Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] The Vietnam War

Episode Date: April 13, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Nov 2018 Historian David Parsons joins Breht for a deep and wide-ranging conversation on the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese National Liberation struggle, unforgivable American imperial war crimes, historical memory, and much more! David Parsons is an author, historian, and leftist podcast host of The Nostalgia Trap. Find The Nostalgia Trap here: https://nostalgiatrap.com/ Find his book, Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouses and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era here: https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469632018/dangerous-grounds/ The Documentary used for most of the clips in the show is "Hearts and Minds" (1974) ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

My eight-year-old daughter was killed. And my three-year-old son. Nixon, murderer of civilians. What have I done to Nixon so that he comes here to bomb my country? My daughter died right here. She was feeding the pigs. She was so sweet. She is dead.

The pigs are alive. My mother and my children took shelter here. Here they died. The planes came from over there. No targets here. Only rice fields and houses. I'll give you my daughter. I'll give you my daughter's beautiful shirt.

Take it back to the United States. Tell them what happened here. My daughter is dead. She will never wear the shirt again. Throw this shirt in Nixon's face. Tell him, she was only a little school girl. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and Comrade Brett O'Shea, and today our episode is on the Vietnam War

with author and historian David Parsons. The clips we used throughout this episode are mostly from the documentary Hearts and Minds, which you can find online for free, and we highly recommend people go and watch that documentary, and this episode hopefully will serve as a nice companion. and peace with that documentary so go check that out if you haven't already as always if you'd like what we do here at revolutionary left radio you can join our patreon at patreon.com forward slash rev left radio you can join our book club we have a secret facebook group we have monthly q and a episode with rotating cast of guests that i bring in to take your questions and you can also do a one-time

donation to rev left at paypal dot me forward slash rev left any and all support for the show really helps means a lot. Dave and I worked countless hours on this episode and we really hope that you find it to be a high quality and unique addition to the discourse surrounding what is the tragic events and the horrific war crimes of the Vietnam War. So having said that, here is our episode with David Parsons on the Vietnam War. Okay, so my name is David Parsons. I'm a historian of the Vietnam War era. My work is mainly on the Vietnam War from the perspective of the anti-war movement. And even more detailed than that, the stuff I do is on the anti-war movement in the American military during the Vietnam War. So my book is called Dangerous Grounds, Anti-War Coffey Houses and Military Descent in the Vietnam Era. I studied and wrote about mainly the coffee houses that were built up around major military installations. in the United States by the anti-war movement. So my work has been mostly on that,

and teaching the Vietnam War in college. At the college level has been the main place I do history. But I also worked on a major museum exhibition at the New York Historical Society over the last several years that gave me another perspective on the Vietnam War and particularly how that history is digested by the American public. So I have a lot of ideas about kind of American memory, and I've worked a lot in terms of kind of thinking about how

the Vietnam War is remembered in the United States, in Vietnam, and particularly what the political uses of our distorted memory of the war does for us today. So that's a little bit about me. Well, I'm from Duncan, Oklahoma, which is about 90 miles south of here. And I lived around several places, Missouri, and Chicago, Detroit, Germany. But the time I got, of high school. I was very conservative. We have, in Duncan High School, we had bought, the high school had bought a, excuse me, a John Birch package on communism. So we studied communism via the John Birch Society and with the big red map with the flowing out of the disease and so forth and learned how Karl Marx was a very cruel man and used to make his family suffer and so forth.

So, you know, when I got out of high school, I thought basically that Teddy Roosevelt's what this country needed, and FDR had kind of sold us down the drain to the colonies. The communist conspiracy is a deliberate and predictable plan of action to subvert the world. Moseny, Wisconsin, in a unique Mayday object lesson, shows what could happen here if communism took over. The unyielding chief of police is liquidated by American legionnaires portraying red trigger men. A grim demonstration of what subversion could lead to, Mosenese May Day serves as a sharp warning to all democratic communities.

It's an international criminal conspiracy. Before we know, we're going to turn our backs around someday, and before we know the whole United States, we're going to turn around one day and see nothing but VC, or not VC, but communism. We're going to turn around and say, what happened? People are just walking in with riots, drugs,

you name, they're tearing us down from inside up. In 1917, when the communists overthrew the Russian government, there was one communist for every 2,277,000. 77 persons in Russia. In the United States today, there is one common us for every 1,814 persons in this country. If we lose into China, Mr. Jenkins, we will lose the Pacific, and we'll be an island in a communist sea. Go ahead. How does it go? Oh, mother. I swear that I am not now or ever have been a member of the Communist Party.

You feel better. Definitely. And before we started recording, you and I were talking sort of about how the Vietnam War is presented in the American context and even criticisms of the Vietnam War or analyses that are very harsh against the Vietnam War here in the U.S. still tend to take the perspective of the anti-war movement, you know, the movements inside the U.S. against the Vietnam War and rarely have the perspective from the Vietnamese anti-imperialists themselves. So I hope that we can also add a little, you know, people's history dimension to this conversation that a lot of Americans just have never had access to due to our education system. Yeah, I mean, and you say that education system, I mean, part of what I was doing with the New York Historical Society was developing curriculum for the Vietnam War. And we worked with the, you know, the Department of Education who required that students, American students in public schools, see the Vietnam War for two days in their entire 12 years of education. And most teachers we learned don't even get to it.

So the reality is that the Vietnam War is not really taught in American schools at all. I think that serves interesting interests when the war sabers are being rattled to go into Iraq or wherever we're going to go into next. That unmemory, that sort of forgetting what has happened or that lack of understanding because of those failures in the educational system really, I think, help promote and perpetuate that imperial aggression when it rises its head again. Absolutely. Yeah, you need a population that doesn't remember what it was like.

because, you know, we talk about the Vietnamese perspective, and I know we're going to get to it, but, you know, the Vietnam War fucked up American people really badly, too. You know, the 60,000 Americans were killed and all those people had families. Many of them were, you know, basically young men from the working class. So, you know, that memory is our memory, too, and the fact that it's been distorted right on top of the people that live through it. And even the distorted memory even repeated by the people that live through it is a really disturbing part of it and one that we need to overcome. Absolutely. Before we get into this pretty big episode, what got you interested in the Vietnam War initially and what sort of educational work beyond what you've already said have you kind of done on the topic? So I am someone who was raised by parents who lived through this era and left a big mark on their lives, even though they weren't really involved so directly. My dad was in the U.S. Marines during the Vietnam War, but he was in the reserves. He never got sent to Vietnam, but it was still kind of the signal event of his life. talked a lot about that history. And I, you know, I became a historian in part because history was the subject that kind of fascinated me the most when I was young. But as I got older and eventually went to graduate school at the City University of New York, Vietnam War was kind of the

obvious era I wanted to study. I wanted to understand how the United States had become involved in the war. But more importantly, I wanted to understand how young people, particularly young Americans navigated this world in which they were involved in the war, literally being called to kill and die for this cause, but also how they navigated the waters of the anti-war movement, et cetera. So I was looking for a project when I was in graduate school that would kind of allow me to talk a lot about politics and culture. I was interested in counterculture particularly and what its uses were politically during that era, because we all know that kind of like the long hair, hippie, drug counterculture, the 60s is a really iconic part.

of the era, another distorted memory, and one that ran up against the anti-war movement in a lot of different ways. So that was what I wanted to study. I wanted to kind of understand that mix more. And finding the coffee houses, the GI coffee houses that were, again, part of the anti-war movement, allowed me to kind of combine all those interests. So in terms of school, that's mainly, the Vietnam War was what I studied in graduate school mainly and became a container for me to talk about left politics in the 60s and 70s. Yeah, that's wonderful. And I think you're the perfect person to have on to tackle an issue, this exact issue,

for those reasons. So let's go ahead and get into it. I mean, we're going to cover a lot of stuff here as much as we can. And again, I try to shape the structure of this conversation to reflect more the underbelly of this fight, right? The parts of the story that often get left out in the American retelling. So I hope we can do a good job of fleshing that out. So first question, let's talk about the history of Vietnam regarding colonialism and

invasions before the Vietnam War. What was the colonial history at play here, especially with regards to the French and Japanese occupations that took place in the run-up to the war? You know, that's a long story. But the basic idea is that Vietnam was colonized by the French in the 19th century. The French were the totalizing force in Vietnam. And when I say that I mean culturally, politically and economically, for much of the latter half of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century. So in that context, what that meant was that in many places the Vietnamese language was erased. All the kinds of cultural destruction that you associate with that brutal imperialism was what the French did to the Vietnamese. And in that

context, you had a resistance movement that's going to grow. Ho Chi Minh is going to be the kind of central figure that resistance movement. But before we get to that, you should know that there's a class in Vietnam that are Vietnamese people who, for a number of different reasons, become part of the ruling class or become part of a kind of middle ruling class by becoming more French. So, in other words, the only way to survive, the only way to rise in the culture of Vietnam throughout this colonized period is to become more Western and more French and to lose your Vietnamese-ness. So even the word Vietnam was made illegal during this era. It was a brutal occupation. They were basically there to take resources in labor, and they enforced a really

intense military reality on the Vietnamese people. But again, there was a class, a kind of middle class of Vietnamese who spoke French and many became Catholic and were part of the French Catholic institutional hierarchies throughout Vietnam. So, you know, this would have been called not Vietnam, but this was the period where we'd call it French Indochina. And that period lasts until it lasts ultimately until 1954, but that story of what happens between 1945 and 1954 is where I think you can get, you can, you can, you start to see the beginnings of a real revolution happening and that's why the French are going to exit in 54. But either way, you know, it's a kind of complicated thing that happens through World War II. I don't know how far you

want to get into it. But the basic idea is that, you know, the Japanese are going to, are going to have a government installed in Indochina during World War II. That's part of what's happening with the imperial forces of Japan and Germany that they're seizing that land and taking over the French governments. So, you know, as the French collaborate with the Nazis, as we know, there's this kind of split identity that happens in Vietnam throughout the course of World War II. And there's a power struggle. And this is part of a wider, the wider context of this is that over the course of World War II and the years after, there's going to be what we call the anti-colonial movements throughout the colonized world. And so you're going to see these things happening

in Africa, you know, the French are going to fight a war in Algeria. The old imperial forces are over the course of World War II losing their grip on the colonized world, and that's going to open up for all sorts of revolutionary activity. That's what's going to make the post-war, post-World War II era, a really ripe era, I think, for people to investigate. you know, anti-colonialism, because I know that's your interest in how you actually defeat the imperial force. And one of those is seizing the right moment. And that's certainly what the Vietnamese are going to do in Vietnam. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's worth noting all the colonial brutalities that one who's familiar with colonial history should be aware of, absolutely

we're taking place here. And just the sort of feeling of being a second-class citizen in your own country, these European colonizers come in and force you all down. And yeah, if you want to rise up in the ranks, even if you want to make a better life for your family, or whatever, you have to capitulate entirely to the French culture and the French way of doing things. And Catholicism was one of these mechanisms, one of these colonial mechanisms that the French used to inculcate French culture into the minds of Vietnamese people. The onslaught of colonialism is the onslaught of any sort of genocide attempt is always not just the brute fact of dominating bodies, but of dominating culture, dominating language, dominating the way people think about themselves.

