Yesterday lot lizzard (lotlizzard) gave links to two articles by T. P. Wilkenson

I don't think he has written any books and I had never heard of him before

I looked him up and found an article on the Phoenix program the US ran in Vietnam, in short, death squads, Inc.

The article was published last year.

Last year I read Nick Turse's book "Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam." Shocking. War on indigenous people (and other things, this topic has been on my mind in the last few years). I went to Nick's book to see what he had to say about the Phoenix program which was not many pages because the whole book is about the atrocities we committed. His main discussion is on pages 190 to 191 and here is the final paragraph before the end of the chapter.

While no exact figures are available, there can be little question that such events occurred in shocking numbers. They were the very essence of the war: crimes that went on all the time, all over Sout Vietnam, for years and years. When you consider this, along with the tallies of dead, wounded and displaced, the scale of the suffering becomes almost unimaginable -- almost as unimaginable as the fact the somehow, the US, all that suffering was more or less ignored as it happened, and then written out of history even more thoroughly in the decades since.

I really trust and respect Nick Turse. He gives a link to an earlier publication of T. P. Wilkenson which to me is a kind of a confirmation.

I have been on vacations with Overseas Adventure Travel and seen the way that indigenous people live on the land with farming by hand and animinals and a limited amount of equipment and chemicals - gas and fertilizer. To me, that is how the world needs to be in the future to protect the earth. In Morocco, they have been farming for thousands of years in the same areas. I didn't realize that Modernity, Neo Liberal Economics, Capitalism, was hell bend on destroying cultures, villages, people, land, etc. That is who we are in our foreign policy

From the article by T. P. Wilkerson which I am going to link below. I have a good sense of the founding generation, but he says

To place the Phoenix Program in its proper historical perspective however it is necessary to grasp the genealogy of the regime responsible for its inception. This regime predates Vietnam. This author has reiterated elsewhere that it is scarcely possible to understand the role of political warfare in the US without returning to 1776, to the moral turpitude of the Founding Fathers.4 These leading lights of the nascent American empire began their journey to Vietnam when they declared independence from the British Empire in order to preserve that peculiar institution known as chattel slavery that the mother country was being forced to abolish in the rest of its colonies.

T. P. W. sounds like Chris Hedges and it hurts to hear this and not sure how much I agree with it

The fundamental structures created by the Constitution were in fact designed to prevent majority rule and protect the political terror apparatus maintained by the elite for that purpose. For example, the system of indirect election, the gerrymandering of electoral districts to favour slaveholders and the maintenance of the infamous slave patrols.5 Under the banner of “Indian Removal”—an early form of what would later be called “pacification”—the Anglo-American settler elite proceeded to seize the entire North American continent. This later became known inter alia as the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny. In fact this was nothing less than the annihilation and/ or enslavement of non-whites from sea to shining sea. Largely oblivious to this constant commercial adventure, wave after wave of European immigrants were deliberately co-opted while serving as arrow or cannon fodder until with the annexation of California only British Canada and Mexico south of the Rio Bravo had not been conquered. The wide Pacific was opened to further invasion and exploitation.

this rings totally true

The greatest mystery—or better said, mystification—to be overcome is the apparent contradiction between America’s proclaimed principles and the intensity of its covert operations practices. Philip Agee once called the CIA, “capitalism’s invisible army”. He recalled that one of his first tasks as a junior CIA officer had been to conduct background checks on Venezuelan applicants for jobs at the local subsidiary of a major US oil company.9 In fact, his conclusion after quitting the “Company” was that capitalism could never be maintained without an extensive military and secret police force to suppress opposition to it.

this rings totally true - destroy local culture to create markets and capitalism

The term “infrastructure” denoted the fact that Vietnamese society, esp. in the rural areas where the Saigon regime was scarcely present, functioned without any need for the US clients. Although the term is also used as a euphemism for “cadre”, members of the Vietnamese Communist Party in the South, this limited use obscures the strategy underlying Phoenix and the US regime’s presence. In order to create the “Saigon product” so to speak, there had to be a need for it—namely an administrative apparatus reaching into the village level which could make demands on the population and at least nominally satisfy local wishes. It is fair to say that no one who had spent any time in the country believed that there was any demand for “Saigon product” among the peasantry. Hence the only way to create and stimulate that demand was to reach into the depths of rural life and do everything possible to destroy the indigenous structures, both economically and socially. Ideally this vacuum would be filled speedily by US-subsidised Saigon infrastructure. This was the underlying theory of the strategic hamlet program and all the USAID activities.23 Due to the fact that the Saigon regime was and remained unable and unwilling to provide the substitute infrastructure, the nation building (counter-insurgency) programs never acquired the varnish of acceptability that they enjoyed among the middle classes in the West

.

The whole article has examples from Philippines, Cuba (19 the century), Latin America, Korea, Japan, etc to provide context for the Phoenix program ...

The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam
by T.P. Wilkinson / August 9th, 2014

http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/08/the-phoenix-program-americas-use-of-te...

and given the wars today, they are not out of line with our past

because that's a problem, I guess

ailed Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker may feel some vindication in this number: 41 percent of Americans say that if a wall is built along the Mexican border, one should also be erected on the Canadian one. And yes, the same percentage favors a wall erected along the nation's southern border.

Meanwhile, 3/4 of Americans say the country is no longer great

Americans are “fed up” with politics, suspect the wealthy are getting an unfair edge, and think the country is going in the wrong direction, according to a new Bloomberg Politics poll that lays bare the depth and breadth of the discontents propelling outsider candidates in the Republican presidential field.

The survey shows that 72 percent of Americans think their country isn't as great as it once was—a central theme of front-runner Donald Trump's campaign. More than a third prefer a presidential candidate without experience in public office.
...
And while a majority of 54 percent say they're moving closer, not further away, from their hopes for their career and/or finances, there are other indications of simmering economic discontents: a much larger majority—70 percent—say they see the gap between rich and everyone else as getting bigger. And 73 percent say that the tax code should be reformed so the wealthy pay proportionately more than middle-class people, a theme that's been picked up by candidates running the ideological gamut from Trump to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic race.

Nearly three-quarters of Americans say they're fed up with politics and think it amounts to “people playing games,” while 59 percent say the political system is broken and the nation needs to “just start over.” Yet if citizens are disgusted, they are not cynical about democracy. Only 30 percent think their vote doesn't matter and most believe that the political process is important. Just 19 percent agree with the statement “I'm not affected by politics—it doesn't matter which party is in power.” Asked for their review of the 2016 campaign so far, 53 percent rated it “entertaining.”