If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed whether by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem. — Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring
Simple stuff: I interviewed Carol Van Strum for my radio show, Finding Fringe, ahead of its airing, Dec. 24, so I could give listeners a bit of reality here on the coast and in the world at large. She will be at the Yachats Commons (Oregon) Nov. 15 for the screening of the flick, The People vs. Agent Orange.
We talked about the state of the state of the world, too, and the reality that this is not just a Trump thing, that the poisons in our bodies vis-a-vis air, food, water, airwaves have been pushed into us by Capitalists, by the dirty people we call scientists and technologists and engineers.
Operation Ranch Hand — 20 million gallons of Agent Orange dumped into an area the size of Mass., and that means, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Birth defects, and even epigenetic issues two generations later.
Daddy got sprayed (USA daddy), and then raised that family, had kiddos, and, bam, surprise surprise — spina bifida, hormone imbalances, diseases, diabetes, you know it, thanks Dow and Hercules and the other chemical companies.
The effects remain one of the most contentious legacies of the Vietnam War. This report focuses on the hardships faced by Vietnamese people living with Agent Orange–related health problems and disabilities and suggests ways the US and Vietnamese governments can better address the legacy of Agent Orange to provide support to individuals and families, and to strengthen bilateral relations.
Read the report: It’s only 28 pages: Agent Orange Victims in Vietnam: Their Numbers, Experiences, Needs, and Sources of Support By Phan Xuân Dũng
Not a great image:
Summary
- US-Vietnam cooperation in addressing the consequences of the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War has achieved remarkable progress, but much remains to be done to assist and reconcile with the multiple generations of Vietnamese affected.
- Assistance for Agent Orange victims in Vietnam is provided by multiple international and nongovernmental actors. As of 2023, the US Congress has allocated more than $139 million for health and disability programs in eight provinces heavily sprayed with Agent Orange. These programs receive mostly positive feedback from participants, despite their limited scope.
- The Vietnamese government supports people affected by Agent Orange through general disability assistance and preferential treatment for those who participated in the war. However, this support does not meet the needs of all families and is not available to some subsets of victims.
- To better address the health and disability effects of Agent Orange, Vietnam should develop a single preferential policy that applies to all cases and better inform international partners and donors. US policymakers should increase funding for and expand the scope of health and disability services, including livelihood and psychological support for affected people.
About the Report
This report examines the experiences of Vietnamese people affected by Agent Orange and other herbicides used by the US military during the Vietnam War and the assistance that has been provided to them by Vietnam and the United States. The report is based on the author’s document-based research and interviews with Vietnamese people affected by Agent Orange and representatives of agencies and organizations that provide assistance. Research was supported by the Southeast Asia program at the United States Institute of Peace.
It is an odd world, where we murdered brown people in Vietnam, and now we are buddies? We have murdered Cubans in the millions and Venezuelans and, it will be more of the same in those countries that end in “a” in South and Central AMerica == Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, and then the “e” and “u” of our country’s madness = Peru, Chile, and the “l” of it — Brazil!
Chapter Excerpt
From Cold War enemies to partners, the United States and Vietnam have come a long way in restoring and fostering bilateral relations since normalization in 1995. However, the path toward rapprochement was not easy. It was an arduous process for those involved, ridden with a myriad of sensitive subjects, among which were the environmental and health consequences of the Agent Orange herbicide used by U.S. forces during the Vietnam War. Even after re-establishing formal diplomatic relations, the two countries failed to reach a common ground on the issue. During the stalemate, in 2002, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam called Agent Orange the “one significant ghost” of the war that hindered complete reconciliation. Not until 2007 did the United States and Vietnam finally agree to jointly address this war legacy.
This paper unpacks the U.S.’ response to the Agent Orange fallout, an overlooked or less emphasized aspect of the warming U.S.-Vietnam bilateral ties that carries significant symbolic, political, legal, and humanitarian implications. The paper answers the following questions: What are the harmful effects of this chemical substance? Who are the victims of Agent Orange in Vietnam? How is Washington assisting Hanoi with mitigation efforts? How should U.S. assistance be con- ceptualized, and what is the rationale for the current approach? Why did the United States change tack after so many years of intransigence? Most importantly, what do the victims need and what more can the United States do to promote reconciliation with the Vietnamese whose lives have been debilitated by the toxic herbicide?
