They kicked out Australia also, after over six hundred deaths, countless injuries, immense financial loss, and endless psychological trauma. As the saying goes 'It is difficult to win a point against someone who is right'.

Gyn-Fish, Is that also known as the Assange effect?

regards
DKit

Dear John, your article is a very romantic, even poetic interpretation and I’m sure it comes not just from your talent as a writer, but also your strong opposition to war, human rights and peace activism.

I’m sure you will always find an audience amongst those who share your views, particularly your anti-American sentiments. However, in order to maintain your world view, you seem increasingly to resort to deconstruction, omission and misrepresentation of history.

The main culprit for creating and maintaining the open sore of Vietnam was French colonialism. As the post WWII administration in the US anticipated, this was to become a cold war ideological divide that could potentially involve the US.

Britain did provide transports to get De Gaul’s troops back to Vietnam after WWII, partly because Churchill feared a collapse of post WWII Empire in indo-china, and partly because of pressure from CD.

The French had occupied parts of Vietnam since the 17th century and their presence, right up to Dien Bien Phu had been an absolute disaster.

It is so easy, even lazy, to simply peddle the grinding ideology of anti-American sentiment as a basis for your articles. Sooner or later you will have to come to terms with the fact that your over simplistic views of geo-politics, fail address any issues of causality, in this case, the French.

Activism during the Vietnam War played a central role in preventing the US from attacking North Vietnam. As a result the US Military were left with fighting on home (insurgency) territory which is why such horrific casualties came about in South Vietnam.
Where would we be now if we had stopped the Allies from attacking Germany in WWII?

What it is we seek to avoid, we create.

“The President (FDR) said he was 100% in agreement with Marshal Stalin and remarked that after 100 years of French rule in Indochina, the inhabitants were worse off than they had been before. “

Source: The Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition, Volume 1, Chapter 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 12-13

Contrary to Mr Pilgers sentimental journey, the reality is that many a Christian pastor was dumped into shallow graves, and barbed wire scrunched up and pressed into their faces..and those 'National Liberation Front' "heroes" STOMPED on it..over and over and over and over ...again..... while telling them to RENOUNCE their faith.

Racial persecution was rampant against the Hmong and Montagnards, and victimization of people based on race was rife.

Why in the world did he even write this..."now"?

I was of the understanding that John PILGER was no longer with us ?

Obviously, I was wrong. In any event, as a Vietnam Veteran, anything this gentleman says is of little or no consequence to me.

I find it quite amusing how some writers tell us all how things are, how we should think, and what we should do ? Interestingly, Mr Pilger, in my humble opinion is one of them.

I wouldn't think he'd be particularly welcome amongst a meeting of VV ? The bloody war is over. Leave them to their country and way of life. And allow the veterans time to (try) heal their minds, and in some cases, their bodies.

Mr Pilger, leave that part of history alone. Find another issue, cause, or hobby horse to write about - many of us still hurt.

o sung wu.Vietnam like the wars of today are all about profit for corporate elites.A single missile costs the price of a house.The drug companies make money from from the thousands of wounded.The tax payer always foots the bill.There was nothing noble about Vietnam.It was a dirty filthy war just like all the others.

Other than "Bad America" and "heroic enemy" as per his usual fare, I fail to see any point in this wandering drivel.

Shadow Minister,you know the West is in the wrong in Iraq,Afghanistan and Pakistan.It is nothing but Israeli/US imperialism hidden under the cloak of terrorism.Zibigniew Brzezinski prior 911 "What we need is a truely massive and widely perceived direct external threat." Enter the sum of Bin Laden whom the FBI say haven't the evidence to convict him for 911.

The whole terror saga is a lie and a beat up,to stage wars and steal resources/energy.

I think that it's worthwhile revisiting the stupid
Vietnam War in the context of Australia participating
in yet another unwinnable war in a far-off land at the
behest of the USA.

Like the Vietnamese, the Afghan people have seen off
any number of attempts by powerful imperialists to
invade and subjugate their country. What was achieved
in the Vietnam War beyond the deaths of hundreds of thousands
of people and the restoration of its independence?

I have a very strong sense that the war in Afghanistan
is going much the same way.

Pilger seems to want to pretend that the cold war was an insignificant event in all of this tradgedy. The Soviets spent 2 million dollars a day throughout the vietnam war to prop up Ho Chi Minh's so called nationalists. They sent 2000 tanks 7000 artillery pieces and 10's of thousands of advisors to help out Ho and his communist mates. The North Vietnamese army that eventually defeated the south, was entirely equipped with Soviet and Chinese equipment

The simple fact is that Ho was a communist threatening to take over a non-communist state at the height of the cold war. The South Vietnamese state may have been corrupt, but the Communists can't claim any high ground there.

