PCN-SPO / Focus / 2015 05 01 /
Focus: The fact of the day decrypted by Luc MICHEL
for the NCP-PCN Press Office / PCN-SPO
Read on AFP (Paris) This April 30, 2015:
“Vietnam on Thursday denounced the” barbaric crimes “committed by the United States on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the last episode of a war that claimed millions of lives. “They have committed countless barbaric crimes, have caused immeasurable losses and a lot of pain to the people of our country”, told Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung to the crowd in front of the palace of independence, assaulted 40 years ago by the North Vietnamese tanks. The “ardent patriotism” led to the final victory thanks to the “brilliant and creative direction of the party,” said Mr Dung. In front of him, regiments of soldiers brandishing a forest of flags marked with the hammer and sickle marched, recalling the entry of the tanks of the communist forces in the city. “
The Vietnam war of liberation is a major historical event: the defeat in 1975 of US imperialism. Because Vietnam is the only war that the US has lost since 1945. And this defeat goes beyond the War of liberation and unification of the Vietnamese nation.
What does mean the American defeat in Vietnam?
How will this defeat be placed in the geopolitical perspective of the global anti-imperialist struggle and the European liberation struggle?
# I: THE LIBERATION AND UNIFICATION WAR OF THE VIETNAMESE NATION IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE GLOBAL ANTI-IMPERIALIST STRUGGLE
“When I was young, I dreamed one day to see my country free and unified”
– Vo Nguyen Giap (interview with PBS)
On 30 April 1975, the tanks of the National People’s Army of Vietnam supported by the Vietcong guerillas forces seized the presidential palace in Saigon. The US puppet regime of South Vietnamese Kollabos collapsed, the Yankee ambassador left the city in shame, the Stars and Stripes rolled as a cloth under his arm. The long struggle for national and social liberation of Vietnam, begun at the dawn of the 20’s, was finally over. The alliance of the Communist Party and the Vietnamese nationalist movement had defeated, a small courageous people of peasant soldiers had driven away the first imperialist world power.
The Vietnamese National-Communism gave to the peoples of the world, and especially to the European revolution, a lesson in courage and hope: YES AMERICA CAN BE DEFEATED!
1975: LIBERATION AND UNIFICATION OF THE VIETNAMESE NATION
40 years after the end of the liberation war, the Vietnamese people still suffer from the legacy of countless odious chemical weapons used by the imperialists ready for anything at that time, as today in other parts of the world, to destroy nations who resist their domination. Three million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were killed during the war, which only had 58,000 dead on the American side, where it was used to make war with the blood of others.
Years of American denial, Western propaganda to rewrite the history of the war by describing the valiant communist fighters of the Indochinese peninsula as monsters, years of demonization, xenophobia in books, films and speeches of imperialists have not removed one of the greatest victories of progressive revolutionaries and did not prevent their historic struggle to become an example for all peoples now facing the terrorist strategies of Washington and its ‘European’ allies of NATO.
The hypocrite shame of the US, its cynical mea culpa about the methods used in Vietnam and, in general, the US support for the reactionary dictatorships in many countries – what the South Vietnamese regime was -, masks further abuses again perpetrated in the name of the free world, of capitalist democracy and imperialist morality.
The national communism victory in Vietnam, closely uniting national and social liberation, is the heritage of all European and international revolutionary militants. This is the legacy of Vietnam …
THE WAR OF LIBERATION OF VIETNAM BEYOND THE YANKEE PROPAGANDA
In the Vietnam War, the collective memory keeps a host of shock images, photos that have the distinction of having been taken by a single camp, the one of South Vietnameses and foreigners. Twenty-five years later only, we discovered the clichés of North Vietnamese photographers, remained virtually unknown outside the Communist press.
An example? The liberation of Saigon …
Distraught Vietnamese climbing the wall of the US Embassy. A US helicopter taking off, while clusters of desperates are still trying to board. These best images of the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975 reflect only one side of the story. In the opposite camp, a trio of the greatest North Vietnamese war photographers show a completely different picture book. Their photos, taken from albums and dusty files, tell the joy of the liberation of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. Dinh Quang Thanh, who followed a Viet Minh tank to the steps of the presidential palace, seized the Saigon crowds covering with viva and food the Northern soldiers.
“We listened to the South Vietnamese radio, saying that there would be a bloodbath if the Communists took power. We knew it was propaganda, and I wanted to show the truth with my camera”, Thanh, now retired, explained to AFP in 2005,. The truth: four soldiers rushed inside the palace to raise the victorious banner, or southern ministers and soldiers, looking resigned but not frightened.
The North Vietnamese photographers have shared the merciless harshness of the war in the jungle, full-fledged combatants. “I considered myself a soldier, the camera was my weapon,” says Thanh. The Northern newspapers have certainly never published pictures that could undermine the war effort. But these photographers feel their work perfectly aware of the terrible suffering during the war, which caused three million deaths, North and South alike. None of the photographers was expected recognition or fortune of a work almost never shown in the non-Communist world.