After providing an overview of the Agent Orange legacy in Vietnam, this paper elucidates the research’s theoretical underpinnings, which revolve around the concept of reparative justice. Subsequently, the paper examines the material and symbolic component of U.S. policies toward the issue of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Regarding material redress, there is no direct compensation or reparations. Instead, the U.S. Congress provides annual funds for environmental remediation projects and health programs to assist persons with disabilities living in areas sprayed with the herbicide. In terms of symbolic justice, Washington has not accepted culpability for the use of toxic defoliants. U.S. leaders avoid drawing causation between Agent Orange and the health effects seen in Vietnam but implicitly acknowledge this through their statements and actions. This ex-gratia approach allows Washington to evade the domestic political costs while securing strategic gains through improved bilateral relations with the Southeast Asian country. The paper argues that initiatives by a transnational network of victims’ supporters, including NGOs and American state actors, helped end the deadlock in bilateral negotiations and prompted American assistance. In the final section, the paper explores the perspective of Vietnamese Agent Orange victims and offers some policy recommendations for the United States. The paper underlines the need for a more victim-centered response, which will build long-term trust and confidence between the two countries and promote a more genuine relationship between the United States and the victims.
Both pieces on Carol Van Strum ended up in Dissident Voice: here and here. I even did a review of that documentary, The People VS Agent Orange, which highlights Tran To Nga‘s fight in France — “Eternal Impunity of Capitalism’s Crimes“. Here’s one passage from that story I wrote:
Dr. James Clary was with the Air Force in Vietnam, which ran the program. He was ordered to dump the computer and erase all memory. Instead, he printed out a stack of documents two feet high – missions, sorties, coordinates, dates, gallons dropped throughout all of Southeast Asia and Laos.
“We had the information coming from Dow that there were real problems for people associated with this chemical. It was all locked up for 35 years.”
Playing down all the negative effects of this chemical was part of the Dow plan. Dioxin was the byproduct in the brew. Dow told the US government they were having difficulty producing the volume of the chemical the US wanted. The government told them to not worry about safety standards and quality control, and that a fast production process which produced more of the dioxin would not matter, since the crops and forest were being sprayed, and if people got in contact with it, the idea coming from both industrialists at Dow and those in government and the military was, “Hey, so what, this is a war . . . these are the effing Vietnamese.”
However, a former military man like Clary never saw it that way. He reiterated that 20 million gallons of it was dumped on Southeast Asia. The Ranch Hand program stopped in 1971, but then the chemicals were enlisted by the US on forest land – clear cuts that were sprayed to denude the razed land of any opportunistic weeds and shrubs. The money has to be made, and the stockpiled product has to go! Sell it to the state forestry department and timber outfits.
Trần Tố Nga, pictured at her home in Evry, France, on May 10, 2021, sued 14 chemical companies that produced and sold Agent Orange to the US military during the Vietnam War. Although her suit was dismissed by a French court, her campaign raised awareness of Agent Orange victims.
“It’s like a sign that says ‘Dig Here’ and they’re not digging,” said Dr. David Ozonoff, a professor of environmental health at Boston University and co-editor-in-chief of the online journal Environmental Health, after reviewing ProPublica’s findings. “It raises questions about whether they want to know the answer or are just hoping the problem will naturally go away as the veterans die off.”
Joel Michalek, co-author of a major Air Force study into Agent Orange exposure and birth defects, said ProPublica’s analysis suggests the issue should be revisited. In the 1980s, he and his team found a higher rate of post-war birth defects in the children of veterans who handled Agent Orange than in the children of those who didn’t, but they later concluded that herbicide exposure was not the cause.
“You see parallel patterns of what we saw back then,” said Michalek, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. “That, to me, is a signal.”