The west had clashed with the communist block repeatedly in the preceding decade. The expansionist tendencies of the communists were undeniable. Local communist uprisings across asia were heavily banrolled by the Soviets and ChinCom.

One has only to look at the countries where the West was successful in keeping the communists out, South Korea, West Germany, Taiwan and Hong Kong and compare them with North Korea, East Germany, Tibet, Burma to see that whilst the west methods may have been questionable, their ideology was undoubtedly superior.

Look at the damage inflicted by Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao and Ceausecu on their own people and you can see the essential problem the west faced when dealing with the communists.

Arjay,

Your infantile/paranoic fantasies are well worn and cliched. They are also demonstrably false. Communism has been vanquished throughout the world and has been exposed as the bankrupt philosophy that it was.

Australia's vietnam veterans fought a war they were directed to fight by the elected gov't of the day. It was their duty. And to a large extent they fulfilled that duty admirably.

It should be obvious to even a fanatic like yourself that the reponsibility for the war does not rest with the soldiers who are ordered to fight it.

You don't need to agree with the war, in order to recognise the courage, honour and sacrifice of Australia's vietnam veterans.

Thanks PAULL for both your comments and sentiments apropos Veterans who fought in South Vietnam.

Funny thing, I essentially agree with most of whats been stated herein about the Vietnam War being...a filthy war etc etc !

Just a small point that I would like to make. We didn't lose the bloody War in Vietnam, at least the combat component ! It was lost in the streets, in the parliament, in congress, and in the hearts and minds of most folk who were not directly involved.

We Vets, really couldn't delineate between friend or foe? Who the actual enemy was ? The NVA/VC in country, or the long haired demonstrator/activist yelling abuse, shouting all manner of bitter vitriolic remarks and comments, when we returned home ?

And in my humble opinion, many who burnt their 'call-up' papers because they're against the war...I really do wonder, if that was true, or were they simply cowards hiding behind their so called activism and antipathy towards the war ? Perhaps that may be closer to the truth ?

And of course, we have individuals like Ms. Jane Fonda roaming around North Vietnam telling all and sundry that it was an illegal and immoral war, and most Americans were against it. True, some were, many were not! Ms Fonda, was a straight out traitor.

Anyway, there are many of you reading this thread, thinking I'm just an old idiot. That's probably true too. But this idiot can look in the mirror, and he sees an idiot. However, there're many protesters of that era who, when they look into a mirror, what do they see, an upstanding, morally flawless, activists ? Or, do they see a coward ?

Perhaps John Pilger would like to either take the current despotic Communist Government in Vietnam to task for all its failiures or alternatively explain in another article while they can be despotic and still admired by him?
Pilger is still smarting from a lifetime apologising for and praising the filthy communists and seeing them fail and all his dreams come to nought.

PaulL talks about paranoid fantacies.This is no fantacy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBp3URuMV28 Here we see two Fox shows X Files 'Lone Gunman' and the Simpsons predicting 911 some months before it happened.The Simpsons episode is clear and undeniable.Explain these two fantacies PaulL.

That's quite fascinating Arjay,
but what on earth does it have
to do with Vietnam?

With respect to the hapless soldiers
who are sent by our governments to fight
these pointless and unwinnable wars,
I think that they generally deserve
our appreciation and respect. On the
other hand there is undeniably a minority
of soldiers who volunteer for military
duty because they quite like the idea
of killing gooks and ragheads.

I repeat my question: what was achieved
in the Vietnam War other than the deaths
of hundreds of thousands of people and the
restoration of its independence?

I find this a very interesting reflection on a very unjust war. But somehow one article is ment to sway the perceptions of all. Come now people i hope you do not base your opinions and decisions on the writings of one news paper or writer. This as it is is interesting, telling a story and can be used with all the other reading one does on Vietnam to gain further understanding of the realities of what happened.
Without question this was as is most war is completely unjustified. Fuelled by peoples fears and paranoia then driven by the profiteers. We are a foolish species cursed to perpetuate our stupidity over and over again.

OSung Wu,

Sadly what you say is true. The US and its allies in the West were in large part defeated by the hippie movement many of whom were no doubt motivated by fear of being sent to war, in concert with the communists.

As you know the insurgency in the South was effectively destroyed during Tet 1968. The Linebacker II bombings of 1972 brought the North to its knees and effectively won the war. The appalling treaty signed at the Paris peace Accords was an acknowledgement that even though the free world forces had won, there was no longer the political will to enforce this. By cutting off of support for the gov’t of SVN, down to the bullets in their guns Nixon and co. effectively ceded the country to the communists. And yet it took the North (still fully supported by the Russians) 3 years to defeat the gov’t of SVN.

