"The Vietnamese who were exposed to the chemical have suffered from cancer, liver damage, pulmonary and heart diseases, defects to reproductive capacity, and skin and nervous disorders.
"Children and grandchildren of those exposed have severe physical deformities, mental and physical disabilities, diseases, and shortened life spans.
"The forests and jungles in large parts of southern Vietnam have been devastated and denuded. They may never grow back and if they do, it will take 50 to 200 years to regenerate.
On August 19th 2008 Vietnam expelled Gary Glitter after he had served almost three years in prison for indecency with two girls aged 11.
Reportedly, Vietnamese women and children are trafficked abroad to the USA, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Taiwan, and the Czech Republic, for commercial sexual exploitation. (Vietnam's global human trafficking an inhuman epidemic)
In 2008 it was reported that: "Approximately 130 women were held prisoner, some in dog cages, at a Ho Chi Minh City brothel.
"The women were forced to work as prostitutes 18 hours per day, local media reports say.
"The Thanh Nien newspaper said police found the women after launching a raid triggered by letters from the captive women, but the brothel owner got away.
"The Vietnamese newspaper said the women, many of whom were from poor rural families, were kept as slaves in debt bondage and if they refused to perform sexual acts on customers they were severely punished by the owner, known as Tri, and his men."
There have been allegations about Ho Chi Minh's sex life. The allegations, by critics of Ho, may or may not be true.
A quote from 'HO CHI MINH'S TRUE COLORS' by Nguyen Minh Can (The Ky 21 Monthly Magazine):
"There is a young girl from the Nung ethnic group in Cao Bang, called Nong Thi Xuan.
"She was brought in to 'serve' Uncle Ho.
"She brought her younger sister Nong Thi Vang and a female cousin with her to Hanoi. Later she had a boy child with Uncle Ho. The boy was named Nguyen Tat Trung. There was also a rumor that she had with him another girl child named Nguyen Thi Trinh.
John Pilger, in an article entitled 'First, They Attack the Past' writes:
The final declaration of the Geneva conference divided Vietnam "temporarily" until free national elections were held on July 26, 1956.
There was little doubt that Ho Chi Minh would win and form Vietnam's first democratically elected government.
Certainly, President Eisenhower was in no doubt of this. "I have never talked with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs," he wrote, "who did not agree that ... 80 percent of the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader."
Not only did the United States refuse to allow the UN to administer the agreed elections two years later, but the "democratic" regime in the south was an invention.
One of the inventors, the CIA official Ralph McGhee, describes in his masterly book Deadly Deceits how a brutal expatriate mandarin, Ngo Dinh Diem, was imported from New Jersey to be "president" and a fake government was put in place. "The CIA," he wrote, "was ordered to sustain that illusion through propaganda [placed in the media]."
Phony elections were arranged, hailed in the West as "free and fair," with American officials fabricating "an 83 percent turnout despite Vietcong terror."
"The terrorists," whom the Americans called the Vietcong, were ... southern Vietnamese defending their homeland against the American invasion and whose resistance was popular. For Vietnam, read Iraq.
And, reportedly, "The day General McArthur signed the peace treaty with Japan half the weapons stored on Okinawa were shipped to Ho Chi Minh and General Giap who met these shipments at the docks of Hai Phong harbor with Lucien Conein, the CIA case officer for Diem."
Among the points made (and this is a very rough paraphrase):
1. There are people we shall call the shadow money lenders, who make their money from lending money.
Wars, including the 'War on Terror', are launched to preserve the shadow money-lenders' political and military power.
The shadow money lenders are involved in financial manipulation.
They control the political leaders.
2. Central bankers can create money and this gives them power.
When there is large spending on armies and wars, lots of money is involved.
But there is always a danger that the system will collapse if people think that the dollars or pounds they hold have become worthless.
In the 1960s, the Vietnam War led to a fall in the value of the dollar.
3.In the early 1970s, Henry Kissinger got the Saudis and other Arab states to push up the price of oil.
The deal was that the oil had to be bought in dollars and the oil profits invested in the USA.
The dollar was saved for the time being.
4. In the 1980s, it was clear that US manufacturing had been neglected and that the Japanese and the Koreans were often more efficient at making things.
The shadow money lenders decided that industries could move to China and that the profits would be invested in bonds in the USA.
This propped up the dollar.
5. From the 1990s onwards, the shadow money lenders encouraged people to borrow vast sums of money and get deeper and deeper into debt.
Various fancy financial schemes were devised to make things look good.
It was like a giant pyramid scheme or ponzi scheme or 'fraud'.
Some bankers became very, very rich.
A lot of people owed too much money, considering their low incomes.
Imagine a family earning $400 a month and having to pay $500 a month in interest.
6.The bubble has now burst.
7.The interest now paid on US government bonds is almost zero.
So the Chinese, Japanese, Europeans and Arabs who have put vast sums of money into US government bonds are earning virtually no interest and they are seeing the possibility of a big fall in the dollar.
The low interest rate also encourages more borrowing and debt.
8. "The Shadow Money-Lenders and its military partner will impose martial law...
"Soon it will be the nationalization of the big corporations like GE, GM, Ford and Chrysler, all too big to be allowed to fail."
9. Henry Kissinger and others have talked of a New World Order.
10. "The shadow money lenders are in a desperate situation and they will start a world war to avoid the collapse of their system."
Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange.
