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Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

Wow had no idea the Vietnam was this bad (bad as in how bad the Americans were). Almost makes the invasion of Iraq look noble. I went through the US educational system and while we know about the Vietnam war, the protesters, this is definitely not the picture of the war that we were given. It's basically propaganda and history rewriting what they are doing here, even though the US didn't even technically win the war. We were taught that the Vietnam war protesters were just pacifist hippies.

No wonder why China is fiercely anti-American (in terms of influence, policy, etc).

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>I went through the US educational system and while we know about the Vietnam war, the protesters, this is definitely not the picture of the war that we were given.

I just want to be one anecdotal voice to disagree with this statement. I went to a city university and my American history class 1945-present included a curriculum with media such as:

A People's History of the United States

The Fog of War (documentary)

Hearts and Minds (documentary)

Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram

Gary R. Hess, Vietnam: Explaining America's Lost War.

Nick Turse. Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.

I know some of my friends took courses where the Vietnam War was referred to pejoratively as the American War. We learned about My Lai in high school even. Where did you go to school that the Vietnam War was glossed over in such a pro-American way? Maybe it's a regional thing? I was educated on the east coast.

I think a college class would have to delve into the topic a bit more.

But given a high school history curriculum being limited they'd have to pick and choose what to cover, and the majority of American kids would end up with the highly distilled, pro-American leaning retelling. I went to high school in the mid-west (Michigan) in a probably center-left leaning (though in the last election probably Trump-leaning) area.

AFAIK it's significantly more nuanced. Actually China did support Vietnam in the war - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#People's_Republic_... - but invaded Vietnam shortly thereafter, as China was annoyed Vietnam de-throned their darling regime the Khmer Rouge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War (Meanwhile, the US bombed the shit out of Laos, who barely had any literacy and were essentially bystanders). Vietnam kicked their ass (the Chinese made basically zero progress in taking land, though later declared themselves "victorious", having "taught the Vietnamese a lesson"), but at a cost: many deaths and a legacy of landmines along the remote and mountainous border. The border was only fully demarcated about ten years ago. These days it is better known for people smuggling (mostly young women from Vietnam to China) and drug smuggling (heroin and meth). Factories are moving from China to Vietnam to obtain cheaper labour, and Vietnam's infrastructure has developed substantially, though it is still behind China.

In the 1940s the US and Nationalist China were allies - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hump ... later, the Nationalists fled and and AFAIK Communist China's only major military engagement with the US was in Korea, where US agents descended from McCarthyism tortured Communists on what is now conveniently remade as a holidaying destination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#Chinese_POWs

Then there's the French being kicked out, the fact that Ho Chi Minh was French educated himself, evolution in US-French relations and the US takeover of France's former most favoured foreign nation status in Thailand, which was used as a strategic regional base for US military supply.

Possible conclusion: It's all a mess, things are never simple in war, humans are sick greedy bastards, and getting over old hatreds stemming from nationalism and past events could be the best thing for the world.

This is a good summary, but it's even more nuanced than that.

For example, while China did lose the Sino-Vietnamese War, they did achieve two important objectives.

First, they proved to be a trustworthy ally to Cambodia. This is why those other SEA countries like Cambodia, Laos, and others that were bullied by Vietnam are much more pro-China right now.

Secondly, they showed that while the USSR was a Vietnamese ally, it would not interfere with China.

> No wonder why China is fiercely anti-American

What gives you this idea? I don't think Chinese policy is particularly anti-American. Sure, they're not a lap-dog like Japan, but I don't see their policy being informed by any particular animosity towards the USA.

They are rivals. They'll smile and nod and but will no way be pushed around by foreign influence.

It's not specific to American imperialism, but to foreign imperialism in the past.

Well, exactly. Their motivations are independence, security and self-determination - exactly what one might expect and qualities I'm sure most Americans would understand.

Like most Powers, China doesn't have friends, it has interests. If cooperation furthers those interests, it will cooperate; if not, it won't. Attempts to cast these behaviours into "country A hates country B for reason C" are usually agenda-driven, simplistic attempts at populism, or both[1].

[1] The obvious exception to this is in the case of historical or otherwise wrongdoing. China still genuinely resents Japan for its behaviour around WWII; many middle eastern states resent the USA for its meddling and violence in the last half-century over there. These are legitimate complaints. Even so, when a country is run by a bureaucracy, it will still generally act according to its current interests, rhetoric notwithstanding.