You need only look at how the vast majority of protesters turned out to see that they were motivated mainly by peer pressure and group think. The protest movement was a youth fad much like the earlier Beatles fad and many since. I don’t doubt there were people who were ideologically committed to this movement. But the vast majority were kids going along with what was cool at the time. Like kids always.

Fonda should have been jailed for treason, and today she probably would. Thankfully it is no longer acceptable to actively and publicly seek the failure of the military forces of the country you owe everything to. Jane Fonda was a opportunist and a traitor.

Arjay,
Are you seriously asking me to view a second rate TV show thats about aliens, or a cartoon about yellow people with four fingers, for proof of conspiracy? You need help.

Talisman,

What was achieved in the Vietnam War other than the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and therestoration of its independence?

3 million people left the region after the communists took over. Does that sound like a popular nationalist movement to you?

Its independence? It may be run by Vietnamese but its hardly independent. Vietnam, like all the other communist countries is run by a cabal of corrupt high officials who pass on their positions to their children. There is nothing independent in this.

The fact that South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Taiwan are not communist is in large part attributable to the war in Vietnam. The Wests willingness to fight the communists there discouraged further expansion by the communist bloc.

Vietnam is still mired in poverty and corruption. It is instructive to compare it with Germany, which was far more thoroughly destroyed than Vietnam.

I would ask, what did the communists achieve in Vietnam

The US backed Pol Pot was directly responsible for the murder of 1 million Cambodians and indirectly another 2 million due to starvation and disease.Cambodia still suffers today.

PaulL ,you will probably find that Vietnam is enslaved by debt money created by the international reserve banks.That is the main reason why they cannot progress.Debt based money which should be created as a tax credit by their Govt to equal our GDP + inflation and this debt based money creation is destroying the world's economies.

Pilger is a wannabe Communist sympathiser who makes friends of the most despotic regimes on the planet while luxuriating in his London Apartment, making the best he can out of the Western capitalism. Always neatly dressed in fashionable gear, happily receiving awards for his 'journalism' he then unleashes on the very nations and people who pay to read and watch his ideological drivel. Of course, he is reluctant to move to one of his darling regimes because he would likely spend most of the rest of his life in abject poverty if not prison for merely expressing his opinion.

Arjay,

You really do live in a parallel universe don't you. The Khmer Rouge were gifted power by the North Vietnamese, who did the bulk of the fighting against the Cambodian government. They were supported with arms by the Chinese communists.

By the way, the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), an undeniably communist organistation, killed 21% of their total population. 2.5 million people.

Ie really takes a closed mind to be able to pretend that the Khmer Rouge were not a communist orgainsation, primarily supported by Chinese communists, and for a crucial period, by the North Vietnamese communists.

PaulL, in 1975 there were about 48 million
people living in Vietnam, now the population
is nearly 90 million. Following the stupid war,
it's not surprising that the collaborators,
colonials and Chinese got out of the place,
but the vast majority of surviving Vietnamese
stayed put. Despite your erroneous assertion,
Vietnam is now an independent nation and is no
longer a part of the French colonial empire.

Since trade sanctions were lifted, the Vietnamese
economy has been going from strength to strength.
Education, iteracy levels and life expectancy have
all been steadily improving, and are extremely
good for a developing, mostly agricultural economy
that was virtually destroyed less than half a century ago.

Your claim that the defeat of the USA and its allies
somehow translated into stopping the spurious
dominoes falling is both counterintuitive and interesting.
Do you have any facts with which to back that claim up,
or is it the wishful thinking that it appears to be?

You haven't demonstrated that the Vietnam War was
anything beyond a phenomenal waste of lives and
money, both for the Vietnamese and the invaders
that they defeated.

Talisman,
Firstly, your inherent racism is showing. “ ... its not surprising that .... Chinese got out of the place.
The Chinese had 170’000 soldiers in Vietnam at the height of the war. On the North Vietnamese side.

The exodus from Vietnam was Vietnamese who did not want to live under communist rule. Many were already refugees from North Vietnam, where Catholics and Buddhists and minorities were persecuted.

You say once trade sanctions were lifted, Vietnam went from strength to strength. I agree. Capitalism is far better at feeding and clothing people than communism. It just goes to show the failure of communism that the Vietnamese couldn’t get by without global trade.

Germany was far more comprehensively destroyed than Vietnamever was. Saigon fell after very little fighting. The South had run out of bullets to fire back after the misguided US congress passed a bill preventing ANY assistance to the gov’t of SVN.

There is nothing counterintuitive in the suggestion that the war in SVN prevented other countries falling to communism. No doubt you’ve heard of a pyrrhic victory. The North’s victory, in concert with the communist supported youth movements in the west, was such a victory. The communist countries were never wealthy enough to fully back local communist insurgencies to the level required, whilst also bankrolling the war against the US. The 15 odd years where the west fought the communists in Vietnam, gave other countries the space and time (in the absence of full blooded Soviet/Russian support) to defeat their own insurgencies. Communist Insurgencies in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines’ were all defeated during this period.

