The Fall of Saigon 1975. Fifty years of repeating what was forgotten.

Written By: - Date published: 10:28 am, April 23rd, 2025 - 41 comments
Categories: defence, Disarmament, Peace, war - Tags:

 Part one: On the courage to remember  

The first demonstration I ever went on was at the age of 12, against the Vietnam War.  The first formal history lesson I received was a few months later when I commenced high school.  That day the old history master, Mr Griffiths, chalked what I later learnt was a quote from Hegel: “The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn the lessons of history.”  It’s about time we changed that.

Painful though it is, let’s have the courage to remember what they desperately try to make us forget. 

Cultural amnesia and learning the lessons of history

Memorialising events is a popular pastime with politicians, journalists and old soldiers.  Nothing wrong with that. Honouring sacrifice, preserving collective memory and encouraging reconciliation are all valid.  Recalling the liberation of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) on 30 April 1975 is important. What is criminal, however, is that we failed to learn the vital lessons that the U.S. defeat in Vietnam should have taught us all. Sadly much was forgotten and the succeeding half century has witnessed a carnival of slaughter perpetrated by the Western world on hapless South Americans, Africans, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, and many more. It’s time to remember.

Memory shapes national identity

As scholars say: Memory shapes national identity. If your cultural products – books, movies, songs, curricula and the like – fail to embed an appreciation of the war crimes, racism, and imperial culpability for events like the Vietnam War, then, as we have proven, it can all be done again.  How many recognise today that Vietnam was an American imperial war in Asia, that “fighting communism” was a pretext that lost all credibility partly thanks to television and especially thanks to heroic journalists like John Pilger and Seymour Hersh. Just as in Gaza today, the truth and the crimes could not be hidden anymore. 

If a culture doesn’t face up to its past crimes – say the treatment of the Aborigines by settler Australia, of Maori by settler New Zealand, of Palestinians by the Zionist state since 1948, or the various genocides perpetrated by the U.S. government on the indigenous peoples of what became the 50 states, then it leads ultimately to moral decay and repetition.  

Lest we forget.  Forget what?

Is there a collective memory in the West that the Americans and their allies raped thousands of Vietnamese women, killed hundreds of thousands of children, were involved in countless large scale war crimes, summary executions and other depravities in order to impose their will on a people in their own country? Why has there been no collective responsibility for the death of over two million Vietnamese?  Why no reparations for America’s vast use of chemical weapons on Vietnam, some provided by New Zealand?

Vietnam Veterans Against War released a report “50 years of struggle” in 2017 which included this commendable statement: “To V.V.A.W. and its supporters, the veterans had a continuing duty to report what they had witnessed”. This included the frequency of “beatings, rapes, cutting body parts, violent torture during interrogations and cutting off heads”. 

The U.S. spends billions projecting itself as morally superior but people who followed events at the time, including brilliant journalists like Pilger, knew something beyond sordid was happening within the U.S. military. 

The importance of remembering the My Lai Massacre.  

Whilst cultural memes like “Me love you long time” played to an exoticised and sexualised image of Vietnamese women – popular in American-centric movies like Full Metal Jacket, Green Beret, Rambo, Apocalypse Now, as was the image of the Vietnamese as sadistic torturers, there has been a long-term attempt to expunge from memory the true story of American depravity.  

All, or virtually all, armies rape their victims. The U.S. Army is no exception – despite rhetorically jockeying with the Israelis for the title of “the world’s most moral army”.  The most famous such incident of the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre of March 16, 1968 in which about 500 civilians were subjected to hours of rapes, mutilation and eventual murder by soldiers of the U.S. 20th Infantry Regiment. Rape victims ranged from girls of 10 years through to old ladies. The U.S. soldiers even took a lunch break before recommencing their crimes.  

The official commission of inquiry, culminating in the Peers Report found that an extensive network of officers had taken part in a cover-up of what were large-scale war crimes. Only one soldier, Lieutenant Calley, was ever sentenced to jail but within days he was, on the orders of the U.S. President, transferred to a casually-enforced three and half years of house arrest.  By this act, the United States of America continued a pattern of providing impunity for grave war crimes. That pattern continues to this day. 

