THEY'RE NOT THE VIET CONG THEY'RE THE NATIONAL LIBERATION FRONT OF SOUTH VIETNAM (NLF). THAT IS A PEJORATIVE YOU'RE A "HISTORIAN" REPEATING A PEJORATIVE TERM 50 TIMES WITHOUT EXPLAINING EITHER THAT IT IS A PEJORATIVE OR SAYING THEIR REAL NAME EVEN ONCE. I HATE AMERIKKKAN "EDUCATION" ON VIETNAM AND KOREA.
- She also commented that Amerikkkan soldiers "couldn't discern the enemy" because peasants were sympathetic to the communist struggle; doesn't that make you question your support for Amerikkkan goal? No, because public "educators" in the U.S. have a narrative and most of them believe it.
It is cool and badass and I don't think it's a pejorative, it's just a contraction of "Việt Nam cộng sản" or Vietnamese Communist.
I'd never heard of it being pejorative, but then again I just shoot for name recognition when I tell fellow USians that the Viet Cong were clearly and undeniably justified in every facet of every action they and their sympathizers took against US soldiers
Oh, well it's been a while since I watched that video
It's these days that I curse Pol Pot for ruining the name "Khmer Rogue"
Be prepared for when the My Lai/Song My Massacre discussion happens. It's often framed as "War is hell, but it was an isolated incident and America(tm) doesn't stand for that and a thorough investigation occurred that proved it was an isolated incident."
The best thing you can probably do is ask about the person who investigated the event (Collin Powell, rest in piss). And then go, hey, wasn't he the guy that lied about Iraq too?
Then if you're feeling more adventurous, you can talk about Guantanamo Bay and how DeSanctimonious was like the civil rights lawyer or some wild shit for the extra-judicially detained.
She won't change her mind, she's paid not to. Best you can do is be enough of a thorn in her side she gives you a good grade because she doesn't want you to argue about anything. And if you have the opportunity to radicalize your classmates.
Teachers unfortunately went to the same schools you're in right now. My comparative gov teacher always gave me shit for not standing for the heckin pledge
i always had band 1st period in high school and the director didnt give a shit. nobody stood up for that shit and we often just played music over the pledge and sometimes didnt even notice it had happened bc we literally cant hear it over our own music
Imma be honest I stand for the pledge because it's really awkward otherwise. I don't put my hand on my chest I just stand up, wait through it, and sit down. American patriotism is really sad.
Do what you need to do to get out of there with your sanity, young comrade o7 Take comfort in knowing that at least some of your teachers are hiding their power levels
they brought an actual baby killer into our classroom for an interview when I was in high school (16 years ago). and i don't say baby killer pejoratively. he tearfully recounted shooting a child because it had a grenade and everyone cooed like they felt bad for him. eye opening moment
this was US history class
She also commented that Amerikkkan soldiers “couldn’t discern the enemy” because peasants were sympathetic to the communist struggle
Wait, is she doing apologetics for the Amerikkkan genocide here?
She told us a story about how she used to be a teacher in another state and another teacher had told her that he dodged the draft for Vietnam. She said she was mad but came around and understood his point of view "although I still don't agree with it." She's doing semi-apologia (which she carried over to intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan).
Edit: Not to downplay the massacre but do you think genocide is the appropriate term?
Re: genocide, it's up for debate but I think it's a valid claim. IIRC, one the US military's (or at least Robert McNamara's) main metrics of how well the war was going was how many Vietnamese combatants they were killing. This resulted in an environment where one of the "military objectives" the troops on the ground got was to just kill as many Vietnamese as possible, regardless of whether they were actually combatants, to pad the counts and look good.
Similarly, the US strategic air command, emboldened by their "success" in Japan, enacted multiple "strategic bombing campaigns", where the goal was to end the war by bombing the shit out of infrastructure etc until the enemy submits. However, strategic bombing seems to not work. Not to say it can't maybe lower industrial output, but it certainly can't end the war by itself. This inevitably leads to just pointlessly slaughtering civilians.