Your assertion that because the West lost the war, therefore it wasn’t worth fighting is fallacious.

There was always a majority in South Vietnam, principally in the cities, that did not want to be ruled by communists. Hence the mass exodus once the communists took over. It might also have had something o do with the 5000 citizens of Hue who were executed by the Northern Army in 1968 when they captured the old capital.

PaulL,the USA funded and backed Pol Pot,a despotic murderer.They created and supported Saddham until he started to think independantly and use Euros instead of the $ for trading oil.Saddham threatened the sanctity of the $ and cheap oil to the cartels,that's why he had to go.

The USA/Israel backs and creates despots for their own economic gain.Hamid Kazai in Afghanistan is another case in point.

Dear Mr Pilger,

I do enjoy your writing and in many ways you are fighting the good fight but a tad more research would be desirable.

Vietnam has not had free health care nor education for a very long time. The government covers 80% of the health bill of those under 5 yo but after that it is the full whack except in cases of TB. This has been the case for decades.

However the fact that Vietnam was a more equal and caring society before market reforms is undeniable except by ideologues. The debate should be about the friction between a freer economy and a the very slow movement toward political reform. The capacity of the market place to corrupt is obvious and without a robust system of checks and balances it can be very destructive in any society, socialist or otherwise.

Again, thank you PAULL, you certainly put an interesting perspective
on that whole terrible war.

We (me) just tried to get through our tour, somewhat mechanically I will admit, without ever truly understanding the political issues thereof.

We were all aware (heard) of the huge 'rage' against the war, back home. And I for one couldn't understand how our own people could possibly turn against us ? Particulary when we were sent by our own government, to basically interdict the flow of communism, reaching as far down as the Malaysian Peninsular.

I may well be wrong PAULL. But I reckon the issues and events of the mid sixties until the early seventies, utterly destroyed patriotism in Australia ?

Yes PAULL, you do possess considerable knowledge of those times. Certainly much more than I. We simply did our twelve months, and came home. Most of us did, at least.

O'Sung Wu,

No, Thank you. Austalian owes a great debt to all of its veterans, but even more so to the Vietnam Veterans.

I cannot imagine being sent abroad to fight for my country with all the sacrifice that no doubt entailed and then being abused and disowned upon my return. It is a particularly shameful period of Australian history.

I think that patriotism is stronger now than it was in the late 60's and 70's. Although you wouldn't know it from the volume of loony-lefters who post here.

One good thing to come of the vietnam vets experiences was that support for our troops today is nearly universal. There may be plenty who disagree with the current war, but very few are prepared to blame the troops for that. Which is as it should be.

Thank you John Pilger. Your article, as is usual with your work, is well researched, concise, humane - adjectives that couldn't be applied to your detractors. Of course, in an article of this length, you couldn't say everything but you certainly convey the general flavour and include some details your detractors prefer to ignore. Methinks some of the responses are from bitter, jealous old men who lack your capacities and insight.

If we forget - or deny - the realities of the American War against Viet Nam, we are destined to repeat the stupidities and atrocities elsewhere. And guess what? That's exactly what the west is doing....

I have always held the utmost respect and compassion for all Australians and innocents who participated in WWI, WWII and Vietnam, and when the subjects are raised, think of my Uncle, who my father never had the opportunity to meet, dying in Tobruk at the age of 19yrs.

Thinking of the heartache and sadness my grandparents would have gone through during those years, and my heart aches trying to imagine at times, what a young kid of 19yrs endured in those trenches in the middle east, further not ever given a life to enjoy the things most of us have enjoyed and taken for granted, from wonderful food, shelter and modern technology.

Paul L generally I agree with you. Just a minor point.. if you talk to many "Vietnamese" refugees.. you'll find many of them are part Chinese.

Many pure Viet others worked for the Americans or Sth Vietnamese Govt.

Spindoc......

//However, in order to maintain your world view, you seem increasingly to resort to deconstruction, omission and misrepresentation of history.// Hi 5 Spindoc :)

ARJAY...fascinating for sure... you might be on something there.. Not sure what though. (The Simpsons was the best bit) Do you have any more on that?

AIR,The Simpson's episode says it all.It shows the arrogance and power of those who planned 911.No,I don't have any to beat that one.Just have a look at the scientific evidence http://ae911truth.org/ and these very credible people http://patriotsquestion911.org/

War is looming because those who perpetrated this crime,seek war as an escape from their own people.Wikileaks has revealed that Aust intelligence sources do not see Iran as a threat yet Israel and the neo-cons in the USA want to attack Iran.

Have to realised the gravity of the situation yet?