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.
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.
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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.
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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 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.