A Vietnamese family. Moments before being killed by US forces. The photograph is haunting. The history is undeniable.
They said they were saving Vietnam from communism. They dropped more bombs than in all of World War II. They used napalm. Agent Orange. They massacred villages. They called it liberation.
This is the pattern. Korea. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Syria. Now Yemen. Gaza. Iran. Every time, the same slogan. Democracy. Freedom. Stopping communism or terrorism or whatever the enemy of the decade is called. Every time, the same result. Dead families. Ruined countries. Empires walking away when they get bored.
The US does not bring democracy. It brings destruction. It does not stop communism. It crushes anyone who refuses to be a client state. Vietnam was not a threat. It was a country that chose its own path. For that, it was bombed back to the stone age.
The photograph is a reminder. The empire has always been what it is. It just changes the branding. We should never forget what that branding hides. Families. Moments before death. For the crime of existing outside US control.
They called Hồ Chí Minh a tyrant.
A man who spent decades in exile, in prison, living in poverty, organizing resistance to colonial occupation.
Who wrote poetry.
Who quoted the American Declaration of Independence in Vietnam’s own declaration of independence, word for word, because he believed those words meant something.
He believed America, of all countries, would understand what it meant to fight a colonial power for the right to self-governance.
America sent bombers.
Think about the layers of that humiliation.
A Vietnamese revolutionary quoted Jefferson and Madison to appeal to American values.
And the American response was napalm.
Because it was never about freedom.
It was never about democracy.
It was about control.
It was about which countries get to be self-determining and which countries exist to serve someone else's interests.
It was about making sure that when Washington said "jump," the government in Hanoi would ask "how high."
Hồ Chí Minh was not willing to ask that question.
So they tried to destroy him.
They destroyed nothing.
He died in 1969, before the war ended.
And the country he gave his life for won anyway.
His face is still on the currency.
Theirs is not.
Rightoid Christian twitter genuinely wants you to believe this is just a young man preaching the word of the lord and not someone experiencing a horrific mental health crisis
58,000 Americans died in Vietnam.
Over 3,000,000 Vietnamese died.
And for fifty years, American culture has centered the grief of the 58,000 while treating the 3,000,000 as a backdrop.
As scenery. As context. As "the Vietnam War experience."
They built a wall in Washington with American names on it.
A beautiful wall. A solemn wall.
Good. Mourn your dead.
But understand what that wall does not say.
It does not say why they died.
It does not say what they were doing there.
It does not say what was done in their name to the people whose country it actually was.
It does not mention My Lai, where American soldiers massacred an entire village, old men, women, children, babies, and the officer who ordered it served three years of house arrest before being pardoned.
Three years. House arrest. Pardoned.
For five hundred people murdered in a ditch.
It does not mention the 2.7 million acres of Vietnamese forest doused in Agent Orange, a chemical weapon disguised as herbicide, that is still deforming Vietnamese children today.
Not in 1970. Not in 1985. Today.
Children born in 2020 with bodies twisted by a war their grandparents fought.
And the chemical companies that made it are still in business.
Still profitable.
Still un-prosecuted.
And yet they send us human rights reports.
They grade our democracy.
They warn us about our behavior.
The audacity is so enormous it becomes almost impressive.
Almost.
🚨 PIERS MORGAN: Why won’t you condemn Hamas?
RANIA KHALEK: Because asking that under annihilation is like asking an Austrian Jew in the 1940s to condemn resistance to Nazi Germany.
PIERS WENT FOR A TRAP
RANIA FLIPPED THE WHOLE TABLE 💥
Andy Pages at 24 years old in 2025:
27 HR | 114 OPS+ | 10 OAA | 4.1 fWAR
His bad 2025 postseason made him one of baseball’s most underrated players coming into the season. This is such a good player