HO CHI MINH AND HIS PEOPLE, VICTORIOUS FIFTY YEARS AGO!

My generation remembers very well the great defeat of Yankee imperialism by the Vietnamese people. But since the Reagan counterrevolution, that world-changing event has been systematically eradicated from American people’s memory, under the deliberate efforts to end the so-called “Vietnam syndrome" - the deep reluctance for launching and fighting in future U.S. imperialist wars.

With the invasion of the small island of Grenada in the Caribbean in 1983, and the invasion of Panama in 1990, the "Vietnam syndrome" was celebrated by the duopoly in Washington as all but eradicated. The next major military operation was the Persian Gulf War (1990-91) against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, launched by the U.S. in a global coalition with 42 other countries after Hussein invaded Kuwait - an operation that was successful in the eyes of the world, incomplete in the eyes of the U.S., though it actually made money for the U.S. from the coalition partners.

But after the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, Bush Jr. launched two large-scale “endless" wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which ended in utter defeat and practically bankrupted the country (no “coalition of the willing” contributions this time).

Today, there's an "Iraq syndrome" and an "Afghanistan syndrome," if you will. The United States has been sponsoring proxy wars, where it supplies weapons and others supply troops (Ukraine and Gaza); but the war in Vietnam remains largely forgotten by the American people, governments, and press, a distant episode at most lamented, mostly by Vietnam veterans and their families, as a tragic, unexplained “mistake.” This has gotten to the point that none of my students in this century could usually tell me what it was about or even how it ended.

And today, of course, the colluding U.S. press remains conspicuously silent on the fiftieth anniversary of what remains the most strategic defeat of U.S. imperialism in its history, which came to an end in Vietnam on April 30, 1975.

But committed activist companions of my generation, like Ed McCaughan, Luis C. Garza, Jose Z. Calderon, and Angela Sanbrano, remember perfectly; and we continue to stand firm, fighting for peace and justice in the world, each in our own way.

A personal anecdote: On May 8, 1972, Richard Nixon ordered the mining the port of Haiphong in North Vietnam, dramatically escalating the war that he had repeatedly promised to end during his more than three years as president.

The American people, already fed up with the war, exploded in massive protests, including in Boulder, Colorado, where I was just a second-year graduate student. Suddenly, thousands of people "took over" the city and for days blocked the streets and the highway to Denver.

As a survivor of the 1968 student movement in my native Mexico, I immediately joined these civil disobedience actions, “camping” that night in the middle of a downtown intersection (Broadway and Boulder Canyon). A friend and I hunkered down in a small tent with our sleeping bags.

Around 1 AM, I heard shouts of alarm, poked my head out, and saw a huge pickup truck speeding toward our street blockade. We barely made it out of the tent when it ran over it and crushed it! We narrowly missed being run over by some pro-war red-neck maniac. Other folks were chased in their neighborhoods and beaten with batons by the furious cops during that week of troubles.

That was my brutal introduction to the anti-Vietnam War movement! Though it was strictly peaceful, the reaction to it wasn't peaceful at all - certainly not the state repression it began facing in 1965, nor from the John Birch far-right vigilantism that already existed. 

Although I must add that, despite all of that, as soon as I arrived in the U.S. I became involved in the peace movement, as a “foreign student”.

In April 1971, as a representative of the foreign students from the University of Colorado, I attended the "White House Conference on Youth" in Estes Park, Colorado. More than a thousand students nationwide attended. We, the foreign delegates, quickly passed our resolution against the Vietnam War, which was passed by the entire assembly!

The entire world—including the majority of the American people toward the end—understood and supported the Vietnamese cause for national liberation. Not so the duopoly, which blithely went on trying to overcome the “Vietnam syndrome” and continue trying to run the world as the “policeman of the world.”

But the previously undisputed global hegemon of the time, the United States was never able to fully recover from the great geopolitical and military disaster it suffered at the hands of an indomitable and unyielding people like the Vietnamese people, who had in Ho Chi Minh a great leader.

As Che Guevara wrote in 1967, even before the victory of the heroic Vietnamese people, to highlight the importance of continuing the revolutionary struggle in all the oppressed regions of the world, we must "Create two, three... many Vietnams, that is the slogan."

The struggle goes on and on. Maga Trumpism and its Fascist Project is on the offensive today, due in large part to the broken, corrupt duopoly at the service of an insaciable plutocracy, both exhibiting a stubborn reluctance to learn the lessons of history since that fateful self-inflicted catastrophe fifty years ago. 

But like the heroic Vietnamese people, no one here among We, the People, is in any way prepared to surrender, sell-out, or leave!

Another world is possible, where all worlds will fit. Another North America is necessary. Another vision is required.