Yeah, and I'm glad to use the word genocide, because that's certainly the word that comes to mind, because it is a cultural erasure. It's a conscious one. It's about control, and the French, you know, the French were not unlike other imperial forces in that they knew what they were doing, and they knew that cultural part of it was really important. You mentioned Ho Chi Minh, and, you know, this is somebody that I should probably do an entire episode on, but I wanted to make sure we address as much as we can in the context of this broader discussion here. So let's talk about Ho Chi Men a little bit. Who was Ho Chi Minh as a human being? How did he live his life before returning to Vietnam after 30 years? Yeah, so Ho Chi Minh is someone who is, you know, he's the badass of the story in a lot of ways. And I say that because he overcame, he has a, you know, a kind of unbelievable life story,

and he overcame a lot of, you know, impossible odds to get his vision realized in Vietnam. But, you know, Ho Chi Minh is also a figure who's biography is kind of muddy. He used a lot of fake names, I think like over 200 fake names. So in terms of being a historian and an archival historian going back and tracing the actual biography, it's tricky, but we know a few important things. We know that Ho Chi Minh was born in the late 19th century, and we know that he was not from the peasant class. This was not, Ho Chi Minh was not someone who was at the bottom of French Indo-Chinese society.

Instead, he had a father who was an administrator. I think that's a really important detail. He understood the kind of sacrifices that people made, and he understood that element we just talked about of a kind of cultural genocide. You should dedicate a whole episode to Ho Chi Men for sure. He's a really important figure with a long life that takes a lot of turns and I think there are a lot of lessons in it. But to start, you know, where you're kind of aiming us at that period when he comes back to Vietnam in 1941 and really begins building the revolution, you know, that's the moment where you see how much he's learned. He leaves the country for many years. He leaves the country for many

years. And he goes to France. He goes to the Soviet Union. He goes to the United States. There's rumors that he pretty well-substantiated rumors that he worked as a cook or dishwasher at a couple restaurants in Harlem during the 19, teens and 20s. So, you know, really interesting life story. But what I think is important about it for us is what he's learning at each of these places. I think one of the main things to understand about Ho Chi-Men is his hatred of the French, first of all, how much he had a real kind of visceral hatred for the people who were destroying his country and brutalizing his people. But he also had a kind of, he had a curiosity about Western values and Western ideology. He came to France. He learned about the United

States and the Declaration of Independence. He began to have a more global view. Because when he went to France, his experience was he thought he would get to France and he would find this culture of, you know, basically bloated, rich plutocrats, you know, the people that were really controlling the world. But instead he saw working people in a struggle against capitalism and meeting workers, French workers, hanging out with the French Socialist Party, eventually being a founding member of the French Communist Party. All of that stuff proved to him that his situation was a little more complex. It wasn't just about French people, hating Vietnamese people and brutalizing them, but it was about a wider kind of system. And that,

the French working people were caught in that system too. So began to make connections and he began to make connections around the world seeing that people were kind of under capitalism, people that were under capitalism and imperialism shared a common oppression. So that's a really, really important idea. And the other important idea is that, you know, the Westernness. He looks at the Declaration of Independence. He looks at the French Revolution. He reads French poetry. He falls in love with Western culture in a lot of ways. And he sees that Western, he sees Western culture as a, as a, as a kind of hypocrisy, a kind of sad promise. He thinks that, you know, that the words the Declaration of Independence are beautiful if they were actually lived. And he begins to think like that those

principles, even though America and France aren't really living up to them, those principles are worth interrogating and worth, worth challenging. He wants to push these countries to live up to their stated principles. So, you know, that combination. of his finding out that the global dimensions of capitalism and then understanding that there's a cultural element to politics, those are the things he's going to bring back in 1941 to Vietnam as he begins to build the Vietnam. Yeah. And you said the word hypocrisy and I had had that written down in my notes here too. Not only was he very aware of the sort of U.S. mythos about in all men are created equal, etc. He even like would read that part of the Declaration of Independence

at rallies and stuff. Yeah. And he would use that writing to the leaders of the U.S. during the French occupation, he would use that argument against them, being like, you guys were also a colonial subject. You know how it is. I'm using your own verbiage and your own perspective to plead here that we need your help and to fight to get these colonizers off our backs, just like you needed help to get the British off yours. Right. And he soon realized that geopolitical imperial interest trumped the mythos that the U.S. tells about itself. And he was let down, I think, a lot by that. What we are trying to put across here this afternoon

is to get you to realize that these weren't mythical, hazy people from the past, these were very real people. When they rose up against the most powerful army in the world, they were actually putting everything on the line that they had, their homes, their wealth, their past, and their future. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And when you judge the revolution and the problems and the success we had, it was a two-way street.

A good many of the citizens at the time of the revolution actually stayed and fought with the British. It was close to being a civil war in many areas. You actually split many, many families. Thomas Jefferson said the tree of revolution is, the tree of liberty is watered by the blood of revolution, every generation. I think that's a little exaggerated, but there's some truth to that. The war had come to Westchester County,

but so too had independence and a new responsibility. Men are getting killed, men are killing. That's the parallel. As far as politics, are you kidding? Oriental politics? Don't put me on, man. Fire! His weapon yet, we're still looking for it, over?

Go for it. Go for it. We had one, man. This guy, might get him patched up. We might get some of the guy from him all of it. The people who are living in the jungle under the bombs, without pay, without their families, are doing so because they're fighting for independence,

because they're fighting, in this case, for unification, they're fighting for revolution. Of course, the name for a conflict in which you're opposing a revolution is counter-revolution. And this was something we never admitted to ourselves at all. It's what we were really doing. The letters and the reports we had on Ho Chi Minh's attitude back in 1946, he wrote, I think it was seven letters to this government and received no reply. The pathos, almost, the sadness that here's a man who felt and believed the United States would be sympathetic to his purpose of gaining his independence from a colonial power.

And then to find we, you know, this is what he'd read, he'd been here, he'd read our constitution, and our Declaration of Independence, he thought surely the United States would be interested. We had testimony in the committee that his one worry was that it was so insignificant. Vietnam was so far away and so insignificant, we would never bother about it. It's too small to ever attract the attention of the United States.

He was sure in his own mind that if we would ever put our minds and focus upon it, we would be for him. How different history would have been, for us and for them, If we had felt a common interest in a colonial province like Vietnam, seeking its independence of France. I do also want to mention, though, just kind of fleshing out who Ho Chi Minh was a little bit more. He was a very, like, sincere, dedicated, committed human being.

The people that followed him sincerely loved him. He was very, very well respected. He wrote this incredibly moving pamphlet on lynchings in America. You mentioned, yeah, you mentioned that he very well might have been operating in hard. Harlem at a certain time. He certainly visited the U.S. and was able to firsthand perceive its culture. And so when he came and he wrote these pamphlets about lynchings in America, this is a really internationalist, empathetic, and just sort of angry, you know, realization of just how brutal racism is in the U.S. And so that really shows you the sort of person that that Ho Chi Men was.

He was fucking bothered by the shit. Yes, he was. And that was the big, you know, weakness in the American presentation during the Cold War of its kind of benevolence, the weak spot was civil rights and the plight of black people in America, which was well known and well exploited by, you know, the Soviet Union and others, you know, communists who are like, essentially, if you've ever seen Soviet propaganda from that era, there's a lot about black people. There's a lot about lynching. There's a lot about kind of pointing that out. So, yeah, Ho is definitely within that tradition. And in terms of being like a kind person, you know, there's a lot written about the kind of two sides of

And they're both really important sides. So that side, many describe as the Gandhi side, the kind of man of the people. He dresses in a very humble manner. He doesn't wear military clothes. He doesn't wear the clothes of the French at all. He wears a simple garb of peasant clothing. And he kind of has the attitude of a simple old man with simple ideas about good and bad. And he presents himself in a really powerful and friendly way. And in that sense is enduring himself to the Vietnamese people. All of that is really important, especially as the Americans move in and start putting these guys in suits in.

It's very obvious that you can look at Ho Chi Minh as the man of the people. He endears himself that way. But he's also got the communist side, the kind of brutal strategist, the person who's going to see the path of liberation for his people, and is going to lay it down basically in 1941 and not deviate from that path until, until it happens and and there's a lot of brutality to that that side of him too so you know i think that

it's really important if we to have like a kind of dynamic picture of hoche man because he's such an important figure he's such a transformative figure in world history we got to understand that he's both he's a lot of things you know and one of the things he is is this uh this person is absolutely seen as the legitimate leader of the vietnamese people endearing himself to them by by being on their side and being on their side against the french but he's also the the person that's kind of behind the scenes working to secure power. And the power part of it has a military angle and that all that all important stuff too. A hundred percent. Yeah. And that dual character kind of reminds me of Che Guevara. The same sort of thing, his personality, very like

lighthearted, humorous, kind, loving human being, clearly driven by empathy. But on the other hand, he was a, he was a warrior, a fighter. And to be a warrior, to be a fighter means getting your hands dirty. And it does mean, if you can, you know, zoom out in some idealist fashion and try to analyze, it does mean a certain level of brutality, but these people are operating in brutal conditions against brutal enemies, and so they have to sort of be brutal in response. But the last thing I'll say before we move on to the next question is I also want to point out this tension, which we might get into it. It'll certainly play a role when you're thinking about Hocuman, this tension between, as David pointed out, class nationalism.

Nationalism, this national liberation struggle was something that, you know, people on both the south and north of Vietnam were fighting for it. They all didn't like the French, right? They all didn't like to be occupied by another country. But this class dynamic, this class dynamic that Ho Chi Minh, you know, saw firsthand by visiting the West and then as we're about to talk about in the second, reading Lenin and Mao, this fleshed out the other side of it. So it can't just be nationalism. It's also an international struggle.

And that's why he's writing pamphlets about black people being lynched in the American South. It's not just about Vietnam. It's a broader global system of domination. And people in France and the U.S., these, you know, centers of global imperialism, the working class there also suffer, and I think that's important. And the French, it can't be overstated. How much wealth and resources were extracted

by this colonial project. Vietnam had a lot of wealth in rubber and tin and other basic commodities. They're being sucked out and extracted and made the French ruling class richer at the expense of the Vietnamese people themselves. And that's a pattern you see in Cuba. You've seen

it all over the world. Wherever colonialism and imperialism is, that sort of class domination, the extraction of wealth and resources. is always taking place. Yeah, thank God it doesn't happen anymore, right? Oh, yeah. We're way past that. We're way past that. Yeah. Oh, God. But let's go, let's go ahead. And this is, you know, I'm extra excited to talk about this next question. What influence did Lenin and Mao specifically have on Ho Chi-Men? It's a big question, complicated question. I think that, you know, for people that are really interested in the, in the real hardcore, like Marxist theory stuff, definitely check out

Gabriel Colco's book, which is called Anatomy of a War. It's kind of a classic text on the Vietnam War, and it's as, it's as, like, deep Marxist as you want to get. But in terms of the stuff that I know, and that I think is important about Ho Chi Minh and Lenin and Mao is that Ho Chi Minh becomes, he becomes a Leninist really over the course of the end of World War I. And he's young, you know, he's at that point he was in his early, in his early 20s. And I guess in 1919, he's about 29 years old.

People, you know, it's undeclare exactly when he was born. So he's in his 20s. And at World War I, when that ends, he goes to Versailles. It's kind of a famous moment. And many people make a lot of this moment. But what happened is, you know, he essentially wanted to, at the end of World War I, he wanted a voice for Vietnamese independence. And he represented that voice and did so by being involved with the French Socialist Party.

