Vietnam Was About Liberation! Thomas Friedman Comes In From the Cold War

By John Grant

Three-time Pulitzer Prize winner New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has discovered that the Vietnam War was not really about stopping communism. That was an emotional delusion. The Vietnam War, he writes, was about anti-colonial nationalism, what the Vietnamese called liberation from a French/American military yoke. When the Vietnamese beat the French, its patron, the United States of America, took up that militarist yoke. Then it took the Vietnamese 21 more years of terrible slaughter before the Americans gave it up.

That’s the narrative Friedman has recognized. The pathetic irony is that the Vietnamese admired America and loved the Americans they fought with during World War Two against the Japanese. The 1945 decision to turn against our WWII ally has to be one of the saddest betrayals in world history.

I’m a Vietnam veteran. I was a young radio direction finder in the military operations in the mountains west of Pleiku along the Cambodian border. My job was to locate radio operators so our forces could use all available means of mechanized death to destroy entire Vietnamese units and anyone else who got in the way. I didn’t discover what Friedman has discovered until the late seventies, after maturing and reading a host of highly respected books of history. Before that, I had been a good American and had dutifully accepted the national narrative lie that the evil North Vietnamese had without provocation invaded the innocent nation of South Vietnam.

As a good, pliant soldier I learned to hate the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong guerrillas. We called them gooks, dinks, zips and slopes. We treated all Vietnamese like dogs. We killed them up close and in great numbers. We killed between two and three million of them. They managed to kill 58,000 of us. More on both sides were maimed; families were destroyed; and in Vietnam many thousands simply went missing, doomed to wander as improperly buried ghosts. We destroyed without a thought; we ecologically poisoned much of the land. The legacy is horrible.

While it took me a while to come to this realization, the American and International Peace Movement had figured out the anti-colonial meta-narrative long before all the killing began. Some say President Franklin Roosevelt was inclined to support the anti-colonial, nationalist impulse Friedman has recognized. Thanks to a cerebral hemorrhage, we’ll never know what FDR might have done. Harry Truman, the senator from Missouri put on the ticket to replace the controversial  left-leaning VP Henry Wallace, had little sympathy for these anti-colonial, nationalist impulses. He was influenced by the rising Cold War fears. The decision in 1945 to support French re-colonization turned out to be a choice for 30 years of the cruelest sort of war on the Vietnamese. As Friedman’s revelation suggests, it didn’t have to happen.

For the rest of this article by JOHN GRANT in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent, uncompromised five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/2526