "out-of-control rocket."
  • Thieu and Ky were "absolute scum of the earth."

The essential point was that these opinions had to be kept from the US public. Their revelation at the time would have completely undermined the purpose of the election.

OTTO

Neues Deutschland
January 16, 2004

Tet Guest

The Vietnamese will celebrate the lunar new year festival of Tet in the coming week. Traditionally, it's the occasion for family reunions as well. The possibility of such a homecoming has been extended to the 73 year old Nguyen Cao Ky who has not seen Vietnam for 28 years and his hometown in the northern part of the country for even longer. The son of a Mandarin from Son Tay, not far from Hanoi, he was trained in the French colonial army as a fighter pilot. After the Americans gave him a final polish at a leadership academy in Alabama, Ky quickly took over the command of the air forces of their South Vietnamese puppet regime and he personally flew bombing missions against North Vietnam.

After countless putsches and counter-putsches, in which Ky himself participated, this fanatical anti-communist became, supposedly reluctantly, the head of the government, and in 1967, the Vice-President of South Vietnam. Today, Ky says it was he who converted Nixon to the policy of "Vietnamization." What Washington really thought about its protégés was revealed by Defense Secretary McNamara decades later in his memoirs. He wrote, "Ky drank, gambled, and was an inveterate womanizer." The deputy US ambassador called him an "out-of-control rocket." And William Bundy, a high government official, referred to Ky and President Nguyen Van Thieu as, "absolute scum of the earth."

Ky conducted merciless warfare against his own countrymen, among them Buddhist pacifists, in the areas under his control. In 1969, when asked whom he admired the most, he said, "Adolf Hitler… We need four or five Hitlers in Vietnam." When the liberation forces overthrew the South Vietnamese regime in April, 1975, Ky, who had by then withdrawn from the government, had himself evacuated by US helicopter. Shortly before, he was still berating retreating South Vietnames military officers as cowards. Since then, he has been living on a farm near Washington, and, in his own words, dreaming of "returning, being a farmer, and playing golf." On Wednesday, he arrived in Ho Chi Minh City. He wants to forget the old hatreds and ideological differences, said Ky in an interview. Vietnam's government apparently thinks the same way. "Generous," was the terse comment of a countryman of Ky's living in Berlin.