But things eventually changed. In 1997, two photographers of the time, the independent Tim Page and Horst Faas, becoming editors at the Associated Press, have published “Requiem”, book-tribute to the photojournalists of the two camps who died in the conflict. For his part, Trong Thanh eventually was successful, in any case in the light of these modest North Vietnamese photographers: he published two books, one in the US, the other in Japan. His favorite photograph was never published during the war: a Northern soldier, kneeling, shares his rations with an injured Southern soldier, in 1971. Exhibited for the first time in 1991 in the United States, it shocked many Americans, who judged it inevitably rigged …
# II: VIETNAM AND ITS GEOPOLITICAL REPERCUSSIONS FOR THE EUROPEAN LIBERATION STRUGGLE
“The great victory of 30 April represents the triumph of the whole nation, of justice on the brutality and of humanity over tyranny”
– Vo Viet Thanh (Mayor of Ho Chi Minh City, for the 25th anniversary of its liberation)
The Vietnam War, through the lessons that all revolutionary militants of the world can still use, did not complete yet in Saigon in 1975, but continues its relentless march to the heart of Europe today. The Vietnam unity, the union of a people divided for too long by Western imperialism, must be an example for Western Europe that the cosmopolitan bourgeois rule seeks to break up and dismantle.
THE HEIRS OF VALMY
The Vietnamese people, with a momentum that symbolizes thousands of Valmy – and will be remembered that Ho Chi Minh and Giap were great admirers of the French Revolution, the one of Robespierre and the Jacobins – by their sacrifices, millions of murdered victims by Yankee soldiers who, despite their technological superiority, have finished broken by peasant soldiers of the Vietnamese national-communist revolution, now shows how to treat the imperialist invader.
And if depleted uranium in Iraq and Yugoslavia has replaced the Vietnam orange gas, the lethal strategy of imperialism is always the same, with one difference. The Vietnam War was lost because the international public at large has turned against US abuses, and since then, Washington has developed a media propaganda machine so powerful that it is able to manipulate entire nations. The Western media, slaves of imperialism and its military arm of NATO, prostitutes of capitalist domination, petty Kollabo hirelings, purposely prevent the European people to open their eyes to the modern colonialism of the United States.
We must never forget that if the war there stopped in 1975, it started on our European soil. Openly when Washington declared war on national-communist Yugoslavia of President Milosevic. Slyly elsewhere, in the Balkans or the Caucasus. Not to mention the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Africa, where Washington and its Zionist ally and accomplice hit European, Arab and African independence.
The tens of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of imperialist collaborators of South Vietnam who lost their lives facing the indomitable momentum of national and revolutionary communism should be so many signs of hope for each European progressive militant, in the West as in the East, and Western imperialism, which triumphs now where Nazism had been finally defeated, has too quickly forgotten the warning given by Ho Chi Minh and his freed people to all those who want to reduce the world to slavery.
TO FINALLY END WITH THE YANKEE SUPERPOWER!
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States defines itself as the “supreme superpower.” The US claims to global dominance exhibited since 1943, in particular by James BURNHAM (the ancestor of the neocons) in “The Struggle for the World”, have become a ubiquitous reality.
In March 1992, after the implosion of the USSR and the beginning of the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Pentagon published, in conjunction with the “National Security Council”, the highest court of yankee international politics, a “Wolfowitz Report” (who will be 10 years later one of the ministers of the Bush II regime and a leader of the neocons) explaining how the USA intends to remain the only superpower: “US foreign policy must have the goal of convincing potential competitors that they do not need to play a greater role. Our status as sole superpower needs to be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations to challenge US supremacy. The United States must consider with interest the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging US leadership or seeking to jeopardize the economic and political order. A dominant military power must be maintained to deter potential rivals even that of aspiring to a larger regional or global role. The international order is ultimately guaranteed by the United States and it must be put in a position to act independently when collective action can not be established. “.
The Report directly aimed Europe, this “group of nations”: “We must act to prevent the emergence of an exclusively European security system that could destabilize NATO.” Japan is also described: “In the Far East, we must remain alert to the risks of destabilization that would come from an increased role for our allies, especially Japan.”
Are allies enemies? Paul-Marie de La Gorce commented the Wolfowitz report in “Le Monde Diplomatique”: “The Wolfowitz report is distinguished by its insistence to favor military power as an essential instrument of international dominance of the United States that is to be preserved. The fundamental concern to preserve the status of sole superpower of the United States is not only for its former adversaries but also for its allies. Very symptomatically, the report qualifies as “less visible” victory, won at the end of the Cold War, “the integration of Germany and Japan in a collective security system led by the United States.” This naturally excludes the accession of both countries to the rank of military nuclear power. “
NATO is not an alliance, it is a harness designed to perpetuate the occupation of Europe. European politicians who submit are traitors, new Kollabos. Against imperialism of the yankee superpower, only one solution: Liberation and unification of the European Nation, from Reykjavik to Vladivostok! 25 years ago Vietnam showed us by example. A billion political Europeans can they least than 25 million Vietnameses?
Luc MICHEL
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Photos: Cover of NAZIONE EUROPA, Italian weekly of the PCN-NCP in 2000 (it was still then the paper press) for the 25th anniversary of the Liberation of Saigon, “For a European Vietnam”. 15 years after nothing more to say …