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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

This is what I like about Pompeii. It allows us to know how "common people" lived. I was impressed by the discovery of thermopolia recently: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/26/exceptionally-...

History told only from the winner's point of view is what makes a lot of people not know that the US lost Vietnam war.

Our generation is a bit worse than the previous ones in terms of how we preserve our culture and media. Digital media is way hard to preserve for posterity. That is why I think preserving geocities is so important. Long live the work made by archive.org and project gutenberg; they really deserve our respect.

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>”... told only from the winner's point of view is what makes a lot of people not know that the US lost Vietnam war.”

This is confusing. VN winning means people don’t understand the US losing? Or VN wining meant they wanted others to believe the US won the war? Or the US actually lost but never the less your assertion doesn’t apply?

I think this is actually an interesting point because the US did lose the war but if the winner writes history, then why do so many think they won?

You have to look beyond the war. VN is doing well now, but overall the US is far richer and more powerful. So they are the "winner" in that sense and can project their view accordingly.

> I think this is actually an interesting point because the US did lose the war but if the winner writes history, then why do so many think they won?

How common is that belief on a whole?

In Vietnam or China, it's common knowledge (and celebrated) that Vietnam won the war.

In the US, I can't imagine talking to someone over 40 that's unaware of how the war ended.

>> In Vietnam or China, it's common knowledge (and celebrated) that Vietnam won the war.

China celebrates Vietnam winning that war? Perhaps, but it'd be pretty surprising. Vietnam won it in spite of China. (The Soviet Union was a huge help though).

Happy New Year to both Vietnamese and Chinese peoples.

In US culturally influenced zones, like Brazil, most people think Vietnam lost the war. Most people I've talked to about it were surprised when I told them how the war ended.

From the PoV of domino theory, one supposes we did ultimately win with the fall of the USSR and thus the COMINT ceased to be a mortal threat to western socio-economic values.

Yes indeed. Dominoes and Matryoshka dolls - the smaller wars within the overarching cold war, which the US did win, despite losing some of the smaller but deadlier wars.

USSR lost to itself and its mortal corruption culminating in Chernobyl. US lost the moral war in VN, but learned to play to its strengths after that, to later outplay USSR as a whole.

History isn't written so much by the "winners" as "the people left in charge after the war". If the US and its South Vietnamese allies had won the war, the post-war characterisation of certain figures, philosophies and motivations in Vietnam would have been very different. Vietnam didn't however, win the war decisively enough to force a change of government to the US, and it suited the politicians still in charge of the US to downplay how important preventing communism from spreading in southeast Asia had once been and focus on how Cold War strategy switched to different theatres and approaches.

In many ways, digital is actually easier to preserve. Consider how many digital artifacts are surviving each year that give us detailed glimpses of daily lives as compared to physical goods that don’t tell much beyond the odd letter or two that survives. There’s more media soon than ever before and it survives in an accessible way longer than ever

and yet, how many artifacts from the 90s web or even 00 web are still there?

excellent point, never thought about it before

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