Word: indochina
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...history of Indochina in the past ten years has silenced many Leftists or put them on the defensive about the way they embraced the idea that America's course in the war was uniquely evil. Some, like Singer Joan Baez, denounced the behavior of the new Vietnamese regime. Jane Fonda is an object of special vilification among veterans. Her husband, California Assemblyman Tom Hayden, once a leader of the New Left, admits, "I am not pure. We have, as Joseph Heller says, two lives: the one we live with and the one we learn with. The consensus...
...Many antiwar protesters were sincerely trying to find answers to the profound moral questions Viet Nam raised about the legitimate uses of American power, and about the nature of the struggle in Indochina. The questions the war raised--in some ways, still raises--were endless. Were the Americans acting as idealists, honoring a treaty commitment to an ally and defending freedom against Communist aggression? Or were they anti-Communist crusaders who committed atrocities against a land of peasants? Were the North Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh austere and virtuous folk heroes, or murderous, Stalinist totalitarians who committed barbarities far worse...
Some movies reverse the moral onus that Americans long felt about the war. They are fantasies of revenge, like Missing in Action, in which Chuck Norris returns to Indochina to rescue old buddies still held there by evil Vietnamese who look like the wily, despicable Japanese in World War II films. These changes reflect a very literal and significant transaction. They suggest that in the American imagination, the Viet Nam veteran, erstwhile psychotic, cripple and loser, has been given back his manhood...
...Viet Nam. Though they run one of the poorest nations in the world, the Vietnamese invest their best brains and creativity in the military: they have occupied Cambodia and Laos, resuming a campaign of expansionism that was interrupted more than a century ago when the French arrived to colonize Indochina. It is ironic that the Vietnamese, so often sentimentalized by the American Left as a simple and gentle peasant people, are the imperialists of the region, restlessly putting new Vietnamese settlements in neighboring countries, seeking Lebensraum...
Chomsky, who spoke as part of a week-long series of events organized by the Committee on Central America, compared U.S. in volvement in Nicaragua and Vietnam. Before getting heavily into the Indochina war in 1965, protest was virtually non existent--in sharp contrast to widespread criticism of U.S. support for anti-government rebels in Marxist-led Nicaragua...