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--To those of my classmates who are watching the documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick on the Vietnam War-- (A comrade's personal comment that appeared on Facebook and was reprinted in the Sept. 24 issue of the Detroit/Seattle Workers' Voice list) So am I. For those of our generation, the Vietnam War was one of the major traumatic events of our lives. It changed the lives of all those who were sent to Vietnam and were forced to kill in an unjust cause; not only did many die, but many more were haunted by the war for the rest of their lives, even if they were among the many, many heroic GIs who opposed the war and the slaughter. But it also changed the lives of those like myself who were fortunate enough to stay out of the army. Millions of Americans hated this war and took part in the struggle against it; many -- inside and outside the army -- suffered reprisals for their opposition. As for myself, this war was one of the main reasons I abandoned the aim of becoming a mathematician, although I loved mathematics and science, and instead devoted my life to the struggle to build a revolutionary working class movement. The Burns/Novick documentary "The Vietnam War" is not perfect. Nothing sponsored by ruling class foundations and even the reactionary David H. Koch could be. So far, it neglects, for example, to talk about the struggle in country after country against colonialism that was going on while the Vietnam War raged. But I've seen so far the first four parts, and it's detailed enough that it gives a picture of the racism, atrocities, massacres, lies, lies, lies, and mass slaughter that accompanied this imperialist war. Watching it is like living through these years again. * This war was a colonial war, which continued the war which had been waged by the French. * This war was fought by an army which trained its soldiers in basic training to hold subject peoples in contempt as subhuman gooks, and whose mode of operation was mass slaughter. Torture, devastation, mass slaughter, and more mass slaughter. * The burden of this war in the US fell disproportionately on poor working people, African Americans, and other oppressed peoples. The war was not only based on racism against the Vietnamese, but was carried out in a racist way inside the US. * This war was brought to us by the Democrats as well as the Republicans, by JFK and LBJ, as well as the reactionary dreg Nixon. The run-up to this war was brought to us by Truman as well as Eisenhower. The liberal Democratic heroes like JFK were just as willing to wade through the blood of the Vietnamese people as any other American capitalist leaders. * The warmongers kept insisting that the US government could win the war in Vietnam if only more troops were committed, but they lost the war anyway. * This war was justified by fanatical anti-communism as well as racism. It showed that there is no crime that the ruling class isn't willing to justify under the name of anti-communism. * Ho Chi Minh and many other Vietnamese patriots turned to communism because it was the communist movement that really backed the anti-colonial struggle. None of the other main political forces in the West really did, not even most socialists who had at one time pledged to do so. This was still true after World War II, when the victorious powers, despite their democratic rhetoric, sought to reestablish their colonial empires. There are important things not in the documentary, or which it gets wrong. And there are a number of left-wing commentaries that describe these things. It's also the case that the Vietnamese communists were subject to the same problems that also afflicted the world revolutionary movement; the building of state-capitalism in Russia and China affected the working class movement around the world. So while the Vietnamese communists remained independent of outside powers, Eastern or Western, the regime they built was not one of real communism. They successfully defeated French and American colonial domination, but the subsequent history of their joining together with Washington in spreading market capitalism is one of the things that shows that none of the present-day "socialist" or "communist" regimes are actually socialist or communist or Marxist. It may also be one of the reasons that some of our filthy-rich ruling class is willing to finance a documentary showing some of the crimes of the war. But that's another story. What the documentary illustrates is the nature of the militarist system here. No doubt everyone takes from history and from documentaries different lessons, depending on their standpoint. And the Burns/Novick documentary has the explicit aim of trying to reconcile fundamentally opposing views. But millions of people who sympathized with the struggle of the downtrodden against colonialism and racism saw in the Vietnam war a sign of the rottenness of the system in the US that brought us this war. And since the Vietnam War, we have seen one war after another, and we also see resurgent racism around the world. And militarists galore: we still see those that say that if "we" are only more ruthless, kill more, maybe destroy entire nations as Trump wants, the world will be safe for ExxonMobil, David Koch, climate change deniers, and the neoliberal 1% who want to own everything and make working people the world over into a giant "precariat", with no rights that a capitalist is bound to respect. So the same question that millions worried about during the Vietnam War remains today: what is the system that keeps bringing us these wars? How can we find an alternative? How can we build a movement that really opposes these crimes? How can we really support working people around the world? These wars aren't just tragic mistakes. A tragic mistake is something that happens once. Something that happens over and over and over again is the fault of an entire system, of a ruling class, and of an outdated economic system that is being protected by this ruling class. <> ----------------------------------- Joseph Green m...@communistvoice.org ------------------------------------ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
