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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if or when the USA will ever reckon with what we did to Vietnam.

Seeing as Kissinger is still alive and a free man, my money's on no.

"Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević." ― Anthony Bourdain

Phnom Penh is probably the most sobering cities to visit in all of Asia. Words can't really do it justice. I was neither expecting nor prepared for the history there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Fields

QRD on what Kissinger had to do with this? I've no doubt he's a bad guy, but my schooling left out his involvement in cambodia.

I swear I heard Bourdain talk about this in an episode from one of his series. The laos episode hits on the topic, but the Cambodia episode is only available for pay.

Laos (Start at 32:50): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1s8jntlpK0

Shamelessly stolen from reddit, quoted from a broken link from Yale:

  The still-incomplete database (it has several “dark” periods) reveals that from 
  October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on 
  Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons’ worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 
  113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the 
  sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at
  all. The database also shows that the bombing began four years earlier than is widely 
  believed—not under Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson.

  The impact of this bombing, the subject of much debate for the past three decades, is now   
  clearer than ever. Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms 
  of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, 
  setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in 
  1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide.

In video form:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZpKFBTutW8

And do you hold the same level of contempt for the PRC and Vietnamese for their greater part in the affair?

1) Unless you intended to argue in favor of boot-licking and international crimes in general, your whataboutism doesn't accomplish much.

2) I don't expect my elected officials to apply American laws abroad. Sovereignty and nuclear powers and etc etc. Soft power is easier and more effective if you aren't being a massive hypocrite.

3) Don't you worry a hair on your little head. There's plenty of contempt to go around.

Nah, the myopic focus on Kissinger means ignoring the other culprits in the room, meaning you don't care about the Cambodians beyond using them in political games. The PRC/Vietnamese would have still sponsored the Khmer Rouge into slaughtering them. But then they would be just another in a long list that you could ignore. That's the reason for the whatabotism, the cruelty of ignoring the rest of their plight. As long as it doesn't stain your hands, you'll ignore the slaughter. And from your second point, you admit you don't care about what war crimes Kissinger did abroad only that it hurt soft power. Sounds like a defense of Kissenger to me.

Cheney is still kicking too. And he did it directly for money.

RIP AB

My subjective experience was that Vietnamese were rather friendly to Americans, while they did not have a lot of love for Chinese. "Americans killed us and committed atrocities, but China wants to take our things, dominate us, or erase us" was kind of the sentiment I got. I was surprised that in many parts of Vietnam signs are in Vietnamese, English, and Korean, while Chinese is suspiciously missing.

Now America is the main pressure pushing back on China in the south china sea. I'm starting to see "made in Vietnam" on all types of items in US stores. Half of Vietnamese that live abroad live in America...

We have incredible amounts of media that are very anti Vietnam war and the general sentiment that I grew up in is that we (the us) were the bad guys. The sentiment I saw in north Vietnam was that they won by attrition and manipulating US public opinion.

Going to Vietnam and seeing the agent orange museum was pretty shocking and dreadful. There was a general understanding we massacred women and children, but agent orange might have been a paragraph in a textbook taught clinically rather than emotionally. Bourdain's episode on Laos might have been the first time I heard about all the unexploded ordinance and mines. It's a pretty bad feeling.

My entire experience with public education, there was no justification or defense of the war. There was one message. We were bad.

All things considered, I don't think we have done/are doing as much as we should, but I also don't think we completely flouted any responsibility to Vietnam.

I suppose my opinion doesn't matter very much, and it would be nice to hear from someone from Vietnam.

How? What would/could that look like?

reparations, dropping IMF conditions, cleanup of agent orange and landmines, formal apology and condemnation of the actions of the US administrations that pursued the war, and so on and do forth

Yep and teaching about it honestly in schools. Borrowing from how they teach about the event in Vietnam and also about how we teach about the events in Germany in WW2.

Honestly? Surely you jest! If anything, the current interpretation of Vietnam by the american media is already what you want. They depict NV as a saint fighting against imperialism while the US as stupid. NV invaded South Vietnam and Laos, helped the Khmer Rouge, took help and advisors from the soviets and PRC (not totally about imperialism, eh?), flagrantly violated the rules of war, cleansed and supressed both religious and ethnic minorities, brainwashed their own into using suicide tactics, violated the core of the paris peace accords, re-educated South Vietnam, enforced single party rule, and so on. And no South Vietnam isn't a saint either, but North Vietnam has a habit of surpassing any of their transgressions by a good margin. If it wasn't so political important to many ideologies, NV would be seen in a far less sympathetic light. American interpretations of Vietnam are arrogantly about themselves.

Tbh even not protecting American war criminals would go a long way. It’s a bit sad that none of the responsible for My Lai got properly prosecuted.

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