There was something Satanic in the way we abandoned South Vietnam, wasn’t there? We went in there to help, got them to trust us fully, then abandoned them. And when we abandoned them, terror, pain and death filled their nation. Rape, pillage, families torn apart, concentration camps, mass executions, misery in all forms.
19 million people were thrown to ravenous wolves, and the people most responsible for it, in this country, LIED about it. They continue lying about it, to this very day.
This is an evil act, is it not? I remember reading some senior Army officer commenting in the late 1960’s to the effect that “if we abandon Vietnam, we will never again be the nation we once were.” That was in Lewis Sorley’s Must-Read book “A Better War”.
What got me back on this line of thought–and obviously my essay on Cultural Sadeism takes the abandonment of the Vietnamese as its backdrop–is not obviously connected.
I was reading the Wikipedia entry on Spalding Gray and read that he was in a porn movie or two, one of which was entitled “Farmer’s Daughters”.
This film contains multiple rape scenes according to the description. You might say “it was the 1970’s”, but that doesn’t answer much, does it?
What I would say is that was 1976, one year after the final conquest–and one might without much risk of exaggeration call the rape–of South Vietnam. All of the “socially committed” hippies starting going on coke benders, having all sorts of weird sex, and otherwise distancing themselves emotionally from what our nation wrought.
Yes, South Vietnam was far away. Yes, most reporters either were banned, or–worse to my mind–HAD NO INTEREST in describing accurately what happened.
Yes, the Boat People made some headlines. You have likely never heard of them, if you were not alive in that time.
And there is Doan Van Toai. Here are some quotes from this article, published in 1986:
For thirty years the motivating passion of the Vietnamese people had been to free themselves from a shameful colonial heritage. Against the French, the issues had been clear and morally certain. Against the Americans and their protégés, they had been less so. But to my generation, at least to those who had not seen life in the post-Geneva “democratic” North, the outlines of the issues had remained the same. We saw ourselves as part of a heroic struggle to assert our Vietnamese identity against the backdrop of a century of Western domination.
But shortly after the complete victory of that struggle in 1975, the Vietnamese in Europe began to receive intimations that the promise of a new flourishing of Vietnamese life had been built on lies. People had discounted the stories of those Vietnamese who had fled in 1975 when South Vietnam fell (much as I had discounted the reports of Catholics who had fled south in 1954 after the Geneva agreement which divided the country into North and South Vietnam). And they tried hard to avoid believing the scattered and incomplete reports from refugees who had begun to escape by boat after the new order had established its apparatus. But now the French papers were headlining news about the hard-labor camps and prisons, and about rule by starvation and blackmail, and the Vietnamese in France found it impossible any longer to avert their eyes.
The understanding hit them that what they had believed was a heroic struggle for independence, on the same order as the historic struggles against the Chinese, had been manipulated from the start by the architects of an insidious inhumanity, far worse than that of the foreign oppressors on whom they had poured their hatred. At each of these meetings I shared my perception that we—those of us who had supported the cause—had been condemned to contribute to the tragedy. And now we were condemned to recognize and bear witness to the nation’s fate. We (that is, the Vietnamese people) had fought magnificently against our outside enemies, but we had been powerless to protect ourselves from the enemy within.
And this:
Like the prisoners, he had believed that the West must be told about the monumental deception being carried out by the Communist regime. Specifically, the Western antiwar movement with all its energy and commitment to the cause of Vietnamese freedom must be educated to what was really taking place. Once they knew, he had thought, they would begin pressuring Vietnam’s leaders back inside the pale of human conduct.
Hoan smiled wanly as he told me this. “Believe me,” he said, “you will get nowhere substantial with these people. Vietnam to them was a fad, or something they did out of anger at their own government. Now they don’t care, I doubt if they ever did. It’s not their fight.”
In my personal view, our nation will be divided, and some large part of it utterly open to and susceptible to the most egregious, venal, and destructive lies imaginable, until we TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT VIETNAM.
To my mind, Vietnam can and should stand in for all the other Communist atrocities the world over. It is the specific one WE MADE POSSIBLE, not by losing a war, but on the contrary by asking millions of Americans to put their own lives on hold in various ways, to die by the tens of thousands, be wounded permanently by the hundreds of thousands, and then PISSING AWAY THEIR VICTORY and lying about the pain and suffering our frivolousness caused people who did not deserve anything that happened to them.
That is the reality.
One sees this ridiculous lack of caring and basic humanity even today, in obvious ways, in things like the attacks on police; or the release of violent illegal aliens, most of whom will go on to most harm other illegal aliens; or policies which make gasoline more expensive, which harms first the most poor by raising costs on everything. You see this emotionally disconnected moral grandstanding, which NEVER ADMITS ERROR, which never stoops to the level of those in whose name it claims to speak, so as to see and care about them, or understand or interact with them in any way.
It is monstrous. This whole edifice of lies is horrific, nauseating.