The failure of the U.S. Army to fully pursue the criminals will be an eternal stain on the U.S. Army whose soldiers went on to commit countless rapes, hundreds of thousands of murders and other crimes across the globe in the succeeding five decades. If you resile from these facts, you simply haven’t read enough official information.  Thank goodness for journalists, particularly Seymour Hersh, who broke rank and exposed the truth of what happened at My Lai. 

Senator John McCain’s “sacrifice” and the crimes that went unpunished.

Thousands of Viet Cong died in U.S. custody, many from torture, many by summary execution but the Western cultural image of Vietnam focusses on the cruelty of the North Vietnamese toward “victims” like terror-bomber John McCain. The future U.S. presidential candidate was on his 23rd bombing mission, part of a campaign of “War by Tantrum” in the words of a New York Times writer, when he was shot down over Hanoi. 

Also emblematic of this state-inflicted terrorism was the CIA’s Phoenix Program, eventually shut down after public outrage and hearings by the U.S. Congress into its misdeeds.  According to U.S. journalist Douglas Valentine, author of several books on the CIA, including The Phoenix Program:

“Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers”. Common practices, Valentine says, quoting U.S. witnesses and official papers, included:

“Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electrical shock (“the Bell Telephone Hour”) rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; “the water treatment”; “the airplane,” in which a prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair.”  No U.S. serviceman, CIA agent or other official was held to account for these crimes. 

Tiger Force – part of the U.S. 327th Infantry – gained a grisly reputation for indiscriminately mowing down civilians, mutilations (cutting off of ears which were retained as souvenirs was common practice, according to sworn statements by participants). All this was supposed to be kept secret but was leaked in 2003.  “Their crimes were uncountable, their madness beyond imagination – so much so that for almost four decades, the story of Tiger Force was covered up under orders that stretched all the way to the White House,” journalists Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss reported. 

Their crimes, secretly documented by the U.S. military, included beheading a baby to intimidate villagers into providing information – interesting given how much mileage the U.S. and Israel made of fake stories about beheaded babies on October 7th.  The U.S. went to great lengths to hide these ugly truths – and no one ever faced real consequences.

Helicopter gunships and soldiers at checkpoints gunned down thousands of Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, much as U.S. forces did at checkpoints in Iraq, according to leaked U.S. documents following the illegal invasion of that country. 

The worst cowards and criminals were not the rapists and murderers themselves but the high-ranking politicians and military leaders who tried desperately to cover up these and hundreds of other incidents. As Lieutenant Calley himself said of My Lai: “It’s not an isolated incident.”

Here we are 50 years later in the midst of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, with the US fuelling war and bombing people across the globe.  Isn’t it time we stopped supporting this madness?

Eugene Doyle 

Next article: The Fall of Saigon 1975. Part Two: Quiet Mutiny: the U.S. army falls apart.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz.

41 comments on “The Fall of Saigon 1975. Fifty years of repeating what was forgotten. ”

  1. Res Publica 1
    23 April 2025 at 11:03 am

    History is a powerful and necessary lens through which to analyze the present. But it only works if we’re willing to see it in full: context, contradictions, and all.

    The criticisms of US intervention, imperialism, and war crimes in Vietnam are absolutely valid. No one’s denying the horror, the injustice, or the long shadow of that war. But what weakens this argument — fatally — is that it’s aimed at a generation that is no longer shaping our discourse, and has already endured sixty years of public reckoning, protest, and institutional reflection.

    This isn’t bold. It’s cheap. It’s hokey. It’s booooorrrriiiinnnng. Punching down at ghosts while today’s living, breathing tyrants go unchallenged.

    We get it. Sometimes nations do bad things. But if we go far back enough, or dig hard enough, just about every polity in the entirety of human history has a war crime or two in their closet.

    What makes the U.S. so morally and historically exceptional that its crimes alone deserve endless, exclusive remembrance?

    Rather than learning from the past, Eugene Doyle seems committed to walling off huge sections of it behind ideological battlements. Russia’s brutal imperialism? China’s expanding authoritarianism? Iran’s repression? Barely a whisper.

    Instead, we get the same tired performance: the West is uniquely evil, and everyone is either complicit in war crimes or (like him) a gloriously noble, heroic resistor just trying to protect us from the enemies only they can see.

    Quo usque tandem abutere, Eugene, patientia nostra?

    How much longer will we have to suffer this endless ideological theatre?

    If you’re going to condemn empire, then condemn all empires. If you’re going to speak truth to power, then speak it to the living — not just to the safely dead.