And it's his experience with the French Socialist Party that's going to disillusion him and lead him down the road to Leninism and communism. So it's that disappointment of the French. French socialists at Versailles when he is demanding, he's demanding more attention paid to anti-colonial efforts. And he realizes that the socialists aren't going to take the radical steps that would be necessary to free Vietnam from French rule. He thinks that the socialists are essentially too close to the ruling class and will capitulate too much. And it's reading Lenin and he describes reading Lenin in his room and it's really kind of a funny story about

Ho Chi Men, the story he tells of himself is that when he read Lenin, he stood up in his bedroom and started like standing on his bed and like giving speeches in the style of Lenin. And he was like, this is the language. We need a revolutionary project. He felt that the socialists were essentially going to basically they wanted to just change the balance of power a little bit, right? It sounds familiar if you know about Democratic. socialist today. They want to change the power a little bit. They sound like liberals. And that's what frustrated Ho Chi Minh and led him to see that for him and in the context of Indochina and the situation with the French, that it was going to be a much harder revolutionary struggle and

that the French Socialist Party wasn't up to it. And so that's when he found the French Communist Party and begins to be much more of a Leninist. And in terms of Mao, you know, that's a longer part of the story. I mean, Ho Chi-Men ultimately is going to meet with both Stalin and Mao during this lead-up to the 1941 moments. But Mao, you know, is going to be more of a offering practical and technical support rather than China being completely in this. So China doesn't completely commit to, you know, supporting the Vietnam. There are a bunch of, I mean, part of this is about like this split between China and Russia, who were not on the same page at the moment. And, you know, you talking about him reading Lenin. I think it was a pamphlet on Lenin writing about anti-colonialism

and national liberation struggles. And yeah, he talks about jumping up in his bedroom, like giving speeches and, you know, after reading Lenin, and I can't say that I've not done that as well, reading Lenin. Len is, he's very inspiring and he's intense with the way that he lays out his arguments and they're so compelling. And you can't help but feel a surge of emotion when reading him. So I absolutely relate to Ho Chi Minh on that front. But yeah, I kind of view it as, you know, after this disillusionment with the socialist party, he really dives into Leninism and Marxism. And again, like, if you think of Vietnam geographically, the north of Vietnam, which was the stronghold for the communist, borders China. You know, Mao's China plays a huge role strategically in this conflict.

And Ho Chi Minh is, you know, I think it's important to think of this as like Ho Chi Minh is surrounded by giants. You have the French, you have the Japanese, you have the U.S., you have the Great Britain and you have China. the former four, all looking for colonial domination aspects here, and China being sort of the only, you know, immediate friend that Ho Chi Min can rely on in this moment. And it's just fascinating. And I know that Ho Chi Min had a lot of respect for Mao. He said at one point, because he wasn't really known as a theaterition, right? Ho Chi Min really was a man of action, a leader, a person that put this stuff into words and galvanized his people. But he wasn't really theoretically contributing to the science of Marxism in the way that Lennon and Mao did. But, when asked about this, it's like a rumor that Ho Chi Minh said, I don't need to write theory because Mao Zedong has written all that needs to be written already. He was being a little sarcastic, little tongue in cheek there, but I think that goes to show the enormous respect that Ho Chi Minh had for Mao and what was happening in China broadly. That's what I like about Ho Chi Minh, honestly. Like, you know, the fact that he was able, you know, he was surrounded by

giants, the fact that he was, you know, influenced by all these ideologies, but he took from them what he needed. And he kind of made a, he made a communism that fit the specific historical context that he was in and that his people were in. And I think that, you know, if young American leftists are thinking about communism in the United States, you know, as a kind of path, I think they need to think about the style of an ideology of communism that would fit here, if that makes sense. Oh, 100%. That's what makes good communist leaders. That's our duty. Yeah. Exactly right. I think that's incredibly important. I hope people really internalized that. But moving on, we've talked about him as a person. We've talked about his

ideological influences, some of his adventures. But he was also a man of action. And so that's important to remember that ultimately at the end of the day, everything else aside, he was a leader and somebody that was in the shit fighting. So what role did he play in the physical anti-colonial struggles with France and Japan? Well, this is the story I love to tell to my students. Ho met up with and became really close with who's going to become his like kind of muscle and his the military running the military wing of the vietnam his name is yop uh g iap and yop is going to be he just died uh when yop just died like a couple years ago he's i think more than a hundred years old to me like you know you can't tell the story of ho chie men and his success without understanding

what yop added to it so yop was the guy that that took ho chie men's revolutionary ideas and put them into military action and you know one thing you got to remember this is where you get to understand the odds that they're up against if you were not french you're not part part of the French, you know, bureaucracy or administration or military, whatever, you couldn't have guns, right? Guns and collecting weapons would have been seen as a, you know, a criminal activity. So it was really dangerous to get guns and really hard to get guns. So by the time you get to 1941, I love this piece, what they had, what Yop and Ho and his other, the other people that were part of their organization, they had in December 1944, in one room, they had two

revolvers, 17 rifles, 14 Flint lock rifles, one light machine gun, and 34 men. That's all they had. And in nine years, they defeated the French Imperial military, which is one of the strongest militaries in human history. So how did they do that? They did it because they were really careful about the way they proceeded. But it was a two-fold strategy. You know, it was a military strategy along with a political endearment to the Vietnamese people and kind of doing actions for them to prove that they were their saviors. I mean, this is essentially Robin Hood stuff. They took these guns and they started going out to small French installations where there were only a couple of guards. They killed those guards. They took the weapons that were inside. They

used those weapons to do more operations against more people. So by going through the countryside and basically doing political assassinations, they started killing important French, you know, bureaucrats and stealing weapons from the French military. And at the same time, they're doing this, they are beginning education programs in the villages. They're beginning to endear themselves to the local population by providing water and food and medical care. They're starting to really begin to develop a visual iconography of liberation. And by the time, time you get to, by the time you get to Dien Bienfou, which is in 1954, which is the battle that kicked the French out, the political leadership in the country, it's just 100% of the

Vietnam. The Vietnam are the people that the people of Vietnam recognize as the legitimate leaders of the country. So, you know, you have that happening at the same time that they're collecting weapons and beginning kind of guerrilla insurrection, but they're doing it, they're doing it quietly. This is not full-scale warfare yet. The Vietnam and Yop and Ho's strategy at this point was to slowly start building up an army, and that army is going to have six divisions in nine years. I mean, it's going to be this army that they're going to build, the Vietnam Army, is going to become one of the most admired forces in the history of warfare. So it's extraordinary. I mean, I always love to imagine them in that room with like, you know, two revolvers and a couple rifles, and nine years later, we defeat the French.

I mean, if you said that to us now, like, let's get in a room somewhere, guys. I mean, we have five revolvers and a couple rifles and maybe one AR-15, and we're saying in nine years we're going to defeat the U.S. military, it seems impossible, right? And I actually, just to caution everyone that's listening, I do think it's impossible. It's a different context. Totally different context. And also, this is going to be happening over the course of World War II. The French are going to be weakened by World War II. I mean, there's a lot to the story. But either way, the military part of it right here where they're starting to build up. guns you know it cannot be overstated the guns had to go along with gaining legitimacy from the people because if you just have the guns and the people don't see you as legitimate you're dead you know your movement's going nowhere and in fact you're you're probably not going to live very long right that if you want to start a revolution you've got to have the guns and the butter yep fidel understood

that mal understood that and hocheon absolutely understood that and it's an incredible part of any political movement on the left has to be backed by mass support. That is an absolutely fundamental building block to any sort of actually, you know, militaristic approach to revolution. You have to have a huge chunk of the population at your back. And the way that in this case, they went about doing that was exactly what you're saying, education, feeding, serving the people, as Mao would say, right? Yeah. Uh-huh. That's how they built that, that force and, you know, built up that goodwill that allowed them to do these amazing things, which you're going to talk about here. Otherwise, it's just they're going, you just have a group of people who you see going around

killing people. And you're thinking, okay, that's going to produce fear. That's not going to produce trust. But what the message is is that, you know, they are going to be killing people. And most of the people of Vietnam are going to forgive them for that and are going to kind of see the utility of it and understand that the people that are doing the killing are not scary. They're on their side. That's going to lead us into some, you know, dark territory. But, you know, it's kind of like punching a Nazi, like punching Richard Spencer in a certain context I wonder how certain Americans take that I don't know you know how many people support that action how many don't sure but can you imagine a movement where like Richard Spencer gets punched and 90% of Americans are okay with it and support it right you need that

that's where we need to be but it's a it's a tricky thing to accomplish yeah 100% 100% well said so this is going to be the last question in like the lead up section sure I think this is the last sort of block to place in on what led up to this war so what was the broader geopolitical situation leading up to the Vietnam War right before it regarding, you know, the Cold War, the Korean War, and Southeast Asia broadly. And why did America ultimately start this war? What is called by the Vietnamese, the American War is going to take place in the context of the Cold War, which I see, you know, a lot of historians go back and forth on the Cold War. I see it as mainly an American project and the Soviet Union as more of a defensive

position in that. But either way, you know, the Soviet Union is going to be involved in the Cold War two. And the American position is incredibly aggressive when it comes to the Cold War. They've stated in the Truman Doctrine that they're going to be basically the anti-communist police around the world, and they're going to arm and fund any enemy of communism around the world. So, you know, that means that during the French war, when the Vietnamese are fighting the French and really, you know, doing this heroic stuff to kick them out of the country, the Americans, the American government is supporting them and is supporting them with money, with guns. The American government offers nuclear bombs for the French to drop on Vietnam.

Jesus great. A lot of really ugly stuff in there. But the basic idea is that the United States had made it clear that if there was independence movement in Vietnam, they would support the French, and that under no circumstances where they are going to allow Ho Chi Minh to take over the country or communism to take over that country. And in terms of the wider context, yeah, This is, you know, 1949 is the Chinese revolution. This is also the moment of 1949 where the Soviet Union gets a nuclear bomb. There's incredible hysteria within the American government about rising communism and losing American influence in that part of the world. Asian communism is particularly of concern because of these, you know, these colonial possessions of the

French, but also the larger picture, which is, you know, the United States wants capitalists. influence in those regions. And so, you know, people ask if this is a resource war. It's not about like literally the resources, although that's a big part of it. You mentioned rubber and tin, tungsten and a few other really crucial commodities coming out of Vietnam. But, you know, the larger picture, I think, is that the United States fears losing influence in the region. And so in 1954, when D.N. BN. Fu happens and to the shock of the world and the shock of the French, the Vietnam proved capable of essentially destroying the French military. I mean, the French commander committed suicide the first day of Dien Bufu battle, and in part because it was recognition that

they had completely underestimated the enemy. This is the story of, you know, the Vietnam had been smuggling weapons around Dienfou where the French military was kind of trying to bait them into a final battle. And they had taken anti-aircraft weapons from the French years before in pieces and dragged these pieces under cover of night through the forest with ropes. These are peasant people who are working for the revolution at night through the forests, through the jungles, over hundreds of miles of territory, hiding these pieces, which they then put back together around Dien Banfu and hide them under dense foliage. And then when the French ultimately opened fire, they pull all this shit out and just start destroying the French military, even shooting aircraft out of the sky, which the French didn't even know they had the capability to do that.

So it was a shocking loss. And the French were gone and had to go to Geneva. And Geneva Conference in 54 is really the bureaucratic process by which the American government takes over the war for the French and comes in right at the moment that Ho Chi Minh had achieved his greatest victory and was ready to consolidate the nation and liberate them from colonial rule. The United States decided to come kill them for 12 years and ultimately are going to come in with troops in the 19th. 1960s and murder Vietnamese people at a rate that the French would be jealous of. So the kind of dark end of this really heroic story, maybe not the end, but the transitional moment is Dien B.N. B. N. B. N. Foo in 1954, when they win their liberation, but for political reasons, the United States is going to step in and not allow Ho Chi Minh to take over the country.

