Has anyone else been to the War Crimes museum in Ho Chi Minh City? (currently named War Remnants Museum) The museum addresses American behavior in Vietnam from a pro-Vietnam point of view. Some of the wall text and posters were clearly unattributed government propaganda, but there were many photos from Western journalists which clearly documented the horrors of the war.
The museum struck me as terribly relevant today, with the parallels between Saigon-based internment/torture/tiger cages and Guantanamo Bay, and the obvious parallel between Iraq and Vietnam.
It’ll take me some time to get my thoughts together on the matter, but I needed to bring up the topic before writing my funny email for the day.
Categories: In the News
9:08 am | 1 comment
November 6th, 2005 at 7:16 pm
Maybe I’m missing the point here, but the only parallel between Vietnam and Iraq is going to be the long and protracted engagement there. That’s is about the only parallel.
We were drawn into Vietnam by the French who were our allies and who never should have been there in the first place. We lost 50,000 good men in a botched “police action” managed by incompetent pentagon bureaucrats.
In contrast, we entered Iraq in a deliberate strategy to draw Islaminc terrorist extremists attention away from our continent to a time and place of our choosing.
I mean this as no disrespect, but unless your were a Vietnam POW (or know someone who was who expressed to you in no uncertain terms the degree of brutality that our POW’s suffered) then you really are unqualified to draw generalized conclusions from a presentation specificly designed to make the North Vietnam appear as righteous victims.
Guantanamo is a country club compared to the POW camps of Vietnam. Why not draw a parallel to our own domestic prison system where inmates are systematically abused by other inmates. China’s record of human rights abuse is unparralled in today’s world unless you want to compare notes about Pol Pot or Nazi and Russian death camps.
Don’t misunderstand me. I was very much against Vietnam. I grieve whenever I visit the Vietnam memorial for the entirely useless waste of human life. My stomach turns every time I hear a news report of another soldier dying in Iraq.
But I feel no compasion for the individuals housed at Guantanamo. If I were dictator, I would have doused them with pigs blood, loaded them with explosives, and blown them into oblivion long ago to save the taxpayers the burden of sustaining their worthless cowardly lives.