    This isn’t resistance. This isn't history. This isn’t remembering anything. It’s selective outrage masquerading as moral insight.

    Reply
    • joe90 1.1
      23 April 2025 at 11:56 am

      This isn’t resistance. This isn't history. This isn’t remembering anything. It’s selective outrage masquerading as moral insight.

      yes

      Reply
    • KJT 1.2
      24 April 2025 at 11:56 am

      So. You are saying we cannot criticise the USA's moral bankruptcy, without mentioning China and Russia, EVERY TIME!

      Or. One “sides” cruelty without saying “oh but the other side does it to”. As if there is a morality scorecard

      That is a nonsense.

      Reply
      • Res Publica 1.2.1
        24 April 2025 at 1:45 pm

        No. We can and absolutely should criticize America's moral bankruptcy in the strongest possible terms.

        But that doesn't five us carte blanche to rewrite history to suit our narrative or ignore the misconduct of other people in our haste to condemn the fastest and best.

        Reply
        • KJT 1.2.1.1
          24 April 2025 at 1:59 pm

          Strawman!

          Who's ignoring it?

          Just because the USA is mentioned on this occasion, doesn't mean we approve of other bunches of murderous baby killers.

          Reply
  2. francesca 2
    23 April 2025 at 3:18 pm

    There's plenty enough vilification of the Chinese, the Russians , anyone you care to name who are our supposed adversaries for one reason or other (usually economic),though it's their alleged immorality, backwardness or authoritarianism we're meant to bridle at.

    I can't read a newspaper anywhere without being urged to view our adversaries as uniquely and irredeemably evil., whilst our shared values (the rules based order anyone)are beyond reproach .A little flawed maybe, but the aspiration is there, while those others…. they are wicked through and through .I'm sick to death of the hypocrisy.

    We do need to hold ourselves and our allies to account.How is it that people can sanctify dissidents in far away countries, but pile shit on our own?

    And thanks Eugene for referencing those Vietnam vets who have come out against war.

    War brings out the very worst in people, and also begets more war.I am dismayed by noting how many these days think war is ok .Usually those who will never be called up.

    Well said Eugene

    Reply
    • Res Publica 2.1
      23 April 2025 at 10:44 pm

      We do need to hold ourselves and our allies to account.How is it that people can sanctify dissidents in far away countries, but pile shit on our own

      Let’s be clear: Eugene Doyle is not a dissident.

      He risks nothing by writing this — not persecution, not exile, not even deplatforming. Just the possibility of well-deserved public ridicule.

      He’s safe and sound in our peaceful little corner of the world, free to sit, think, write, and chuckle at his own entirely non-existent cleverness — while in the real world, women and children are being bombed in their homes by the very same “anti-imperialists” he’s so eager to sugarcoat.

      Reply
      • francesca 2.1.1
        24 April 2025 at 8:22 am

        And there we have it , human rights and freedom of speech for us, devastation and carnage rained down on the rest.Actually , they'll come to love us for it.

        Phew! I find the moral certainty staggering, particularly in the time of Gaza (also known as the real world)

        Gutless hypocrites practise that most noxious form of whataboutism…the supposed moral superiority of the west excuses all our atrocities and negates the idea that we should question our assumptions and attempt to be better. The kind of popular thinking that had Assange banged up and tortured in the worst prison in the UK for years without public outcry

        And Doyle is a dissident writer, in that he opposes official policy , despite your authoritative "Let's be clear"

        Yes we can thunder against the Chinese and Russians and N.Koreans, piss in the wind..but real morality starts at home , standing up to our more powerful brothers and calling them and ourselves to account.

        Keep writing please Mr Doyle, you're a breath of fresh air

        Reply
        • Res Publica 2.1.1.1
          24 April 2025 at 9:55 am

          And Doyle is a dissident writer, in that he opposes official policy

          Simply opposing government policy in a democracy isn’t dissidence.
          It’s participation. It’s called free speech. Normal, expected, wholly ordinary civic engagement.

          You can lionize left-authoritarian contrarianism all you like, but don’t kid yourself: there’s no moral courage in writing comfortable critiques from a safe distance, with zero consequences.

          Yes, we should call out our friends and allies when they act against our shared values. But that’s not dissent. It’s healthy diplomacy.