Exactly. And we're going to get into some of the U.S. leaders that were responsible for this in a little bit, but just suffice it to say that JFK, the liberal darling, as I'm doing research on this, it just enrages me to see how rehabilitated or how praised JFK is as some progressive of the time. But he was a rabid, a rabid anti-communist. Countless people would die with him at the helm of the brutal death machine known as the American Empire. But let's go ahead and dive into the war itself. The first thing I want to say up front before we get into the first question about the actual war is what we in the U.S. know as the Viet Cong. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but it's almost like a slur that was created by the enemies of the communist that imply that

they were that they were traitors, right, playing off the Vietnamese language. That's right. Yeah, it's a pejorative term. I mean, it's the only people who use it are Americans. And whenever I hear it, I kind of cringe, but I also understand that that's just kind of the way we talk. And so Viet Cong has, for better or worse, become the stand-in for the National Liberation Front. Right. But even the questions I wrote, I use the term Viet Cong, but as I've done the research since I've written the questions, like preparing for it, I realize that that's a fucked up term, and I'm actually not going to use it. So instead of the Viet Cong, let's both of us try our best to use the phrase National Liberation Front, which is what they actually were. Yeah, and the NLF. Yeah, and that's fine with

me. The NLF are, that's what they're called, and it'd be weird to repeat that. So, yeah, everyone can understand when we say NLF, we mean what's usually known as the Viet Cong. But yeah, that's a pejorative term, but again, part of that kind of twisted memory. Exactly, right. So let's just go into it. So who were the National Liberation Front, the NLF? How were they organized? And how did they begin to respond to the American invasion? The NLF, the national liberation front is going to be the part of the political wing of what was the Vietnam in South Vietnam. So what happens over the course of Geneva that we didn't really get into, that's an important thing, is that the country split. And it's split

artificially along this parallel that splits it roughly equally into north and south Vietnam. I mean, the arrangement is that the forces of the Vietnam, that military, will go above that line, that DMZ, and they will be in North Vietnam, and then the people that are anti-communists are going to go in South Vietnam. And the United States is going to essentially try to build a South Vietnamese state, an anti-communist government that they're going to call South Vietnam. So that means that the people who are with the Vietnam are now in the this new country called South Vietnam. And this new country is being administered by the United States. And what that means is they're going to have to start a guerrilla movement, an

underground movement, to liberate the people of South Vietnam. And so the NLF is the South Vietnam section of the larger liberation movement. And then NLF are going to be responsible for all of the resistance within South Vietnamese society. So NLF are going to be just like the, man, they're going to be both a political and cultural wing of the movement and also a military wing. And the NLF's army of guerrilla warriors is going to build into the hundreds of thousands, ultimately, millions. I mean, I'm a little confused here then. The NLF, you said we're operating in the south. What was their northern counterpart?

Their northern counterpart would have been the northern Vietnamese army. Okay, okay. So Ho Chi Minh had like an official army. They're going to be wearing military uniforms. They are, you know, literally a military. The NLF is going to be an insurgency. As an insurgency, something closer to the things we see in Iraq, you know, the kind of guerrilla warfare that ultimately the NLF is going to come out of the closet, essentially, and be just like the Vietnam. They're going to be the recognized legitimate leaders within South Vietnam. It's the NLF that the Americans are going to be fighting the most in South Vietnam. And that's kind of like, to go back and like look at, there's an interview with, I mean, Noam Chomsky has a lot of great stuff in the 60s about Vietnam, but there's an interview with, I think William F. Buckley, where he talks about like the big lie, the war in Vietnam is that, you know, the Americans invaded South Vietnam. It was South Vietnam, the place where we were trying to install, you know, our government essentially and an anti-communist government.

That's where so much of the violence is going to be because that's where we're brutally attempting to enforce our. our will. So, you know, you talk about Kennedy, you know, JFK, the early, you know, part of that, before they're sending troops, they're beginning all sorts of programs to try to limit the influence of the NLF among the people in South Vietnam. And so, you know, this is the Phoenix program. This is the Strategic Hamlet program. These are programs designed by the CIA that are essentially, you know, genocidal programs. The Strategic Hamlet program was designed to take people from the countryside and quote unquote isolate them from the influence of the national liberation front so what that mean was putting them in concentration camps and they're going to put tens of thousands of people

in concentration camps and the strategic hamlet program is going to fail miserably because it's going to make the nlf a lot stronger when you start stealing people and putting them in cages the resistance movement only grew after that so the phoenix program is you know those those who want to go down that rabbit hole should read about the phoenix program you know i'm sure you've heard of it but This is the CIA's program to really root out the NLF's presence in South Vietnam. This is before American troops are really sent or as they're beginning to be sent in the early 60s. This is Kennedy administration. And the Phoenix program was an assassination and torture program.

They went and they found people throughout the villages that were associated with the NLF, whether they were or not. They tortured people. They murdered people. The numbers are in the tens of thousands. This is where the CIA really got its hands very dirty. at the beginning stages of the war. And you can tell that the beginning stages of the war, what America was really putting off

was a straight out war with these people. American government knew the political situation was stacked against them. So they said we're just going to try to enforce the political situation with pure force. And that's why the Americans are going to fail because the Americans don't understand the political situation

and think that just guns are going to be enough. And that's what gets us into some really dark areas of the war. Yeah. fucking imperial vampires. Yes. Yeah, that leads well into the next question, which, you know, this is sort of the people's history version of this. I think it's important to really hone in on this.

So let's talk about some of the massacres committed by the U.S. in this war. It's important precisely because it highlights just how brutal and unforgiving U.S. imperial ambitions were. So what sort of war crimes did the U.S. commit and what tragedies stand out in your mind as particularly disturbing or unforgettable? The planes again. Are they American or Vietnamese? I don't know whose they are. Just airplanes. What was this here?

I used to raise pigs here, right in there. Where was the kitchen? The kitchen was here, we built it with bricks. This was the floor and this was for the heat. What's that? That is the bomb crater. The bomb struck there and destroyed everything I had. An older sister died and another older sister left.

Yes, they were just the three of us. There was the three of us, but then one died, and I'm supposed to live in a house over there. But now it's just a heap of rubble. How old was your sister? Seventy-eight. What did she die of? Bombs. Bombs were trapped here the other day, and they killed her.

I'm so unhappy. My sister died and I've got no home left. I've moved in with my sister here. I've been wounded. I can't do anything for a living now. I'm old and weak. I've got nothing to sell. Nothing to do.

You really just don't have time for personal thoughts when you have to find around a five, six hundred miles an hour. You might call it an electronic war in a certain way. born in a certain way. I didn't have time to think about anything else. If you wanted to later, you might. But it was all business. It's just strictly professionalism. We had a job to do. We went out and we did it. Never could see the people. You know, you never could see, occasionally you saw the houses when you were bombing around a village or bombing in a village. You know, you never heard the explosion. You never saw any blood or any screams. It was very clean.

You're doing a job. You're an expert of what you do. I was a technician. Everything just collapsed under the bombs. Everything just caved in. It's like a brute and it's nest. The way things are with the house in a rubble. The bird comes home and finds no nest.

Where am I to find a place to sit and work for something to eat? Even a bird needs a nest it can go back to. Cry into for sleep and food. Look, they're focusing on us now. First they bomb as much as they please, then they film. We fought against the Chinese for 12 centuries. We fought against the French for 100 years. We fought against the French for 100 years.

And finally, when the war was lost by the French in 1954 at the Battle of Dienbein, Fu, the Vietnamese were liberated from foreign oppression. But it was at that precise moment that the Americans came to Vietnam, little by little at first. Then more and more as an invasion, an invasion of the war. an invasion of the American army. 500,000 of them in Vietnam, and this war became a war of genocide.

The people of North Vietnam and South Vietnam fight only for freedom, independence, and national unity. This war is a war against the American imperialist. This is our war for a war. independence. I would say first of all, the entire, and I think you would agree with this, the entire war is a war crime. Everything that the Americans did to the Vietnamese people should be seen as barbaric, illegal. But in terms of, you know, some of the highlights or low lights of that story, I mean, when is the Phoenix program and associated programs that were meant to basically imprison

and torture the South Vietnamese if they were at all associated with the NLF? That part of it is really ugly. And you're right. That's where you see the kind of imperial mindset, which is really at its most naked, just about domination to the point of death. So that part of it is really, really ugly. You know, for me, there's a couple things worth mentioning. One is the Milai Massacre, which is, you know, obviously well written about territory. And anyone who hasn't read Seymour Hershey's reporting on the Mili Massacre, go and look at it because the details are important. The Mili Massacre occurred in March of 1968. American soldiers walked into a village and by the end of about five or six hours had killed more than

500 civilians, mostly elderly people and children, and even took a break in the middle of the killing to sit down and eat lunch while there were still people alive and then went back to killing them after eating lunch. There were dozens of rapes that took place at Milai, sexual torture, etc. You really see some of the darkest elements of American violence coming out to the point where there's almost like a cathartic relief that the soldiers are experiencing by being able to unleash themselves in this way. But what's notable about Mili is not as, you know, yeah, the brutality is nasty, but it's really, that's how the war was fought in the countryside in terms of American soldiers search and destroy. That was, search and destroy was the kind

of main strategy of the ground troops era of American involvement of Vietnam. So search and destroy was literally walk the countryside and look for communists. And that allowed for a basically a terror campaign of American soldiers walking into these villages and burning them and killing the people there. So the Milai massacre isn't that crazy, even though people are going to flip out when the pictures are published in American newspapers in 1969. I would say, you know, the larger crime, I mean, all those massacres are really important, but the fact is the United States bombed and killed with guns and napalm and chemicals, millions of people over the course of about 12, 13 years. And one of the things that sticks out to me about that through all the napalm and everything else is Agent Orange, which is a defolient, a chemical defoliant created by both Monsanto and Dan. alchemical were making this.

And Agent Orange was a defoliant that was meant to kill the trees and kill the jungles in the densest regions of the country so that they could flush out the NLF that are hiding in those trees. Ultimately, the United States dropped so much Agent Orange, millions and millions and millions of barrels and gallons of this stuff. They toxified the entire country. It got into the groundwater. Vietnam, to this day, has the biggest instance of...

birth defects and childhood cancers than any other country on earth. Everyone in Vietnam has Agent Orange and traces of that chemical. There have lots of really important studies and books about this. The legacy of Vietnam is really in the DNA of the Vietnamese people who will be carrying this poison in their bodies for the next seven generations. So that legacy, the idea of toxifying the entire place, really gives a kind of dark poetry to the whole endeavor. which is that, you know, we really unleashed an enormous amount of violence on people that were

peasants seeking their liberation during the 1960s and 1970s. And that legacy is one that the American people have yet to come to terms with in any way. And that part of it is the part of it that really, that really bothers me the most is that the United States committed a genocide on the level of the Holocaust within recent memory. And it's a memory. And it's a memory. is instead a kind of weird, support our troops' memory. That distortion is at the heart of the project that I'm doing as a historian. Many bombs, many coffins. These are for children.

Eight or nine hundred a week. I have lost seven children myself. Many have died here. So it's nothing like in the countryside, many more have died there. In the countryside there are no coffins, there's no money to buy them. How did all the children die? Poison. Poison you know.

These planes keep spouting and spraying the stuff, and so many people have died. It seems to destroy their intestines. With this spraying and bombing, so many have died. Each day, right on time, the bomb craters appeared. Hundreds of tons I drop each day. And we can't talk about it. We can't talk about it because we are afraid of the government. Yeah, well, I mean, wow.

I mean, listening to you talk like that and also just during the process of researching this war, I'm constantly fucking grinding my teeth. Like, it hurts, honestly, it hurts my fucking heart to see the brutality is inflicted here. And you mentioned the corporate, like, the Monsanto and Dow Chemical behind these war crimes, right? And it's a generational effect. It's not just the moment of the war itself, but it's when the war is done

and the fucking American imperialists go back home and the rot that Agent Orrin and these chemicals have done to this country continues to tear through the people in the same way that the nuclear bombings of Japan went on to have a generational babies, little children, who've never done a damn thing in their life, you know, deformed beyond all measure by U.S. corporate war crimes. And these are the same motherfuckers who will use chemical attacks as the pretext to invade other countries to this day.

