Today marks half a century since the end of the war in Saigon on April 30, 1975. However, for the Vietnamese people, this date signifies not only a victory but also a “symbol of resurrection” that broke the chains of Western colonialism. Yet this resurrection was not the first. Exactly 21 years earlier, in 1954, the Viet Minh had defeated the French army at Dien Bien Phu, creating an “earthquake that heralded the end of colonialism.”
In the Atlantic Charter of 1941, Churchill and Roosevelt had promised the European colonies “the right to self-determination.” After Japan’s surrender in 1945, the Viet Minh expected to be granted that right. After all, they had fought alongside China and the Allies against Japanese occupation. But the shadow of the Cold War proved darker than colonialism itself.
To help France reestablish dominance, British General Douglas Gracey deployed troops from the then undivided India to Saigon. Even more striking was that the Allies rearmed surrendered Japanese units against the Viet Minh. While France, having suffered under Nazi rule, repeated the same atrocities in Algeria, the U.S., driven by a “fear of communism,” turned Vietnam into a bloodbath for 20 years.
The U.S. defeat in 1975 gave rise to the phrase “never again.” Yet this did not prevent the CIA’s largest covert operation in Afghanistan in the 1980s, nor the 20-year-long occupation beginning in 2001. The evacuation from Kabul by helicopter prompted headlines around the world declaring it a “repeat of Saigon.”
History turns in a spiral of lessons unlearned. The massacres in Palestine today and the bloodshed of 504 people in My Lai were both met with global silence.
The 1954 Geneva Accords temporarily divided Vietnam along the 17th parallel. The reunification elections scheduled for 1956 terrified the U.S., because, as then-President Eisenhower admitted: “Ho Chi Minh would have received 80% of the vote.”
The elections were canceled; the puppet regime in the South turned into a U.S.-backed dictatorship. The result: a hell in which 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans died; where pregnant women and babies were massacred in My Lai.
The 1955 Bandung Conference united 29 African and Asian countries under the ideal of a ‘world without colonialism.’ Zhou Enlai’s pragmatism from China, Nehru’s intellectual stance from India, and Nasser’s charisma from Egypt created a historic opportunity. Despite calls of “East versus West,” the conference was overshadowed by the Cold War.
Donald Trump’s threats today echo the fear-based politics of the Reagan era. The ongoing war in Ukraine is the new act in a long series of proxy wars stretching from Vietnam to Syria.
Vietnam’s victory showed that humanity could triumph against colonialism. But the West’s forgetting, ignoring, or repeating its colonial atrocities, occupation policies, or crimes against humanity — in short, its “historical amnesia” — casts a shadow over that victory.
The screams of children in Gaza echo those in My Lai. The resistance in Palestine is the resonance of the Viet Cong. History does not repeat through victories, but through what is forgotten.
