The Cold War was a lie: On the Vietnam War and its meaning

Comment published in New York Times online blog, in reply to Col. Nguyen Manh Ha, Military History Institute of  Vietnam, “War brings resistance, not cooperation,” New York Times, April 29, 2015,

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/29/lessons-40-years-after-the-fall-of-saigon/war-brings-resistance-not-cooperation?comments

The war was an atrocity, a crime, not an error. It is one of the great mass atrocities of the 20th century. Among many others, for many of which the US government bears either some (as in Cambodia) or principal responsibility. The author is right to suggest that the US pay reparations to the Vietnamese government on behalf of its people, or to the survivors and their heirs. It is important to recognize that the war had 2 million Vietnamese victims, often killed in horrible ways, and that their lives were as important as the 58,000 Americans who died in the process of killing them.

The war was fought under false pretenses, based on the "domino theory" and the idea of incipient Soviet world domination. In fact, the Communist "threat" was sustained outside Europe as a cover for the real threat. In Europe, the US after the war understandably did not aid the East Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, and Poles when they rose up against their regimes. Internationally, there was not a Soviet allied movement but rather a broad and uncoordinated movement of national liberation struggles, mostly against colonialism, many of them socialist in some sense or other, some ideologically allied with the Soviet Union but most not linked to it militarily. The US troops did not fight Soviet troops in Vietnam. The whole "Cold War" was a phony war to suppress national liberation movements that posed a risk of being anti-capitalist.