[News] 40 years since the Vietnamese victory - we owe a massive debt to them

[Anti-Imperialist News]

    Thursday, 30 April 2015

40 YEARS SINCE VIETNAMESE VICTORY OVER NEO-COLONIAL WAR AND OCCUPATION, 
WE OWE A MASSIVE DEBT TO THEM

*http://sonsofmalcolm.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/40-years-since-vietnamese-victory-over.html
*
*
*
*40 Years since the Victory of Vietnam against Colonialism and 
Neo-Colonialism*
*Mera Naam, Tera Naam VIETNAM! VIETNAM! *
*(My name, your name is VIETNAM VIETNAM!)*
- Solidarity slogan of South Asian peoples during the Vietnamese War of 
Liberation

Sukant Chandan
/Sons of Malcolm/
30 April 2015

Today is the 40th Anniversary of the liberation of Vietnam by the 
revolutionary leadership of Ho Chi Minh and General Giap and the entire 
resistance forces in Vietnam, who defeated Japanese colonialism in 1945, 
French colonialism in 1954 and then USA neo-colonialism in 1975.

The colonial and imperialist war against Vietnam was an attempt by the 
'west' to stop the tide of independence struggles that was raging like a 
prairie fire across the southern three continents in the period after 
the second world war.

The genocidal imperialist war against Vietnam was an attempt of the 
imperialists to take revenge on the global united resistance that gave 
the USA its first post second world war defeat in the theatre of Korea 
when the Soviet Union and Socialist China gave support to the Korean 
peoples defeat of the imperialists in the early 1950s, with the Korean 
people paying the terrible price of 4 million martyrs in the three years 
of the 'Korean War' in 1950-1953.

The imperialist war in Vietnam was revenge for the victory of the 
Chinese Revolution in 1949.

The Resistance of the Vietnamese people ushered in a new phase of 
militant global struggle, leading Che Guevara and many others to focus 
on Vietnam as the vanguard of the global revolution, with Che arguing 
for other peoples to take up the model of the Vietnamese Revolution in 
order to disperse the impact of the colonial genocide against them and 
in order to develop a major global push in defeating imperialism.

The Resistance in Vietnam and its victory was overwhelmingly achieved by 
the Vietnamese themselves, and then with support from China and the 
Soviet Union. The Vietnamese Resistance opened up a massive space of 
rebellion in the 'west', with the anti-colonial internal struggles 
within the west, especially in the form of the Black Liberation Movement 
throughout the west but especially in the usa to combine their struggle 
against the same common enemy with that of the much bigger, more 
intense, incomparably more bloody and traumatic struggle of the 
Vietnamese against the common imperialist enemy. This unity led the 
Black Panthers to offer their own cadres to join the Vietnamese 
Resistance (the Vietnamese appreciated the offer but pressed upon the 
Black Panthers to escalate their struggle within the usa), it led the 
firebrand radical and world champion boxer Muhammad Ali to lose his 
champion belt in refusing to fight his brothers and sisters in Vietnam.

The Vietnamese Resistance won their struggle no one else won it for 
them, as sometimes politicos in the west try and make out that their 
opposition to the war had any strategic contribution in that imperialist 
war's defeat. Apart from the escalating struggle of the Black and Brown 
people allied with radical white organisations, which played a minor and 
tertiary role in the defeat of the imperialists in Vietnam, it was the 
Vietnamese and them and their primary global allies that won the war. 
However, the Vietnamese struggle radicalised the western youth and gave 
them the biggest historical opening for rebelling against the system.

Vietnam was destroyed deliberately for generations. Vietnam was 
reunified and liberated in 1975, over three million dead, over 50 
million gallons of toxins were put into the land and people of Vietnam 
by the enemy. The people were intensely raped, looted, bombed in their 
millions. Vietnam has gone on to conduct the liberation in extremely 
difficult circumstances, and it is an obligation of all 
anti-imperialists, decolonials, and people who believe in justice for 
Humanity that they continue to give unconditional support to Socialist 
Vietnam and their on-going process of protecting their independence and 
uplifting their people and land.

