Vietnam and Ukraine

You can't make this stuff up. This has happened multiple times and in connection with different media and news outlets. Today while driving home NPR reported that Biden was giving Medals of Honor to Vietnam veterans – men that for whatever reason had been neglected for the past fifty years. Now they're getting their recognition for their bravery and service – or at least that's the official narrative.

And then in the very next segment, a report regarding Ukraine and the fact that it's civilians who are bearing the brunt of the Russian attacks and there are further calls for war crimes investigations.

This is hypocrisy in the superlative and a case of great ethical blindness – a double standard beyond all bounds. Vietnam veterans and the officers and political leaders that gave them orders should be reckoned as war criminals. The entire war was a lie, fought and pursued on false pretense, a case of deliberate pre-meditated mendacity. Fifty-eight thousand Americans died but something like two or three million Vietnamese died – who can really know? Given the decimation of the region, the US must also be held (at least in part) responsible for the conditions that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the death of another two million people. After Vietnam ousted them in 1978, the US would back the Khmer Rouge throughout the 1980's. Something like five million people (and perhaps more) died in the region over the course of twenty-five years.

Millions of civilians dead, war crimes untold, massacres, rapes, and the use and after-effects of chemical weapons which persist to the present day, Vietnam (and the whole of Indochina) remains to this day the scene of a great crime. And yet the US is unrepentant as evidenced by the continued celebration of this obscene war.

Russia is guilty of war crimes and Putin's hands are stained with blood but Vietnam was an atrocity only exceeded by the worst actors of World War II. It's literally that heinous and yet few Americans know this as very few have bothered to look into it – or if they do they go no deeper than a Ken Burns-style film. Most cannot look for emotional reasons as it would plunge them into an existential crisis.

I'm sure there are Russian soldiers who exhibit great bravery on the battlefield and yet how would the US respond to a medals ceremony in Moscow for battlefield heroism in the Donbass? They would sneer and find it morally offensive and they would be right to do so.

But they will not look in the mirror.

This blindness on the part of the US media and the political sector expose the fact that when it comes to condemning Russian actions in Ukraine the United States of America has no moral standing. And let's be clear, Vietnam is just the tip of the iceberg.

Finally it also demonstrates that the Left in the United States is all but non-existent and has for the most part acquiesced on this point. The moral case against Vietnam has not lessened over time and the fact that there's been not just silence but for the most part celebration of American soldiering in Eurasia and Africa over the past several decades only shows how much the Left has functionally collapsed and lost its moral backbone.

I have no time for the popular narratives regarding Vietnam. I respect the soldiers who are repentant. But those who seek glory are to be reviled and dismissed as those who possess seared consciences and glory in their shame. They did not fight for 'our freedom' or any other such nonsense. They were cannon fodder, fools, and murderers. They were stormtroopers for the empire and living by the sword they died by it. End of story. They made their choices and faced the consequences. The heroes were the resistors, those who fled abroad, and the soldiers who came home, threw away their medals and told the truth.