Oh, that country used a chemical war. That's chemical warfare. That's against international law. So we're going to have to go in there and occupy this country for a little while. So these motherfucking hypocrites, I mean, it's a blood-soaked hypocrisy that no amount of my anger right now could. ever sufficiently addressed. But it makes me shake with rage. Yeah, I agree with that rant. And I mean, the real thing about it that really makes you understand how frustrating it is to be, to be someone who understands this, even at the time that you're going through this, is seeing American officials

and all of American culture support the war and not only support the war, but talk about the brutality of the Vietnamese and how important it is that we support our military in their efforts. It's just, it begins to paint a picture of a very, very sick society and one that has essentially internalized its right to do this to people. And you've got to point out, you know, the example you just brought up about Hiroshima, you know, these are Asian people. And they're, you know, you can connect a lot of racial attitudes in, in American life to the, the kind of ease with which we kill millions of people that aren't white. Yeah, the exact same white supremacy that did this in Japan, did this in Vietnam, did this all over the world, is the

exact same white supremacy that is fueling these fascist movements in the U.S. at this very moment. It's the same thing. It's just a domestic or an international approach, but it's the same rotten white supremacist bullshit. And it manifests in different ways, but no matter where it manifests, innocent people get killed, and it has to be stopped. Yeah, I'm with you there.

So, yeah, well, absolutely. I mean, fuck, it's a lot. But we have to continue with this conversation. So back home in the U.S., and I know this is one of the angles that you've really focused on in your work, back home in the U.S., what was the response from the left? What actions did the most committed anti-imperialists take and what successes, if any, did they achieve? Well, that's another big story. So I'll try to break it down to what I think is the most important. I mean, the anti-war movement begins right away.

It's beginning even really, I mean, people tend to have certain memories about the anti-war movement taking place. on college campuses with long-haired hippies and that kind of thing. And there's certainly going to be that moment. But before that begins, there's just long period where the kind of main anti-war voices in America are voices coming out of churches, you know, Quakers who are going to be calling attention to American policy in Vietnam. You're going to have a number of different religious figures and civil rights figures that are talking about us a little bit. But, you know, the kind of college movement that people remember, you know, it starts out very much not part of the counterculture. The people that are opposed to the Vietnam War early on, if you look at the

pictures of them in, you know, 1964, 65 even, you know, these teach-ins at Berkeley and other places, they're wearing suits, you know, they're really earnest. And I think that that's part of understanding that why did so many young people oppose the war is that they were raised in a very patriotic environment. These were people that were raised, basically memorizing the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, raised on the idea of American benevolence in World War II, and, you know, raised in this period of intense, you know, suburban affluence and the Cold War. So they really believed in American values and really believed in their participation in it. And I think that's part of why you see the early activism on college campuses is because it's like, these are middle class

white kids who were raised to believe that they had a role to play in the society. And so when they found out about the war, I mean, they had already been, a lot of them already been active in, you know, anti-nuclear bomb stuff. That was an entryway for activism in the late 50s, early 60s. A lot of them were engaged in the civil rights movement. So, you know, at a number of different kind of elite college campuses, public places, you know, places like Berkeley, you have these students who really felt like they, you know, when the war came and they learned about it, they thought it wasn't injustice. They thought it was

un-American. They thought it kind of was outside of the bounds of what America was supposed to be. So you got these really earnest voices that we would probably describe as liberal today, who basically said, you know, this is the wrong war at the wrong time. We shouldn't be doing this to people. And I guess the main story is that the anti-war movement begins by kind of saying this is so un-American what the United States is doing in Vietnam. This is so outside of our democratic principles. This is so outside of what we expect from America as the benevolent force from World War II. But things get more radical rather quickly over the course of the 1960s. And you get a number of different ideas and forces from the anti-war movement that are going to bring, you know,

different elements of resistance into the story. So, you know, the, although, you know, college campuses are going to be a big site for anti-war stuff, it's going to grow and it's going to grow into to ultimately become a movement that encompasses a really diverse range of Americans. I think that one of the important things that I'd want to say about the anti-war movement, too, is that it was a real constituency in the sense that presidents were terrified of the anti-war movement. Both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, you know, they talked about them all the time and talked about what to do about it. I mean, Nixon basically is going to launch a, you know, a war against the anti-war movement,

you know, a covert one using the CIA and FBI. etc. The anti-war movement in America against the Vietnam War is part of a wider history of the left and a part of wider history of what we call the new left, which, you know, there's Marxism there, but the Marxists were not really the loudest voices on the left, especially in the anti-war movement. They're going to become louder as time goes on and you're going to have splits and as Marxism kind of enters the scene. But for the most part, you know, the anti-war movement all the way until I would say 1968, when SDS or students for a Democratic society, when they split up, until then, it was, you know, not an incredibly radical movement. It's not really, you know, super influenced by Marxism. Although, you know, again, there are going to be groups that are doing that. And I'd say that the one that stands out the most is the Socialist Workers Party, the SWP, and the YSA, the Young Socialist Alliance. Both of them got a lot more active against the war. in the later part of the war in like the 1970s.

But yeah, we can talk about what the anti-war movement actually did, but a lot of it was about finding ways to actually challenge power and doing that, you know, through demonstration. And so public demonstration is what we probably remember the most. But one thing I think that people forget, I think, is how the anti-war movement became such a diffuse, amorphous movement. It wasn't a monolithic thing. And it definitely wasn't just located at college campuses.

It involved every kind of American. Right. Okay, I have this topic coming up next. And this is a topic that I think, especially on online discourse, doesn't get the proper amount of nuance necessary. And genuinely, it's an issue that I struggle with, too. So as in any war, it's often the working class who gets sent to fight. On the other hand, many of the atrocities committed against innocent Vietnamese people

were carried out by soldiers on the ground. When Vietnam vets came back to the U.S. after the war, many of them face a disgusted citizenry who did not view them as heroes. How should we think about these complexities and how do you view the soldiers who went and fought in this war? That's a really great question, and I think it's a real paradox. It's one that I've tossed back and forth with a lot of people over the years. There's a great book about that that kind of puts it as Vietnam veterans, neither victims nor executioners, which kind of gets at the kind of binary that a lot of people are going to see these soldiers as

I don't know why I'm over here this job is evil they sent me here to Vietnam to killing us in people my mother wrote me said the president he doesn't care he trying to leave the footprints of America here they say we're trying to stop Chinese expansion but I ain't see no Chinese since we landed sent my whole entire unit thinking we could win

against the Viacorn guerrillas dad in Giuddin I didn't sign up to kill women or any children for every enemy soldier we killing six civilians You know, and it ain't right to me I ain't got enough A motherfucking fighting me It frightens me And I just want to see my son and moms

But over here they drop in seven million tons of bombs I spend my days dodging all these movie traps and moms And at night breaking the guard that I get back alive And I'm forced to sit back and wonder Why I was a part of Operation Rolling Thunder In the foxhole with nine months left here Jungle like the fucking Harbinger of death hair You know the American

Vietnam veteran is going to become a kind of ideological object in the years after the war. As people use the soldier as a kind of entryway to talk about all the different tensions that the war brought out and used by politicians as kind of ways to silence dissent is this story that was told, and it's a myth. You know, this story that's told about American soldiers coming back and everybody's spitting on them. The reality is that most Americans were intensely supportive of American veterans. The story that's more important is that, you know, the veterans are going to come back to a society that doesn't want to talk about the war, that wants to forget what happened, and that doesn't

have a place for anything but kind of, you know, blank patriotic platitudes. So that part of it is really important. And in terms of the class element, this is a working class war. I mean, 100%. And there's a great book called Working Class War by Christian Appie, who I really wanted to mention on this podcast, make sure his name is out there because Christian Appie is one of the, I think best historians working today in terms of talking about Vietnam and what it means in our memory. And he's got a, his first book, Working Class War, is about kind of recovering this idea

that the one thing that united soldiers in Vietnam was that they were from the lower economic classes, that whether they, whatever race they were coming from, the working class were the people who were drafted, totally disproportionate to the population. So the result is, yeah, you have this kind of working class sensibility that the soldiers are a part of. And, you know, the best kind of entryway in understanding these tensions is the hard hat riot. I don't know if you know the hard hat riot in 1970. What happened is, you know, Kent State happened in May of 1970. National Guardsmen opened fire on protesting students.

In fact, students who were actually not involved were shot by the National Guard. Four of them were killed. and there was a vigil in New York City. You know, the country was shocked by these killings at Kent State, but I want to underline the fact that many Americans were really happy that the National Guard had finally opened fire on college students. And you can find an incredible amount of editorials and letters to the editor in newspapers across the country of ordinary citizens writing in to say

how happy they were the National Guard shot college kids to death and that they should do it more and that we wouldn't have these problems if they would open fire on them more. So that was the kind of attitude that was in the country at the time. And in a couple days after Kent State, a group of high school and college students in New York City who were part of the anti-war movement and part of a number of anti-war organizations decided to do a vigil for the students at Kent State in Lower Manhattan, a construction union decided to go down there and confront them. The construction union was led by a number of really intensely right-wing pieces of shit who used their positions as, you know, union bosses to send the construction workers and inflame their emotions and send construction workers down there.

The construction workers went down there with American flags and their helmets and beat the shit out of all these kids, threw them through windows, et cetera. There were dozens of people very seriously injured. And this was called the hard hat riot. The next day, or over the next days, Richard Nixon put a hard hat, was photographed with a hard hat on his desk in the Oval Office and saying that the working class of America had finally stood up to these ungrateful anti-war kids who basically deserved what they got. So that was part of installing this myth, this myth that it was, you know, working class

people who, uh, who were patriotic and supporting the war. And it was these nasty little shits at college campuses that were, you know, the real enemy, um, of the American soldier in particular. Why this is a lie, um, is that there's a great, there's a great book called, uh, hard hats, hippies and hawks by Penny Lewis. And it's about all this stuff. And it really gets at the class element of the Vietnam War. The basic idea is that the working class were the people who were most likely to be against the war. So the further you go down the economic ladder in America in the 1960s and 70s, the more you're going to find people who are against the war. The more you go up the economic ladder, the more you find people who are supporting the war. And so that idea is a really

important one because the working class were against the war and the reason they were against the war is because for two reasons I think. One, their working class identity makes them understand that the war is bullshit and the war has always been a ruling class activity and the working class used to know that in America. But the other element of it is that the working class are the ones that are sending their kids to die in this war. So they have a visceral connection to the war, right? They're the ones that are actually suffering the most of losing their children, seeing their children crippled and destroyed. by this war. So the working class were natural anti-anti-wariers. And Penny Lewis shows this really well with, you know, she's a sociologist, so there's lots of statistics and stuff like that. But the basic idea is that we have been sold a lie. And the lie we've been sold is that the down-home working class people who work blue-collar jobs and drive pickup trucks are super patriotic and support American wars. And if you don't support American wars, you know, you're kind of betraying the heart and soul of this country. When the opposite is true, it's the ruling class who support the wars, and they support

the wars in part because they don't have to fight them, their kids don't have to fight them, and they can do what they always do, which is exploit the working class to their deaths. Thank you so much for saying that and for making very clear what the reality of that was, because that same bullshit, that same lie about the working class, about good patriot Americans and who the rabble are, that same lie is. marshaled every single day in our current society, whether it's about war or any other political issue that's divisive, is this same notion that is the, you know, working, like even Trump. I mean, how in the fuck can this clown who is a billionaire with silver spoon shoved in every

orifice since he's been born, act like he's this working class hero and people will buy into it and Fox News will push this mythos all the time. Yeah, and the evidence is that the working class does not support him. Yeah, exactly. Statistically, exactly. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's again the same lie because the reality is that the Trump supporters are, are, tend to be people with a little bit of more money. It's very, it's too easy for us to say, well, it's those stupid working class people, those rednecks that are voting for Trump when it's really, um, the guy that owns a car dealership. Yeah, it's the fucking insufferable suburbanites of this fucking country, you know? Yeah. But thank you for that. Because I think that's incredibly important. I really, really

hope people not only internalize that point, but argue it because, you know, part of this false memory about the Vietnam War is that we have to push back with the real truths of the shit and it still matters. I think the legacy which we'll get into at the end of this episode the legacy of the Vietnam War still matters because it informs so much of today's politics and the same exact currents and strains

that were present and intensified under the Vietnam War are still present with us today and we're still wrestling with them. So yeah, that's incredibly important. Yeah, the real fascists aren't the working class. They're the homeowners in America. Exactly right, exactly right. The petty bourgeois. Yes, there you go.

