Word: vietnams
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lessons of Vietnam that Ford would like to ignore is that more than two decades of repression by a series of corrupt regimes supported by the U.S. could not stifle the will of the Vietnamese people. Even though more than a million people died as a result of the American policy, its failure spoke--more eloquently than any polemic against the PRG--for the inadequacy of terror as a political weapon...
WHILE HARVARD lulled in the calm of slow change and little protest this past year, the world saw dramatic triumph for the people of Vietnam. Our focus was turned away from the important issues at Harvard when, after thirty years of relentless fighting--and twenty years when the United States was the enemy--the National Liberation Front marched into Saigon victorious in its longstanding struggle for independence. And in Cambodia the Khmer Rouge won in its fight against the corrupt Lon Nol regime after five years of fighting...
...VICTORY of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front was a victory, first of all, for the people of Vietnam. Last April, for the first time in two decades, Vietnam was rid of an American onslaught and free of a barrage of bombs unprecedented in the history of the world. The thousands of refugees spawned by 30 years of war--seeking escape from bombings, marches and retreats, free-fire zones and protective reaction strikes; or ripped untimely from their homes by "strategic hamlet" programs and "forced-draft urbanizations"--have begun to return. And the people of Vietnam will benefit from a government...
...victory of the Vietnamese people in shaking off a hundred years of French colonialism and of the NLF in defeating the half million American troops sent to stop them must not now obscure our memories of Vietnam. The official American response--that we need not try to learn from Vietnam but must now look toward the future, and that there should be a moratorium on recriminations--must not be heeded. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's statement, that the U.S. should not help rebuild North Vietnam--a country he did as much as anyone to destroy--must be disregarded...
Reconstruction is not simply a matter of discharging America's debt to Vietnam--the war brought too many beyond the reach of debtors and creditors. It is more a matter of earning the astonishing friendship so many Vietnamese have expressed towards an American people that--sometimes, as in the bombing of a neutral Cambodia, unknowingly--let its government commit barbarities in its name...