Hacker News Reader

Comment by ncfausti | Hacker News Reader

I lived in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City for a couple of months (before the pandemic). Vietnam is probably my favorite country I have ever visited. I hope to come back soon.

When I was in HCMC, I visited the The War Remnants Museum. It is on the same level as Auschwitz in my mind. It made me physically ill.

I was so unbelievably ashamed for my country and it's awful leaders during that time. The more I've learned about the war in the time since, the more I've started to understand that we are heavily indoctrinated in the US to believe a ton of bullshit growing up, particularly in relation to our foreign policy blunders.

I'm sorry for the suffering inflicted upon your country and people.

View on HN

Weird, because I grew up in the 80s and 90s and there was nothing but negative press about the Vietnam War. Consensus has been that it was a giant mistake for most of the past couple decades.

I think you're right it was quickly viewed as a "blunder", even just before the war's end, but I think GP might feel that "mistake" is underselling it to a shocking extent. The Strategic Hamlet Program amounted to herding people in South Vietnam into concentration camps -- no, not as awful as those of the Nazis, but concentration camps nonetheless. There were many other brutal policies inflicted on non-combatants (not just spontaneous outbursts, policies).

Have you watched any movies about the Vietnam War? Like Casualties of War (1989) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097027/, Apocalypse Now (1979), etc : https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000091595/ To argue that Americans have been 'heavily indoctrinated in the US to believe a ton of bullshit' doesn't square up with the coverage and popular media about Vietnam that I've seen since I've been alive. Virtually all of the movies and press are about disillusioned soldiers, brutality, violence, lost causes, etc.

The North had Hanoi Hilton and Desert Inn and plenty of places it kept and tortured political dissidents and American POWs in violation of the Geneva convention. The Vietnam War was a giant mistake, a huge blunder, however, as others have mentioned the Korean war was fought under similar pretexts and no one regrets the U.S. stepping in to save South Korea.

I don't know whether or not the U.S. made all the right choices in the Cold War against the U.S.S.R. Would you prefer a world in which the U.S. hadn't engaged at all against Russia or stayed completely out of Asia (as well as European conflicts)? I don't know if the world that exists today would be better or worse off, really hard to say.

I'm not ncfausti so I think most of this comment doesn't apply to me. Nevertheless, I don't agree with many of your conclusions.

* The existence of films critical of the war does not imply that the mainstream "serious" political opinion of the day (that you would read in national newspapers, for example) went beyond calling the war a "quagmire" or "disaster", then with a justifying "but...", usually mentioning Domino theory or Containment as you implicitly do. I disagree with that assessment.

* The fact that North Vietnam (or Japan, or anyone) were awful in their treatment of PoWs doesn't excuse the US treating civilians in South Korea terribly. You are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of your own actions (or a close ally's actions), not someone else's. It's not "whataboutism" to focus on the effects you can actually control, even if it's historical. You can't change the past, but you can learn from your own history and understand what is "foreign propaganda" and what's actually just an uncomfortable truth.

* I can think of a few US interventions in the Cold War that seem to have hurt more than they helped, even with info available to decision-makers before committing to them. Vietnam is one of them.

Edit: I don't want to contribute to a pointless back-and-forth asking leading questions of each other, and don't have the time to go into major detail or link reading material, but I just thought I'd at least elaborate my thoughts more on the "blunder" comment, and the point about focusing on your own actions.

I meant “civilians in South Vietnam”. Although the Jeju uprising massacres of leftists in post-war South Korea were unjustifiable also.

>When I was in HCMC, I visited the The War Remnants Museum. It is on the same level as Auschwitz in my mind. It made me physically ill.

I'm generally pretty stoic about these sorts of things, but that museum really did a number on me. I felt emotional and choked up most of the time and it put a damper on the rest of my day. I'm glad I went, though.

I've been to that same museum and also the Cu Chi tunnels. I thought they were neat examples of Vietcong ingenuity and resourcefulness but I'm not ashamed of the US at all. War is complicated and in the case of communist uprisings, internal purges follow "victories" that are just as atrocious as anything outside assistance can do. See Stalin's Great Purge, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot, etc.

Right now, it's very popular on sites like Reddit and increasingly here to fill threads with bad historical takes that list everything bad the US has ever done, as if its acting in a vacuum where no other countries exist. In nearly every case of US intervention, you'll find that other countries were intervening on the other side. That's what the cold war was about. Domino theory was valid and rational. Large marxist countries exported revolution, allied powers supported governments resisting revolution. You might enjoy the underdog story of ethno-nationalists defeating the "empire" but on the other side of that story is always millions of families who lost lives and property to shitty redistribution schemes afterwards. My parents are from a latin american country that suppressed its marxist rebellion(with US help), but I have Cuban-American friends whose grandparents weren't so lucky.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com