Perspectives

"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

- Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, Sept, 1945.

The American War ended one year before my eighteenth birthday.  At that time, I was an ultra-conservative, righteous American, ready to endure the draft but surely not looking forward to it.  Stopping the spread of communism and preserving our way of life was worth the sacrifice, after all.  And it was all that much more important, living in the San Francisco bay area and having to deal with hippies and draft dodgers in San Francisco and Berzerkeley, who simply didn't understand the dire emergency engaging the entire world.

When the truth about My Lai finally came out -- the stories and the pictures -- I couldn't believe it.  I layed on the living room floor and cried.  It was a brutal lesson in insanity, and it changed my viewpoint forever.  It exposed the manipulative method of a corrupt puppet government, bought and paid for by western corporations that were hell-bent to maintain their exploitative operations in Indochina.  The sad fact is that we are fed those same lines every decade or so, and like lemmings, we follow our government off the cliff over and over again.

Vietnam has been a story of exploitation for centuries.  The tribes that settled the Indochinese peninsula were all originally from southern China.  Most of them fled China during one of several mainland wars, and settled in Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.  While the Thai cooperated with the U.K., the rest of Indochina was occupied by the French.  The French, God love them, were not very good landlords, and eventually lost control of Vietnam through their abuse.  The Viet Cong -- the same group that were portrayed in the U.S. as evil, bloodthirsty communists -- were the same homeland heroes that overthrew the British during our own revolutionary war.