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I posted
commentary by this author yesterday. He’s an American-born and educated
Australian, lived in Japan for many years, professor at Tokyo Institute of
Technology, and author on Japanese life. A regular contributor to the Japan Times, he wrote a 2004 series
on “Revealing the ‘Japanese Sensibility’”, one of which I’ve linked to here: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fl20041219a1.htm COUNTERPOINT On April 30, 1975, the
government of South Vietnam surrendered to the North. The United States and its
coalition of willing allies, after intervening in what was a post-colonial
civil war and ravaging Vietnam on a massive scale, was finally defeated.
Despite the war having produced some 2 million Vietnamese casualties during the
time of U.S. involvement -- and with babies being born there to this day with
birth defects caused by American chemical warfare (it isn't hard to find the
WMD here) -- Americans, Australians and other allies have "put that war
behind them." "We've moved on
from that," they say. "It's history." This selective amnesia
is not happenstance. The facts of the war in Vietnam and the record of
monumental cruelty inflicted on the Vietnamese people by the American coalition
have been deliberately filed away. Sure, there is talk of "mistakes."
But the United States won't go back to that war: It could crimp America's style
of proactive intervention in our new century, the century of the "never-ending"
war on terror. What should this very
important anniversary mean to the U.S. and its allies in that unjustifiable
war? It should tell the American people that
they were duped by their leaders. It should tell the soldiers' families that their relatives
were sent to fight (and in the case of around 70,000 Americans, to die) not in
defense of American values -- as Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and
Nixon claimed -- but to impose American ideology on another nation. The final defeat in
Vietnam 30 years ago should have taught Americans to study history before
recklessly invading other countries. The Vietnamese people had been colonized
by the French as early as the 1880s, occupied by the Japanese during World War
II, then recolonized by the French until 1954. The wish of the Vietnamese
people of virtually all political persuasions at that time was for genuine
independence and social reform. But Americans, taking up the anti-independence
cause, were unable to judge the aspirations of another nation outside of the
most narrow conception of American values. Take over Vietnam, give their young
men lettermen's sweaters and their young women gardenia corsages for the senior
prom and, gee whiz, democracy is yours for the asking. The defeat in Vietnam should
have taught Americans that each country has to find its own path to social
equality -- and that American values of liberty are not universal. Some of
them, as we are now seeing in Bush's America, are barely surviving in the
"homeland." If other nations wish
to incorporate some fine American element of governing, they can do so in their
own good time. In that very way, the people who founded the American republic
borrowed grand ideas from Europe, assimilating them into an ever-changing
American experience. Why
don't Americans trust others to do the same? Why is it that some Americans insist on
imposing American institutions, so specific to American custom and mores, in
every corner of the globe? This, above all, is
what America should be thinking about at the end of this month. A country's
take on democracy comes from the peculiar circumstances that led to its
establishment. The American social model is not the only one. Japanese,
Koreans, Swedes, South Africans, Indians, Venezuelans . . . they have their own
traditions of dealing with social and economic inequities. Sometimes they do this better than the
U.S. does; sometimes not. They don't need U.S. intervention to appreciate the
difference. Thirty years ago, the
U.S. strove to impose its model on Vietnam through the offices of corrupt local
officials. It failed. It wasn't a mistake. It was a crime! I was born in 1944 and
the Vietnam War was the war of my generation. It is also representatives of my
generation who have repeated, on a potentially more lethal scale, the very same
crime in Iraq. Will they ever apologize for the needless killing and awful
destruction that they and their allies have perpetrated on the Iraqi people? Judging from the past
it doesn't look promising. An American withdrawal will have to happen first. After that, Americans may come to know
what it is like to be told by the rest of the world that they must apologize
again and again. Perhaps then Americans will finally take a good hard look at
their past and be mindful of it in the future. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fl20050424a1.htm |
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