There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
All the wrong people remember Vietnam. I think all the people who remember it should forget it, and all the people who forgot it should remember it.
A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.
You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It's the same thing with psychotherapy.
Back then when Chomsky and Herman wrote, the left, myself among them, all knew that something terrible was happening in Vietnam, though most now claim to remember otherwise.
The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust our own government statements. I had no idea until then that you could not rely on them.
Millions also perished in the Chinese camps, and there have been terrible genocides in Cambodia and Vietnam.
Vietnam was a lie but at least there was a political agenda. It was the domino theory. Iraq is about nothing but George Bush's ego laced with imperialist ambitions. And it was helped by your government.
I was the guy who was constantly speaking out against the Vietnam War. I have no regrets about that.
America has become amnesiac, a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.
We've committed many war crimes in Vietnam - but I'll tell you something interesting about that. We were committing war crimes in World War II, before the Nuremberg trials were held and the principle of war crimes was stated.