Viet-amnesia: Bush's distortions of that dirty war
By
Caleb T. Maupin
Published Oct 6, 2007 11:27 AM
George W. Bush, in a recent address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention,
bemoaned the fact that the U.S. “gave in” and “cut and
ran” out of Vietnam. He made it clear that he thought that war should
have continued.
“Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of
Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of
innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like
‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing
fields,’” said Bush.
Like most of the words that come out of Bush’s mouth, this is a big
mischaracterization—basically, a lie.
Since the U.S. left Vietnam, the life of the Vietnamese people has steadily
gotten better, mainly due to the removal of foreign domination and the
introduction of socialist planning.
It is the first freedom and peace the Vietnamese people have known in over a
century.
The French conquered Vietnam in the 1860s and made it their colony. In 1940,
during World War II, Japan invaded Vietnam but kept the French administrators
on as part of their colonial regime. By 1941, a national liberation front led
by Ho Chi Minh, a communist, began fighting both the French and Japanese
imperialists.
When the world war ended with the defeat of Japan, the Vietnamese liberators
declared an independent government but French and British troops rushed in to
try to crush them. The French didn’t leave until 1954, after they
suffered a huge defeat at Dien Bien Phu.
But the big corporations and banks in the U.S. had their eyes on Vietnam, too.
Washington took the place of France as colonial overlord. Troops were sent to
prop up a puppet government in the south of Vietnam. This soon escalated into
the huge invasion of that country known as the Vietnam War.
In that war, the U.S. dropped 6.7 million tons of explosives on the Vietnamese
people. Some estimate that as many as 4 million Vietnamese were killed in the
brutal bombing that Gen. Curtis LeMay of the Air Force cheered on with the cry,
“Bomb them back to the Stone Age!”
Millions of gallons of the deadly chemical Agent Orange were sprayed from
planes; much of the land in Vietnam is still poisoned. Vietnam estimates that
even today, a million people suffer health problems because of this chemical
that Bush says was to “defend freedom and democracy” in Southeast
Asia.
A movement of popular resistance, in Vietnam and then the United States, forced
the U.S. to withdraw from Vietnam in 1975.
The Vietnamese finally had their own country back, and they set out to build it
in a way that served them, not U.S. corporations and Wall Street bankers. Child
care programs, schools and hospitals were set up all across the Vietnamese
countryside.
The old rulers of Vietnam who aided the United States in brutalizing the
Vietnamese people were punished. Most were not executed, but rather given a
chance to reform themselves after doing productive labor for society. Some fled
Vietnam to the United States, were they were given automatic citizenship.
So were the Vietnamese government’s policies truly “agony”
for the millions of Vietnamese people? Hardly.
According to the United Nations, since 1980 the life expectancy of the average
Vietnamese has risen by 14.7 years. The U.N. also reports that infant mortality
rates have been reduced to well below half what they were before 1980.
Vietnamese children are now guaranteed education at community-run schools.
Healthcare is now available to all Vietnamese citizens. Literacy rates have
gone up.
In 1980, the new Socialist Vietnam had the honor of seeing Pham Tuan, a hero of
the resistance to the U.S., become the first Asian to be launched into outer
space, by a Soviet rocket. It was trying to build a socialist society based on
social ownership of the land and all production.
But in 1986, the government of Vietnam, faced with weakened support from the
larger socialist countries, stepped back from its planned socialist economy and
allowed private ownership of land and businesses. However, the Communist Party
remains in charge.
Since the thousands of U.S. troops, the B-52 bombers, and the Agent Orange
dispensers were driven from Vietnam, along with the U.S. corporations and
wealthy capitalists who these forces were defending, life has greatly improved
for the Vietnamese people.
If the U.S. had remained in Vietnam, continuing to bomb, pillage and repress
the people, it would have meant more and more death and destruction. The
heroism and might of the Vietnamese in both north and south, combined with the
strength of the U.S. anti-war movement, which spread to the military itself,
enabled the Vietnamese to win back their country.
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