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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the May 11, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
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EDITORIAL
THE RIGHT GUYS -- AND WOMEN -- WON
With the arrogance only a true imperialist could display, U.S. Sen. John McCain said
April 28 that "the wrong guys" won the Vietnam War. His comments, made during a highly
publicized visit to Ho Chi Minh City, outraged the Vietnamese people and millions
worldwide.
Vietnam Foreign Ministry spokesperson Phan Thuy Thanh responded: "Our people were the
victims of [a] brutal war of aggression. . It runs counter to the norms of morality
that these people who brought bombs and shells to sow death among our people and wreak
havoc with a country now pass themselves off as having the right to criticize their
victims."
McCain, a failed Republican presidential candidate, was a Navy pilot during the war.
His father was a commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam.
In 1967 McCain's A-4 plane was shot down while raining death on Hanoi, North Vietnam's
capital. He was captured and imprisoned for much of the war. Despite his crimes, and
despite his self-serving rhetoric while building his political career, McCain was
treated as well as could be expected--as he admitted during a 1994 visit.
This year the socialist government magnanimously allowed war criminal McCain and his
entourage to once again visit the country just as the Vietnamese people celebrated the
25th anniversary of their just victory over U.S. imperialism.
McCain should have come on bended knee, begging forgiveness for his crimes against
their homeland. Instead he came to defame the people's revolution and to glorify a war
that, as Thanh noted, left three million Vietnamese dead and four million wounded.
Vietnam has struggled along a hard road since its reunification in 1975. Washington
has refused to pay one cent in reparations for the horrendous damage caused by the
war--flouting the Paris peace accords. The mostly-agricultural nation has tried to
carry out socialist construction, but was hard hit by the loss of its economic
partners in the USSR and Eastern Europe.
Although a decades-long blockade has been officially lifted, Washington continues to
look for ways to undermine Vietnam politically and economically. Trade talks between
Hanoi and Washington have deadlocked because the Clinton administration wants to
impose a yearly congressional "review" of Vietnam's status--similar to the
restrictions it imposes on People's China.
McCain speaks for the ultra-right, militarist wing of U.S. imperialism. But the whole
capitalist class is united in wanting to return Vietnam--and all Third World countries
that have achieved some measure of independence--to colonial status. Like Britain with
Zimbabwe and its other former colonies, Wall Street will never stop trying to derail
Vietnam's independent development.
That's why the war against Vietnam--and Korea, Cuba, Iraq, Yugoslavia, etc.--is not
over, even if the bullets have stopped flying.
Imperialist wars won't be over until major revolutionary upheavals in the U.S. and
other centers of global capitalism take the weapons and political power away from the
exploiting class, which is trying to turn the whole world into one big sweatshop.
- END -
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