I don't think we help them one bit. All I think we've done is destroyed their country-related waste. No, I don't think we've helped them. As fellow human beings, I don't think they should be there doing that. Certainly a mature person can say they made a mistake. Why can't a government? You know, you let us all go off to war as a yay team, you know, fighting Vietnam and all this kind of shit in 1965 through 1968. Now, 1968 comes along and boo team come on home.

and all this shit, you know, and don't say nothing about it, because we don't want to hear about it because, you know, it's upsetting around dinner time, you know. Oh, God damn, it upset me, you know, for a whole goddamn year. It upset a lot of people to the point where they're fucking dead, you know, and all this shit. Now, you don't want to hear about it. I'll tell you about it every day. Make you sit out and puke on your dinner, you did?

Because you got me over there, and now you don't brought me back here and you want to forget it so somebody else can go do it somewhere else? Hell no, uh-uh. And you're going to hear it all every day as long as you live because, hey, it's going to be with me as long as I live When I get up in the morning, when John gets up in the morning, when a lot of dudes are sitting around here get up, man, the gut hurts because they got shot there. I got to put on the arm of leg because it ain't there no more, you dig?

And all the rest, my man, here's got a whole list of them. He can't work right, you know? Now you do something about that. You know, make that all disappear, you dig, you know. Make it all go away with the 6 o'clock news, turn it off, you know, or switch it to another channel and all that shit. Uh-uh, the hell with that, you dig. It's here and it's for real.

And it's going to happen again unless these folks just get up off their ass and realize it has happened, you know. All right. So actually, let's talk about the ruling class a little bit, since we're talking about it right now, which, and then this is important, too, because this is like, you know, putting names and faces to this brutality. Which members of the U.S. ruling class who orchestrated this war at the time stand out to you as particularly guilty or depraved? Who are the worst of the worst, in your opinion, and why? Oh, Lord. Okay. So, yeah, these are the devils. They're all white men. You know, the people that were the main architects of the war. I mean, there are a number of, of them. And I, you know, I struggle, I've struggled over so many years about how I, you know, feel about these people because it's like, you know, there's a weird powerlessness in hating them because they're dead, first of all. Well, some of them, some of them are still with us. But also, you know, they're, they're untouchable figures in some ways. And that's what's so

frustrating about them. Truman lied from 1950 on, on the nature and purposes of the French involvement, the colonial reconquest of Vietnam that we were financing. and encouraging. Eisenhower lied about the reasons for and the nature of our involvement with Ziem and the fact that he was in power essentially because of American support and American money and for no other reason. Kennedy lied about the type of involvement we were doing there, our own combat involvement, and about the recommendations that were being made to him for greater involvement. President Kennedy lied about the degree of our participation in the overthrow of Ziam. The Johnson, of course, lied and lied and lied about our provocations against the North Vietnamese prior to and after the Tonkin Gulf incidents about the plans for bombing North Vietnam and the nature of the build-up of American troops in Vietnam.

Nixon, as we now know, misled the and lied to the American public for the first months of his office in terms of our bombing of Cambodia and of. of Laos, ground operations in Laos, the reasons for our invasion of Cambodia and of Laos, and the prospects for the mining of Haiphon that finally came about in 1972, but was envisioned as early as 1969. The American public was lied to month by month by each of these five administrations.

As I say, it's a tribute to the American public that their leaders perceived that they had to be lied to. it's no tribute to us that it was so easy to fool the public. You know, I think you're right to, I think you're right to locate Kennedy as a big figure in the acceleration of the Vietnam War. And I think it's a hard thing to get around and it's a hard thing for people to square with the image of Kennedy, just like the image of Obama as this kind of like benevolent guy who you want to go, you know, hang out with or something. He's very mannered.

I think that's a part of it, right? In a ruling class, these are men that were educated at Harvard. So how could they be, you know, how could they be brutal? How could they be these kind of bloody monsters that we imagine them to be because they're from Harvard? And that's something we've got to get over as a culture. But either way, you know, JFK, you know, this is something that I talked about on my podcast with Frederick Logovall, who's a great Vietnam war historian. You know, JFK's culpability in this is pretty large. I mean, he extended the war in a million different ways, and you're right, he was a brutal cold warrior.

But it's really, you know, it's Lyndon Johnson who's going to send ground troops. And that's a leap that Logueval and others historians that have really studied the archival stuff have kind of concluded that, that Kennedy would not have done that, that Kennedy would have most likely found a diplomatic solution gotten out of Vietnam. Johnson was not going to do that. And Johnson, the kind of pathological tragedy of the Johnson administration is that Johnson was expanding the great society. He was, you know, he was a liberal in the classic New Deal sense. And, you know, a lot of people in the DSA would go crazy for Lyndon Johnson because he's like, you know, the stuff he was creating is about civil rights. It's about expanding democracy.

It's about expanding programs like Medicare and Medicaid. I mean, great society is really something that in terms of. American society, we would die for something like that now. But Johnson is ultimately going to sacrifice those programs to the Vietnam War. And that's the pathological tragedy in a lot of ways. And he knew it. I mean, he knew that ultimately that he lost his way. Johnson's going to leave office disgraced in 1968, go grow his hair along and start smoking cigarettes and kind of lose his mind and die in a couple years in Texas. The other people, you know, I think you can't get around. John Foster Dolis is an insane monster.

the Dulles brothers, people should know about them. The Dulles brothers, John Foster Dulles was a secretary of state during the Eisenhower administration. He was the person that went to Geneva and basically said there was no negotiation with Hocci Min at all. The British and the French were like, who is this guy? Like, it's kind of hilarious. They were like, this guy is a completely antagonistic asshole. You know, the Dulles brothers and his brother was director of the CIA at the time. So they're like a really important story.

You know, William Westmoreland, who was the general in charge of the military strategy, he's in that documentary hearts and minds saying that, you know, oriental people don't care about their lives and you can kind of kill them and doesn't bother them at all. He had a savage racial attitude towards the Vietnamese. I would place him high on the list of people that have their hands most bloody and are probably burning in hell right now, hopefully. You can't get around, I guess, the last one I would mention, there are a million others, but in terms of the ruling class,

Henry Kissinger, who, you know, was just confronted last week at NYU by a couple of brave students who stood up and yelled that he was a war criminal, and I'm glad that he's hearing that until he's dying days. But David, David, David. Yeah. What about civility, though? Oh, man. You're right. They should be polite to him. Do people, I guess you're right. I mean, the crowd, what's amazing to me about that crowd, because I watched that, that clip there's a student that stands up and is like you're a war criminal you should be ashamed of yourself and the whole crowd is like just like so vicious they're like throw her out get her out of here i mean they're like literally like just filled with hatred and so and you

talk about the legacy of the vietnam war being alive today i mean henry kissinger was at fucking n yu a couple weeks ago speaking so continuing to like be celebrated um and given money to come speak and everything else um you know kissinger there's a lot you could talk about with the vietnam war. Him and Nixon together were a really dark duo. And if you want to go back and look at the, I listen to any of the Nixon Kissinger tapes, I mean, the kinds of things they're talking about very casually are bombing dams in Cambodia, knowing that's going to flood these regions and kill up to a million people.

And they're talking about this stuff as if it's just, you know, little bits of a wider strategy. And that's what we're going to have to do. They even contemplate, you know, they contemplate nuclear war together. other, and their attitude is, you know, Kissinger is what's described as from the realist school of, you know, diplomacy, that what that means is he doesn't really care about life at all. It's entirely a strategic game to him. It's all power.

And the fact that we not only allowed that person to be such an integral part of forming the history of the world in the last 60, 70 years, but also celebrate this man and act like he's a brilliant person from, again, the Ivy League is something that indicates a really fucked up part of American society. Watch when that guy dies. You know, when that guy dies, yes, all of us on Twitter are going to be like dunking on him and, you know, making fun of him and everything. And that's great. I love seeing that shit. But like the ruling class is going to be, just like they did with John McCain, they're going to be trying very, very hard to kind of lionize and canonize this person. That's a person who we should, we should, we should

regard as one of the lowest forms of life to ever have power in history. Absolutely, beautifully said. It reminds me, and I have to do it, this classic Anthony Bourdain quote about Henry Kissinger. I'm going to read it in full because, I mean, Anthony Bourdain took his life earlier this year. If anything, you take from Anthony Bourdain's life, this quote really sticks out. And it's funny because I posted it a while back and actually it kind of went viral. And it got back to Anthony Bordane before he killed himself. and he actually retweeted it a few months before he died.

That's amazing. Yeah, so it's one that sticks with me for sure. Yeah, you should read it. And, you know, I just, Bourdain, it's so weird to, like, you bring him up, it still hurts. It's still like this weird tragedy that I think it speaks to, you know, our lack of a system of left kind of celebrities. Like, you know, whatever they might be, people that we can look to and be inspired by, you know, there's a dearth of that and we need more of that. I mean, I doubt he was a hardcore lefty or anything, but. No. The way he used his incredibly huge platform at CNN to go into these places and talk about the history of imperialism, to talk about the history of war, and really go down and meet the regular people inside these societies and give their point of view, that's important. And using a big platform like CNN to do that is doubly impressive.

He's that side of that. He's that side that we talked about with the Gandhi side of Ho Chi Minh. He's that side of it, right? Like, that's a model for how to endure yourself to people across many cultures. We need a Marxist Bourdain. Like, let someone get on that. Fuck, yeah. So here's the quote. I'm going to read it in full. This is by Anthony Bourdain. Once you've been to Cambodia, you'll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about the treacherous, pervaricating, murderous scumbag,

sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia, the fruits of his genius for statesmanship, and you will never never understand why he's not sitting in the dock at the Hague next to Milosevic. While Henry continues to nibble noi rolls and Ramaki at AIS parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he's secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, and undermined and through to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg. Incredibly powerful. Yeah.

Beautifully said. So, okay, never forgive, never forget. Those are the names. Those are the faces that were instrumental in this mass murder and this war crime. but how did the war eventually end? Who won? And what was the body count on all sides once the smoke finally cleared? Well, I mean, how the war ended is contentious.