I think the main argument against labelling it a genocide comes down to intention. For instance, the US probably didn't explicitly want to exterminate the Vietnamese population, but the ways in which they conducted the war led to much same result as if they had. This is all certainly up for debate. However, if a lib you are talking to believes that the Holodomor qualifies as a genocide, then I think it is more than fair to respond that the US' actions in Vietnam meet the same criteria.
I mean, this "we have to kill them because they could all be evil foreign collaborates allied with the Soviet Russians!" shit is practically identical to the rational used in Germany for exterminating Jews.
That's before we get into the phrenology and assorted other junk racial science running rampant through the state department and US military during this era.
The US wasn’t in Vietnam to exterminate the Vietnamese, killing Vietnamese was rather a means to an end.
The US was in Vietnam to exterminate perceived dissidents. While that wasn't universal to Vietnamese people, US military commanders were more than happy to wipe out whole townships on the implication that some of them were Soviet-aligned. That instinct - the belief that Vietnamese lives are less valuable individually than a "purge" of ideology is nationally - is absolutely genocidal.
I won’t argue with you if you do want to consider it a genocide, it’s a completely understandable take.
I think its a semantic distinction that really cuts across the question of race versus class conflict.
The US attitude towards Vietnam was explicitly classist. Southern "urban" Vietnamese residents were functionally considered a different kind of person than northern "savage" Vietnamese residents. The peasant farmer was considered an enemy in a way the professional or industrial resident was not.
So perhaps genocide is the wrong turn of phrase, simply because it cedes the race-based premise.
Oh yeah. That book "this monstrous war" by Wilfred G Burchett does contain a chapter on the use of bioweapons in the Korean War. It even includes a small blurb about how the same people involved in the korean war were also experimenting with bioweapons and their deployment techniques in the invasion of China. Sorry for getting back to you a few days late
The US military's Far Eastern Command (FEC) wanted to silence Burchett by "exfiltrating" him from North Korea but its request to the Australian government for permission, which included a $100,000 inducement (over $1,000,000 in 2022 dollars), was turned down. Instead, the FEC established a smear campaign against Burchett with the backing of the Australian government.[19] Australian journalist Denis Warner suggested Burchett had concocted the claim that the USA was engaging in germ warfare and pointed out the similarity of the allegations to a science fiction story by Jack London, a favourite author of Burchett's.[20] However, Burchett's former colleague and veteran anti-communist, Tibor Méray, confirmed Burchett's insect observation in his critical memoir On Burchett. Burchett's finding was later supported by a 2010 report by al-Jazeera.
Burchett visited several POW camps in North Korea, comparing one to a "luxury resort", a "holiday resort in Switzerland", which angered POWs who had been held under conditions that violated the Geneva Conventions. Historian Gavan McCormack wrote that Burchett regretted this analogy, but said that the factual basis of the description was confirmed by POW Walker Mahurin.[24] Similarly, Tibor Méray reports a "Peace Fighter Camp" which had no fences.
Burchett achieved a major scoop by interviewing the most senior United Nations POW, US General William F. Dean and organising for photographs of Dean to be taken. The US had claimed that Dean had been killed by the North Koreans and had intended using his death as leverage in negotiations with the North Koreans. It was consequently angry that Burchett reported he was alive. In his autobiography Dean entitled a chapter "My Friend Wilfred Burchett" and wrote "I like Burchett and am grateful to him". He expressed thanks for Burchett's "special kindness" in improving his conditions, communicating with his family, and giving him an "accurate" briefing on the state of the war
Holy shit this dude's the real deal
His book's one of the very few whom the Feds actively sought to suppress.
According to Gavan McCormack, “in the United States the entire consignment of the book (500 copies) was seized by US Customs and dumped in the sea on its arrival in that country late in the same year (1953), and as a result no major American library possesses a copy to this day.”
Calling the North Vietnamese “Viet Cng” is the equivalent of calling Japanese soldiers “Jps” - racist war propaganda
The fact that popular culture recognizes that one is racist but ignores the other shows that Japanese are partially recognized as honorary whites
Not to defend her or anything but most westerners are so poorly educated that they genuinely believe Viet Cong to be their real name. I thought that until like three years ago.