The deeply neo-colonial conceit and dark side of the human condition is 
shown when those who will support a people when they die in their 
millions for liberation but will turn their back shortly after the 
imperialist enemy has been defeated and the tasks of reconstruction is 
on hand, that at the very moment when the Vietnamese and other peoples 
need empathy and solidarity, that the neo-colonial lefty knives come out 
and they snipe and turn their back on the Vietnamese.

The Vietnamese nation and people continue to make strides towards 
healing their people and country and developing the conditions towards 
socialism and equality. We owe a massive debt to the Vietnamese people. 
We have everything to learn from them in terms of their anti-imperialist 
and socialist ideology and their ethics and culture of resistance and 
liberation. They owe us nothing, we owe them everything.

In 2003 I went on a solidarity delegation that conducted some volunteer 
labour in building roads in the central highlands of Vietnam. We gave 
back a tiny amount of what we owed the Vietnamese. We visited the 
Vietnamese government orphanages of those children still born with 
severe defects from the toxins ('Agent Orange') which will impact the 
Vietnamese people for generations to come. While the mainstream media 
will focus on the death, deformities and destruction of the Vietnamese 
war in line with their white supremacist colonial nature as they only 
like to show our people when they are dead or dying or torn to bits. In 
contrast, we raise up the Humanity and the earth shaking achievements of 
the Vietnamese and learn at their feet of what being a revolutionary is, 
and what a revolution against the enemy gone mad looks like.

Every city had a museum dedicated to the Resistance during the war, 
staffed often by a stern and militant Vietnamese female comrade. These 
museums showed the creative wonders of the Vietnamese people in their 
quest for freedom, each museum was a revolutionary university. We 
visited Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum, and gave thanks to one of Humanity's 
greatest freedom fighters.

We visited the martyrs tomb in Cu Chi where the famous underground 
resistance tunnel system is, and saw the thousands of names of martyrs 
from Cu Chi engraved in the inner walls of the tomb.

And of course, we discussed, talked, and ate the delicious Vietnamese 
cuisine with a wonderful people in a stunningly beautiful land who can 
enjoy relative peace and security of their Homeland.

Towards the end of the imperialist debacle in Vietnam, they had a policy 
of 'Vietnamisation' of the war, ie., getting Vietnamese people to 
increasingly face even more of the brunt of the war instead of the tens 
of thousands of soldiers from the usa dying and getting injured. The 
enemy has continued this strategy and has used death squads in Libya on 
the ground while Nato bombed and destroyed Libya from the skies. The 
enemy has now directed and supplied their primary ally in the region in 
the form of Saudi Arabia to front their neo-colonial war against Yemen.

The enemy continues to 'Black face' its neo-colonialism to confuse the 
masses, a strategy which has some success as both Libya and Yemen have 
seen no national mobilisations by the white left led anti-war movements 
in the west, we can even say these are popular wars in the west with the 
anti-war movement refusing to push for serious anti-war mobilisation.

Those of us loyal to the Vietnamese, Libyans, Zimbabweans, Yemeni and 
all resistant victims of the strategies of Nato and neo-colonialism must 
wrest control of the anti-war movement and raise the ideologies and 
strategies appropriate to resisting neo-colonial war, indeed global 
covert and overt neo-colonial war has ALWAYS been an integral part of 
the colonial and neo-colonial system.

My Mother and Father raised me from childhood in loyalty to the 
Vietnamese people, with my Mother recalling her participation in 
demonstrations in support of the Vietnamese people and their central 
slogan was 'mera naam, tera naam, Vietnam! Vietnam', translated as 'my 
name, your name is Vietnam! Vietnam!'.  Our names continues to be 
Vietnam, Korea, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Cuba and every on-going 
struggle of our resistant peoples, leaderships and countries which are 
still in an intense and complex knife edges struggle in this last phase 
and age of struggle to totally defeat neo-colonialism once and for all 
across the planet. Will we stand by this struggle? We owe it to them.
-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20150430/5e61a1de/attachment.htm>