          New Zealand already does it all the time. Quietly, thoughtfully, and without the self-congratulatory performance, drama, and handwringing.

          Reply
          • Francesca 2.1.1.1.1
            24 April 2025 at 10:30 am

            Look up the dictionary .

            You are not the sole arbiter of what words mean

            And I am yet to hear NZ call out the genocide in Gaza
            Neither did I hear NZ say a word about Assanges cruel treatment

            Perhaps as you say it is quiet …whispered so no one hears …lest we be slapped with a more than 10% tariff

            It is our timid selectiveness at work

            Reply
            • Res Publica 2.1.1.1.1.1
              24 April 2025 at 10:45 am

              Maybe we should ask the good people at the Oxford Dictionary

              Dissident

              a person who strongly disagrees with and criticizes their government, especially in a country where this kind of action is dangerous

              Or if American English is more to your taste, the Collins Dictionary

              1. countable noun

              Dissidents are people who disagree with and criticize their government, especially because it is undemocratic.

              …political dissidents.

              …a former Soviet dissident.

              So, unless Comrade Eugene's next essay is being smuggled out of a siberian gulag, maybe let’s cool it with the heroic framing.

              If we can’t trust dictionaries to define the meaning of words, who can we trust?

              But hey, I'll concede we live in a free countyr, and you can call him a dissident if you like.

              But the fact remains: this analysis is as worthless as it is lazy, trite, and empty.And your defense of it, along with your selective moral outrage, is both puzzling and weirdly retrograde.

              Reply
              • francesca …
                24 April 2025 at 10:57 am

                Worthless, lazy , trite, empty…all these value laden words.. emotive and unnecessarily combative

                The word dissident is not confined to the Cold war, although some people prefer to live in those times

                Would dissenting ideas be an acceptable alternative for you?
                Although the broader comment was about far more than one word

                Reply
                • Res Publica …
                  24 April 2025 at 1:34 pm

                  That's fair: you're perfectly entitled to disagree with my disagreement.

                  But if you’re going to argue that this piece is brave, important, or dissident, then it’s fair game to challenge that framing directly and forcefully.

                  I used strong language because the piece struck me as intellectually weak and morally selective. The author has pushed a narrative. I disagreed with it.

                  In the real world, we call that debate.

                  And on the definition of “dissident”? It's a straightforward appeal to meaning. Because if you’re going to use a word that carries weight and historical baggage, it’s reasonable to expect it be used accurately. Semantics matter.

                  You’re welcome to keep defending the author and his analysis. I just don’t think either of them deserve to be put upon a pedestal.

                  Reply
            • Psycho Milt 2.1.1.1.1.2
              24 April 2025 at 5:42 pm

              And I am yet to hear NZ call out the genocide in Gaza

              Nor will you, for the excellent reasons that:

              1. There is no "genocide in Gaza."

              2. The NZ government isn't obliged to share your opinion of who needs "calling out."

              3. A lot of your fellow citizens, ie voters, will back Israelis against Muslim terrorists any day of the week, the government's well aware of that, and it wouldn't want to piss us off by backing the terrorists.

              If ever there were a "Please learn a lesson from history" example, it's this one.

              Reply
              • Nic the NZer …
                25 April 2025 at 10:05 am

                Good on you for still being willing to affirm your commitment to the genocide of Palestinians (a phase of the much longer running ethnic cleansing), in public. As the article accurately describes this is simply the ongoing practice of long established western values which you appear to have converted into a (rather ugly) culture.

                Of course, you will already understand that the ongoing and yet incomplete international law cases do not need to complete before a genocide can be established and do not inhibit it being considered a genocide until their completion. This would make a mockery of international law. In signing the genocide convention, it is a commitment of NZ to consider this possibility while it is ongoing, and further to act to prevent it.

                Reply
                • Psycho Milt …
                  25 April 2025 at 1:11 pm

                  It's pointless to accuse me of 'commitment' to something that I don't believe exists (and have good reason to disbelieve in).

                  Reply
              • SPC …
                25 April 2025 at 10:57 am

                There is no "genocide in Gaza".

                Too many dead civilians to deny there have been war crimes (not the first to do this in war).

                At what point is lack of access to food and medical supplies/equipment and adequate water/power/shelter (and persistent need to move from place to place) facilitating the war famine and disease trifecta (as Lancet warned).

                At which point is deliberation as to this course, causation. And how is that causation, different in outcome to a planned genocide?

