Don’t go to the actual museum in Vietnam, watch the netflix show instead. michael-laugh

  • heggs_bayer [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    The Viet Cong were no angels. They killed my grandpa, who was affectionately known as the Kansas Kid Killer. They wiped out his whole unit, the Easterner Exterminators.

    Have these Vietmanese people no shame?

  • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    Guys I went to a revolutionary war museum in America and it was nothing but blatant anti-English propaganda! Heavily lacking in nuance, no talk of the bad things Americans did to the crown.

  • spacecadet [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    Most propagandized people on the planet.

    I think I’m entering a Joker-ified era and feeling some grotesque glee at seeing these people flail and whine as they are forced to confront the objective evil of the US colonial empire.

    • weeen [any, any]@hexbear.netOP
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      3 months ago

      obama-socialism must be nice to think you live in the superhero nation and there just so happens to be evil villain nations who want to destroy you with their propaganda…

  • BelieveRevolt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    In the Netflix series, Ken Burns says the war was ”begun in good faith by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings”, and aren’t both sides to blame, really? A much more balanced view.

    • hypercracker@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      I thought that documentary made the Americans look like disgusting monsters who kill for fun and it was still too kind to them.

      • REEEEvolution@lemmygrad.ml
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        3 months ago

        If only, the documentary left out Agent Orange completely. Regular massacres by US troops received exactly zero mention. But a lot of time was wasted of crying how the war divided the american public, with forder anti-war protesters crying how bad they were to their ghoulish neighbours.

      • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        The Ken Burns Civil War was pretty great. However, as the war in Vietnam was still within living memory, there was no chance for it to get it right.

    • regul [any]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      When you’re a decent NSA agent acting in good faith (by lying) to foment escalation in a war your country has no business participating in anyway.

  • SacredExcrement [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    “The Vietnamese don’t understand anything that we did to their country, but I, a white westerner afraid to leave my house because of news propaganda designed to manipulate, understand literally everything better than they do. This is why you should do what I say and watch a Netflix show about it instead”

      • Evilsandwichman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        https://www.willflyforfood.net/war-remnants-museum-a-grisly-reminder-of-the-vietnam-war-in-ho-chi-minh-city/

        For people who haven’t clicked the link yet, heavy NSFL warning; there’s pics of children born with deformities. (Although thank you for the link honestly)

        What disgusts me as well (even looking at the portion talking about the crimes of the French against the Vietnamese people) is that it’s being conducted by people who even then, not merely today, thought they were superior to the people they were conducting horrific crimes against. I genuinely hope the global South deepens ties with China and Russia; Imperialist governments are a cancer on this world.

        • weeen [any, any]@hexbear.netOP
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          3 months ago

          Every so often I see twitter fights about who ‘really’ won the war, americand saying ‘well we killed more people so we won’ are you really proud of that? yeah congratulate yourself on destroying thousands of families for a war you had no reason to start. When the hegemony fails, that will be the legacy of your country.

          • Evilsandwichman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            3 months ago

            Honestly it’s the stupidest argument to even have; Our government didn’t fight for us, they fought because communism was a danger to the status quo that benefits corporations; they literally fought the common working man. Our troops committed horrific atrocities to innocent people for the benefit of the ultra wealthy and they suffered and died for nothing, and they were absolutely at fault for every crime they did as opposed to people’s claims; they didn’t have to be there, the punishment for refusing the draft wasn’t a death penalty, it was prison and a fine; like honestly what’s worse, a prison sentence or a literal warzone? Comparatively the people of Vietnam fought for their country, they died to save their country from foreign oppression. Loss to a Vietnamese fighter meant the death and torture of his people, loss to a US soldier just means death.

            We the people, we the people bickering on twitter or any other social media had nothing to win or lose in this struggle; identifying with our government that did not operate with our interest as a goal is stupid; and despite how much I despise the pigs in uniform, for all the people who think there’s something to win or lose in this struggle, the real victory is stopping your family from serving in the military or stopping them from leaving the country to go kill innocents in a foreign country for nothing.

            The Vietnamese are the only ones who can honestly say they fought for their country; our troops fought because they were too stupid to tell that a warzone is worse than prison and because they’re just hired thugs, just glorified mercenaries. To all the people crying about ‘tHeY ToRtUrEd oUr tRoOpS’: good; the worthless rats should’ve stayed home; or hey, crazy thought: there was also the option of defecting to the Vietnamese side. Literally so many options to pick from other than murdering innocents for cash/corporations. There were people who literally moved to Canada to get away from it. The only real heroes on our side were literally the ones who avoided serving; I’m glad some people like Hugh Thompson actually did something to stop a massacre, but he also shouldn’t have been there (and worse than him are the people who harassed him for so much of his life because of his stopping a massacre and reporting it, rather than harassing the war criminals who treated the lives of the Vietnamese people as sport).

            Literally the people of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Korea and many, many other nations are all owed justice, justice far beyond what our country can ever hope to give. They were human beings; they’re not video game sprites that only exist at the moment they’re murdered and then cease to exist. They went through their childhoods and teen years with their families, all hoping to make their lives great, only to have our losers show up, destroy their lives and then leave; and then whoever are left from these families have to pick up the pieces and make their lives work after having it brutally shattered. There is zero shame in our country for what we did there; for everything we say about ‘that war was a mistake’/‘that war was unjust’, the losers who say this still show respect like mindless sheep to ‘veterans’ (baby killers) and we have actual conventions for these war criminal losers to gather together. When you ask people what they think our government does wrong, there’s always that inevitable complaint about not treating ‘the veterans’ right; those ‘veterans’ are nothing more than American ISIS, or American wehrmacht.

      • Chronicon [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        shook the anarchism out of me.

        If you have the time/energy would you mind elaborating? I’m not an anarchist but sometimes I am at a loss for good ways to explain why

        • zed_proclaimer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          If he expounds too much he risks a ban, but let’s just say the the Vietnamese were an extremely organized and disciplined group who very much relied on authority

          • Chronicon [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            3 months ago

            I don’t think respectfully explaining merits a sectarianism ban but yeah, that’s fair. I was thinking there might be something more specific than “these people were extremely successful and they were communists”

        • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          The imperialist powers will go to any lengths to destroy your revolution. They will stop at nothing.

          While there is absolutely room for guerilla warfare operated by independent cells, this is only useful in a limited capacity in the context of an insurgency or when your command structure is fucked etc.

          You don’t face down the full brunt of the NATO axis powers and survive in the longer term without a significant command structure and a necessary degree of authoritarianism.

          There just was not enough resources to go around to provide for everyone and to support military actions. Compromises were necessarily made. If every unit or cell is squabbling amongst themselves for resources, intra-military infighting occurs and it threatens to hamstring military capacity. An insufficiency in hierarchy and authoritarian measures comes with the opportunity cost of permitting worse attacks from countries like the US; while it’s better to be more democratic, those are concerns for a civil government in peacetime. There is nothing more authoritarian than torching and poisoning the land, not to mention the generations to come.

          It just put me closer to being in the shoes of those who fought for national liberation and revolution. It’s easy to say “You cannot make a revolution wearing white gloves” but really sitting down and encountering what this truly means on a practical, realistic, and very tangible level created a fissure in my idealism that would prove to be irreparable later on.

          They will come for your revolution and if you aren’t capable of out-organising them then your revolution will be strangled in its crib.

    • yuli [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      do go if you get the chance!! it’s very touching

      when i was there about a year ago they had another exposition of children’s drawings during covid, the way soldiers and the state were celebrated for helping their people is something completely foreign to the west