You know, like the story, how you tell that story depends on your point of view. But the basic idea is that the United States lost the war. The United States was not able to enforce its will upon the Vietnamese people, despite unleashing the more bombs on Vietnam than all the bombs that were done. dropped by all sides in World War II. There was just a, I can't really overstate how much violence the American government perpetrated upon the people of Vietnam. But at the end of that process, you know, Nixon, Nixon came in in 1968. The ending is political. Nixon comes in 1968 and he essentially shifts the war strategy from, he starts pulling ground troops out. He

realizes that that strategy is killing Americans at a rate that the American people are not able to sustain. And so he starts pulling troops out and making a big deal out of troop withdrawals and starts bombing the country much, much more heavily. And that that bombing campaign is going to last all the way through the end of the war. In fact, Kissinger is going to drop bombs even after the peace treaties are signed just as a fuck you and kill, you know, thousands of people. So like the last parts of the war really are still really, really ugly. It's Nixon and Kissinger are trying to. They're goal is to win what they call peace with honor. So they want to get out, Nixon and Kistinger want to get out of the war. They want the war to be over, but they want to be able to say they won. So, you know,

it's just another kind of absurd part of this is that, you know, we have essentially a national ego that can't be hurt. So we have to kind of find, rig up a way to like blame people for why we lost. Nixon's going to blame journalists and the press. Nixon's going to blame, you know, a fractured American society that didn't support him enough and didn't support the war enough. But, you know, Nixon's going to ultimately leave in disgrace himself with Watergate. So the end of the war is that the United States, you know, goes to Paris ultimately in 1973. The treaty is signed and the Americans ultimately pull out all, pull out at the same time the NLF is basically winning village by village and is just taking over village by village and getting

closer and closer to Saigon. And by the time the United States leaves in those last helicopters, and you can see those very famous images of the helicopters leaving. And, you know, South Vietnamese people that are, you know, desperately trying to get on those helicopters so they know what's coming, which is the NLF. And the NLF is going to come in and be pretty brutal to the people that collaborated with the Americans. So that means there's going to be a period of chaos and violence in Vietnam as the NLF secures its final power. But the end of the of the story is that the Vietnam, south and north Vietnam are united. Ho Chi Minh's vision is achieved. They are liberated. They are communist. They are one nation. And that is true all the way

to today. So the United States did not achieve its goals. And so that means they lost. But winning and losing is accepting the kind of framework that the Americans wanted to see it in the first place. So I think the basic lesson for us to just think about how the war and is the war ended when politically it was just impossible for Nixon to continue it. And Nixon pulls out and that's the end. But that's going to mean that that open end of the war is going to leave a kind of space for this kind of contested memory thing to happen in the years after. And I think Ronald Reagan is going to be the one that's most important in reconstituting a vision of Vietnam that's totally different from what actually happened. One that is much easier to swallow for

Americans, I think. Yeah. That legacy is still being wrestled over with regards to the Iraq war as well. Totally. That same pattern plays out. But, you know, this was, this was ultimately a victory for the forces of anti-imperialism and the communist who fought bravely, the National Liberation Front, and all this regular Vietnamese people who defended their villages, defended their farms, and fought their asses off to beat back this American imperial death machine. I mean, they're all incredibly courageous, but at the same time, as you kind of alluded to, to talk about winners, and lose, like, who won and who lost the war, it's almost, it's almost, it's, it's incoherent to talk about it, because the bloodshed, the body count, the amount of misery and

suffering, especially, and it always gets me when it's like the elderly or the very young, children, when they're the ones that are being targeted and when they're the ones getting hurt, that suffering is just like no amount of technical victory could ever, ever make up for that. So I kind of reject the dichotomy between winning and losing. I mean, yes, the anti-imperial force is won in the technical sense. But the amount of brutality and bloodshed that the Americans inflicted on the Vietnamese people is just a fucking tragedy of world historical proportions. Yeah, it's pretty brutal.

And I should say that, you know, a lot of Americans did come to terms of that and understand it through the course of, you know, the Mi Lai Masker, if you've seen those photos. And then the famous photo that's called Napalm Girl, the girl with outstretched arms. And she's nine years old in the photo. Kim Fook, who became an anti-war activist in her own right and his. is currently a anti-war speaker and figure in Canada. You know, she, that picture became the kind of iconic, you know, the iconic photo of the war for a lot of Americans to understand what had been, we had done. And so I would say that a lot of Americans, there is a set of Americans. I mean, I study them because I study the anti-war movement and I go talk to the people who were involved in the anti-war movement.

they're you know this this stuff radicalized them not just radicalized them but completely you know broke the hearts of a lot of people on the left in this in this country during this era um they they understood what the crime of the vietnamese they understood uh how what the american military machine was doing to these people and like us you know like us when we look at um troops aligning at the border as uh you know thousands of migrants uh seek asylum in the United States and troops ready to open fire upon them, we feel helpless, you know, and we feel broken and we feel like, oh, we want to do something, but we don't know what. And I think that a lot of Americans specifically, leftists especially, you know, they live in that feeling. They live in that feeling of like being brokenhearted about these tragedies, knowing that you're responsible for them in some way and it's unclear what to do about it. um so like in terms of like you know the vietnam war you have like in vietnam the people knew what to do

about it because they were the ones being killed but the people in america have this weird kind of distance from that stuff and that distance is you know some people can care about it and some people choose not to so like that luxury and that privilege is kind of the hallmark of american engagement with war right i feel like i'm fucking heartbroken every goddamn day but maybe, I don't know, I think people on our side, I mean, I don't want to get too, too off the path here, but certainly, certainly, like Chase said, if you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you're, then you're a conrad of mine. And I think, you know, it hurts to be that way, to feel empathy for people that you don't even know. But it's also, I think,

what kind of makes us strong and makes us know that at the end of the day, with all of our weird failures and flaws, that we are on the right side of history and we don't want to see this should happen again and you know at some point it's like by any means necessary we have to prevent this imperial death machine from continuing to devour the world yeah and and if we lose that empathy and what we're doing then we kind of lose the the point of the whole project in the first place exactly right i mean we're the ones that are you know we're standing up for humanity and we're standing up for the goodness of humanity and you know sometimes you got to do that with guns but um it's it's something that that i think we can't forget that we're we're standing up for a positive

vision of what human beings can be. And that does keep me going. I think it keeps a lot of us going. But let's transition over to the reflections and legacies part of this conversation, which I think you, you know, waded into a little bit there. But what do you think are the biggest misunderstandings about the Vietnam War? And what do you think it's essential to understand about the war for leftists today? The biggest misunderstandings about the war are everything.

You know, like I said, we're losing a kind of generational knowledge because this stuff isn't taught in schools um ken burns has you know that 20 hour 18 hour documentary out now which i actually did an episode with christian appie about taking it apart um and criticizing it a lot because it's not the best delivery system for um for information about the war and if you're i'm sorry what what's the name of that episode so we can plug it right now it's just a christian appie is the is the guest i don't know if i was naming episodes back then um but yeah that's on my podcast the nostalgia trap so if people want to go back and listen to that we uh i would i would actually love to do another episode about it because there's so much in that Ken Burns documentary

that contains, you know, all of this mythology. I mean, one of the things they have at the end of the story, at the end of 18 hours, they kind of give the final word to the anti-war movement. And it's a woman who's crying and apologizing to American troops for disrespecting them by being against the war. And it's like, yeah, and it's just vomit. And it's kind of unbelievable. But that's what I'm talking about. This kind of like, you know, the fact that Ken Burns can away with bullshit like that is because people don't know what happened. I wish more Americans understood what the Vietnam War was. I wish they understood that it was genocidal. But at the same time, you know, I think in Trump's America, there are a lot of Americans who would just say, good,

you know, like, I don't care. Like, they literally, like, have that bad of an attitude. And that was always there. I think that, you know, I mentioned that the Kent State thing, like, you can go back and read these editorials. There's a great book called Reporting Vietnam. that has a lot of excerpts from mainstream news. But these editorials of ordinary American citizens that were celebrating either the deaths of Martin Luther King or celebrating when kids were shot at Kent State, this was not like some obscure part of American life.

This was like the mainstream of American middle class have this attitude. So with that in mind, the people that fought against the war in Vietnam, the anti-war movement in America, the young people who got involved in that, the old people that got involved in that, they were, they knew that they were fighting against long odds, and they were fighting against a culture that was really a war culture. And I think that the United States is still very much a militarized war police culture. I mean, I think people are more sympathetic to the police and military than really any other

institution. And that's really disturbing. But you've got to remember that it's always been that way, that the left, particularly anti-war people know that they're outnumbered. And the outnumbered, you know, the Vietnam men were outnumbered too. It's just the way you play your politics when you're outnumbered is a very specific thing. And I think the left should go back to the Vietnam anti-war movement and the other kind of things that were happening in the wider left during that era to kind of understand how to navigate some of the, the trickier elements of doing that kind of politics in America in

our time. Yeah. And you know, you mentioned the episode you did on the Ken Burns documentary, it's something I've watched. And, you know, I don't know as much as you, but I was certainly recoiling in lots of parts. So I think it's important to push back on the narrative because, I mean, fucking liberals loved it. And what Ken Burns does is sort of this, this centrist, both sides sort of approach to things that at times is just pure apology for imperialism, or at least it softens the blow of imperialism or tries to humanize imperialism and the people who carry it out. And, you know, that is a very dangerous current in our society. And so it should be combated. And I applaud you for

doing so. I got to go listen to that. Thank you. How insane is it that Ken Burns can make this movie in this era and not recognize Vietnam as anything more than an absolute criminal enterprise by the American government? Instead, it's like it's as if, you know, he plays the Bob Dylan song at the end. It's like, it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, you know. And it's basically like Ken Burns' message is that we should just remember the Vietnam War is this kind of like blank memory of things that, you know, shit was crazy and we all went through it together and we all sang songs together. And it was kind of like there's no lesson to be learned at all. And there's no power analysis at all. It's a really, it's a disturbing thing because it's like a memory

book. You know, my podcast is called The Nostalgia Trap. And Ken Burns' Vietnam War documentary is 100% a nostalgia trap. It's meant to kind of placate people. and put them, lull them into this notion that the Vietnam War is a dead memory and not something that we have to contend with, understand its meaning, or we're going to, you know, obviously repeat the same kind of fascist crimes that we committed then. Fuck yeah. Yeah. Good work on that. So what's the legacy of the Vietnam War for Vietnam today? How has the war changed that country? Well, I mentioned that, I mentioned, you know, the kind of, like, really grim chemical legacy of Agent Orange and other things that were dropped on the country. So there's that part of it. But there's also, you know, the war still, you know, is a complicated legacy in Vietnam.

I don't think there's a monolithic attitude among the Vietnamese people about it. There's still a lot of bitterness about what people did, who they were working with, et cetera. There's a really fantastic, I know I keep recommending books and stuff, but there's a really fantastic graphic novel called Vietnam America. And it's by G.B. Tron, a T-R-A-N, who's a... young artist who is the child of people who fled South Vietnam during the fall of Saigon in 75. And it really gets at, I use it in my classes a lot, because it really gets at this kind of, you know, bifurcated cultural experience of people that are Vietnamese, that had an identity that was split by war, that was split by outside forces.

The war's legacy in Vietnamese society today is a heavy one. I've never been to Vietnam to communicate with and met with a few of the people from the main museums over there in Ho Chi Minh City that are meant to kind of display the war and what their museum is, I mean, I can't explain to you how different their museum's presentation of the war is

from the kind of museum presentation you would see here, which was, you know, they call it the American War. They don't shy away from the fact that the Vietnamese are very proud of the fact that they defeated the Americans, and this is their war for independence. And, you know, it's recognized, I think, as the critical moment in the history of their country is finally uniting in 1975. But it's also one that, you know, I think we as leftists should understand that, you know, this was not, this was not, you know, simple. This was

really this was really serious and really violent and turned people against each other in really ugly ways. And the politics of Vietnam are going to be fucked up for a while until all the dust settles. So today, you know, the

Vietnamese people, I think, remember the war as just this incredibly tragic event in their history, but one that they can draw a lot of pride from, which you contrast that with Americans, who have to you know it's not a proud part of our history when people bring it up they don't know what to say about it so the only thing they can say is well it's really sad that we all spit on

the troops when they came back that's a lie though that's not what happened right but that but that lie allows americans to kind of slip out of responsibility for what they did to vietnam and locate the the whole tragedy of that war um in the bodies of uh american soldiers which is a really unfair thing to do to our veterans. And one that I think that is, you're right, still very much happening in the sense that conservative forces like to use those soldiers as props for their politics. And, you know, liberals do it too. Oh, yeah.