                Abbas puts it that Hamas might deserve it, but not the people of Gaza do not.

                https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g20pj6epvo

                Reply
                • Psycho Milt …
                  25 April 2025 at 1:32 pm

                  There's no particular number of dead civilians that constitutes a war crime, and this is a war that's been going on for 18 months.

                  Re provision of aid, 4th Geneva Convention section 23 includes:

                  "The obligation of a High Contracting Party to allow the free passage of the consignments indicated in the preceding paragraph is subject to the condition that this Party is satisfied that there are no serious reasons for fearing:

                  (a) that the consignments may be diverted from their destination,
                  (b) that the control may not be effective, or
                  (c) that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy through the substitution of the above-mentioned consignments for goods which would otherwise be provided or produced by the enemy or through the release of such material, services or facilities as would otherwise be required for the production of such goods."

                  The criterion of "serious reasons for fearing" aid will be diverted and used by the enemy's military is well met in this conflict. It's up to Hamas' allies to pressure it to surrender, not up to the Israelis to support Hamas' war effort.

                  As to what the people of Gaza deserve, "Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?" Best not think in terms of who deserves what.

                  Reply
        • KJT 2.1.1.2
          24 April 2025 at 11:57 am

          Wot Francesca said.

          Reply
    • aj 2.2
      23 April 2025 at 10:59 pm

      If I may add this, My Lai was also a place of great heroism (and humanism) by the actions of helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson and his crew who ended the massacre. For his trouble he was widely vilified by the military, politicians and many of the public.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Thompson_Jr.

      Reply
      • KJT 2.2.1
        24 April 2025 at 12:16 pm

        I worked for several years with an ex Vietnam vet Huey gunner

        He told me many of the things that were considered normal.

        Including shooting up random fishing boats, regardless of which "side" because "they were bored"!

        Reply
        • Res Publica 2.2.1.1
          24 April 2025 at 1:43 pm

          And all those South Vietnamese civilians clinging to helicopters as they fled the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. They did that because… what, exactly?

          Boredom? Confusion?

          No. They were terrified of what was coming next.

          That alone should give anyone pause before trying to reduce any conflict to one side’s cruelty.

          The United States has no monopoly on war crimes or misconduct. And neither does New Zealand.

          Remember the Operation Burnham Inquiry? Civilian deaths. Misreporting. No accountability.

          Or cast your mind further back: during the Second World War, we shot and killed 48 unarmed Japanese POWs at Featherston. No one was ever tried. No one was held responsible.

          Maybe, instead of bleating endlessly about American peccadilloes, we should be more honest, and more critical of our own.

          There’s innocent blood on our hands too.

          Reply
          • KJT 2.2.1.1.1
            24 April 2025 at 1:52 pm

            Doubling down your "whataboutism" to justify your "whataboutism" is a ridiculous debating tactic.

            Reply
            • aj 2.2.1.1.1.1
              24 April 2025 at 2:04 pm

              They did that because… what, exactly?

              Collaboration with an occupying power has never ended well when the occupier leaves. Any time in history.

              Reply
              • KJT …
                24 April 2025 at 4:17 pm

                I seem to recall reading about European countries being "mean" to collabrators after WW2, also.

                Reply
                • Res Publica …
                  24 April 2025 at 4:44 pm

                  If by mean you mean flat out executing, exiling, depriving of property, and/or stripping them of civic rights, then yes.

                  Reply
                  • aj …
                    24 April 2025 at 7:18 pm

                    Norwegian Vidkun Quisling. Has become the byword for traitors who collaborate with the occupying force.

                    Reply
                    • joe90 …
                      24 April 2025 at 7:41 pm

                      And the almost 2 million Vietnamese who fled their country, around 800K by boat, between 200K and 400K of them are thought to have perished at sea, during the Indochina refugee crisis.

                      Were they quislings?

                      /

                    • aj []
                      24 April 2025 at 8:13 pm

                      I think the words 'Indochina refugee crisis' provide your answer.

                    • joe90 …
                      24 April 2025 at 9:45 pm

                      I think the words 'Indochina refugee crisis' provide your answer.

                      Weak

                      Soldiers and civil servants of the former regime weren't the only people denounced, arbitrarily detained, imprisoned, and who died without trial. Writers, poets, journalists, artists, priests, pastors, monks and retired former civil servants were among the new regimes victims. As were ethnic Chinese business people, rice traders, small market owners and operators who were arrested and sent to re-education camps during the regime's anti-bourgeois campaigns.

