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The quincentenary provided many opportunities to examine "the murder of history," apart from the obvious ones. Some were taken. The 500th year opened in October 1991 with a flood of commentary on the 50th anniversary of Japan's December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor. There was wonder and dismay over Japan's singular unwillingness to acknowledge its guilt for "the date which will live in infamy," and sober ruminations on Japan's disgraceful "self-pity" and refusal to offer reparations to its victims, its "clumsy attempts to sanitize the past," and failure to "come forward with a definitive statement of wartime responsibility," as Tokyo correspondent Steven Weisman framed the issues in a New York Times Magazine cover story on "Pearl Harbor in the Mind of Japan." These deliberations were carefully crafted to highlight Japan's major crime: its "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor. Among the issues scrupulously excised were the US attitude towards Japan's horrifying rampages before the infamous date, and the great power interactions that lie not very deep in the background. And one would have to search diligently for a discussion of the proper rank, in the scale of atrocities, of an attack on a naval base in a US colony that had been stolen from its inhabitants by force and guile just 50 years earlier -- another part of the background that slipped by virtually unnoticed, as did the centenary of the latter deed in January 1993.
More remarkable still was another anniversary passed over in silence at the very same moment: the thirtieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's escalation of the US intervention in South Vietnam. Autumn 1961 was a fateful moment in the history of US assault against Indochina, one of the most shameful and destructive episodes of the 500-year conquest.
On October 11, 1961, Kennedy ordered dispatch of a US Air Force Farmgate squadron to South Vietnam, 12 planes especially equipped for counterinsurgency warfare, soon authorized "to fly coordinated missions with Vietnamese personnel in support of Vietnamese ground forces." On December 16, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, whom JFK had put in charge of running the war, authorized their participation in combat operations against southerners resisting the violence of the US-imposed terror state or living in villages out of government control. These were the first steps in engaging US forces directly in bombing and other combat operations in South Vietnam from 1962, along with sabotage missions in the North. These 1961-1962 actions laid the groundwork for the huge expansion of the war in later years, with its awesome toll.21
State terror had already taken perhaps 75,000 lives in the southern sector of Vietnam since Washington took over the war directly in 1954. But the 1954-1961 crimes were of a different order: they belong to the category of crimes that Washington conducts routinely, either directly or through its agents, in its various terror states. In the fall and winter of 1961-1962, Kennedy added the war crime of aggression to the already sordid record, also raising the attack to new heights.
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