-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the July 24, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------Vietnam, Nike & U.S. imperialism
U.S. government should pay war reparation
By Deirdre Griswold
In June, a Vietnamese court sentenced a Nike factory supervisor to six months in prison for forcing 56 workers to jog around the plant in the heat of the day. Several workers had fainted. The supervisor was from Taiwan.
The prison sentence was a signal to the many foreign companies that have opened plants in Vietnam not to behave the way they do in repressive capitalist countries.
Indonesia is another place where Nike has extensive factories. But there, it is the workers, not management, who police regularly attack and jail.
The Indonesian government is the product of a fascist military coup in 1965 that was backed by Washington. It has the blood of a million workers, peasants and progressives-- slaughtered by the military in the aftermath of the coup--on its hands.
Vietnam's history is very different.
Vietnam's workers fought for decades for liberation from foreign domination and capitalist exploitation. They defeated the invading armies of first French and then U.S. imperialism and tried to build a socialist economy. But in recent years, Vietnam opened up to foreign capital to try to overcome severe poverty and underdevelopment.
It takes no imagination to understand why conditions there have been so harsh. The war took 3 million Vietnamese lives. It left 4.4 million people wounded and 400,000 missing in action.
Two million people were poisoned by toxic chemicals like the defoliant Agent Orange.
This devastation set the economy way back. It was intentional. One of the most infamous statements of the war was Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay's boast that U.S. B-52s would bomb Vietnam "back to the Stone Age."
The U.S. government--whose policies are shaped by the huge corporations and banks-- couldn't allow heroic Vietnam to build an independent, prosperous economy based on public ownership and equitable distribution.
Workers in the United States today are coming to understand that super-exploitation in other countries comes back home in the form of low wages and rotten conditions. And that's what the Pentagon's wars have been about--beating down resistance to profit-hungry corporations that follow the U.S. flag around the globe.
Vietnam wouldn't be in the position it is in today if Washington had been forced to pay reparations for its horrific war. The Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations spent billions of dollars trying to subdue Vietnam in order, as Eisenhower put it, to secure "the riches of Southeast Asia."
But not one U.S. administration has yielded even a nickel to pay for rebuilding the country--even though U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger agreed to that during the Paris Peace Talks.
U.S. workers will be supporting justice and at the same time defending their own interests by demanding that Washington pay reparations to Vietnam--to be funded out of the profits of the exploiting companies that want to turn the whole world into one big sweatshop.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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