“This year 2025 is the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Vietnam from the “American War.” The war officially ended in 1973 but the remaining Americans fled South Vietnam in chaotic air and sea lifts two years later as North Vietnam forces invaded to unite their country. Vietnam then became the Socialist Republic of Vietnam with its capital in Hanoi while Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. The war left more than three million mostly Vietnamese civilians and 56,000 American military dead as well as the newly coined ecocide, named for the destruction of up to 40 percent of Vietnam’s forests, mangroves and farmlands by the herbicide Agent Orange.
Seven U.S. presidents sequentially punished this small, agrarian Asian country for fear of their choosing a socialist form of government; then for defeating the American military; and, later, out of spite for uniting as a socialist country President Eisenhower clairvoyantly warned of the U.S. falling under the control by the military industrial complex — unwarranted influence wielded by a partnership between the military and a growing cohort of U.S. weapons contractors — while he deceptively set the stage for the U.S. war against Vietnam. He prevented elections in 1956 for a unified Vietnam because he knew the popular nationalist hero and socialist Ho Chi Minh would be elected president.
His successor President Kennedy simultaneously delivered the most humanistic peace speech at American University in 1963 of any U.S. president, sought peace with the Soviet Union, and also read with great admiration Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” Yet, he surreptitiously ordered the U.S. spraying of Agent Orange in Vietnam in 1961 in U.S. planes disguised with South Vietnam insignia so the U.S. would not be accused of chemical warfare. Presidents Johnson and Nixon sustained the genocide-like war on the Vietnamese and ecocide of their environment. One U.S. general opined that Vietnam could not be defeated unless our government bombed it back to the Stone Age.”