> No wonder why China is fiercely anti-American

You know what happened during the Cultural Revolution in China right? Yet hardly anyone is talking about it.

People in China talk about it all the time. But you do have to speak Mandarin or the local dialect to hear it. Many don't want to talk about it in English because it gets annoying to hear expats and tourists preaching to them.

It's all over the literature too. Hell, half of Three Body Problem, the darling of a few years ago, is actually about the Cultural Revolution. No spoilers but suffice to say that the poisoned seeds sown during the ruinous waste of the Cultural Revolution precipitate everything in the story.

Every nation will try to hide the atrocities its own forces inflict on the 'enemy'. There's nothing unique about America in this regard; China is just as guilty.

Except people only believe the other side hides these things.

"Every nation will try to hide the atrocities its own forces inflict on the 'enemy'."

An the other way around, which could be even worse. From 1991 to 2009 US TV stations were barred from showing coffins returning from war zones, so that the public was disconnected from the atrocities of war, no matter who would commit them. On one side we (though I'm not an US citizen the principle applies globally) have action war movies where badass heroes save the world - those are characters finely crafted in a way every teen would like to impersonate in real life - and on the other side there can be regulations preventing media from showing what really war is (not to mention the growing use of drones). This is the worst kind of propaganda, the one that makes you want to kill or be killed and be also excited or even proud of it.

The textbooks and the mainstream media in all places tend to play the "nationalism" card; that's self-serving in all sorts of ways, after all. And no one articulated the 'nationalism' caricature better than George Orwell: "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

This varies by textbook. The textbook went to High School with (The American Pageant & New York State in 2003-2008) definitely talked about this and they had a photograph[1] from the massacre.

Your point about the influence of textbooks is rather important though. Putting aside the fact that many people just don't pay attention in history class, the default narrative that is being taught is quite varying. If I owned a house rather than just renting one, I would be starting a collection of High School history textbooks for this reason.

[1] https://robertjprince.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/ut-vietnam...

I am not sure that one massacre, no matter how bad it is, defines a whole war. The Vietnam war was meant to block the expansion of communism which at that time had a fair amount of blood on its hand.

I'm not sure the blocking of communism is as noble as a cause it was proclaimed to be.

Most of the anti-communist fear in the US was pointless, and arbitrary. Communism only served as a threat to the US in so as much as it was on paper not what the US adopted, and therefore the US had to be against it to maintain its own legitimacy. But in the end there's not much difference between the US and China (a so called communist country) except that China is less developed and the market is more tightly controlled than the US market. But as you can see China has trended to the mix of market freedom and control similar to that of the US and the world didn't end.

In practice, communist countries were more authoritarian military dictatorships more than anything and if the country did bad things it was more or less due to the regime rather than communism. And the US would have been fine with such regimes at the time so long as it wasn't communist. For example, South Korea was a dictatorship until the 90s.

> I am not sure that one massacre, no matter how bad it is, defines a whole war.

Considering that millions of vietnamese were massacred during the whole war, you are right. My Lai was just a microcosm of an even greater atrocity.

> The Vietnam war was meant to block the expansion of communism which at that time had a fair amount of blood on its hand.

So using that logic, vietnam could invade the US because we have a fair amount of blood on our hands?

Why didn't we invade australia which was wiping out the aborigines?

It just seems like rationalizations just for the sake of rationalization. Like we invaded iraq to bring freedom.

Iraq civilian body count is in the hundreds of thousands, nothing noble.

Right, but not hundreds of thousands killed by US troops. Hundreds of thousands killed by Iraqi (or other non US parties) in a civil/ethnic war.

We can go into the debate of whether Iraq would have been better off left under Saddam Hussein, and that may be the case, but it is not comparable to US troops deliberately killing civilians.

Maybe an apt time to mention the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haditha_massacre

And I am sure there has been others. But you don't get to 100,000 civilians with US killings. There has been 100+ dead terrorist attacks almost on a weekly basis for years in Iraq to the point where they don't get reported in western media anymore.

You might get to 100,000 - it’s been a lot of years, a lot of drones and some huge bombardments.

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