And so Vietnam is being recolonized by the Poison Manufacturers:
“Monsanto today, and for the last decade, has been focused solely on agriculture,” Charla Lord, a spokesperson for the company, said when asked to comment on the company’s past history in the country. “But we share a name with a company that dates back to 1901. The former Monsanto was involved in a wide variety of businesses including the manufacture of Agent Orange for the U.S. government. … The U.S. courts have determined that the contractors who manufactured Agent Orange for the government are not responsible for damage claims associated with the military use of Agent Orange because the manufacturers were government contractors carrying out the instructions of government.”
The U.S. government has also issued statements backing away from responsibility for deaths and devastation in Vietnam. Instead it acknowledges a number of dire conditions, diseases and fatalities as “presumed” to be associated with Agent Orange exposure in its own veterans.
Some 69 miles northeast of Ho Chi Minh City in Dong Nai province, Nguyen Hong Lam and his generation of Vietnamese farmers associate Monsanto with its parties and its genetically modified seeds, rather than the Agent Orange attacks that they lived through. According to Lam, the parties, more officially known as launch events hosted by Monsanto, were held between 2012 and 2014, in line with the launch of Monsanto’s genetically modified crops in Vietnam. While Lam doesn’t affiliate Agent Orange with Monsanto, he does know the feeling of community that Monsanto created.
“There were parties that lasted even three days,” he said of the events, which were meant as promotional outreach to farmers. “Dozens of tents would be put up right in the fields to accommodate up to 400 farmers. They were always as much fun as wedding parties.”
Monsanto gatherings such as these were not uncommon here, especially with the company aiming to increase its contact with farmers around the country
“We do hundreds of these [launch] events in the field. Seeing is believing. Their livelihood depends on that,” Narasimham Upadyayula, CEO of Monsanto’s subsidiary Dekalb Vietnam, which is fully owned and operated by Monsanto, said. “We gave them a vision.”
All it takes is that soft Edward Bernays mind killing POWER of AmeriKKKa:
The Americanization and what it ushers in, including the expansion of companies like biotech giant Monsanto, risks burying the history of Agent Orange.
When the lawsuit settled in 1984 for $180 million, U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein ruled that direct payments could only be made to disabled veterans or survivors of those who’d died, cutting off children like Kerry.
Weinstein, who’d expressed doubt that veterans had been harmed, was even more skeptical about their children, writing, “however slight the suggestion of a causal connection between the veterans’ medical problems and Agent Orange exposure, even less evidence supports the existence of an association between birth defects … and exposure of the father to Agent Orange.”
Mike Ryan wasn’t surprised. “I knew we had no shot,” he said.
In 1997, when the VA finally began offering compensation for children with spina bifida, the Ryans didn’t bother applying. Mike Ryan said it was never about the money; it was about recognition of the debt he believes his country owes his daughter kERRY. “She has 22 birth defects, and they want to pay only for spina bifida? Come on, give me a break.”
Kerry died in 2006 at the age of 35.
Mike Ryan, now 71, said he hadn’t kept up with scientific advancements that potentially confirm what he’s spent years arguing — that a father’s exposure to toxins can cause health problems in offspring. In the end, it won’t matter what researchers discover, he insisted.
“They will never admit it,” he said, “because if they do, then America is admitting to drafting the unborn.”
For decades, Vietnam veterans have suspected that the defoliant harmed their children. But the VA hasn’t studied its own data for clues.
A new ProPublica analysis has found that the odds of having a child born with birth defects were more than a third higher for veterans exposed to Agent Orange than for those who weren’t.
‘If we are overly accommodating, we will inevitably surrender our culture.’ Nguyen Kim Phuong
The U.S.’s lobbying efforts have been well-received.
Jeffrey Smith, author of the best-selling book “Seeds of Deception,” minced no words in interviews about the topic. “The [Vietnamese} government was getting skewed advice from the biotech industry and from their chief supporter—the U.S. government,” he said.
[Some of the more than 100,000 pages of discovery material related to the chemical industry that were stored in Carol Van Strum’s barn in rural Oregon],
“If we are overly accommodating, we will inevitably surrender our culture. All we want is justice.” — Nguyen Kim Phuong, 86, who lived through both wars involving the French and the Americans. Phuong is forgiving about the war and is happy to see U.S.-Vietnam relations moving forward. But he is not happy to see Monsanto continually increasing its reach in his country, with little consequence for its actions.