Vietnam, US Amnesia, and the spectacle of power

As America marks 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War, the silence speaks volumes. The war was not an error in tactics, but a deliberate projection of imperial violence cloaked in moral pretence

It all began there: their arrogance, miscalculation, oversimplification, and chronic inability to conscientiously accept that protecting the rights of others and respecting their will is not an act of benevolence, but a prerequisite for securing peace at home.

This is the true crisis that has plagued the United States throughout its history — a moral affliction that has morphed into a habitual performance of impunity, a praxis of political nihilism. It has become almost diabolical in its predictability.

The leader becomes everything — even, as Trump jested, the Pope: “Why don’t I become Pope?” he smirked shortly after completing the first hundred days of his extraordinary second term in office, while the world mourned the death of Pope Francis, a man of towering moral stature.

The flippant remark reveals not just the moral decay of a singular figure but the hollowness of a system where ethics are memes and policy is scripted like late-night satire. American power, once cloaked in lofty rhetoric, now feeds off spectacle. Everything — joy, tragedy, and farce — is commodified, and all are delivered by a single man in high-definition absurdity.

It was in the thick of such ideological exhaustion that I met Daniel Ellsberg, who passed away in 2023, in Stockholm during a stark winter in 2014. The air was sharp, but his gaze was sharper. This was the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing a war that had long abandoned morality for optics.

He listened with the solemnity of someone who had borne witness to institutionalised deception and replied with the deliberateness of a man who understood its cost.

After our conversation, as we were stepping out, Lonnie Snowden, the father of Edward Snowden, appeared, introduced to me by Daniel. “My son is a rigorous reader,” he said quietly, almost apologetically. “Many Americans don’t like what he has done. But there is a reason. There are Americans who wish to live with conscience. They will go to any length to expose the truth.”

Meanwhile, Daniel reaffirmed, “The public is lied to every day by their officials, and if you can’t handle the truth, you don’t belong in a democracy.” This is where the bottom line lies in much of the arbitrariness of the US remaining a superpower, and in what happened in Vietnam.

The Vietnam War, whose 50th anniversary we now mark with barely a whisper of accountability, remains a searing indictment of the American empire. It was not merely a war of Cold War miscalculation — as official histories would have us believe but a brutal, deliberate campaign of domination, justified through intellectual cowardice and cloaked in ideological alibis.

What began as a nationalist movement by the Vietnamese to free themselves from colonial yokes, first French, then Japanese — was quickly rebranded by the West as a communist threat. The United States, in an unholy marriage of paranoia and hubris, chose to crush this desire for sovereignty under the heel of firepower.

Ho Chi Minh, before he was labelled a Red, was a nationalist and poet who quoted Thomas Jefferson in Vietnam’s Declaration of Independence. On  September 2, 1945, he declared: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights.”

This was not mimicry. It was an invitation to solidarity. But the West, deaf to any history but its own, betrayed that appeal. America refused to see Vietnam except through a Manichaean lens, where every call for autonomy was communism in disguise and every insurgent was a Soviet puppet.

So began the bloodletting. By the war’s end, more than three million Vietnamese civilians were dead. Entire villages were erased under Operations Rolling Thunder and Ranch Hand. The United States dropped more bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia than it did in the entirety of World War II. Napalm, a horrific concoction of polystyrene, gasoline, and benzene, was deployed without mercy. Children fled, their skin melting off in molten strips. Kim Phuc, the naked girl in the Pulitzer-winning photograph, became a symbol of American cruelty. “Too hot! Too hot!” she had cried, her flesh on fire, her innocence permanently cauterised.

Between 1961 and 1971, more than 20 million gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed over Vietnam. It defoliated forests, poisoned water sources, and sowed carcinogenic legacy into the land. Generations later, Vietnamese children are still born with grotesque deformities.

The American Government has acknowledged the “use” of Agent Orange but not its criminality. Reparations remain elusive, and legal redress is denied. The crimes are filed under bureaucratic euphemisms, buried in the footnotes of history textbooks.

The My Lai massacre, where over 500 unarmed civilians were slaughtered by American troops in 1968, is often cited as an aberration. It was not. It was systemic. The Phoenix Program, a CIA-backed initiative, sanctioned thousands of extrajudicial killings. Interrogations morphed into torture, and torture into routine. In the words of former CIA officer Bart Osborn: “I never saw an interrogation. Not once. What I saw was an assassination. They didn’t even bother to interrogate. They just killed them.”

And who remembers the lesser-known horrors? The Tay Vinh massacre? The bulldozing of Ben Tre, where an American officer reportedly said, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it”? These aren’t missteps; they are the natural consequence of a doctrine that treats foreign lives as expendable abstractions.

America supported Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic autocrat, in a majority — Buddhist nation. Diem’s regime jailed monks, banned Buddhist flags, and massacred protestors. The Buddhist Crisis of 1963 reached its horrific crescendo when Thich Quang Duc immolated himself in Saigon.

He sat calmly as flames consumed him, a silent scream against tyranny. “To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance,” read his final letter. And yet, to the West, he was either an anomaly or a propaganda tool. Buddhism, in this context, was not passive spirituality. It was resistance.

The institutional response in America has been one of strategic amnesia. Commemorations are scripted, not sincere. The Pentagon’s memorials praise bravery, but silence barbarity. Veterans are paraded, but victims are forgotten. The real question is not whether America regrets Vietnam, it’s whether it ever really considered it a mistake. Daniel Ellsberg told me, “They never meant to win. They just didn’t want to lose in a way that made them look weak.”

On this 50th anniversary, the question is not whether America lost in Vietnam, but whether it ever truly intended to win without annihilation. And how many Vietnams have followed since, from Fallujah to Kandahar, Mosul to Raqqa, and Gaza to Sanaa, America exports its righteousness with payloads of destruction.

The theatre may change, but the script remains disturbingly constant. Vietnam was never a mere misstep in execution; it was a fundamental miscalculation in conception.

The ghosts of My Lai, Tay Vinh, and Kim Phuc’s molten flesh do not fade; they persist, festering in the collective memory, never fully acknowledged. These haunting images and legacies have been woven into the fabric of American foreign policy, where the “cost of war” is debated in terms of strategy and numbers, but never in terms of justice. As long as America refuses to face what it did, these ghosts will not rest.

(The writer is a Colombo-based columnist. Views expressed are personal)