But that legacy is one that hasn't been broken and is very much alive. And it's, you talk about infuriating. I mean, seeing the way that Vietnam war is invoked even by, you know, people. that are either for or against Trump, it's just always wrong. And it never really, never really centers the Vietnamese people. So here's kind of a tricky question, but I'm genuinely interesting. I think our listeners are as well. In your opinion, what lessons can anti-imperialists, leftist and militants learn from the National Liberation Front and their strategy fighting a much bigger and far better equipped U.S. war machine? So what you're really asking is, can we

fight a revolutionary war in America. David, the FBI is listening. The FBI is listening. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, I mentioned that, I mentioned that story of Jop and Ho and their 34 guys and their, you know, 16 guns or whatever in that room and how they defeated the military, the French military just nine years later as kind of an example of, you know, how extraordinary a thing that is. I think there's probably been a lot of people in rooms with guns like that that said they were going to plan something that didn't defeat a major imperial power, right? And just got their ass kicked and wiped and erased from history. So, you know, in terms of, in terms of lessons, I think the main lesson is that you have to endure yourself to the people.

You know, and I think that however that takes shape in America is something that's really tricky to imagine because we're such a, you know, we're such a weird culture and the internet is here too. it's really hard to think about it's really hard to kind of compare the two situations at all i actually wouldn't at all we're not in we're not in the situation that the vietnam were in uh or the vietnamese people were in at all that being said you know as someone who is on the left and someone who imagines that um we're going to have to have a revolutionary struggle in order to bring um peace and justice to this world and actually protect people from fascists and stuff like that you know, I think that there are lessons, the better lessons are maybe to kind of look at

the left and look at the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 70s, see what worked for them and what didn't. But the stuff that worked the best was the stuff that kind of had wide popularity and finding that, again, is hard to do. But at the same time, you know, that's how politics works and people people are able to still build coalitions so i mean the the kind of boring answer to this is that it's a lot of hard work um and and and and you know hoche men's hoche men's vision as much as it was achieved you know they sacrificed millions of people and a lot of vietnamese harshly judge ho chie men for that and they actually look at him as someone who you know wasted so many lives in vietnam for this vision so you know i guess the bottom line is that

that transformative struggles are usually not super peaceful ones. And, you know, we've mentioned on my show, someone mentioned, well, recently that, like, well, you know, slavery ended in America, and we ended that pretty quickly. And I'm like, well, yeah, about 600,000 Americans killed each other in the course of that happening. So, you know, the basic lesson in the Vietnam War is that revolutionary struggle is messy and violent and hard. Choose your sides wisely. but also, you know, in America, we have to come to terms with the very specific, you know, social, cultural, economic privileges that we have as being kind of apart from that, the real bad news around the world, and how we join up with people that are different from us is going to be something that is the challenge of our time. And I say that because the anti-war movement attempted to kind of join up with the revolutionaries and the NLF. were lots of people in America who were waving NLF flags and were kind of like wanted to either

abstractly or even realistically join up with the NLF and some world revolution. And those people, you know, it didn't work out. It didn't work out for a lot of different reasons. But that, that lesson is one that I think that we're going to have to come the terms with, is how do we, how do we as privileged members of the American class, you know, how do we best join and best show solidarity with and best help and accelerate and expand the people that are doing the dirty work around the world because there are going to be, and there are already people in revolutionary struggle right now. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that's well said. You know, operating inside the imperial core, inside the capital of global imperialism and capitalism is a much different and interesting ways, much more difficult thing to do. How do we even approach this topic? when we're living in the belly of the beast itself. I mean, we've talked on the state and revolution episode we put out recently about some of these issues. And on the guillotine, we try to wrestle with this difficult issue as well. But I think at this moment, some of the core things that the left needs to be orienting itself towards, based on what you said and based on my analysis and comrades that I respect, is mass work actually going out to communities, working class communities, immigrant communities, and doing work that they need done.

The second thing would be organized self-defense, taking this idea that you're going to have to defend your political project. And even we're seeing the rise of fascist movements coming out and attacking left-wing protest or left-wing things in the same way during the Vietnam era. You had, you know, we're going to do a rally against the war. And then these reactionaries show up and create violence. Yeah. This summer, I think, at the San Antonio Ice Encampment Patriot Front, the fascist organization came out to that ice encampment, totally outnumbered the activists there. And just ransacked the entire setup. So taking organized self-defense and defending your political projects, even if they're incredibly small, is something we have to take more seriously now than we've had to maybe 10 or 20 years ago.

And then the last thing, as you were alluding to, is this internationalism is realizing that the struggle is not just here. The struggle is inexorably bound with the struggle of people all over the world. And as Americans, as Westerners, we do inherently materially benefit in ways that we can. can't opt out of by the domination of the global south by the imperial death machine. And that contradiction is sort of at the core of our radical movements. And it has to be wrestled with. It has to be dealt with. Or else, you know, we're just going to be replicating the same sort of white supremacy and imperialism that leads to these tragedies in the first place. So I think you and I converge on that quite a bit. Yeah, totally. No, those are all, those are all really

great ideas. And the kind of one thing I would add to that that we've already mentioned is to It's to remember that we're the good people, you know, and we're the ones that are, that have to kind of prove that. And endearing yourself to the people involves, you know, showing why that is, you know, why we should have, why we should be kind of the legitimate inheritors of world power. And that's the people themselves. My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud

for big powerful America and shoot them for what they never called me nigger they never lynched me they didn't put no dogs on me they'd rob me in my nationality rape and kill my mother and father

well I'm going to shoot them for what how are I going to shoot them little poor little black people and little babies and children women how can I shoot them poor people just take me to jail and so you know the other thing I would mention is I've talked a million times

over the years about you know this question of you know guns and violence it always comes up with guys like guys like to talk about this stuff a lot yeah yeah and you know it makes sense it's part of it's part of the fantasy of american violence is that it's transformative you know we tell stories about the american revolution and the civil war and even world war two as the kind of like benevolent violence so it can't i i guess that's not surprising um but i think the real lesson of of of Vietnam and even, you know, the lesson of the Vietmin and the NLF is that we have to, we have to be the ones that people look to and say, yes, that's, that's who we identify with.

Those are the, those are our values too. And you can build something that's pretty unstoppable if you can, if people recognize that their values are, are together and that they're, that they're building that something, something, I guess that the bottom. line is give people a meaning, you know, give people a meaning in their lives, and that is a project that will grow. Yeah, this isn't a fucking action movie. It's not, it's not a platform for people to play out their machismo. It's a way of serving the people and rooting yourself in communities so that you have credibility and that you can actually operate from that base of support, which is utterly essential. That's what I wanted to say. Yes. Okay, last question.

We started with questions about Ho Chi Minh. It's only right that we end with them. What can we learn today from the ideas and actions of Ho Chi Minh as a revolutionary leader and what stands out to you most about him? Again, he's a man who read the situation correctly. Ho Chi Min very early on said that you will kill 10 of our people for every one of yours that we kill, but we'll still win because you don't have the will to take that. He was actually really prophetic about America in particular. He said that if the Americans actually come and fight a war against him, the way we will win is by touching the hearts of the American people. And when you see people in America, a couple years later with NLF flags and Americans, you know, a society really being torn apart by this

idea that millions of Americans were opposed to the policy, that's really important that Ho Chi Minh was correct about that. And he saw that this was not just, about who had the bigger guns. I mean, America, this is how fucking stupid the American military and government machine was during this era, and I really blame the government more than the military, is they really just believe that just brute force was enough to change a situation in this dynamic and to enforce their will. And what they learned was that there weren't enough guns in the world to unleash upon these people to stop them from their vision of liberating themselves because there are only other option with slavery and death. So, you know, the fact that

the American government and military didn't understand that and win in with just force is a lesson for us now to understand something that Ho understood, which is that there's this kind of political, cultural end of things that you have to be seen as legitimate in the eyes of the people. If not, the guns don't work. And I guess the dark end of that is that America, despite knowing this just kept kept on with the guns and kept killing people, even though they knew it wasn't going to do anything. The bottom line for us is, you know, you can go through some dark, some dark history in your life. And the people who live through the Vietnam War, whether they were in Vietnam or in the United States, around the world, you know,

this was a global thing. And so, you know, we have to, I don't know, we have to be able to to have our eyes wide open as we move through dramatic historical events. And I think that Ho provides us with a kind of model, especially as leftists, for how to maintain a kind of consistent set of revolutionary values, even as the world is just chaotic around you. David, it's been a genuine honor to speak to and learn from you. Thank you so much for coming on for tackling this difficult and huge subject and doing it in a way that is incredibly nuanced and unique

and offers that true working class proletarian, anti-imperialist perspective before we let you go, what recommendations would you offer to anyone who wants to learn more about this war and where can listeners find you, your book, your podcast, and your work online? Well, first of all, thank you so much for saying that, Brett. I really appreciate it. I had a really good time. I think the Vietnam War is such a huge subject. We could go on and on, and you should definitely bring in other historians with other perspectives, because there's a lot of us that are starting to be, you know, the kind of radical end of the Vietnam War history discipline.

And I think you're going to see that grow as you have a generation of historians like me who were born well after the war was over and are coming to it without the kind of baggage of the historians that wrote the histories before. So that part of it is important. I mentioned Christian Appie. He's one of the writers that I really recommend. And his recent book is called American Reckoning. I would check that out. The documentary Hearts and Minds is, I think we just tweeted out that there's free copies of it streaming on Archive.org.

Hearts and Minds is a documentary made by Peter Davis, who was a big part of the anti-war movement and created a really a document that I think will withstand the test of time as telling or providing a picture of American and Vietnamese society that is just shattered. A really great, great movie, 1974. But there's also, if you're interested in the kind of radical end, the more radical end, there's also a movie that came out in 68 called Year of the Pig. That's a really radical, more radical take, more, I think, avant-garde in its aesthetic. But either way, both of those are really intense documentaries that I think show a lot more complicated history than what you're going to see.

in the Ken Burns, which I recommend watching. I think you should watch it, but understand that there are deep critiques of that perspective that Burns provides. And in terms of finding my stuff, my book is called Dangerous Grounds. I mentioned that. Anti-war, coffee houses,

and military descent in the Vietnam era. It's out from University of North Carolina Press, and it's about the movement that's called the GI movement. That was a big part of building anti-war

coalitions with the military during the Vietnam era. So that is my book. And then, you know, I think one of the main works I do as a historian is my podcast, which is called The Nistalgia Trap. I interview historians and journalists and other people who I regard as, you know, people that are writing about radical stuff, the left, politics, things like that. So if people are interested in history, politics, and radical stuff, check out Nistalgia Trap. And again, thank you, Brett. I think your podcast is awesome. and continue doing this work. I think that, you know, as much as I talk about the coffee houses, as these really important sites for the left, in the 60s and 70s, podcasts are places where people can have conversations that you can't really have anywhere else. I mean, we just sat down for two hours, and we've never met each other, but we banged out a lot of really important stuff about the Vietnam War. And we're going to share this with your audience. And I think that that is a really important part of building the kind of knowledge and solidarity that we're going to need to get through what promises

to be an intense life through this history. Absolutely, brother. Yeah, extremely well said. And although we had never met in real life, you have a friend and a comrade here in Omaha, Nebraska, anytime I'm needed. Let's keep up the great work with your podcast and your books and all of that and sort of addressing this complicated history from a radical perspective. And let's see if we can work in the future together because I'd love to have more

conversations with you going forward. Thank you for listening. RevLeft Radio is 100% listener funded. If you like what we do here, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio or make a one-time donation at BuyMea Coffee.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. will be in the show notes.