 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||
THE VIETNAM WAR AND ASIANS IN AMERICA (5 of 8)
What was true in the 19th century is true now. The basic policy hasn't changed. Only the stakes have grown ten times bigger. American overseas business is almost half the volume of domestic business and catching up fast. Export of arms and munitions alone account for $5 billion a year. Foreign investment of American corporations amounts to more than $120 billion. With 7% of the world's population, American uses up 70% of the world's resources. American capitalism cannot survive without its Empire. To protect the Empire, the U.S. deploys more than a million troops in 2100 bases around the world. Also to protect the Empire, the U.S. handpicks "anti-communist" dictatorships in Asia, Africa, and South America. The dictators, the Thieus, the Parks, the Suhartos, the Lon Nols, together with the small local ruling elites, serve to keep the lid on the revolutionary fury of the people.
To suppress the revolution - this is the real reason why the U.S. is fighting in Indochina. The U.S. cannot afford to retreat. The generals in the Pentagon talk much about the "domino theory": as Asia goes, so goes the world. They have every reason to be afraid, for they, too, have learned Mao Tsetung's famous saying: "A single spark can start a prairie fire."
THE BEGINNING OF CONSCIOUSNESS
All the hard meaning of the racism and imperialism that are part of traditional US, policy, the Vietnam war has forced us, the Asian Americans to see. Just when we're getting smug about finally "making it", just when we're ready to justify all our past pains, humiliations, loss of historical identity by the "melting pot" dream, the Vietnam war confronts us with the big gap between the American dream and the American reality. On what conditions are we "making it"? On two basic conditions:
First condition: that we remain marginal in the capitalist hierarchy. As long as there are unhappy people more open to exploitation than we are, we are relatively secure. In this country, there are the Blacks and the Chicanos who are below us. In the "free world" as a whole, there are the economically colonized peoples of Asia, Africa, and South America who are at the bottom of the American enterprise. The reason fewer Chinese women in the U.S. are working in the sweat shops today, for example, is that it's a lot cheaper to hire their sisters to work in the sweat shops of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea.
