[News] Ho Chi Minh City: Nguyen Thai Binh Street

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/19/ho-chi-minh-city-nguyen-thai-binh-street/ 



  Ho Chi Minh City: Nguyen Thai Binh Street

by Ron Jacobs <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/ron-jacobs/> - April 
19, 2019
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There’s a street in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City called Nguyen Thai Binh 
Street.

The United States had intensified its bombing of both northern and 
southern Vietnam earlier in April. 1972. Nixon, Kissinger and their 
henchmen in the Pentagon called the campaign Operation Freedom Porch. 
The northern cities of Hanoi and Haiphong were carpet-bombed with wave 
after wave of United States Air Force B-52s dropping their explosives 
across both metropolises. Meanwhile, the US Navy was preparing to mine 
Haiphong Harbor.

On April 20th, 1972 a rally against the US bombing northern Vietnam and 
the mining of its harbors took place in Seattle, Washington at the 
University of Washington. It was one of hundreds such protests against 
the US actions taking place that week around the world. I attended one 
in Frankfurt am Main, Germany that ended up being broken up by police 
with truncheons and water cannons. People I knew in Maryland and DC 
wrote to me about similar police attacks at protests in DC and at the 
University of Maryland. Following their stories about the bombing raids, 
the military’s daily newspaper /Stars & Stripes/ (published for men and 
women stationed overseas) provided its readers with a brief summary of 
demonstrations against the latest US attacks. So did the /International 
Herald Tribune/ and various European newspapers available at the 
newsstands in downtown Frankfurt.

Anyhow, back to that rally in Seattle. One of the reasons for the 
protest there was unique to that city. It involved a student at the 
University who was being threatened with deportation because of his 
antiwar activities. That student’s name was to become the name of the 
street I opened this story with: Nguyen Thai Binh. Born in southern 
Vietnam, Binh was attending the university on a scholarship provided by 
the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Now, despite the 
claims made by the agency and many of its staffers, USAID was (and is) 
essentially a branch of the CIA. It is the carrot that operates along 
with the stick; the good cop who works with the bad cop.

Nguyen Thai Binh was studying agriculture at the school. After living 
and studying for a couple years, he became involved in the movement 
against the US war on the Vietnamese. As the date for his graduation 
neared, he described his studies in an open letter: “A ‘leadership’ 
scholarship of the US Agency for ‘International Development’ brought me 
to this country four years ago. During that time, besides gaining some 
technical knowledge which is useless to serve my country in this war 
situation, I have studied the massive social, economic and cultural 
damage caused by the war of US aggression in Vietnam….”

Nguyen Thai Binh was learning the true nature of his host and sponsor. 
In response, he spoke at teach-ins, rallies and other protests against 
the war. Indeed, he spoke at the April 20, 1972 rally in Seattle. 
Furthermore, he and several other Vietnamese students from around the 
United States occupied the Saigon government’s consulate in New York in 
early February 1972. Binh and the others were arrested. According to 
documents composed and filed by the US Immigration and Naturalization 
Services (INS), Binh stepped up his antiwar activities after the 
arrests. His role in the movement in Washington state was drawing the 
notice of the authorities. Binh graduated with a degree in fisheries 
management on June 10, 1972. He was given deportation orders around the 
same time. The US government was not going to allow him to tell the 
truth about their war, especially since those truths were coming from a 
Vietnamese citizen who they had believed was on “their side.” Binh was 
unbowed. He continued his activities while he readied himself for his 
trip back to Vietnam.

Binh began his journey back to Vietnam on July 1, 1972. His plane from 
San Francisco stopped in Honolulu, Guam and Manila. It was on the final 
leg of the journey from Manila to Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) that 
Binh passed a note to a flight attendant demanding the plane be flown to 
Hanoi. When the pilot refused to acknowledge the first note, Binh wrote 
another. When the plane landed on the tarmac in Vietnam, the pilot and a 
retired police officer on board wrestled Binh to the floor of the plane 
and killed him. They then threw his body out of the plane. Binh’s anger 
and despair at the death and destruction perpetrated on his country and 
its people had sent him to the edge. His antiwar speeches and activities 
seemed to have no effect on those who ran and profited from the war 
machine. Like those antiwar US citizens who crossed the rubicon into 
violent resistance, the never-ending butchery and slaughter of the 
imperial war machine had claimed another.

Antiwar activists memorialized Binh at rallies and in print after his 
death. Friends in Seattle enlisted others, including the Yale chaplain 
Reverend William Sloane Coffin, to form the Friends of Nguyen Thai Binh. 
His papers are in the University of Washington Archives. The Vietnamese 
memorialized Nguyen Thai Binh by naming the aforementioned street in his 
honor.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
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