                      But sure, nothing to do with the prospects of denunciation, arbitrary detention and the imposition of indefinite sentences without trial to brutal prisons, forced labour camps and re-education camps, where hundreds and perhaps thousands of Vietnamese are thought to have been tortured to death and where thousands more are known to have died from malnutrition, physical abuse, and medical neglect.

                      Fucking weak.

              • Res Publica …
                24 April 2025 at 4:42 pm

                Ahhh yes the poor Vietnamese, brutally occupied by checks notes the Vietnamese.

                If you accept North Vietnam was a totally legitimate independent state, then you have to do the same for the South too.

                Reply
  3. Tom Hunter 3
    23 April 2025 at 9:50 pm

    Two of my kids have been to Vietnam on school trips and although they got the standard tour of a war museum, complete with all the stuff Doyle mentions here, the Vietnamese people themselves were quite pro-American – while being strongly anti-Chinese.

    The writer does himself no favours by simply taking the same agitprop stance that the Vietnamese Communists and their supporters took sixty years ago with the simple-minded Vietnam Good, America Bad approach – McCain the "terror-bomber" and complaining about "the image of the Vietnamese as sadistic torturers", and then simply skipping over the well-documented tortures of those American POW's, like Leo Thorsness:

    …. he ejected from his exploding fighter doing 690 miles per hour, injuring both knees and sustaining multiple fractures of his back….. Upon his capture, he was tortured in interrogation without sleep for 19 days and 18 nights. “It took them 18 days to break me,”….

    Regarding the torture he endured upon his capture, Leo wrote: “I would say that my 18 days and nights of interrogations were unendurable if I hadn’t endured.” He observed that “[t]here was nothing particularly imaginative about the North Vietnamese techniques. They hadn’t improved much on the devices of the Spanish Inquisition.”

    He was distraught when he was broken on day 19 of his initial captivity. “I tried to cry. But I was past tears.” Upon his return to his cell, however, he was assured that everyone who is subject to such an interrogation “has one of two things happen: either they broke or died — some did both.”

    And of course the entirely deliberate and cold-blooded massacres of civilians in Hue by the North Vietnamese is not mentioned in this Good-Guys-Bad-Guys narrative. Nobody in Vietnam was ever held accountable for either that or the prison tortures either.

    BTW, the My Lai massacre was basically stopped by a US helicopter pilot and his crew who observed the massacre of the civilians. Did any North Vietnamese soldier ever do something similar to prevent their side's war crimes?

    Reply
    • Psycho Milt 3.1
      24 April 2025 at 2:30 pm

      It's funny how it's always the liberal democracies that need to learn the lessons of the terrible things they've done in their histories, and yet the liberal democracies are the only societies in which you see people continually hand-wringing about the terrible things done by previous governments, decades or even centuries ago.

      As you point out, we aren't going to see the Vietnamese bewailing and memorialising the terrible things their govt did in the war, and we sure hell no aren't going to see Chinese commentators berating their society for the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979. I may not like American hegemony, but the potential alternatives look a lot worse.

      Reply
  4. francesca 4
    23 April 2025 at 10:03 pm

    Sounds like the Yanks did the Vietnamese a damn good favour, and the Vietnamese really love the US for all the atrocities .Well,I guess going by that in a few years the Ukrainians will love the Russians , all will be forgiven and Ukraine will be strongly anti European

    Reply
  5. SPC 5
    25 April 2025 at 6:09 am

    The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless.

    Immature thought is predominately purposive and utopian. Thought which rejects purpose altogether is the thought of old age. Mature thought combines purpose with observation and analysis

    What is History, Mr Hegel?

    Reply
  6. SPC 6
    25 April 2025 at 6:15 am

    International Revolution failed.

    Outside intervention is not sustainable, if the purpose is subjugation (the exception is imperial assimilation, but this is unlikely without contiguous borders or dominant air/sea power).

    The Warsaw Pact nations were captives, not those of NATO.

    The woman of Afghanistan were and are now, once again, captives. A society now facing a Gilead future did not see the human rights of those women as part of their own forever war, so now they fight this on their home front instead. And are no longer fit for leadership.

    Reply

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